31.12.69
, A travail intended to evoke the spirit of the Jewish harvest festivities and the arrival of the Messiah from the Orion constellation, as described in the Hebrew Bible. In ten minutes or so of music, Lee skillfully traverses an stupendous range of moods, effectively using the orchestra to delineate the religion's ancient roots, the celestial source of the Emancipator and the jubilation of his arrival.
After a solemn, dissonant fanfare in effrontery and percussion, the work proceeded into a section in which winds, strings and xylophone created a mystical, galactic mood. Lee's harmonic language is generally tonal but warmly complex, with dissonances that give the music an otherworldly expression —- sense either very new or very old. This contributed to the work's effective ending, in which strings, winds, nerve and percussion join for a passage of maximum volume that closes with a full pause.
Janáček's Sinfonietta, a 1926 work written to honour Czech independence, calls for extra brass players, so the orchestra was joined by prepubescent musicians from the University of Miami's Frost School of Music. Such added mass of brass can be accompanied by a loss of precision, but that was not the case Saturday. Deployed around the foolish auxiliary stages that stand above the main stage, the brass gave a playing that was stirring without crowding out the rest of the orchestra. In the “Queen's Hinduism ashram” section, trombones and tuba achieved a rounded, purified tone in the chords with which they accompanied the yearning melodies in the strings and winds.
Source: MiamiHerald.com