By
Bryce Christensen
By jet, by cruise ship, by train, and by car,
Americans travel like no other people on earth.
But during the evening of November 17th, a fortunate group of
Americans gathered in Cedar City’s Heritage Center traveled on the most
glorious conveyance of all: Music. For
in a concert dedicated to “American Composers Without Borders,” the Orchestra
of Southern Utah (OSU) transported enthralled listeners to distant lands and prospects
via music created by talented American music-makers.
To start the evening’s journeys, OSU President Harold
Shirley welcomed the audience, promising that the program listeners were about
to hear would indeed erase boundaries, giving each concert-goer a private
passport to marvelous new horizons.
And the evening’s first stop fulfilled everything
Shirley had promised: composed by the Utah-based American composers Steven
Sharp Nelson and Marshall McDonald, Africa
carried listeners to a mysterious continent teeming with vitality. This five-segment number limned the
life-cycle from birth to death, and beyond, with a deep emotive force
certifying that Nelson and McDonald travel as something more than gawking
tourists. Opening with the pulsing
heartbeat of a single marimba (played by David Jordan), this captivating number
quickly swelled into a kinetic celebration of the adventures and delights of an
African childhood. The entire audience
felt the magic of this childhood, but that magic touched no one more deeply than
the OSU percussionists, who lit up the concert hall with the radiant flames of
their enthusiasm.
Sparks from that enthusiasm fell into the dry kindling
of the Enterprise High School Choir, joining the Orchestra for this
number. The lambent voices of this choir
quickened the exuberant adolescent segment of Africa, as the young singers channeled their own spontaneous and
irrepressible hopes so compellingly into Swahili verses that linguistic
boundaries melted away in the intense heat.
Under the impassioned baton of OSU conductor Xun Sun,
the orchestra turned from the fervid joyousness of adolescence to the
angst-filled drama of young adulthood, the tension of this drama poignantly
delivered by plaintive exchanges between a solo violin (LuAnne Brown) and a
solo cello (Nina Hansen).
Instrumentalists and vocalists alike then modulated
their tone into the darker tones in the Age segment of Africa, a segment probing the regrets and sorrows of advancing
years. Briefly condensed into a piercing
flute solo (Ariel Rhoades), the theme of this segment also occasioned a somber
but profoundly moving response from the choir, as prepared to voice subdued
sorrow as they had been earlier to express exultant joy.
In the final segment of Africa, the orchestra segued into a supernal foray into the
afterlife, carrying listeners briefly across that most fundamental of
boundaries—the one separating the living from the dead. Yet after an interlude of paradisiacal bliss,
the orchestra returned to the percussive earthy dynamism of birth, so
completing an unforgettable life cycle.
Something of the transcendent mood of the final
segment of Africa persisted in the
concert’s second number, Song of Eternity,
by contemporary composer Mark Dal Porto.
In a work that opened with notes of serene majesty and then deepened
into soul-plumbing melancholy, Song once
again transgressed metaphysical boundaries separating time from eternity, the
terrestrial from the celestial. Dal
Porto’s searching melancholy deepened to a pensiveness so intense that it
finally distilled into the complete introspection of silence, a silence broken
first by a hopeful oboe (Brad Gregory), then joined by a sublime harp (Kendra
Leavitt), then by the stirring energies of the strings, and finally by the
cumulative force of the entire orchestra.
After rising to a resplendent climax fusing all the harmonic and
rhythmic voices of the orchestra, Dal Porto’s otherworldly masterpiece glides
into a conclusion of soundless reverence.
Not silence but muted and gentle sound pervaded much
of the next number, Chaconne After a Storm
by the contemporary American composer Chad Cannon (another Utah native). Though the title of this selection identifies
it as only a passage across a meteorological boundary—that separating
storminess from calm—the orchestra played this number with such exquisite
tenderness that it transported listeners across hidden emotional
boundaries—fissures in the heart---as well.
Foregrounding the harp (Kendra Leavitt again) in the opening measures,
the score soon shifted its fragile emotional burden to the cellos and basses
before finally yielding that burden to the violins, violas, and harp, who
carried their spiritual cargo up to a real but hard-won realm of tranquility.
The tone changed dramatically with the evening’s next
composition: Typewriter, by the 20th-century
American composer Leroy Anderson.
Indeed, the boundary musicians and listeners crossed with this number
was that separating seriousness from facetiousness. With OSU assistant conductor Adam Lambert
temporarily replacing Xun Sun on the conductor’s platform, OSU’s other assistant
conductor, Carylee Zwang, soloed on the most unlikely of instruments—the
typewriter! Soloist and orchestra alike
frolicked their way through this utterly frivolous but also utterly amusing and
entertaining trifle.
With the second Leroy Anderson piece of the evening—Bugler’s Holiday—Carylee Zwang took her
turn on the conductor’s stand while Adam Lambert took his place as the leader
of a trumpet section featured in this festival of sheer propulsive energy. The infectious energy of this number left more
than few listeners humming the bouncy ascents of its refrains during
intermission!
After the intermission, OSU President Harold Shirley
reappeared to introduce the final number of the evening: Rhapsody in Blue, by the 20th-century American composer
George Gershwin. With this popular number,
Shirley reminded his audience, listeners not only hear musicians transgressing
the traditional boundary separating jazz from classical but they also hear a
melody so expressive of sheer flight across all kinds of geographical
boundaries that United Airlines has chosen it as their advertising theme.
But in introducing the evening’s final number, Shirley
also introduced a remarkable soloist: thirteen-year-old pianist Sarah Sun. Daughter of OSU conductor Xun Sun, Sarah Sun
positively dazzled with her keyboard performance! Playing with the technical virtuosity and the
artistic expressiveness of a musical artist twice her age, Sun delivered all
the pyrotechnics of the most frenetic passages and all of the liquid sonority
of the most nuanced measures.
To be sure, Sarah Sun was not the only musician on the
stage performing masterfully during the Gershwin number: the Rhapsody opened with a beguiling solo by
clarinetist Sarah Solberg, soon joined by the entire orchestra responding to
the direction of Xun Sun (now back on the conductor’s platform) with a
thoroughly impressive performance of this number, luminous and vibrant.
Still, only one musician on the stage was too young to
drive a car—and she was transforming her piano into a vehicle for reaching
astonishing musical regions! (If the
conductor felt a bit of fatherly pride, it was a more than understandable
emotion!) No wonder the members of the audience
leaped to their feet at the conclusion of the concert in a standing
ovation! For this was a concert during
which they had not only felt the power of five American composers lifting them
to new regions of the body, mind, and spirit but had also experienced the
wizardry of one remarkably young musician carrying them to an undreamed-of
wonderland where a girl barely in her teens played like a seasoned virtuoso!
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