ISO takes flight with its new music director to be

The connection of the music to winged creatures was slight here and there, but the theme "In Flight" stayed consistent throughout the concert the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra played Friday night under
the direction of its music director designate, Jun Mȁrkl.

Jun Mȁrkl and the ISO soar together.

The important thing about thematic programming of classical music is that images both general and specific can be held in the mind while the ears are cajoled and programmatic unity takes shape. Mȁrkl's shrewd program choices keep the flight connections aloft, ending with "The Pines of Rome," whose concluding movement blasts away birdwatching to privilege returning legions processing in triumph back to the ancient imperial capital after military triumphs elsewhere.

What was up above at Hilbert Circle Theatre in "The Pines of the Appian Way" was thus the extra brass, no birds, that the score calls for to swell the victory celebration. "One of the greatest crescendos," as the conductor called it in Words on Music, capped a performance that exemplified the bond between the orchestra's eighth music director and the ensemble. The bird song is supplied by machine as "The Pines Near the Janiculum" transitions to the final movement's ominous rumbling. 

Kevin Lin was a cameo emperor in Stravinsky's "Rossignol." 

Respighi could orchestrate with seeming abandon, which is suggested in the boisterous child's play of "The Pines of the Villa Borghese," the movement that opens "Pines." The ne plus ultra of Respighi in this mode is "Roman Festivals." When the ISO offered its finale, "La Befana," in a Side-by-Side concert many years ago under the baton of Alfred Savia, ISO music director Raymond Leppard was said backstage to have disdained the score as noisy and vulgar. The Star's rock critic, my guest at the  performance, had an unimpressed response from a different end of musical experience: "It was too loud," he said.

Conducting "Pines of Rome" from memory,  Mȁrkl displayed his love for the piece and his crisp attention to all its details. "Pines Near a Catacomb" sounded appropriately sepulchral. The ISO's horns and lower strings produced a blended tone of deep foreboding. "The Pines of the Janiculum" was loaded with rustic charm long before the birds made their recorded appearance. Imagine the shock this innovation must have caused at the work's premiere a century ago when the technology of sound reproduction was much more primitive.

The new music director seems to have steady rapport with the musicians, which is borne out by conversations I've had with ISO members past and present. That came through in the connectedness on display in Ralph Vaughan Williams' "The Lark Ascending." It's a tone poem that too closely places the solo instrument in the ensemble context to be called a violin concerto, despite the violin's prominence from beginning to end. It's a unified picture, part fantasy and part nostalgia for pastoral peace, of a bird in nature often celebrated in poetry for its heaven-bent song. It requires the solo violinist to lend himself fully to the natural celebration of nature not only paired with the orchestra, but emerging in full solo flight at the end. Friday's performance held the audience spellbound, thanks to concertmaster Kevin Lin's rapt insights and suavity as soloist.  

A more challenging piece in terms of detailed display of its composer's narrative ability in a purely instrumental work was Stravinsky's "Song of the Nightingale" (Le Chant du Rossignol). It paved the way for the spectacle of "Pines of Rome" with its abstract but revelatory take on a Hans Christian Andersen tale. The story upholds the value of natural healing for a Chinese emperor over a mechanical device imitating a a nightingale's true song. 

 Of course, as the conductor said from the podium in his amusing account of the original, artificial imitations break down and tend not to convey the benefits of nature. Thus endeth the lesson. The orchestra performed the work elegantly and richly colored, as though it were standard repertoire and not a relative novelty of complex design. 

The concert opened with two genial compositions out of the Viennese Strauss family. A winged mammal sneaks immediately into the program, which will be repeated at 5:30 p.m. today. Johann Strauss Jr.'s Overture to Die Fledermaus opened the program with the orchestra primed to observe the many brief pauses, thematic redirections, and tempo fluctuations that are cheekily strewn about the melodious score. The bat of the operetta's title is not quite germane to the goings-on in the hit show. That's immaterial, however, to the zest of the music and how well the overture lends itself to the variety of the music to follow. It fitted well among its feathered company. 

Josef Strauss' "Dorfschwalben aus Oesterreich" (Village Swallows from Austria) first brings birds into the picture, with an extra percussionist playing the waterpipe, which twitters and burbles when blown into. The six-minute work encapsulates the waltz genre as it emerged in Austrian social life of the 19th century. It confirmed the brilliance of Mȁrkl's communication of the genre's essentials to the orchestra.