Gaiety fills Gala

ISO season opening
Gala concert
Hilbert Circle Theatre
Sept. 11

It was a team affair — this 15th Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Gala concert, heralding the season opening not only of Indiana’s largest performing arts organization (its 76th) but symbolizing the launch of 2005-06 arts-in-general. ISO conductor laureate Raymond Leppard shared the podium with ISO Pops director Jack Everly (and, as it turns out, two others I’ll save for later). Much festivity, much formal wear and perhaps an excess of upper and lower stage and sidebox ivy-leaf decor marked an occasion which has now become an annual ritual. And, on balance, a desirable one.

Guest soprano Silvia McNair

Special to this Gala was the final appearance of retiring concertmaster and principal violinist Hidetaro Suzuki. After receiving an extended standing ovation, he began the proceedings by conducting our National Anthem. It will seem disheartening to no longer see him — after 27 years — enter by himself to tune the orchestra before the conductor appears. But times and situations create change, this one more or less being inevitable.

Leading the audience in singing the “Star Spangled Banner” was guest soprano Silvia McNair, an Indy favorite since the days of ISO music director John Nelson. A beautiful woman by any measure, McNair continues to deliver an equally beautiful voice: rich, pure, well projecting. With a repertoire ranging from grand opera to musical theater, we heard a bit of each in this pops/short-classical sampler program.

McNair began with a medley jumping back and forth between opera and show tunes, allowing that she now prefers the latter. For example she went from Giuseppe Verdi’s “Sempre libera” from La Traviata to Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” — an arduous leap if ever there was one (Porter himself hated that song). Then McNair settled in, with Everly on the podium, to deliver a quite fetching “The Man I Love” by George Gershwin: singing uncharacteristically marked by sheer vocal prowess over style (and perhaps the better for it). Later, with Leppard conducting, she sang two Chants d’Auverne, as arranged by Marie-Joseph Canteloube from the 1920s. Quite lovely.

This Gala featured a second guest, the marquee violinist Pinchas Zukerman, who first appeared with Leppard in the somewhat boring Rondo from Mozart’s “Haffner” Serenade in D, K.250. Written in the composer’s youth as background for a social gathering, its figurated violin theme is excessively repetitive, Zukerman doing nothing but dutifully playing it through. He followed with a violin/orchestra arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “I Dream of Jeannie” — wherein his sustained tones were wobbly and his pitch uncertain. Zukerman redeemed himself, however, with the first American performance of a fantasy arrangement by Eddie Karem of Jerry Bock’s Fiddler on the Roof music — this one conducted by Everly.

The program began with Overture, an Everly medley of classical/pop/classical/pop selections: alternating genres and conductors as apropos. Leppard started with the Marriage of Figaro Overture, only to be interrupted by Everly, who took over with “I Got Rhythm.” We even heard some of the Tchaikovsky Pathétique’s second movement thrown in, though it’s hardly an overture. But then there was the William Tell Overture’s final phrases which ended it all.

Everly conducted the somber final scene from Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Swan Lake, as the next-to-last offering—perhaps chosen for its huge contrast to the last piece, Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Perpetuum mobile, Op. 257. It was here that Everly started; Leppard then took over; Zukerman (a well established conductor in his own right) then displaced our conductor laureate; then McNair came out and waved her baton most fervently; she then borrowed a second violinist’s instrument, stood and bowed; we didn’t hear a sound from her as the piece cleanly ended.

As ISO music director Mario Venzago established a year ago, hijinks and the orchestra’s Gala go hand in hand.