By any measure, the program of music performed by the Missoula Symphony Orchestra on Saturday and Sunday was unusual. For the season-ending pair of concerts, the ensemble lurched from a foreboding overture, to a nostalgic concerto, to a single movement from a much longer symphony, and finally to a highlight-reel of instrumental numbers from an opera. During much of the program, the orchestra itself was cut to a portion of its normal forces, only to bring on extra firepower for the finish. Even the featured soloist, Ana Vidovic, arrived on stage toting an instrument rarely seen in the context of orchestral music: an acoustic guitar.
Yet by any measure, this was one of the most consistently fine performances put on by our local orchestra in modern memory. In this musical mish-mosh, magic was made. [Read More...]
Missoula Symphony Orchestra conductor Darko Butorac says that he always begins with a simple principle in mind whenever he sits down to program a concert for the orchestra: diversity.
“I really like contrasts,” says Butorac. “I don’t ever like to serve the same type of food for my guests at dinner.”
But, in the case of this weekend’s season-ending pair of concerts, Butorac says that the “music-geek” in him couldn’t help but be attracted to subtle parallels between the two main courses on the menu, Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier Suite” and Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” [Read More...]
“Stories in sound is why we’re here.” With those words, conductor Darko Butorac turned to his business, leading the Missoula Symphony Orchestra in the second half of a diverse program of music on Sunday.
Of the four works on the concert, two told the essence of their stories in their titles: Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture,” and John Corigliano’s “Elegy.” But it was in the two longer (and less descriptively titled) works on the afternoon’s bill, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Maurice Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe” Suite No. 2, that the afternoon audience found the subtlety and substance of the day’s narrative. [Read More...]
The Missoula Symphony Orchestra has quite a diverse program on tap this weekend, including one of my personal favorite works in the entire orchestral repertoire: music from Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe.” For those curious about the show, I decided to put together a compilation of clips from YouTube.
Fate holds a peculiar position in the classical concert hall. At every performance, the music of the program is there on the page in indelible ink, theoretically preordained and immutable, the most meticulously organized choreography of human expression in our culture. Yet any time that live musicians go about translating scratches on paper to waves of sound, the unpredictability of results would seem to belie the whole notion of predeterminism.
Even the same musicians, playing the same music twice, never sound quite the same.
It is much for this reason that one goes back, time and again, to hear familiar classics. In the best performances, one feels a simultaneous sense of inevitability and newness, of revelation and reassurance.
Sunday afternoon’s concert by the Missoula Symphony Orchestra was not quite such a performance. Yet as the ensemble performed a program of music explicitly themed around meditations on fate, the present trajectory of our local orchestra held tight to the script: They just keep getting better. [Read More...]
“Well, that was sure worth the price of admission!”
Sometimes, the offhanded comments of audience members capture the spirit of a concert better than the meditated musings of a professional critic.
Those two quotes above, overheard in the University Theatre lobby during intermission at Sunday’s performance by the Missoula Symphony Orchestra, pretty much told the story of the day. In a diverse program of works by Beethoven, Mozart, Debussy and Stravinsky, the highlight of Sunday’s concert was the playing of the orchestra and its guest soloist, pianist Stewart Goodyear, in a performance of Mozart’s 20th Piano Concerto. [Read More...]
To those with a casual knowledge of classical music, Igor Stravinsky is widely considered the first major avant garde composer of the 20th century. But as Darko Butorac prepares to conduct Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite” in a concert by the Missoula Symphony Orchestra this weekend, he wants you to know: This is nothing to be afraid of.
“Truly, in this day and age, your average movie score is more jarring than the ‘Firebird Suite,’ said Butorac. “As a society we’ve grown accustomed to these sounds; there’s nothing that would shock anybody in this music anymore – but there’s plenty that would move people.” [Read More...]
I received a press release today stating that in the 2009-2010 season, 90 American orchestras will present 179 world premieres of new music.
The list of orchestras presenting those new works range from youth orchestras, to tiny community orchestras, to the most respected professional ensembles in the country.
Missing from the list: Any orchestra in the state of Montana. This seems a rotten shame to me, particularly considering the wealth of talented composers living in Montana… [Read More...]
I’m sitting in the Music Recital Hall at UM, listening as the Summer Opera Festival orchestra practices a section of tightly knit contrasts: fast outbursts set against subtly shimmering textures – a hallmark of the music of Giuseppe Verdi. The music starts and stops, as Darko Butorac barks out corrections.
“Oh mama mia, mama mia,” he sighs as the string players smudge a tricky bar. “I can’t subdivide this for you. You have to do it for yourselves.”
He counts out the tempo again, and this time it sounds just right.
Trouble is, back here in the percussion section, I have no idea where we are. On my sparsely notated sheet music, I see “Tacet 5-6-7,” an indication that I simply sit out three long sections of the music. When does the next section begin? It’s not really clearly noted. When it does eventually begin, my music tells me to count out seven bars of rest. Then fifty-two bars of rest. Then fifty-three. Then forty-one.
Then, I’m supposed to whack the bass drum very, very hard. [Read More...]
It has been almost exactly two years since the Missoula Symphony Orchestra named Darko Butorac its new conductor and artistic director. Sunday’s concert by the MSO served as a strong testament to all that has changed at the orchestra since his appointment — and a harbinger of further transformation.
For its season finale two years ago, in a concert conducted by Anthony Spain (one of five conductors who vied for the position that Butorac ultimately won), the orchestra performed one of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.
In Sunday’s concert, the orchestra revisited Shostakovich with an account of his precocious First Symphony, penned when the composer was only a teenager. [Read More...]
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