From a stroll around the countryside to a violent ritual sacrifice, the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra embodied two of the most intricate pieces of music known to the world.
"Welcome to the Beethoven Pastorale Symphony meets the Rite of Spring. Also known as Bambi meets Godzilla," said music director and conductor Christopher Wilkins.
The Philharmonic delivered their performance to a sold-out theatre on Saturday night at the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center in Downtown Orlando.
An hour before the show, audience members, who already had tickets, were invited to a pre-concert conversation with Wilkins where he summarized the ideas behind the two pieces.
He said that through its instrumentation, the Pastorale Symphony gave its audience images of cuckoos, nightingales, flowing waters in a brook and even a thunderstorm. In contrast, Igor Stravinsky's piece, indeed encompassing springtime, took its audience through a procession of worship to the earth and ended with an image of a young virgin woman being chosen as a ritual sacrifice to mark a pagan tribe's fertilization of the earth.
The musical pieces were composed a little more than 100 years apart and by two very different composers.
"In a way you couldn't find two more different orchestral pieces and in another sense they both speak about similar ideas," Wilkins said.
The audience members were awe-struck at how well the musicians played.
" I'm really proud of the Orlando Philharmonic for taking on such a big piece and doing so amazingly well with it," said Lisa Hopko, who graduated from UCF in 1998. "It's a huge undertaking and I just feel like the whole Orlando Philharmonic was brought up to a new level as of this season."
Esteban Meneses, who graduated from UCF in 2009 with a bachelor's in advertising and public relations, noticed a definite difference in the way the orchestra played.
He felt that the way the musicians interconnected with one another, especially during the Stravinsky piece, was amazing.
"They kind of sounded perhaps a bit nervous at the beginning [of Rite of Spring] but it all came together real quick," Meneses said.
The instrumentalists had only three days to practice together, so they were both challenged and excited to perform.
Ben Lieser, a horn player during the Stravinsky piece, said that there were challenges in making this piece come together.
"Oh of course, just making sure that we all are staying together throughout the [song] because of constant meter changes and what not," Lieser said.
Bill Warnick, also a horn player, noted that the Stravinsky piece is especially hard to pull off. Yet, with the amount of practice the players did on their own, this certainly helped.
He noted that it took a lot of concentration during the piece.
"I'm not thinking about anything. I'm just [so] focused on what I'm doing that there's no time to think. If you stop to think, you're in the wrong place. You listen and you're watching the conductor and watching the music," Warnick said.
With all the sounds and incongruent chords and rhythms, many audience members had varying emotional interpretations of the pieces.
The Beethoven Pastorale, meant to be a very smooth flowing and naturalistic type piece, engaged the audience with feelings of spring time and peacefulness. Even though a movement within it included a nasty squall, the piece ended with "thankful feelings."
"It's very uplifting," said Elena Anemogiannis, a junior music major at Rollins.
On the other hand, the Stravinsky piece began with a harsh and almost ominous feeling and carried its audience through a whirlwind of emotions.
"I probably thought of like a hundred different things somewhere in the context of that piece. Everything from clowns to strange people marching to lots of other stuff," said Arup Guha, a professor of computer science at UCF.
The premiere of the Stravinsky piece, in 1913, actually caused a riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The musical lyrics incited such emotions that audience members were virtually riled.
Wilkins noted that both Beethoven and Stravinsky took instrumental solos and overlapped their rhythms.
For the Beethoven piece, Wilkins asked his audience to listen carefully to find what characters were being personified in the instruments. For Rite of Spring, Wilkins said the piece has many differing beats and so to the ear, it seems the music is off.
Saturday's members noticed this right away.
"[It's] so fast. It's so many different counts and measures and they were counting to 11 and then at one part [the conductor] was counting to three and then four and then five and then three," Anemogiannis said.
Garrett Flick, a senior economics major at Rollins, thought that Stravinsky's rhythms were incredible.
"It almost kind of hypnotizes you," Flick said.
Saturday's performance was met with a long applause and a standing ovation.
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