Music often is described as magical, but music written about magic itself goes a step further. That’s the step Tacoma Symphony Orchestra will take Saturday in it’s Enchanted Symphony concert.
The evening opens a season full of well-loved classics and plays on a Halloween theme with music about witches, a magical bird, a secretive writer and a cursed violin with a vindictive soul.
The witches, bird and writer are all fairly well known by their tunes because they were used in equally dramatic films. Mussorgsky’s 1886 “Night on Bald Mountain,” with its shrieking violins, menacing brass and frantic woodwinds dancing at a witches’ Sabbath, isn’t just a concert favorite.
It also furnished the scene for one of the scariest animation sequences in the classic “Fantasia”: a towering blue devil scooping up maniacal followers and dropping them into the fires of hell. And it has popped up in other films from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.”
“The Firebird,” meanwhile, was the 1910 ballet that launched Sergei Diaghilev to fame as a choreographer, and tells the Russian folktale of a magical bird who helps a prince marry his beloved princess in exchange for the bird’s own freedom from an evil sorcerer. With evocative scoring, eerie solos for high bassoon and oboe, and Russian folk melodies, “The Firebird” also has been a pop-culture hit, appearing in “Fantasia 2000” and CDs by the rock band Yes.
The third Russian piece on the TSO program is the violin-melodic Romance from Shostakovich’s “The Gadfly,” written for a film about a mysterious satirist and reused for the BBC/PBS mini-series “Reilly, Ace of Spies.”
For violin soloist Maria Bachmann, who will play the popular chaconne from “The Red Violin” suite by John Corigliano – scored for the 1998 film of the same name about a violin that curses each of its owners – the real enchantment is in the instrument itself.
“I love the movie,” said Bachmann, on the phone from her New York home. “It’s very evocative and spiritual. Although one thing that’s not true in it is that violin makers put blood into the varnish! But what is true is that each violin has its own soul. I’ve played on some wonderful violins, including some Strads, and each one has its own unique voice and character. You can feel it.”
Bachmann’s own violin was made not, as in the movie, by a distraught luthier bitter at his wife’s untimely death, but by renowned Naples maker Nicolo Gagliano in 1782. “I don’t know exactly who has played it and probably I’ll never find out,” says Bachmann, “so it has a sort of mystery to it.”
Bachmann has gained a reputation for interpreting Corigliano’s work, garnering praise for her “refined expression” at Chicago’s Corigliano festival in 2010 and winning BBC Magazine’s “North American CD of the Month” for her 2007 recording “The Red Violin.”
And though Bachmann also champions other contemporary composers such as Philip Glass and Paul Moravec, she’s a Corigliano fan.
“I think he’s terrific; he’s one of the best composers in the world,” she says. “I’ve known him for many years, and I love working with him. He’s truly one of America’s greatest masters.”
After this Saturday, the orchestra goes on to an eight-concert season filled with mostly classical favorites spiced with a couple of new works. There’s a November concert in the Rialto of Bach, Copland and Schumann; the annual holiday concert and “Messiah” performance; and another Rialto concert in February with Barber’s “Adagio” and Mendelssohn’s “Italian” symphony, plus Michael Torke’s groundbreaking “Ash.”
A Hollywood Pops concert, a performance of Fauré’s “Requiem” by the TSO chorus and a season finale in May of Beethoven’s 9th symphony and the 9/11-inspired “Voices Shouting Out” by Nkeiru Okoye finish off the year.
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568, rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com
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