The Bloomington Symphony Orchestra’s April 27th “Underground Railroad” featured two world premiere performances, and a fantastic performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.
Two Davids, BSO, Chamber Singers face goliaths
by Peter Jacobi H-T columnist
April 29, 2008Sunday afternoon’s Bloomington Symphony Orchestra concert featured a parade of winners, not the least of them being the orchestra itself, playing resoundingly well under its energetic and perceptive young maestro, Charles Latshaw.
One likes to be assured that “the city’s official community orchestra,” as it has been labeled, is performing at a proficient level. What one heard on Sunday at Bloomington High School North offered assurance.But the musical parade also featured a pair of impressive new works commissioned by the BSO from prominent local composers along with three soloists, who added their distinctive talents to the well-attended program.
The premieres came as bookends. David DeBoor Canfield’s “Evil Taunt, Fair Menace,” a salute to the Native American flute, served to open. David Baker’s “Stories of the Underground Railroad” wound up the event. They were different as different can be but each supplied the essences and atmospheres needed for what the composers intended.
At stage center for the Canfield piece, its title an anagram of the instrument honored, was the musician it was written for: James Pellerite, he of distinguished credentials (solo flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and professor of flute at IU among them), who has in recent years championed the native instrument. Canfield, the orchestra’s chief second violinist and a prolific composer, gave Pellerite plenty of the plangent and soulful and mournful to play, and play it to the max he did, this against an orchestral environment suggesting menace, mystery and elusive things of the spirit. The imaginative orchestration gave prominence to percussive thingamajigs such as African thumb piano, steel drum, turkey yelper, accordion ratchet and Tibetan singing bowl.
Baker’s paean to the Underground Railroad, with words of history crafted by BSO tuba soloist Paul Hartin, quoted themes from spirituals, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the “Dies Irae,” within a musical framework emotionally rich enough and yet aurally subtle enough to both contain and highlight the text.
That text addressed “100-thousand pieces of human cargo” saved from slavery on a “train without tracks” by heroes unknown and known, the latter including the Underground Railroad’s leader, Harriet Tubman, who cajoled and threatened the wearied-unto-death to continue their flight, lest they be murdered by their own to prevent leakage of information through torture by the pursuers. The resonant voice of James Mumford, longtime director of the IU African American Choral Ensemble, gave life to the words, many of them focused on Indiana’s contribution to this escape-to-freedom movement. Latshaw and orchestra gave song to Baker’s alluring music.
Between the premieres, the BSO brought young Seung-Mi Sun to the front, she a junior at Harmony School, member of IU’s Violin Virtuosi, and this year’s winner of the orchestra’s Youth Concerto Competition. Seung-Mi played the opening movement of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Close to letter perfect, her performance was brimming with excitement, solo cadenza and all, and a keen sense for the music’s melodic rapture. She’s got talent, to be sure. A large contingent of friends cheered her lustily at entrance. But everyone else in the audience joined in for a deserved and cheers-punctuated standing ovation that followed her impressive accomplishment.