The Quad City Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Mark Russell Smith, kicked off its 110th season in October, 2024.

Having kicked off its 110th-season Masterworks series on October 5 and 6 (honoring the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth with his Symphony No. 7), the Quad City Symphony Orchestra has a special program in November.

Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be presented with a mass of artistic forces – not only the orchestra, but the first appearance of Ballet Quad Cities on a Masterworks program in 17 years, along with sopranos and altos from the Augustana College Choir and Augustana Choral Artists. (Davenport's Adler Theatre will host the performance on Saturday, November 2, and the concert event will be held at Augustana College's Centennial Hall on Sunday, November 3.)

After composer Mendelssohn read the classic Shakespeare play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) at age 17, he wrote a concert overture (August of 1826), “a shimmering work capturing the magic and whimsy of the play in music,” according to San Francisco Ballet.

Contemporary music scholar George Grove called it “the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music.”

Sixteen years later, King Frederick William IV of Prussia commissioned Mendelssohn to expand upon his work for Ludwig Tieck’s production of the play. Mendelssohn wrote incidental music that included songs (“Ye spotted snakes”), melodramas (text spoken over music), and purely orchestral music such as the well-known Wedding March.

“In Shakespeare’s comedy, an evening of mischief, merriment, and mismatched couples reaches a pinnacle when the fairy queen Titania falls madly in love – with an actor with the head of a donkey. It’s enchantment as revenge by the fairy king Oberon,” the San Francisco synopsis says of the George Balanchine ballet that premiered in 1962. The mishaps quicken when the realms of fairies and mortals intersect in the forest after dark. Oberon and his servant Puck’s attempts to simplify the tangled relationships of two human couples only creates more misunderstanding.

Mendelssohn didn’t write it for a ballet originally, but QCSO music director/conductor Mark Russell Smith enlisted the help of the QC’s professional ballet company, in a new version choreographed by its artistic director Courtney Lyon.

“The music is so colorful and so descriptive that Balanchine did a whole ballet,” Smith said recently, noting that he previously conducted the piece in Richmond, Virginia. “Obviously, the original was the words and Mendelssohn’s music, with no ballet. We’re combining all these things in a hybrid. I just love the music.”

After performing Midsummer excerpts in a 2016 program, the QCSO will now present an hour-long version; the full ballet is typically two acts (without spoken text), and Balanchine incorporated a number of other Mendelssohn works with it, to tell the whole story.

The BQC one-act is a truncated version with two narrators, a women’s choir, and highlights from the play.

“Mark kept it really wide open for me – dance to what you want to dance to,” Lyon said, noting she studied the play and pulled out the most important parts to be danced.

Veteran QC actors Shelley Cooper and Doug Kutzli will read parts of the dialogue and provide narration of the story. The choir will be in the back, and the dancers will be in front (in costume, but without a set).

“The music is so lovely, and of the Shakespeare plays, it’s such a great one,” Lyon said. “There’s so much physical comedy to it, I just feel it lends itself to [dance] and I love anything that comes from literature.”

Without a typical ballet set or lighting effects, Lyon added, “In a way there’s more freedom. I feel like it allows people’s imagination to go further than an actual set. I’m okay with it. Can you imagine all that energy on stage for the audience? It’s going to be awesome. I am so excited.”

Lyon said is also thrilled to work with singer, director, and choreographer Cooper. “I’ve seen some of the work she’s done at Augustana and her solo shows. I love what she does. She has great skill.”

Lyon has never danced or choreographed the Midsummer ballet before, and is focusing more on the fairies than the lead human characters of Lysander, Demetrius, Helena, and Hermia.

“A lot is left out,” she said. “The humans are left out. It’s the fairies who refer to the humans. The highlights are all there. The wedding march is there. The music lends itself to the etherealness, the magic.”

Madeleine Rhode (center) featured in the Ballet Quad Cities production in April 2024 at the Adler Theatre, Davenport.

Ballet Quad Cities last joined the QCSO on a Masterworks program for Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake Suite in March of 2007. The company also collaborated with QCSO at St. Ambrose University’s Galvin Fine Arts Center in October of 2021, with a small group of musicians performing A Soldier’s Tale and Benny’s Gig.

As BQC has often performed its annual Nutcracker presentations with Orchestra Iowa in the Adler orchestra pit, choreographer Lyon said it’s always wonderful to dance to live music.

“When you’re a dancer and you get to perform with either an orchestra behind you or in the pit,” said Lyon, “you feel the vibrations of the music and you can sense the movement of the musicians. You can sense the conductor; you’re tuned into that. There’s a really close tie when you dance to live musicians. You’re really aware of what’s happening.

“The dancers love it,” she added. “It takes them to the next level in performance.”

QCSO conductor Smith is very experienced in presenting large-scale works (such as requiems, masses, and Beethoven’s Ninth) with big choirs, so this performance, characteristically, will pull out all the stops.

“I’m an opera conductor, so having 1,000 moving parts is not out of the ordinary,” Smith said. “This for sure is out of the ordinary, because this is a massive work. We’re not in the pit and I conduct ballet also. That’s the biggest challenge – making it work with everybody on stage, having room for the dancers downstage from the orchestra.”

The Sunday afternoon performance at Centennial Hall, a smaller venue than the Adler, will be a bigger logistical challenge, as the QCSO won’t rehearse there with BQC.

“We have to just snap our fingers and magically appear, so that’s undoubtedly a big challenge,” Smith said. “We plan for that, we’re professionals. The dancers will go there the week before and our production people will work it out. We have lots of meetings to get all the logistics worked out. There’s no room for error.”

In QCSO's seasonal repertoire, Smith looks for opportunities to partner with other arts organizations such as BQC.

“This gives us a great chance to work with actors, and the ballet, and the chorus, as well,” he said. “It’s just an ideal opportunity. It’s the highest-quality music – just magical music. And coupled with that, the partnership with the community is exactly what I look for.”

This season, BQC features two new dancers (picked from 300 who auditioned) – Mikaela Guidice, who came from Oklahoma City Ballet II, and Caitlin Sendlenski, a 2023 Butler University (Indianapolis) graduate, who danced last season with Grand Rapids Ballet.

“What stood out to me about them was their training, what kind of dancers they are, what potential they have to grow in our company,” Lyon said. “We’re not just classical ballet. You need to be very adaptable; we’re always doing new works. I look for someone who is very open-minded.”

Dancers are also judged by their personality and must be strong working in BQC’s outreach in the community and area schools, she noted.

“A dancer who joins the company needs to be ready to take on that responsibility and want that,” Lyon said. “Our dancers are just amazing humans. I enjoy working with them and enjoy the product they bring.”

Following the Masterworks intermission, two short works by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail will be performed.

More Shakespeare and an Indian Connection

The November concerts start with another Bard-inspired piece: music for Romeo and Juliet (1947) by David Diamond (1915-2005), and before intermission, two short works by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail.

The Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence, Esmail was Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence and has been in residence with Tanglewood Music Center (Co-Curator in 2023) and Spoleto Festival (Chamber Music Composer-in-Residence in 2024).

Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music. She’s penned commissions for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Kronos Quartet, and her music has been on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including Conspirare's The Singing Guitar, Imani Winds' BRUITS, and Brooklyn Rider's Healing Modes.

The QCSO will play Esmail's Testament (movement three from Vishwas), a lively, five-minute work for orchestra that also has an optional tabla (a pair of traditional Indian drums) part. It will be followed by RE|Member, a “wild, colorful overture for orchestra, with a minute-long prelude and postlude on either side for oboe solo/duet,” according to ReenaEsmail.com. “The work has some tricky passagework, especially for the winds.” (In the piece, solo oboist Andrew Parker will play a duet with himself, via video – a theatrical flourish that Mark Russell Smith said is written into the score.)

Smith wanted to feature Esmail and didn’t want to have a whole program devoted to Shakespeare. She was recommended by QCSO executive director Brian Baxter as the composer of music the orchestra hadn't performed before.

“She’s very active; lots of orchestras are playing her music,” Smith said. “She has a big following.”

He also called Esmail “a really interesting voice and someone I think Quad Cities will be really interested to hear.” Smith is always looking for current composers to include in QCSO concerts.

“She uses the Western orchestra, but is really effective in writing for the instruments in getting Indian folk sounds,” he said. “We have tablas, which are Indian, but then we have Western-European woodwinds used in a manner and orchestrated in a manner that sounds really Indian. It’s a tricky style and super cool.”

 

The Masterworks II: Midsummer Night's Dream program will be performed at the Adler Theatre (136 East Third Street, Davenport IA) on November 2 at 7:30 p.m., and at Augustana College's Centennial Hall (3703 Seventh Avenue, Rock Island IL) on November 3 at 2 p.m. Admission is $8-70, and more information and tickets are available by calling (563)322-0941 and visiting QCSO.org.

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