Music Review: The Fox Valley Symphony charms yet again
All in all, the concert was marvelous and special. Kudos to Maestro Sütterlin, to the orchestra, to Sam Wu and to Soloist Teregulov. I look forward to more concerts with exciting new music.
Saturday night's Fox Valley Symphony concert at the Appleton PAC - entitled Oceana - was entrancing. Maestro Sütterlin gave us a concert composed entirely of music composed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the audience enjoyed it enthusiastically.
Many people have the idea that “modern” classical music is difficult, inaccessible, discordant and downright annoying, but the music we heard was anything but that. It was accessible, charming, enjoyable and fun.
The orchestra began with a short piece by Brian Raphael Nabors entitled Iubilo. It was a good way to begin the concert because it felt like an overture. It especially felt like an overture to a Broadway musical from the 40s or 50s. Think Oklahoma or The Pajama Game.
Iubilo was followed by Oceana, which was a multimedia piece by Stella Sung and Annie Crawley. It was a beautiful and stirring artistic appeal for us to think about the need to preserve our oceans from pollution.
The third piece on the program was Cetacean Songs, which was written by Sam Wu who also conducted the piece for us. It was a lovely and moving cello concerto in which the cello, played by soloist Eduard Teregulov, reproduced the sounds that whales make when they communicate with each other in the sea. Soloist Teregulov did a marvelous job, and he also charmed the audience.
After the intermission, we heard another charming cello concerto by the Italian composer Matilde Capuis entitled Tre Momenti for Violincello and String Orchestra. It was beautifully played by Mr. Teregulov and the orchestra.
Maestro Sütterlin and the orchestra wound up the program with a fine performance of Debussy’s La Mer. La Mer, written in the first decade of the twentieth century is one of the pieces that define the beginning of modern concert music. It is lovely and easy to listen to, but in its subtle way, it represents a break with the romantic music of the nineteenth century. To us, La Mer does not seem revolutionary, but it shocked Debussy’s contemporaries.
All in all, the concert was marvelous and special. Kudos to Maestro Sütterlin, to the orchestra, to Sam Wu and to Soloist Teregulov. I look forward to more concerts with exciting new music.
