The Colby Symphony Orchestra performed its semi-annual concert this past Sunday, March 13 at the Williamson Performing Arts Center of Lawrence Sr. High School .  Part of the “Music at Colby” series, the performance featured two period-highlighting works, the famous Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the less famous Stravinsky theater piece, L’Historie du Soldat.

In a brief but hearty introduction by the Colby Symphony Orchestra Conductor, Jonathan Hallstrom discussed the historical and musical intricacies of the two pieces. Hallstrom discussed the contrasting nature of Beethoven’s work composed during the aesthetic movement Classicism,  and Stravinsky’s work composed at the beginning of Modernism. 

Although Stravinsky is frequently considered a neoclassical composer, the libretto, written by C.F. Ramuz shows expressionist influences.

Considering the orchestra’s membership of only fifty student and faculty musicians, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 was executed with an effective intensity, belying the orchestra’s small size. With the famous first five notes of the first movement (“Allegro con brio”) the orchestra set the stage for the intense theme-and-variation that would resonate throughout Beethoven’s Fifth. 

Hallstrom conducted the orchestra smoothly through movements, exhibiting pristine Classical woodwind melodies over rhythmic lower string section solos and a thunderous timpani.
In the last movement after sections performed a softer polyphonic melody in a canon exchange, a string-plucking interlude presented another return to Beethoven’s thematic variation, employing exciting tempo increases and rising dynamics (coincidentally the thrid and fourth movements are both marked “Allegro”). 

Although certain solo sections could possibly have been even more powerful, Hallstrom’s interpretation of the famous work was an immense success.

Catching the audience slightly off-guard after Beethoven’s Classical symphony with ties to rigid form and familiar tonalities, the second half of the concert showcased Igor Stravinsky’s multi-faceted artistic medium theatrical narrative, L’Histoire du Soldat, or The Soldier’s Tale. 

The performance combined music, dance, poetry and theater, providing a quirky change in atmosphere from the familiar orchestral symphonic concert to an unorthodox entertainment (of course, Stravinsky’s instrumental compositions are impressive and complex).  This eccentric synthesis of artistic mediums in the second half delineated the intertwining relationships between movement, character, word and sound.

An on-stage narrator (Associate Professor of Music, Steven Nuss) told the old Russian tale of a soldier’s (Joe Kolbow) fateful skirmish with the Devil (Johnnie Niel), through the clever and amusing rhyming translations of the original libretto.

With the performance’s original intention to be an on-the-road musical tour, a carnival-esque atmosphere was conveyed by comedic witticisms of narration and wacky stage props and design, all orchestrated by Colby Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance, Todd Coulter.
Sitting on a stool in the center of the stage, Hallstorm conducted the unconventional instrumental ensemble of only seven musicians (clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, violin, bass and percussion). 

Stravinsky’s titillating contemporary accompaniment perfectly complemented the actions of the characters throughout the show: the soldier marching meant a quick walking-bass and prominent trombone down-beat sound, a deal with the Devil meant sinister dissonance from the violin and a mystically-textured duet between bassoon and clarinet. 

During a waltz near the end, the soldier’s love interest, the princess (Sara Mulry), performed an increasingly sultry dance (“first stiffly, then languidly, then like a thing possessed” said the narrator), which notably featured clarinet and violin solos, woodwind glissandos and triangle bells. 
Stravinsky’s extraordinary utilization of complex rhythms, tempos, styles and instrumentation provided a sophisticated take on a simple tale. 

The semi-annual Colby Symphony Orchestra performance was extremely captivating because of the concert’s program combination of Beethoven’s Fifth—one of the most iconic symphonies of pioneering Romanticism—coupled with Stravinsky’s L’Historie du Soldat—an offbeat theatrical narrative with late-Romantic inspirations—a combination which highlighted the significance of era influencing genre and form.