A booming electronic bass, the cranking of a car motor, and the mechanization of Chicago’s Fermilab particle accelerator are not sounds you’d expect to hear blasting through speakers during an evening at the symphony. But on Saturday night, this soundscape was an integral part of prolific composer Mason Bates’s magnificent four-movement piece, Alternative Energy, masterfully performed by the Redwood Symphony.
Eric Kujawsky, the Symphony’s director, took the audience on a rich journey that deeply resonated not just in the ears, but throughout the entire body.
Prior to the night’s most triumphant piece, Kujawsky introduced the audience to Bates. The composer proceeded to perform the electronic elements of Alternative Energy, a four-movement symphony that traverses four epochs, characterizing the evolving relationship between humans and mechanical power. Bates’s work is nothing short of cinematic, and Redwood Symphony did more than deliver.
The piece opened on Henry Ford’s farm in 1896, taking us through the dawn of industrial energy via driving melodies that are accompanied by the sounds of relentless tinkering and flashy combustion.
The second movement reflects a modern-day particle accelerator, and brings the electronic profile of the piece to its full force. The sounds of crackling voltage unite with surging lines in the orchestra. The brass brought to mind the bursts of energy emitted by colliding subatomic particles, and performed the flashes of jazz excellently.
Just when it seemed that the night could not get any more electric, the third movement lands 90 years in the future at a Chinese nuclear plant, where a grungy techno bass is felt to the bone. The strings made the theater at Cañada College feel tense with urgency, and ultimately implied a disaster at the plant before sweeping to the final movement.
A denouement set in the Iceland of a post-energy Earth soothed the audience to the end of the night with enchanting performances from the woodwinds and the strings. Bates showed that the electronica can do more than just raise heartbeats, interspersing calming birdsong with the clear but understated tones of the mallets.
In celebration of the group’s 40th anniversary, Redwood Symphony opened the evening with Emmanuel Chabrier’s colorful tone poem, España. The orchestra did justice to the piece’s warm and inviting brightness. It was difficult to keep from swaying to the vibrant and agile rhythm as Kujawsky energetically marched the orchestra through their delightful rendition of the work.
Next up was a strong presentation of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, featuring Palo Alto native Karen Bentley Pollick as the violin soloist. Clad in glossy emerald, Pollick deftly brought out the composition’s uneasy excitement. Although there were moments when the orchestra could have exerted more dynamic control in order to let the fine details of Pollick’s technique shine, her solos were not the only gems to admire. The woodwinds, notably, provided attention-grabbing interludes full of clarity and color.
For an encore, Pollick brought out her electric violin (some foreshadowing of the electronica to come after the intermission) and joined the orchestra in a salsa from Swedish composer Ole Saxe’s Dance Suite.
Looking back on the evening as a whole, you can’t help but admire the thematic craftsmanship Kujawsky put into assembling this program. Each piece cut deep; the brightness of España begged the body to dance, the unorthodox solos in the Violin Concerto tingled the surface of the skin, and the electronic bass in Alternative Energy rocked the ribcage. The program also explored how different voices and timbres contrast and (dis)integrate, as was evidenced by the shocking and artful ways Bates’s electronics brilliantly clashed with the orchestra’s traditional sound.
Once again, the Redwood Symphony demonstrated its prowess in putting together an ambitious and provocative program, and delivering it with stunning force, clarity, and detail.
