Five by Design

We do silly things for love. This must be one of them.

In what Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith termed a "fun experiment" at his February 7 "Inside the Music" lecture, the Quad City Symphony, for its "Valentine's Day" Masterworks concerts, replaced classical-music repertoire for half of the program with tunes from the 1940s sung by a five-member swing group. Last year, we got Scheherazade; this year, we got the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."

The orchestra was the opening act, performing Berlioz's arrangement of Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Dance, Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Tchaikovsky's "Waltz" from Swan Lake. During the second half, the orchestra served as backup band for vocal group Five by Design, which performed a variety of old-time pop selections including, among others, "Night & Day," "Begin the Beguine," "The Trolley Song," "Mairzy Doats," and "Sing, Sing, Sing."

I enjoy all kinds of music, and symphony orchestras have long attempted to attract new audiences by blending popular and classical music in their Pops concerts. Simply put, the swing music on the February program belonged in a Pops concert, and it diminished the Quad City Symphony's Masterworks series - whose traditional forms and repertoire are my balms against the temporal superficiality of what Mahler called "a garish world."

The musical mismatch in conception was exacerbated in the February 9 Adler Theatre concert by the artistic disparity between the orchestra and vocal group, both in technical execution and ability to evoke an emotional response. Even judged only in its genre, Five by Design could not match the performance standard of the orchestra.

It should have been only a sampling - a taste of love, lust, delusions of grandeur, and jocular deception - but the Quad City Symphony on December 1 delivered a fast-paced, funny, and fully satisfying performance of Act III of Guiseppe Verdi's opera Falstaff.

Last season, the Quad City Symphony's Der Rosenkavalier excerpt was plagued by balance problems between the singers and orchestra and by dramatic incoherence - with neither a translation of the German libretto nor an explanation of the plot.

This year, Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith got it right logistically, educationally, and musically. Smith moved the instrumentalists upstage, opening up a large area in front of the orchestra that put the principal singers closer to the audience. The cast members had more room to move and act, sharpening the differences between their characters.

Even though the 30-plus members of Jon Hurty's Quad City Choral Arts sat behind the orchestra, far from the dramatic action, the location made their sound appropriately ethereal when they took on the roles of sprites, nymphs, spirits, and ghostly apparitions.

The changes of staging also improved the balance between the singers and the orchestra. From its upstage position, the orchestra was easily heard yet never overwhelmed the singers.

When the Quad City Symphony unveiled its versions of Mozart and Beethoven at the Adler Theatre on November 3, it stripped away the formalism of the Classical period and replaced it with the sensuality of mid-19th Century Romanticism. That approach by Conductor and Music Director Mark Russell Smith enhanced the literary thread that connected the five movements of Beethoven's "Pastorale," and the orchestra's consistently warm and expressive performance made both composers' music more satisfying.

Even though Mozart's Overture to The Magic Flute and Concerto for Clarinet (both composed in 1791) are paramount examples of Classical form, and Beethoven's 1808 Symphony No. 6 is a harbinger of the early Romantic movement, Smith had the orchestra perform with nuance beyond the scores - applying practices largely developed after these pieces were written.

In the middle of the turbulently self-expressive, politically conflicted, structurally groundbreaking nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven is a quiet outlier, a revolutionary work whose only discord is a thunderstorm.

It's hard to believe, but the tumultuous Fifth and the mild-mannered Sixth symphonies were premiered in the same ice-cold Vienna theater on December 22, 1808. Conceptually contrasting pieces, each work taps into a distinctly different aspect of Beethoven's personality. No. 5 is an emphatic example of how he portrayed his life through music - bitterness with Vienna, romantic failures, increasing deafness, and frustration with the music politics of the aristocracy. But Symphony No. 6 ("Pastorale") is devoid of this me-against-the-world battle. The conflict is gone because Beethoven had no conflict with nature. No. 6 is simply an observation and organization of what he called "the feelings of nature" put into music, and it enlarged the possibilities for the symphony as a form.

When Maestro Mark Russel Smith cues the Quad City Symphony to begin the "Pastorale" on November 3 and 4, don't listen for themes of fate, politics, or philosophy; let Beethoven's retreat into nature be your respite for 40 minutes. He points the way in his musical story by titling each movement so we know exactly what it's depicting - a first for a large-scale symphony.

It was standard repertoire in the expected order, but the performance that Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith and the orchestra gave at the opening of the Quad City Symphony's 98th Masterworks Series on October 6 was anything but typical because of the thorough, culturally sensitive thinking behind the showcase piece.

Richard Wagner's youthful Overture to Rienzi and Max Bruch's lyric Violin Concerto No. 1 were executed consistent with German performance practices, largely confined to the composer's instructions in the score. But Smith created a sharp contrast of musical styles to the concert's first two pieces with "country kid" Antonín Dvo?ák's Symphony No. 8. Instead of the typical literal interpretation of the score, he transformed it through unwritten, more-expressive Bohemian playing techniques, creating a performance that felt authentic - similar to what audiences might have heard in its Dvo?ák-conducted 1890 debut in Prague.

The Quad City Symphony next month will launch a 2012-13 Masterworks Series that takes a step back from last year's ambitious, adventurous, and modern programming and instead plunges into the deep end of 19th Century Romanticism.

Gone is the wide-ranging repertoire that musically delineated the four main historical style periods spanning 300 years, from early-18th Century Vivaldi to a world premiere by local composer William Campbell. Gone are the global concept of Britten's War Requiem, the eclectic contrasts of Modernism, and the contrapuntal complexity of the Baroque. And, by focusing on swing music for the February Masterworks concert, the symphony has effectively eliminated one of its season's six primary showcases for classical music.

?The finale of the Quad City Symphony's Masterworks season was a difficult juggling act requiring the preparation of contemporary, impressionistic, Classical, and Romantic musical languages while collaborating with and attending to the artistic needs of a composer, a piano soloist, and three sopranos.

The orchestra fundamentally pulled it off, although it sounded like one more rehearsal for the large, complicated program would have helped the symphony master the nuances of each piece.

William Campbell

While a brief, unpretentious piece, Coyote Dances - by local composer William Campbell - is long on musical adventure, drama, and humor fashioned from a Native American moral yarn reminding us not to get too big for our britches.

In personal and e-mail interviews, Campbell - chair of the St. Ambrose University music department and an associate professor there - explained how he portrayed a story of the folkloric trickster hero Coyote in music and the March 31 and April 1 premiere of the composition with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra.

"I wanted to write fun music with exuberant, joyful moments," the composer said. And the score indicates that Coyote Dances is full of them.

It was more than a concert. It was an artistic assault against war.

Performing Benjamin Britten's choral masterpiece War Requiem - with its contemporary music, Latin requiem, and harrowing poetry of World War I soldier/poet Wilfred Owen - the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and its performing partners from Minnesota, Germany, and our own community on March 3 exposed the crippling sadness, human devastation, and insanity of war and found in its darkness a timeless argument for peace.

It was a gutsy decision for the symphony to program a single, 90-minute composition with unfamiliar words and music exploring the grotesque realities of war. But Quad City Symphony Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith accompanied that choice with education, altering the usual concert format by using the first 40 minutes to explain Britten's literary restructuring of the requiem, demonstrate its fresh sound, and show key guideposts in the dramatic flow of the piece.

And the coherent, compelling performance of Britten's epic work decisively outweighed any disruption of concert rituals.

The March concerts by the Quad City Symphony Orchestra feature just one work, and the imposingly somber title alone might give their potential audience pause: War Requiem. It is a difficult and complex work, and a mammoth undertaking for the symphony and its performance partners. But understanding composer Benjamin Britten's goals and methods can illuminate the experience of his anti-war masterwork and help attendees make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Pages