Cosmic concert at MBT
Ad astra per WSO
by Christopher Key
I’m not sure whether it’s appropriate to review a classical concert by saying, “Far out!,” but the Whatcom Symphony Orchestra certainly earned that encomium today. It all started with the premiere of Maestro Roger Briggs latest composition, Pulsars. The maestro seems to be something of an astronomy buff since he prefaced the work by explaining what pulsars are: stellar sources of powerful and rhythmic electromagnetic radiation. Briggs’ brilliant composition evokes both the power and strangeness of this phenomenon. My only gripe was that I wanted it to last much longer than it did. He dedicated the work to the WSO and their performance justified it.
Fitting Edvard Grieg into this program required a bit of convoluted reasoning on Briggs’ part, but it didn’t really matter. Grieg’s celestial music achieves escape velocity on its own. Internationally renowned pianist Dan Sabo makes his home in a place called Bellingham on planet Earth and we’re much the richer for it. He and his wife Victoria, who is also a gifted pianist, operate a private music studio. Sabo is perhaps best known for his dedication to the work of Olivier Messiaen and studied in Paris with the composer’s wife, Yvonne Loriad-Messiaen.
He proved himself to be a master at interpreting Grieg, as well. The Norwegian composer’s Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, is one of the most beloved works for that instrument. The usually well-disciplined WSO audience couldn’t restrain itself until the end of the piece, bursting into spontaneous applause at the thunderous end to the first movement. Well-deserved, and a totally understandable breach of concert etiquette. Sabo received a standing ovation in the appropriate place and thanked the audience with a brief encore.
Following intermission, the WSO boldly went where few have gone before, performing Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets. Excerpts from this work, most notably Mars and Jupiter, are performed fairly often. The complete work, not so much. That’s a shame because it’s an amazing Grand Tour of the Solar System. It’s also a work of daunting complexity involving an augmented orchestra and an offstage vocal sextet.
The WSO beamed us all up with brilliant work from the brasses. Concertmaster Grant Donellan got to show off his soloist chops in Venus and Mercury and the percussion section demonstrated that warp drive isn’t confined to science fiction. Fortunately, Pluto hadn’t been discovered when Holst wrote the piece, so there’s no need for any awkwardness regarding that body’s recent downsizing. That’s probably a good thing, since the ethereal ending of Neptune would be a hard act to follow. Briggs and the orchestra earned another standing ovation and, frankly, I may not come back to Earth for a while.
The Mount Baker Theatre was nearly sold out and that’s a very gratifying sign that the economy may be recovering. The next world that the orchestra plans to conquer comes on April 24 with an evening performance called “Songs of Humanity.” Metropolitan Opera star Erin Wall will join the orchestra in a program of works by Dvorak and Gorecki.
An insert in the program informed us that the WSO will add a performance on May 8 at the Blaine Performing Arts Center. It’s presented by the Pacific Arts Association and is billed as “…a march, a marriage and a mystery for Mother’s Day.” The march is by Sousa, the marriage is from Mozart’s Figaro, and the mystery is a Lemony Snicket concoction called The Composer is Dead. Beethoven, Briggs, Sibelius and Cole Porter are also involved. For more information, see www.whatcomsymphony.com and www.pacificartsassoc.org.
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