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ASO Flies into Outer Space
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Saturday in Symphony Hall. www.atlantasymphony.org
“Star Wars” bombast and NASA images and hints of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with the dawn of mankind — all this and more came jumbled together Saturday night in Symphony Hall.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert was well attended and adequately performed. On the podium was Laura Jackson, who was making her farewell as the ASO’s assistant conductor, concluding a three-year fellowship. (She’ll be back next spring as a guest conductor.)
A serious talent, she nevertheless couldn’t get the musicians into gear; an evening of space music felt more earth-bound than astral.
Perhaps it was because the programming seemed specially designed to bore the been-there done-that musicians. The young maestra opened with the first couple of minutes from Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” where massive triads depict God’s moment of creation or a sunrise or, in Stanley Kubrick’s film, the evolution of humans. The ASO did it loud. It thundered and throbbed. Two minutes and out.
The swashbuckling main title tune from John Williams’ “Star Wars” soundtrack, from 1977, is a cultural benchmark, and no piece of concert-hall classical music composed in the past 30 years can approach its familiarity with the public. Many reasons can help explain its popularity, but among them is not the slender quality of the rest of the “Star Wars” score.
After the main tune, the ASO played three other excepts from the George Lucas saga. Could “Yoda’s Theme” stand alone as a piece of music, detached from the movie? The ASO couldn’t make a case.
Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” a scenic tour of the solar system via astrology, closed the 90-minute program. Each of the seven movements imagines a planet as a character in its mythical guise, such as martial “Mars, the Bringer of War” or quicksilver “Mercury, the Winged Messenger.” (Earth, not part of the zodiac, isn’t depicted.)
But Holst’s dreamy fascination with our heavenly neighbors, back in 1916, has been replaced with the hard, cold, computerized and sometimes astonishingly beautiful images from NASA space probes.
So Hatch Productions, in Buffalo, N.Y., licensed footage from the Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, Calif., and sequenced them to accompany a live orchestral performance of “The Planets.” A nifty idea, in theory.
Saturday’s show included WSB-AM radio announcer Scott Slade. With his low tenor voice, made memorable by a baritonal richness and a metallic edge, Slade put us “in the mood” by tossing off factoids to arouse our inner space junky.
“Venus,” for example, was no longer the zodiac “Bringer of Peace” but a bright orange rock with an extremely dense atmosphere, scorched by 860-degree temperatures and choked by 300,000 times the carbon monoxide of earth.
But the nagging fault came with the visuals. Great intentions, so-so execution. The trouble with these NASA/”The Planets” shows — they’ve been around for at least a decade — is that there’s too little artistry in how the images are assembled. Saturday’s run paid no attention to the feelings and emotions stirred by Holst’s music. It felt sterile.
Instead, I’d love to see a savvy artist use this spectacular astronomy footage, maybe combined with Holst’s astrology ideas, to create a new work of art. Accompanying a crack orchestra, the project could take off and fulfill the ASO’s ongoing goal of moving the orchestra into the 21st century.
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