Photo by Kristen Sayres // Buy this photo
Memphis Symphony Orchestra conductor Mei-Ann Chen.
The Memphis Symphony Orchestra blasted off to the future this weekend.
Maestro Mei-Ann Chen led the first Masterworks concert of the season Saturday night, a cosmic-themed program that was both conservative and ambitious. As she begins her second full season with the MSO, Chen is firing on all thrusters in her mission to improve the quality of the orchestra, secure the loyal base of subscribers and establish programming to lure in new fans.
The three works in Saturday's performance at The Cannon Center for the Performing Arts (and Sunday at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre) were, in their differences, all beautifully performed by the musicians although a heralded multimedia effort after intermission fell short of its ambition.
The opening was a triumphant performance of four selections from Michael Gandolfi's 2007 work "The Garden of Cosmic Speculation." The composer, who spoke before the performance, told of how he was inspired by a real garden in Scotland bearing that name that celebrates physics.
The pieces were beautifully textured and varied, with the orchestra making the most of the composer's evocative artistic expressions of science. There are many lesser compositions that try to sound spacey and do little but contort noises with special effects. Gandolfi does none of that. He understands science and music, and the result is a tribute to the abiding humanity that accompanies our thirst for discovering how things work.
The next work on the program was MSO concertmaster Susanna Perry Gilmore's thrilling and sensitive performance of Erich Korngold's "Violin Concerto." Korngold fled expanding anti-Semitism in Austria in the 1930s and went to Hollywood where he soon earned two Academy Awards for his film compositions.
This concerto, composed in 1945, pulled quite a bit of inspiration from his Hollywood work, and the cinematic flavor is there throughout -- a lush romanticism that veers to the overly sentimental but manages to power on through some spiffy hoedown passages in the final movement to a rousing end.
Gilmore deftly handled the often difficult passages with elegance and precision, which the audience rewarded with a strong ovation.
The final piece of the evening was the featured work, Ravel's popular orchestration of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." The long-time favorite piece was given a multi-media presentation, however, with the accompanying film by astronomer Jose Francisco Salgado.
The film is a series of photos and computer simulations of celestial objects and a few Earthbound images taken from space. Evoking the universe is an ambitious goal, but unfortunately the film, even though it was made specifically to accompany the music, didn't have much visual impact.
It's tough in this era of immersive IMAX movies and spectacular CGI visual effects in Hollywood films to create something truly awe inspiring. Salgado's film was competent and lovely, but rarely much more than a two-dimensional slide show using basic computer graphic tricks.
The orchestra played the "Great Gate of Kiev" with grandeur and style. The accompanying visuals failed to match that big bang of magnificence.
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