(Composer/flutest Valerie Coleman. Photo by Kia Caldwell.)
By Montague Gammon III
Sandwiching a family-friendly, kid-thrilling, grownup-enthralling, brilliantly colorful new concerto for symphony and animation between a 21st Century fanfare and a 19th Century masterwork, the Virginia Symphony Orchestra opens its 2024–2025 Season with a Friday evening concert in Newport News and a Sunday matinee in Virginia Beach, conducted by VSO Music Director Eric Jacobsen.
Valerie Coleman’s six-minute Fanfare for Uncommon Times, a heroic and attention grabbing piece scored for brass and percussion which premiered in New York in October of 2021, kicks off the concert and the season. Coleman’s the founder and former long time flutist with the chamber music A-list Imani Winds. She’s a Grammy nominee, and a faculty member at Juilliard and the Mannes and the Manhattan Schools of Music, who sports a fine print pageful-plus of accomplishments and awards. She was selected in 2020 as Performance Today’s second ever Classical Woman of the Year. (JoAnn Falletta was the first, in 2019).
Jacobsen, in a phone chat, termed Coleman “a beautiful musician.”
He called her Fanfare “a really remarkable work” with “a really fun melody.” He added, “It’s such a great way to open a concert! And the piece is picturesque as well, so it fits nicely on this program with the Mussorgsky [Pictures at an Exhibition] and the Mason Bates [Philharmonia Fantastique].”
Pictures at an Exhibition takes listeners on a tour of the 1874, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Imperial Academy of Arts display of works by Mussorgsky’s late friend Viktor Hartmann, a water colorist, costume designer, sketch artist and architect. He had died at the age of 39 of an aneurysm 10 ½ months before Mussorgsky wrote, in the first three weeks of June, 1874, this ten part work for piano as his memorial to his prematurely lost friend. (Trivia: Mussorgsky lent the museum, from his personal collection, two of the exhibited pictures, but most of the pieces in the exhibition are lost.)
Ten of those 100-plus artworks are individually depicted in music, with the walk from one to the next as a varied but clearly recurrent theme called “Promenade.” The individual suites or movements range from an initially ponderous, then more dynamic, string section enhanced, demonstration of sheer power as an old, tired, undernourished ox draws a wagon load of what might be coal, to a dance of newly hatched chicks, costumed for a ballet, to the finale: the magisterial, grandiose in the most positive way, celebratory pealing “Great Gates of Kiev,” the most popular and often excerpted part.
From an 1891, or perhaps 1886, partial version by the otherwise generally forgotten opera conductor Mikhail Tushmalov to a 1971 rock version, with lyrics, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, to a 2012 version in which ten composers each orchestrated, for UK’s Amadeus Orchestra, one of the ten movements, there have been dozens of arrangements and orchestrations and samplings of Musorgsky’s original piano version. (Even Michael Jackson mined “Great Gates of Kiev,” and more than once!)
The VSO will play Maurice Ravel’s 1922 orchestration of “Pictures.” Jacobsen called it “the most spectacular one,” and “truly one of the great orchestral masterpieces,” as well as a “one directional collaboration between Mussorgsky and Ravel.” The Ravel is the most widely respected of all the orchestrations, head and shoulders above all others.
Musicologist, composer, teacher (Juilliard faculty, Oberlin Conservatory Dean, etc.), Norman Lloyd wrote in his Golden Encyclopedia of Music that the Mussorgsky suites were “completely original–unlike anything else written at the time. They come as close as music can to making a listener ‘see” what he is hearing.”
For the enthusiastic synesthesiast, who can see sound and hear colors, or who wants to, even “Pictures” is not the most notable work on the program.
Musically worthy as the Coleman “Fanfare” and the Mussorgsky/Ravel masterpiece are, it’s the work that comes between them on the program, a great-grand-nephew of Disney’s pioneering mixed media 1940 “Fantasia,” that will have people talking when they leave the Ferguson and Sandler concert halls.
That’s Philharmonia Fantastique, composed by Richmond native Mason Bates with animation by Jim Capobianco. This 25 minute, visually and musically colorful, “concerto for orchestra and animation,” is unlike anything ever seen or heard at any VSO concert.
Featuring an animated magical Sprite whose body and one leg represent the percussion segment of an orchestra, the other leg representing the strings, an arm of brass instruments and an arm of woodwinds, “PhilFan” is something like a cross of a 60’s light show with Sergei Prokofiev’s introduction to orchestral instruments Peter and the Wolf, all raised to the 10th power, with DNA from Disney’s Fantasia clearly present. (Jacobsen mentioned Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, another candidate for musical parentage, or at least the fraternal twin of an immediate progenitor.)
Like “Pictures” but switched from a sonic equivalent of visual art to an animated visual interpretation of sound, Philharmonia Fantastique, like the Mussorgsky, takes the form of a guided tour.
That coated-in-many colors Sprite is the tour guide. She (so YouTube previews call her) uses images recorded by cameras that go inside instruments as small as the flute (to watch how the valves open and close), and as large as the cello, revealing how instruments make and color their unique sounds, and how all the disparate parts of the orchestra create one coherent, melded, musical (aural) event.
Mussorgsky wrote in a June 1880 autobiographical sketch that even the “laws” of art laid down by the greatest “artist-reformers” are not “immutable, but..subject to transformation and to progress, like everything else in man’s spiritual world,” and that “art is a means of communication with people, not an end in itself.”
WANT TO GO?
Pictures at an Exhibition
Presented by Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Eric Jacobsen, Conductor
Valerie Coleman: Fanfare for Uncommon Times
Mason Bates: Philharmonia Fantastique
Modest Mussorgsky/Maurice Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition
7:30 p.m., Fri., Sept. 13, Ferguson Center for the Arts, Newport News
2:30 p.m., Sun., Sept. 15, Sandler Center for the Performing Arts, Virginia Beach
757-892-6366
New box office hours: Tues. – Fri., 10am-4:30pm
