Beauty
Beyond Time, Beyond Place
By
Bryce Christensen
“Any great art work,” declared the great composer and
conductor Leonard Bernstein, “ . . . revives and readapts time and space, and
the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of
that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its
strange, special air.” Exulting in that
“strange, special air,” hundreds of music lovers gathered in Cedar City’s
Heritage Center on the night of November 8th for a concert performed
by the Orchestra of Southern Utah (OSU) in celebration of the centennial of
Bernstein’s birth. Aptly devoted to the
theme “Timeless Drama,” this concert compellingly reminded listeners of the
marvelous timelessness of Bernstein’s musical readaptation of time and space.
But during the evening’s program, OSU’s talented musicians also demonstrated to
listeners that great composers besides Bernstein have shared his power to
revive and readapt time in ways that draw listeners into delightful new worlds.
Indeed, even before the evening’s concert began, local
pianist Cody Stratton had set the tone for the evening with lobby music that
defied the limits of time and space, blending together a musical potpourri of
classical music and his own delightful creations. Carrying listeners out of the concert hall to
a sylvan world beneath the stars, Stratton’s “Campfire Bird” especially
prepared listeners for an evening of musical transports.
In welcoming the audience to the concert, OSU
president Harold Shirley first focused on the music written by Leroy
Anderson, a 20th-century
American composer who shared with his more famous contemporary Bernstein a
great power to revive and readapt time and space. Fittingly, Shirley promised that the two
Anderson compositions the orchestra was about to play would stir nostalgia as
they took listeners back to the simpler and less factious America of Fifties.
While listening to Anderson’s “Blue Tango,” many in
the audience might well have sworn they were back in Manhattan Center in 1952
when Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra launched this composition into
enduring fame. Named for a dance
renowned for the close embrace maintained by couples performing it, this number
became a harmonic tango that kept flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns,
trumpets, trombones, violins, violas, cellos, and all of the other instruments
very close in an exacting musical choreography rendered deceptively
effortless. OSU assistant conductor Adam
Lambert demonstrated superb skill in wielding the baton keeping the entire orchestra
in perfect synchrony. Somewhere the
shade of Winterhalter must have looked down--and listened in--with warm
approval. Swaying in sympathetic
response to the exotic rhythms revived and readapted from an earlier era, many
in the 21st-century audience would have leaped to the dance floor
had one been open to them.
In turning next to Anderson’s “Belle of the Ball,” the
orchestra maintained the dance theme, but did so while reviving and readapting
a very different time and place. Explaining that in “Belle of the Ball” he had sought
to recapture the enchantment of Viennese waltzes, Anderson gave Lambert and the
musicians under his direction a number that drew from the strains of Strauss
and other masters of the waltz the beguiling inspiration for ethereal elegance,
melodious and otherworldly. Long a
mainstay of the repertoire of the Boston Pops, Anderson’s “Belle” afforded Lambert
and the Orchestra of Southern Utah an opportunity to do a collective
impersonation of the famous Boston orchestra that was every bit as convincing
as their previous impersonation of Winterhalter’s ensemble! Leaving an enraptured audience unsure whether
they were in 21st-century Cedar City, 20th- century
Manhattan or Boston, or 19th-century Vienna, OSU delivered both
Anderson standards in all their enthralling loveliness.
Time and space yielded to artistic wizardry in a
different fashion in the concert’s final pre-intermission number--Antonio
Capuzzi’s Concerto in D Major. As
Shirley explained in his prefatory remarks, this time-dissolving work conveys the
brilliance of a musical era when the Baroque metamorphosed into the
Classical. Originally written in Italy for
the double bass, this selection captured the audience as the occasion for a
remarkable solo performance by trombonist Michelle Lambert. With admirable poise and skill, Lambert
rendered every 18th-century flourish with 21st century
verve. Lambert moved from the profound
depths of her instrument’s lower register into the mellower tones of its higher
notes with liquid grace. Particularly
brilliant in the kinetic final measures, Lambert’s singular virtuosity captivated
all who heard it. But perhaps no one found greater pleasure in hearing her
memorable solo than did the man on the conductor’s platform: Adam Lambert, whose identity as the soloist’s
husband made him the ideal conductor for this number. Never were musical and marital concord more beautifully
joined!
In welcoming concertgoers back to the hall after intermission,
Shirley spoke glowingly of the composer especially honored this night: Leonard
Bernstein. Bernstein, Shirley explained,
was a composer whose genius could not be hidden, even during an era of
McCarthyist hysteria and cowardice.
That genius shone brightly as the orchestra performed Bernstein’s
Overture to ‘Candide,’ a
composition demonstrating how the composer’s art could revive and
readapt the imaginative vision of the Enlightenment satirist Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). Taken from a light opera based on a
mercilessly ironic novel by the French philosopher, Bernstein’s overture
readapted the time and space of an Enlightenment satire in the dynamic rhythms
of 20th-century drama, so exposing the hypocrisies and deceptions of
the composer’s own time. Under the always-impassioned and inspiring baton of
OSU conductor Xun Sun, OSU’s percussion section rose to the challenge of the complex
rhythms of this daunting number, as drums and cymbals together played off the
rest of the orchestra, taut with the irresistible energy of its cadences. As the concert hall pulsed with the
sprightliness of this ever-popular work, concert-goers occupied a time and
place stunningly distant from modern Iron County.
But Bernstein’s skill in reviving and readapting time
and space manifested itself most spectacularly in the evening’s final
number: just as enchanting in 2018 as it
was when first performed more than sixty years ago, Bernstein’s music for Symphonic
Dances from West Side Story
dazzled listeners as it revived and readapted the time and space that once were
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, reconceived
as inter-ethnic romance in a blue-collar neighborhood in 20th-century
New York City. In the soaring lyricism
of “Tonight,” listeners thrilled to that incomparable moment when young love
first knows itself. In the stirring
Latin rhythms of “Maria,” they shared a passion transcending ethnic prejudice. In “America,” they felt anew the irresistible
appeal of a land that nurtures lofty aspirations; and in “One Hand, One Heart,”
they joined in the tender hopes of a vulnerable couple anticipating marriage,
blissfully unaware of the tragedy awaiting them. Under Sun’s versatile directing, the OSU instrumentalists
performed all of the iconic passages from Bernstein’s West Side score with a sureness of interpretive touch that put the
audience back in time to 1957 and away in geography to Broadway, where
Bernstein’s genius helped make this play a blockbuster.
At the evening’s close, as concert-goers filed out of
the Heritage Center, they reflected on how a half-dozen musical numbers, unforgettably
performed, had transported them to readapted times and spaces, making them
happy if temporary inhabitants of astonishing imaginative realms outside of
their habitual chronology and geography.
These satisfied concert-goers felt deeply indebted to Xun Sun, Adam
Lambert, Michelle Lambert and all the other OSU performers, and the Sorenson
Legacy Foundation and other concert sponsors for having afforded them the
opportunity to experience the air of a rare Cedar City night in November as
something intoxicatingly strange and special.
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