** Review **By JACKIE MAJERUS
BRISTOL – Musical humor is always a treat, and the audience at Saturday night’s performance by the Nutmeg Symphony Orchestra was lucky enough to hear some of it.
The regional orchestra, stripped of all its string players and jazzed up with saxophones and a euphonium for a “Winter Winds” concert, offered up a fine evening of music, some of the best of it by Connecticut composer Thomas Duffy.
Duffy’s “Butterflies and Bees!” and “A Parisian in America” led the concert in the Chippens Hill Middle School auditorium.
“Butterflies and Bees!” is as beautiful and busy as the name suggests. Duffy said last week that the piece, which he wrote in 1999, was inspired by an illusionary painting by M.C. Escher painting that shows birds in flight at the top, swimming fish at the bottom and a morphing of the two in the middle.
Duffy called it an “optical illusion for the ear,” and indeed it was.
His 2000 piece, “A Parisian in America” followed, and it was my favorite of the night.
I love it when music makes me laugh, or at least chuckle and this piece delivered.
Knowing the story behind the piece – a stuffy Frenchman visiting New York City has a devil of a time trying to cross the street and ultimately gives up and decides to try Canada instead – helped quite a bit.
Duffy is masterful at plucking slices of familiar music, blending them and overlapping them into delightful, chaotic confusion.
“A Parisian in America” offered the clash of marching bands, busy city streets, taxi horns, the warping of the French national anthem and more.
It was just plain fun.
Listening to the vivid scene Duffy imagined made me wonder if the vast artistic talents of Yale’s director of bands extended to a sketchbook. The story is short, funny and clever – he even includes the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – and would lend itself to an animated cartoon short.
Maybe I was imagining such a thing because the surroundings in the school auditorium were so painfully drab.
This was the second time I saw this quality symphony perform in the middle school auditorium, and if anything makes the case for a community theater, this does it.
While turning the house lights off would have helped, it wouldn’t have saved the show from the curse of an ugly hall.
Duffy says his tone poems, or musical stories put the listener “in another world” for a little while.
That’s a tall order for someone sitting in the CHMS auditorium, which has a “you’re in a middle school auditorium” design theme.
If the cinder block walls weren’t enough, they’re painted a lovely institutional gray. The aisles are carpeted, but the floor is unpainted cement – functional for a middle school, but
The stage has curtains on the sides, but they weren’t used, and it’s not clear that they could be. Behind the stage, the back wall isn’t covered with a black curtain or even a backdrop.
Instead, the uninspired monotony of the gray cinderblock is broken up by one large pipe, about two-thirds of the way up the wall. It juts out from the back wall and heads skyward, until we in the audience can’t see it anymore.
There is one adornment, however. A round, plain, standard-issue school clock, the kind that you first see on the wall in kindergarten and don’t stop looking at until graduation, is right smack in the middle of the back stage wall.
I can see how the clock would be useful for students and teachers who are suffering through an assembly, but it doesn’t do much for an audience willingly in attendance.
Now that the former Bristol Symphony Orchestra has taken its show on the road and gone regional, the group plays in the Mum City only a time or two each year.
Maybe by the time they come back for an adult show – a children’s concert at Bristol Central High School is on the calendar this spring – there will be a municipal auditorium in the works.
A public performing arts space – for music, theater, movies and more – is desperately needed and long overdue in Bristol.
After presenting Duffy’s work, the orchestra turned to another Yale composer, the late Paul Hindemith.
They played his “Symphony in B flat Major,” which conductor Marshall Brown declared the finest piece of music ever written for a band.
It’s a “tour de force,” Brown said, commissioned by the U.S. Army, featuring fugues upon fugues.
Certainly it was dramatic, and well received. Brown even asked how many had heard it before. A show of hands revealed that it was the first time for many.
After a short intermission, the symphony delivered several marches and then a couple numbers accompanied by more than 30 student musicians, many from Bristol Central or Bristol Eastern high schools.
The young musicians fit in flawlessly, and it was no doubt a treat for them to perform side by side with professionals.
It was good to see a bigger crowd this time. Though there were clearly parents and grandparents in attendance to see the younger performers, hopefully they will return to see the symphony when their children aren’t on stage.
Brown did his best to give the audience the back story to the works presented by the orchestra that night, even having the symphony play snippets of some pieces to illustrate his point.
The next concert, Brown told the audience, is a collection of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. It’ll be presented March 29 at Avon Old Farms School.
The final concert of the 2007-2008 series, “The Majesty of the Organ,” is scheduled for Saturday, May 17 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Torrington.
For more information, go to http://www.nutmegsymphony.org/.
*******
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com
BRISTOL – Musical humor is always a treat, and the audience at Saturday night’s performance by the Nutmeg Symphony Orchestra was lucky enough to hear some of it.
The regional orchestra, stripped of all its string players and jazzed up with saxophones and a euphonium for a “Winter Winds” concert, offered up a fine evening of music, some of the best of it by Connecticut composer Thomas Duffy.
Duffy’s “Butterflies and Bees!” and “A Parisian in America” led the concert in the Chippens Hill Middle School auditorium.
“Butterflies and Bees!” is as beautiful and busy as the name suggests. Duffy said last week that the piece, which he wrote in 1999, was inspired by an illusionary painting by M.C. Escher painting that shows birds in flight at the top, swimming fish at the bottom and a morphing of the two in the middle.
Duffy called it an “optical illusion for the ear,” and indeed it was.
His 2000 piece, “A Parisian in America” followed, and it was my favorite of the night.
I love it when music makes me laugh, or at least chuckle and this piece delivered.
Knowing the story behind the piece – a stuffy Frenchman visiting New York City has a devil of a time trying to cross the street and ultimately gives up and decides to try Canada instead – helped quite a bit.
Duffy is masterful at plucking slices of familiar music, blending them and overlapping them into delightful, chaotic confusion.
“A Parisian in America” offered the clash of marching bands, busy city streets, taxi horns, the warping of the French national anthem and more.
It was just plain fun.
Listening to the vivid scene Duffy imagined made me wonder if the vast artistic talents of Yale’s director of bands extended to a sketchbook. The story is short, funny and clever – he even includes the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – and would lend itself to an animated cartoon short.
Maybe I was imagining such a thing because the surroundings in the school auditorium were so painfully drab.
This was the second time I saw this quality symphony perform in the middle school auditorium, and if anything makes the case for a community theater, this does it.
While turning the house lights off would have helped, it wouldn’t have saved the show from the curse of an ugly hall.
Duffy says his tone poems, or musical stories put the listener “in another world” for a little while.
That’s a tall order for someone sitting in the CHMS auditorium, which has a “you’re in a middle school auditorium” design theme.
If the cinder block walls weren’t enough, they’re painted a lovely institutional gray. The aisles are carpeted, but the floor is unpainted cement – functional for a middle school, but
The stage has curtains on the sides, but they weren’t used, and it’s not clear that they could be. Behind the stage, the back wall isn’t covered with a black curtain or even a backdrop.
Instead, the uninspired monotony of the gray cinderblock is broken up by one large pipe, about two-thirds of the way up the wall. It juts out from the back wall and heads skyward, until we in the audience can’t see it anymore.
There is one adornment, however. A round, plain, standard-issue school clock, the kind that you first see on the wall in kindergarten and don’t stop looking at until graduation, is right smack in the middle of the back stage wall.
I can see how the clock would be useful for students and teachers who are suffering through an assembly, but it doesn’t do much for an audience willingly in attendance.
Now that the former Bristol Symphony Orchestra has taken its show on the road and gone regional, the group plays in the Mum City only a time or two each year.
Maybe by the time they come back for an adult show – a children’s concert at Bristol Central High School is on the calendar this spring – there will be a municipal auditorium in the works.
A public performing arts space – for music, theater, movies and more – is desperately needed and long overdue in Bristol.
After presenting Duffy’s work, the orchestra turned to another Yale composer, the late Paul Hindemith.
They played his “Symphony in B flat Major,” which conductor Marshall Brown declared the finest piece of music ever written for a band.
It’s a “tour de force,” Brown said, commissioned by the U.S. Army, featuring fugues upon fugues.
Certainly it was dramatic, and well received. Brown even asked how many had heard it before. A show of hands revealed that it was the first time for many.
After a short intermission, the symphony delivered several marches and then a couple numbers accompanied by more than 30 student musicians, many from Bristol Central or Bristol Eastern high schools.
The young musicians fit in flawlessly, and it was no doubt a treat for them to perform side by side with professionals.
It was good to see a bigger crowd this time. Though there were clearly parents and grandparents in attendance to see the younger performers, hopefully they will return to see the symphony when their children aren’t on stage.
Brown did his best to give the audience the back story to the works presented by the orchestra that night, even having the symphony play snippets of some pieces to illustrate his point.
The next concert, Brown told the audience, is a collection of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. It’ll be presented March 29 at Avon Old Farms School.
The final concert of the 2007-2008 series, “The Majesty of the Organ,” is scheduled for Saturday, May 17 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Torrington.
For more information, go to http://www.nutmegsymphony.org/.
*******
Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com
12 comments:
Where they playing next, Folsom Prison? They'll feel right at home in the cinderblock cellblocks.
Who designed and built CHMS? For a brand new modern school there is no excuse for such a terrible auditorium.
Good thing we don't have liberal dreamers like Jackie running the gov't. Or do we?
I am glad someone likened CHMS to a prison. I have been in there a few times. It's design has always struck me as more fitting for a prison than a school. They must have used the same architects.
Why did Brown pick Chippens Hill?
Why not the Boulevard?
All the more reason to get behind the push to renovate the Boulevard Auditorium that was organized during the last administration.
Exactly why I didn't waste $22 to get in. IF it were free admission I would have thought about going.
Picky, picky, picky. The school is in great physical shape.It's clean and efficient. The custodial staff is top notch. I'll give you the clock; somebody should have cared enought to draw a curtain. Visitors I speak with generally praise the facility. It opened in 1993 to serve as a middle school, not a community theater. It is what it was designed to be. A community theater is in the city's plans for the future. Until then, just listen to the music.
There is a lesson to be learned here.
Chippens Hill was developed and designed as a Middle School. Efforts were made to control costs, but still maximize the educational value.
It was not intended to be the Community Theater, and should not be evaluated as such.
The lesson should be carried over to the discussion regarding the West End School site.
Either it is an Education project, or it is a Community project.
If we try to marry the two, BOTH will suffer.
Lets learn from our mistakes.
She never said it should be a community theater. She never said it was a bad middle school. She just said Bristol needs a performing arts space so people don't have to see theater or hear a symphony in a middle school atmosphere.
Wow, I actually like the plain, well-kept and raw look of the school auditorium. As an '01 graduate, I look back and think how lucky I was to attend such an up to date and well maintained school. Perhaps such a show would be better served at a venue such as CCSU or UCONN?
Was the correct time showing on the Clock?
If so, much better than city hall!!!
Apparently you were not listening closely enough if you found the time to be visually distracted.
Perhaps you should venture to the Torrington concert. I know you will love the setting and the music will be stellar!!!
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