Music Review: Symphony Orchestra
Music with muscle and heart

Not a lot of film scores have an afterlife in the concert hall. The music Serge Prokofiev wrote for “Lieutenant Kije” in 1933 has. It’s lived way beyond expectation, and rightly so because it amounts to a delightful escapade, particularly when performed as spiritedly and flavorfully as it was on Wednesday evening by the IU Symphony Orchestra under visiting conductor Cliff Colnot.

The concert attracted a sizeable crowd to the Musical Arts Center, in larger part probably for the second item on the program, Beethoven’s ever popular Fifth Symphony, but the Prokofiev has many admirers already and wins new friends easily. Two gentlemen sitting behind me wondered beforehand in overheard conversation what this “Kije” piece might be like. When it was done, they applauded enthusiastically.

Colnot, principal conductor of Chicago’s Civic Orchestra and various other enterprises, has become a favored guest on campus, as one who works effectively with young people, bringing both technical discipline and musical understanding to the ensembles he prepares.

The “Lieutenant Kije” Suite requires preciseness of execution, a challenge when rhythms introduced go every which way concurrently and consecutively. It also needs mood establishment: Reinforcing scenes from a film that relate the adventures of a soldier who’s pure invention, the creation of courtiers loathe to tell their czar he’d misread a military report. Wednesday’s performance had the pulse of the elaborate hoax.

So, too, did the reading of Beethoven’s Fifth have pulse. It had muscle. It conveyed struggle as the composer meant it to. Here, after all, is what we’ve come to believe is his most personal depiction in music of self, a man of indomitable spirit facing the destiny of deafness. The score, from that opening four-note motif, evokes emotional conflict, love of life mixed with fear, yearning for personal peace blended with affliction in the making, a courageous soul wrestling with fate.

Colnot stressed the duel, its titanic dimensions, bringing an abundance of force to expositions suggesting determination amidst despair and radiant glow to moments of hope and ultimate triumph.

The musicians played both works extraordinarily well, and that includes the array of soloists called upon to display their skills in each. Had any of them faltered in what were key passages, impact could have been severely diminished. There were no lapses. Everyone contributed to the max.

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The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.