SMSO takes journey to the outer limits

March 13, 2011|ANDREW S. HUGHES

Every contemporary composer must feel good when an orchestra plays one of his or her works.

But for Howard Frazin, Saturday's concert by the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra will have added meaning when it performs his "In the Forests of the Night."

A native of Chicago, the Boston-based composer spent much of his childhood summer vacations in St. Joseph, where his father now lives.

"It's the first time I've had my music performed in the Midwest since I've been an adult," Frazin says by telephone from Boston. "The last time I had something performed in the Midwest was my senior thesis at Michigan, when I couldn't read music, so this is a real homecoming for me."

As a child and college student at the University of Michigan, Frazin says, he played piano by ear, but he didn't study music until after he earned his bachelor's degree in English. For his senior thesis in Ann Arbor, he wrote a musical piece based on a short story by Charles Dickens while taking a composition course for non-majors in the music department.


"When I went to people's homes where there was a piano, I would go up to the piano and play, but I had no formal training," he says. "My parents weren't concertgoers at the time. I can probably count on both hands the number of concerts I attended before college."

And he believes Gustav Holst's "The Planets" was on one of those concert programs he attended either at Grant Park or on a school field trip to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

"I think Holst is a very, very good example of a great 20th-century composer, somebody who was able to connect with a large audience while at the same time speaking in a language that was new and different," he says. "I also think a lot of the accessibility of somebody like Holst has to do not just with the surface sound but also the thoughtful expressiveness of the music. You can tell he's talking about something. It's not programmatic music in that there isn't a story but there's something abstractly narrative."

The same can be said for Frazin's "In the Forests of the Night," an orchestral arrangement of a song he wrote using William Blake's "The Tyger" as the words.

"To me, the Blake poem is about, 'Did God create good and evil?' " he says. "The tiger is, essentially, evil. The poem asks if God created good and evil, and essentially answers it, yes. During Blake's time, there was the idea that for free will to have any meaning, we would have to make a choice between good and evil."

In the poem's fifth verse, Blake asks if God smiled when he saw his work and if the same being that made the lamb also made the tiger.

"It's saying, was he happy when he made the tiger?" Frazin says. "It's kind of regretful in a way because there is the tension between good and evil, and if we know both, there is the potential we'll chose badly sometimes."

SMSO music director Robin Fountain describes Frazin's "In the Forests of the Night" as tonal.

Fountain says he chose "In the Forests of the Night" to open Saturday's concert because he believes the orchestra should play contemporary music, and because the orchestra requested a Classical symphony and it contrasts well with the second selection on the program, Franz Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 94 in G, "Surprise," which is "comparatively bouncy."

"I think Haydn is wonderful for an orchestra to play," he says. "It's a specific style and a wonderful orchestra builder. It requires incredible precision and unity among the orchestra in a way that the bigger Romantic pieces can hide. It's something very demanding, not in the athletic way of the Strauss tone poems we played earlier in the season but in a chamber music way."

The concert's major work and focus, however, is Holst's "The Planets," which will feature a suite of films designed to accompany it.

An astronomer at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, Jose Francisco Salgado, created the films in 2005 for the Chicago Sinfonietta using images from NASA and the European Space Agency, films shot by crews in space, telescopes, the Adler's history of astronomy collection and original animations.

"A slide show of beautiful images would work, but I wanted to be more ambitious and create a film that would follow the tone of the music," he says by phone from Quad Cities, Iowa, before a performance. "In many ways, the film is my visual interpretation of the music using astronomy visuals. ... Hopefully, they'll come out of the concert hall in awe of these worlds and with the determination to learn more and read a book or visit a science center."

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