Last orbit: Symphony wraps up trilogy with space images set to Dvorák piece
Antonín Dvorák composed his Symphony No. 9 in 1893, and 76 years later a recording of the piece was shot into space with the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon.
That connection is worth stashing away for trivia night, but Houston Symphony music director and conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada says it’s just that — trivial, ephemeral — and has no bearing on the choice of the piece for this week’s world premiere of “Cosmos: An HD Odyssey,” the third and final installment of the symphony’s multimedia performances fusing music and footage from space.
“It’s just a coincidence,” Orozco-Estrada says. “Not the reason.”
Talk about thematic content, though, and Orozco-Estrada’s eyes become stars. “The music gives us the opportunity to describe so many different moods and colors. It’s helpful when you have all these beautiful pieces of video.”
Perhaps Dvorák looked to the night skies of New York in the 1890s and pondered what was out there. But the music he composed more likely expressed his interest in earthly places as a renowned composer from Prague living far from home as the director for the National Conservatory of Music in New York, dealing with feelings of wonder and anxiety of displacement into a world of new sights and senses.
“What he wrote was tied to human feelings,” OrozcoEstrada says. “Being in America, missing his people in Prague.
Dvorák was very melancholic at the time, thinking about home. It’s about being connected with your own past but also trying to connect to something new. That’s universal. The piece became very international with the ‘New World’ idea and the connection between Europe and the United States. But the piece describes this human thing.”
So Orozco-Estrada chose Dvorák’s piece over other contenders such as Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.
And thoughts of home certainly appeal to a conductor from Colombia, who lives in Vienna, with jobs in Houston; Frankfurt, Germany; and London.
This week OrozcoEstrada is in Houston to close out the symphony’s 2015-16 season with “Cosmos.”
Producer Duncan Copp’s first commission with the Houston Symphony began seven years with “The Planets: An HD Odyssey,” in which planetary visuals were paired with, fittingly, Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite.
“Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for the reaction,” Copp says. “I was a little nervous the purists would ridicule it.”
Instead, the reaction was quite positive. The first two in the spacerelated series have been popular both in Houston and beyond, as the visual pieces produced by Copp travel around the world to be to paired up with other symphonies.
Much of Copp’s work has been space-related, though he grew up an ocean away from NASA in the English countryside, where his curiosity was first pulled to the stars.
“Space travel was always a point of fascination as long as I can remember,” Copp says. He points out he wasn’t even born when Neil Armstrong went to the moon. “My eureka moment was watching the first shuttle launch live on the BBC in 1981 — it completely grabbed me.”
He’d eventually find his way to collaborate with NASA as part of its Venus mapping team. Beforehand, he earned a doctorate in astronomy. Most filmmakers do not have one of those.
For each of the three projects with the Houston Symphony, Copp is given the music and “free reign with the visuals.”
“For ‘Earth’ and ‘Cosmos,’ it was a bit like Christmas,” he says. “I’d come up with the broad conceit for those productions but had to wait to see what music I’d be given — both were perfect choices. In terms of the imagery, I knew the areas I wanted to draw from, but the big challenge is procuring the best resolution material possible, which often meant working with individual scientists to get back to the source. Pairing up the visuals with the musical phrases is slightly organic; you have a feel of what might work visually, so I’d say pace is what’s really important, in particular how the pace of the shot finds a synergy with that of the music. There’s an instinctive feeling when they click together; it feels right, nothing jars.”
Like Orozco-Estrada, Copp sees the process as working thematically despite the lag between the composers’ works and the technology that presents the visuals.
“For ‘Earth’ and ‘Cosmos,’ in particular, the pictures aren’t supposed to be true to the original thematic,” Copp says. “It’s more about the melding of visuals and music, something that’s as old as the hills, really. The irony is these productions would have been impossible only 20 years ago or so, let alone when the composers wrote their music. They’re testament to just how rapid advances have been in space science and exploration, and in many ways that’s what the ‘HD Odyssey’ productions are celebrating. I like the way old and new meld . Would the composers approve if they were watching in Jones Hall? I can only hope they would.”
Orozco-Estrada inherited the tradition when he arrived two seasons ago but admires the way the project “looks at the world outside the orchestra. It ties into Houston and NASA but also creates something more global and international and universal that’s all connected right here.”
The stimuli in “Cosmos” are both classical and truly modern: music written more than 100 years ago paired with images captured through innovative, contemporary technology.
A composition written by a famed composer who was feeling homesick for Europe and awed by the New World finds itself more than a century later paired with images of even more far off places, a combination that prompts contemplation about home and places far from home.