ESO concludes season with 'fantastique' performance
The Elgin Symphony Orchestra's 60th anniversary season concludes this weekend with music director Robert Hanson conducting three works joined by a common musical thread.
That common theme is the 13th century plainsong chant "Dies Irae" - "Day of Wrath" - which was a major section of the Roman Catholic mass for the dead until its repeal by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s for being too negative in spiritual tone for the church's modernized requiem service. Yet, over the last two centuries, many composers have been attracted to the melody's inherent drama.
The concert, which opened with a matinee performance Friday, includes Hector Berlioz's revolutionary 1830 masterpiece "Symphonie Fantastique" as its centerpiece.
Berlioz uses the "Dies Irae" in the final movement of his autobiographical "Symphonie Fantastique," in which the opium-taking hero dreams of the perfect woman, meets her at a fashionable ball, visits the countryside and then dreams he has murdered her and is sent to the guillotine.
In the finale, the hero attends his own funeral, a grotesque scene dominated by ghosts, sorcerers and cackling witches. It's pretty dramatic stuff for 1830, and musicologists regard "Symphonie Fantastique" as one of the major flowerings of music's romantic period.
On Friday, Hanson led a highly dramatic performance with especially fine playing from the ESO's woodwind and brass sections. The tolling funeral bells accompanying the "Dies Irae" theme in the finale were especially effective with their slightly "dirty" tone. No bland doorbell chimes here!
Toronto-born pianist Stewart Goodyear gave a dramatic performance of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt's "Totentanz" - "Dance of Death" - a one-movement concerto-like work that actually is a set of variations on the "Dies Irae" theme. "Totentanz" premiered in 1865, and likely was influenced by "Symphonie Fantastique"; Liszt attended its 1830 premiere.
Friday's concert opened with another "Dies Irae"-inspired composition, the "Red Cape Tango." The piece is from American Michael Daugherty's "Metropolis Symphony," a work written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics in 1938.
Though extracted as the final movement from the symphony, the tango stands on its own as a dramatic concert work. It opens with haunting, antiphonal horn calls, gypsy castanets and a huge battery of percussion instruments at the conclusion.