CSO’s Beyond the Score series debuts at SSO

By Philippa Kiraly

The Seattle Symphony’s new series, Beyond the Score, debuted at Benaroya Hall Sunday afternoon to a good-sized house, with quite a lot of kids present. The idea and the format began five years ago with the Chicago Symphony, creative director Gerard McBurney and executive producer Martha Gilmer, and involves taking one iconic orchestral work, deconstructing it for an hour with the aid of the orchestra, conductor, visual images, a narrator and a couple of actors, and then playing the work in its entirety in normal concert fashion. It’s been highly successful in Chicago, bringing in new audience and working so well that there are now three programs a year, each repeated.

Judging by the audience’s response to Debussy’s “La Mer,” this could well happen here.Actor John Patrick Lowrie took on the role of Debussy himself, and punctuated the proceedings with pithy comments from the composer, from which we could deduce where he was coming from musically and what he wanted to achieve in his music, but also something of his character. Actor Lawrence Albert described the connections between the sounds of the sea and the sounds of instruments, going into oceanography, acoustics, vibrations and harmonics, the different types of musical scale used over the last centuries and different influences on the composer, and how Debussy married all these. Meanwhile there were overhead visuals of the sea, some video, some impressionist or earlier paintings or Japanese woodcuts, and sometimes with a musical stave overlaying that with notes that moved according to the scale and what Debussy was doing with it.

The whole was artfully done, not over anyone’s head, yet not boring to anyone familiar with the work. Narrator Steve Reeder, until recently with KING-FM, tied things together and the whole was frequently punctuated with musical examples performed by the Symphony and conducted by British conductor Michael Francis.

A chance conversation at intermission revealed a woman, unfamiliar with the work and not a musician, who was both interested and enthusiastic about this approach and, judging by the attentive audience, she was not alone.After intermission, narrator, actors and screen disappeared, and Francis conducted the orchestra in the complete performance of “La Mer.”

There have been other conductors in the past, like Leonard Berstein, who have bounded to fame by stepping in at the last minute. Francis, as you can read elsewhere in “The Gathering Note,” has done this several times in the last few years, yet he cannot be older than in his early 30s. More unusually, he plays bass in the London Symphony and stepped out of that role to conduct the orchestra at a few hours notice abroad. He has returned to that podium and to others frequently.

He takes over for an ailing Jeffrey Kahane with the San Francisco Symphony in early November, substituting Milhaud’s “Le Creation du Monde”—no easy work, for the piano concerto Kahane was to play as well as conduct, and taking on an originally planned world premiere as well. Francis then makes his New York Philharmonic immediately after that with another world premiere.

His performance with the Seattle Symphony bore out the promise indicated by these engagements. His “La Mer” had space to swirl and ebb like the sea it portrays, to grow in tempestuous intensity or be exquisitely calm. When needed, Francis’ beat was meticulous and clear, his meaning and the orchestra both transparent. At other times he conducted with huge sweeping circles with his arms, drawing the orchestra into likewise great waves of sound, but the beat was always there, in his knees some of the time, and always obvious.

Definitely a conductor to watch and to be invited back.

The remaining Beyond the Score concerts this season are February 27, with Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” conducted by Stephen Stubbs, and May 22, with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphonyl, with Christian Knapp.