By Daniel Buckwalter
(#CommonManAtTheSymphony)
The return of Francesco Lecce-Chong and the buzz over the open-road future came together at the Eugene Symphony’s concert on March 20 for Gustav Holst’s The Planets.
And Holst’s seven-movement journey through the solar system in front of a full house at the Hult Center — coupled with some high-technology piano playing from Dan Tepfer — made for a stirring end to a busy and cheery week for the Eugene Symphony Orchestra.
The week began on March 13 with the naming of Alex Prior as the symphony’s new music director. He will take the podium in September for the 2025-26 season, and Eugene Symphony officials are ecstatic about the possibilities Prior’s appointment brings.
That still leaves time to enjoy the out-of-the-box thinking of Lecce-Chong, the music director at Eugene Symphony for seven years and this year the symphony’s artistic partner. Thursday’s concert, the first of three he will conduct to end this season and his tenure, was a reminder to all as to what that thinking looks like on stage, a fact he happily noted to the audience early in the concert.
“You’re responsible for all the crazy things I’ll do for the rest of my life,” he said.
Take, for instance, Tepfer’s piano piece, The Harmonies That Bind Us, which he had been working in collaboration with Lecce-Chong for the past five years and which had its world premiere (“Only in Eugene,” Lecce-Chong added).
It was a technological marvel.
To explain the best that I can — because I do try to keep 21st century technology at arm’s length — Tepfer, a jazz pianist and composer who has been computer coding since he was a kid, improvised the entire Harmonies piece. No one knew quite what to expect.
To help bring along the orchestra, he would tap notes into one of two tablets on the piano’s music rack and with specially designed foot pedals. Those notes would go straight to tablets on the music stands of every symphony musician, and the musicians had to react on the spot.
And it worked. It even had a visually appealing aspect in that every note Tepfer struck on the keyboard was digitally — and artfully — displayed on a large projection screen above the orchestra.
After intermission came Holst’s The Planets, composed in the early years of World War I and premiered in 1918. It was, in its own way, every bit as futuristic as The Harmonies That Bind Us, and its impact has been felt in both classical and popular culture ever since.
From Mars (the Bringer of War) to the tranquil Venus (the Bringer of Peace), to Mercury (the Winged Messenger) and Jupiter (the bringer of Jollity and and, with its magnificent hymn-like middle section, perhaps the most noble passage in symphonic music), The Planets transformed symphonic music and influenced film scores.
The orchestral suite ends with the solemn Saturn (the Bringer of Old Age), the mischievous Uranus (the Magician) and Neptune (the Mystic), an ethereal portrait of the outermost planet that was accompanied by a group of sopranos and altos under the direction of guest chorus director Naomi Castro.
All in all, it was indeed an otherworldly experience with the Eugene Symphony Orchestra.
