Cover image: ‘Mars – the bringer of war’ still from Adrian Wyard’s video (below)
Sunday afternoon the Auburn Symphony Orchestra gave an excellent performance of Holst’s The Planets (with visuals) and Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon” Suite, ably conducted by guest Anthony Spain, music director of the Northwest Symphony Orchestra. This season finale played to a packed audience at Auburn Performing Arts Center.
Next season begins a new era for the ASO. Since the abrupt departure of founding music director Stewart Kershaw in 2015, the orchestra has had guest conductors for concerts, but now, after a lengthy and meticulous search, Wesley Schulz has been named as music director and takes up his baton in the fall. At the same time, the orchestra’s general manager, Lee Valenta, retires after 20 years. It would be hard to say how much Valenta has done for the orchestra, but he deserves much gratitude from all concerned, audiences, musicians, and board, for the way in which the orchestra organization has held together since Kershaw’s departure as well as somehow managing to raise the funds to keep the orchestra going, even through the recession.
Big kudos also go to the musicians. Without a steady presence on the podium it can be hard to retain good musicians or find new ones. The orchestra was founded by Kershaw in 1996 as a way for members of Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra (of which he was then music director) to have a chance to play orchestral music, and many of the ASO still play for both.
It’s the musicians themselves and their self-respect as musicians and members of an orchestra, who hold up the quality when a permanent conductor is not there. Judging by the performance Sunday, which sold out, the ASO members have achieved that in spades.
Under Spain’s guidance, they brought out all the pictorial moods Grofe wrote into his “Grand Canyon” Suite, making it easy to imagine. It’s a five-movement work which was enhanced by being played in a smaller space than a huge auditorium, so that bird sounds (flutes and piccolo), the clop-clop of donkey hooves (wood blocks) and even a bray or two, plus the sense of sun and desert space contrasted with a sudden storm, all came through clearly.
The wild wind of the storm has often been created with a wound-up wind machine but here it came from a computer, along with thunder claps and rolls from the percussion, pouring rain from other instruments, cleverly composed by Grofe and well executed.
The man behind the computer was Adrian Wyard, who also created from NASA photographs the visuals of the seven planets in the Holst work, seen on a screen above the orchestra. Perhaps the most effective was the first one, Mars, the Bringer of War. The music itself is pervaded by the inexorable sound of marching feet, and the closeup videos of the desert-like Mars surface lent itself to the feel of the soldiers marching forward over this rough terrain. Since no true close-up images of the other planets exist, the visuals showed more distant photos of their surfaces, often with color to bring them to life, plus scenes of stars and nebulas in the night sky.
Spain and the orchestra brought out the different aspects of Holst’s Planets, which in Holst’s imagination represented not only war, but aspects such as peace, old age, magic, and mysticism. At the end, Spain recognized many individual players who deservedly received plaudits for their important roles.
