Shadow and Light: Music from Theater, Film, and Dance

Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Hisaishi, Barber, Herrmann, Copland

The Earlham Symphony Orchestra, with guest community and professional musicians, performs a suite of pieces associated with stage and screen. They alternate in mood between light and shadow, reflecting the depths of human experience.

Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream were both composed for staged performances of the plays, but while the Mendelssohn is filled with the magic and humor of Shakespeare’s fairy world, Beethoven confronts us with the fate of a man condemned to death for standing up to the forces of political repression.

Joe Hisaishi’s theme music from Howls Moving Castle reflects the lightness and color of that fantasy world, whereas two other film scores bring us into more shadowy territory. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, now iconically associated with the Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now, is a powerful expression of transcendent sorrow. Excerpts from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Hitchcock’s Psycho deliver a powerful investigation of a disturbed mind, using famously dissonant music written for strings alone.

The concert concludes with Aaron Copland’s Suite from his ballet Appalachian Spring, a masterpiece of American music that depicts the lives of settlers in 19th Century rural Pennsylvania. But even here, the score projects shadows of an upcoming war. This work concludes with the hopeful message conveyed by the variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” reminding us of life’s purpose and meaning in the midst of shadow and of light.