The Bloomington Symphony Orchestra will take concert goers on a virtual vacation.
Moving through Spain to central Asia, the concert is aimed to help temporarily take audience members away from the cold ?and snow.
Featuring a variety of internationally inspired and historical music, the BSO’s upcoming concert “Shades of Music” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. This concert was originally rescheduled for a later date due to inclement weather last weekend.
Adam Bodony, the artistic director of the orchestra, said “Shades of Music” accumulates compositions from nationalistic composers that incorporated hints of other cultures into their music.
One example of this is Alexander Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia.” Bodony said the song was created to celebrate Alexander II’s expansion of the ?Russian empire.
So Borodin included two intermingling melodies into the musical score. There is a Russian melody, and there is an ?oriental melody.
Bodony described a specific scene he imagines when thinking of the song: there is a caravan crossing the steppes of central Asia. It’s accompanied by a Russian guard. As the two melodies pass back and forth, eventually combining into one, he said he envisions the communities uniting.
“We have this sense that this group is traveling, mingling together,” he said.
Donna Lafferty, executive director and trombonist in the orchestra, described the song as having an exotic atmosphere about it.
“It absolutely transports you,” she said.
Other songs in the concert will be “España” by Emmanuel Chabrier, “Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber, “Masquerade Suite” by Aram Khachaturian and “Slavonic Dance No. 1” by Antonín Dvorák.
The concert’s set list is made to take listeners up and down emotionally. While Lafferty said the last song, “Slavonic Dance No. 1,” is uplifting, she also said “Adagio for Strings” has been called the “saddest piece of music ever written.”
Regardless of emotion, Lafferty said she prefers to play songs with strong melodies, even if she is not the one that’s performing them. As a trombonist, she acknowledges that she rarely gets the melody of a song. However, she said she does not mind.
If people focus on only the individual of an orchestra, Lafferty added, it’s not possible to pull together in the music.
Lafferty said she likes soulful music. There has to be parts that build, that swell in volume until there is this accumulation of sound.
“It gets me most when everybody pulls together,” she said. “You don’t get this massive wall of sound (with a solo).”
This atmosphere is made in part because the BSO is a community orchestra. People come together simply to play music.
Lafferty described one moment that happened during a rehearsal.
“There was one rehearsal where we had a violin and flute do a duet,” she said. “Everybody in the orchestra was motionless watching this.”
In the moment, she said she could only think one thing.
“Oh my God,” she said. “This is what it’s all about.”
Lafferty said she wants people to not only listen, but to also feel. Her hope is that people leave the concert thinking, “Holy cow, that was amazing.”
