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I write it with some regularity, but this past week has been another one of those Duluth weeks completely inundated with music and drama performances every night of the week. Just making choices can become exhausting.
This was the week of Duluth Homegrown Music Festival, so all of the popular evening haunts were bustling with multiple performers for eight straight evenings. This year, the 17th, a Classical Music Showcase was added in the Sacred Heart Music Center for Saturday afternoon. Around fifty musicians shared in a medley of opera, piano, banjo/Bach, flute ensemble, string quartet, songs with lute, and a local choral group. The evening activities were yet to begin!
This past weekend, UMD staged its final musical production of the season, an opera called Street Scene, written in the late 1940s by composer Kurt Weill, using a tense play about a tough New York neighborhood at the time. Rudy Perrault led an all-student orchestra, and Alice Pierce directed this all-student production - - probably a first Duluth production of this jazzy opera. The overall effect was powerful and emotional. In particular, Anna Torgerson and Zach Winkler as would-be romantics Rose Maurrant and Sam Kaplan made a convincing case that it was possible to survive the dysfunctional, murderous events of the present and move forward with hope into an unknown future. A cast of nearly forty gave creative stage experience to a lot of young students.
Also this past week, a young string quintet - two violins, viola, cello, double-bass - was in town for performances with the Matinee Musicale series and the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra. This quintet, known as Sybarite5, has been together six or seven years since forming at the Aspen CO Music Festival. They play classical and popular music, but with an edgy energy, frequently using unconventional bowing and fingering techniques to create new sounds from their traditional string instruments.
Tuesday evening at Pilgrim Congregational Church they played about a dozen selections which they announced from the stage. They ranged from Mozart to Piazzolla, tossing in selections by Brubeck, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, Komitas, Dan Visconti and others.  A program like this is a creative stretch for Matinee Musicale, but our so-called classical musical scene has been in flux for centuries and still seems to be encouraging new energy and style.
Sybarite5 was on hand Saturday evening at the DECC to share the first half of the DSSO concert with a Minnesota premier of Beatbox for string quintet and orchestra by Dan Visconti, a young, Chicago-based composer. In several movements, Beatbox began with a traditional jazz sound, then hinted at musical episodes shaped by country, bluegrass, rock, and new-age stylistic patterns. The DSSO was involved in an accompaniment mode, frequently looping through repetitions while Sybarite5 created variations on the chordal structure. It was refreshing to watch Conductor Dirk Meyer continue to raise one to five fingers, keeping the orchestra in the appropriate loop during this intense concerto.
In the third section, the quintet and strings were creating very heavenly sounds, while mallets were adding melody and rhythm from the back of the stage. In another section, the DSSO woodwinds sounded like a freight train coming around full circle. After twenty minutes of very similar sounds from Sybarite5, however, I was ready for a bit more substance to balance the evening. This happened in a dramatic manner with the Symphony No. 9 in D by Ludwig van Beethoven.
A hundred choristers and four soloists joined the large orchestra for what turned out to be an exhilarating performance of this well-known symphony. Since the interpretation of musical narrative seems to be a gift of Music Director Meyer, this Beethoven epic was right up his baton-wielding sleeve. Soft was soft, loud was loud, slow was slow, and fast was fast, which kept this performance from ever being sluggish or long. Even the ‘adagio’ third movement was more lyrical than I commonly hear.
The soloists had to stay alert to keep up with Meyer’s pace, but the orchestra and chorus had been well-rehearsed and were ready to surge. Bass-baritone Seth Keaton was powerful in his delivery, and the lovely voices of soprano Sarah Lawrence and mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert soared over the top of the orchestra with lyrical joy from the stimulating Ode to Joy by poet Friedrich Schiller.
Indeed, the sheer joy radiating from Meyer, the DSSO chorus and soloists, and many of the DSSO players, infused the house. The audience found that each movement elicited spontaneous applause; finally, they could all rise and clap energetically as the performance brought an end to the week and the DSSO season.