Enviable Potential
By Bryce Christensen
“Old age may have wisdom,” remarks commentator Gretchen Vogel, “but I will always envy youth for its potential.” The stunning (and enviable) potential of youth was fully on display on April 11th in Cedar City’s Heritage Center, where the Orchestra of Southern Utah (OSU) sponsored its annual Roy L. Halversen Young Artists Concert. Named for an outstanding music educator who for decades enhanced the musical arts in Cedar City, the Halversen Concert now enjoys wide recognition as a prime venue for the showcasing of rising new musical stars. And this year’s three featured stars—two instrumentalists and a composer--evinced more than a little enviable potential in their singular musical talents.
As he opened this year’s Halversen concert, dedicated to the theme of “Capture the Moment,” OSU President Harold Shirley heightened the audience’s expectations as he recognized the gifts the night’s featured young artists had already demonstrated in outshining their peers in the competition for inclusion in this concert.
Shirley prepared listeners to listen to the surprising first young musician by urging them to lay aside any preconceptions of the tuba as merely the source of unimportant, slightly silly oompahs in the musical background, never as a solo instrument. What the audience was about to hear, Shirley announced, was a tuba solo, delivering a smooth and “almost buttery” sound that all would relish.
Making good on everything that Shirley had promised, Aria Williams, a sophomore student from Southern Utah University (SUU), then performed Suite for Tuba by Don Haddad. Astonishing all present, Williams poured from her tuba a stream of astonishing musical energy, energy that she modulated with exceptional skill and artistic grace. No, it was not the fairy grace of a piccolo or even the elfin grace of a clarinet. But as a kind of elephantine grace, it was all the more unexpected—and pleasing. Who knew that an elephant could dance so captivatingly? Deftly handling the choreography of this amazing dancing, OSU assistant director Adam Lambert conducted a contracted orchestra (no strings) in this piquant number.
At the conclusion of Williams’ brilliant performance, Shirley introduced the evening’s second featured young musician: Robby DeBry, a composition and jazz trombonist currently studying at SUU. To prepare the audience for DeBry’s daring composition Ashtoreth, Shirley crossed a genre boundary to speak of the visual art of the British Romantic painter J.M. W. Turner, whose works often bewildered contemporaries looking for easily recognizable images.
Shirley’s comparison offered an ideal perspective on DeBry’s work, inspired by Jeremiah’s condemnation of apostate Israel’s idolatrous worship of the Queen of Heaven, Ashtoreth. Plunging the audience into a cauldron of musical and spiritual turbulence, this work—like Turner’s paintings—left behind easily recognizable surfaces, as it plumbed dark and mysterious depths. Shifting from the morose and brooding to the volcanic and eruptive, from the phlegmatic to the kinetic, this work probed the dynamics of spiritual conflict in challenging ways. Like Turner’s visual art, DeBry’s musical art summoned auditors to intense and difficult contemplation. OSU director Xun Sun conducted this world premiere with impressive responsiveness to its variegated textures.
Changing the mood of the evening, Shirley announced as the next featured young musician, Aubrey Aikele, a junior at Moapa Valley High School, slated to perform the Piano Concerto No. 2, Larghetto calmato by Edward MacDowell. This work, Shirley indicated, would showcase the dazzling keyboard virtuosity of Aikele as soloist, stunningly fused with the collective harmonies of the orchestra as a whole.
The number fully lived up to the billing. After a muted and pensive opening rendered by the strings, the piano announced its arrival with a passage of pyrotechnic intensity, as coruscating arpeggios repeatedly culminated in thunderous chords. Again and again, Aikele’s frenetic but perfectly controlled energy softened into seductively pacific tranquility. And under the skilled baton of OSU assistant director Carylee Zwang, the orchestra seamlessly melded its musical threads into one vibrantly hued tapestry. As the radiant center of this tapestry, Aikele evinced a rare combination of primal power and artistic sophistication. She will delight many more audiences in the years ahead!
Following the works of the three young Halversen artists, and after intermission, Shirley introduced the final number of the evening-- the first, fourth, and fifth movements of the Symphony No. 5 by Mahler, to be played by the entire orchestra, under the direction of Xun Sun. This number, Shirley explained, has earned the reputation of being the Mount Everest of orchestral music.
But as the lead musical mountaineer, OSU director Xun Sun raised an undaunted baton, signaling the path upward, and the intrepid musicians under his direction fearlessly, and adeptly, made the ascent. As if signaling the first step of the climb, trumpeter Rich McMaster delivered a piercingly beautiful solo, thrilling every listener with its bright yet stately tones. Those stately tones announce the opening of the symphony’s first movement, Trauermarsch, dominated by somber measures, cadenced with the rhythms of a funeral march, majestic yet sweetly melancholy.
Just as poignant, though decidedly less funereal, the fourth movement—Adagietto—conveys a plangent sense of heart-felt but unfulfilled longing. Believed to constitute a kind of love song from the composer to his wife, this movement delivers a deep intensity of passion, laced with heart-melting sorrow. The OSU strings carried the enormous emotional burden of this movement with compelling tenderness.
In the last movement—Rondo Finale—an effervescent mood breaks out, as brilliant sunlight breaks through all of the earlier movements’ darker clouds. Spritely, even jocund, notes lift listeners into an ecstatic new perspective. In the sharp contrast with the opening death march, many listeners may well have seen reason for what Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan once said about hearing Mahler’s Fifth: “A great performance of the Fifth is a transforming experience. The fantastic finale almost forces you to hold your breath.” OSU did indeed deliver a great performance, one leaving many in the audience breathless during the overwhelming finale. But then, as any experienced mountaineer knows, no one breathes easily at the summit of Everest. And with hundreds of listeners on their backs, Sun and his orchestra did reach that sky-touching summit!
When they were finally able to breathe freely again, the hundreds who had gathered for this season-ending conference left the Heritage Center deeply grateful for the musical talent that makes OSU such a marvel. The musical talent in this exceptional regional orchestra clearly includes three marvelous conductors and scores of accomplished instrumentalists. On this particular night, the concert-goers very much appreciated the three primary sponsors who had made the concert this orchestra had just performed affordable: The Charles and Gloria Maxfield Parrish Foundation, the Dixie and Ann Leavitt Leavitt Foundation, and Ripple Effect. And all those concert-goers left for home dreaming not only of next season’s OSU concerts but also of all the many concerts that this night’s featured young stars will surely produce in the decades ahead as they again and again demonstrate their potential to ascend imposing musical heights--perhaps some even beyond Everest.
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