Symphony and NASA long have orbited each other
All this month, the Houston Symphony has been honoring the moon landing’s 50th anniversary in an appropriate and rather unique fashion: seeding its repertoire with a variety of celestial-themed compositions. This summer’s “space program,” as it were, will reach its zenith later this week with the orchestra’s annual “Star Spangled Salute.”
Scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion and Miller Outdoor Theatre, respectively, the concerts will mingle the usual patriotic tunes with pieces that highlight a relatively overlooked aspect of the orchestra’s history: its longstanding relationship with NASA.
“Any time we can work with folks from NASA, we love it,” says Lesley Sabol, the symphony’s director of popular programming.
Over the years, the symphony has periodically called on astronauts to narrate vari
ous pieces, Sabol notes, and NASA has been happy to return the favor. In 2001, the agency lent equipment that helped mitigate the damage to the orchestra’s library after hundreds of scores were swamped by the waters of Tropical
Storm Allison.
“As you can probably imagine, some of those were very priceless, with all the markings from famous conductors,” Sabol says. “(They) would have been lost forever.”
Going back to Gemini
The symphony’s association with space is even rendered in the architecture of Jones Hall itself. The twin cometlike sculptures streaking from the lobby ceiling represent artist Richard Lippold’s homage to NASA’s Gemini program, whose two-man astronaut teams helped lay the foundation of their Apollo successors’ achievements. (The building opened in 1966.)
Clippings from the HSO archives reveal astronauts as fixtures at symphony soirees from the mid-’60s on; one of them, Scott Carpenter, narrated a performance of Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” in 1967. Barely two months removed from the moon landing, Texas philanthropist Ima Hogg — who helped found the orchestra in 1913 — welcomed astronauts and other members of the Apollo 11 flight team as her guests for the opening concert of the 1969-70 season.
“The opening concerts are a salute from the Houston Symphony Society to the dedicated men and women who made possible the recent landing on the Moon,” the evening’s program noted.
After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, killing all seven people aboard, the symphony joined Houston’s other major performing-arts companies at a benefit concert for the astronauts’ families. Acting as emcee for the evening was John Denver, the “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” pop star who had been a finalist in the same civilian spaceflight contest that sent New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard the doomed voyage.
According to UPI, when Denver finished performing the original song he had written for the occasion, “Flying for Me,” the standing ovation lasted two minutes.
Inspiration from disaster
The Challenger disaster also inspired Maryland-born composer Christopher Rouse to dedicate his mythology-inspired “Phaethon” to the fallen shuttle crew; a decade later, thenHSO music director Christoph Eschenbach conducted the world-premiere recording of Rouse’s sevenminute piece.
This December, the orchestra will debut composer-in-residence Jimmy Lopez’s Symphony No. 2 Ad Astra. Part of his research included a trip to Mission Control, where he was permitted to converse with a resident of the International Space Station.
In a way, the orchestra’s latest fascination with the cosmos began ramping up last July, when it performed James Horner’s Oscar-nominated score to “Apollo 13.” Before the concert, one of HSO’s popular “live-topicture” performances, a NASA-sponsored lobby exhibition featured a lunar mural, moon-rock samples and experts on hand to discuss the space agency’s plans.
Sabol recalls principal pops conductor Steven Reineke conducting an informal poll from the podium that evening.
“He asked, ‘How many people in the audience have worked for or still work for NASA? Please stand up so we can honor you,’ ” she says. “It was, I would say, 40 percent of the audience — it was so amazing.”
Among the remainder of the crowd, she adds, “people were cheering, screaming and yelling.”
Neighborhood concerts
Earlier this month, the orchestra warmed up for the Fourth with four “neighborhood” concerts in different corners of the Houston area, performing a different space-themed work at each one — however tenuous its actual relationship to the heavens may be.
Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, for example, did not become known as the “Jupiter” symphony until about 30 years after the maestro’s death. Apparently something about it struck a later generation of admirers as especially godlike.
Nevertheless, Sabol notes, “it’s great to program on a neighborhood concert because some people will recognize it; others will listen to it and like it a lot.”
Other summer selections make more sense: Claude Debussy’s mystical “Clair de Lune”; John Williams’ beloved theme music to “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial”; and even Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the 1896 tone poem rescued from obscurity one year before the moon landing by Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“The piece itself is fantastic, but most people only know the opening,” Sabol says.
Finding ‘The Right Stuff ’
For the Star-Spangled Salute, Sabol says she and her fellow programmers considered several spacethemed selections before deciding on the end-credits music for 1983’s “The Right Stuff ”; “Commemoration,” a fanfare by contemporary composer Robert Wendel; and an orchestral favorite, John Adams’s “Short Ride in a Fast Machine.”
“It features the orchestra so well,” she says. “It’s a technically challenging piece which they’ve played many, many times; but it’s really fun to showcase them in a setting where a lot of people sometimes have never seen or heard the symphony.”
And, she adds, “we just wanted to show off the orchestra’s vitality and musicianship.”
The performance of “Short Ride” will be accompanied by footage of a shuttle launch, recalling arguably the symphony’s greatest NASA collaboration: its 2010 performance of “The Planets-An HD Odyssey.”
For those concerts, Gustav Holst’s score was accompanied by footage taken by NASA’s Magellan and Voyager probes, among other spacecraft, and compiled into a film by “In the Shadow of the Moon” director Duncan Copp.
Before the first performance, astronaut John Grunsfeld handed conductor Hans Graf a baton that had flown on the shuttle Atlantis the previous summer. Programmers debated including a movement or two of Holst’s suite in this year’s Star-Spangled Salute, Sabol explains, but ultimately decided to pass.
“Because it’s such a large orchestra — (the score) features quadruple winds, two harps and a ton of extra musicians — we decided, ‘Let’s not go that direction,’ ” she says. “Also, we’ve done that a lot, so we wanted to do something a little bit different.”
Sabol says she also thought about using something from “First Man,” Damien Chazelle’s wellreceived 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic, but ultimately found it “a little bit too atmospheric and quiet for this kind of program.”
“Some pieces (we considered) are not as recognizable, even though there’s a space theme,” Sabol adds. “We really wanted people to have that nostalgic, familiar feeling.”
When it comes to July 4 concerts, it’s hard to get more familiar than Tchaikovsky’s “1812” overture. Even though the famous cannon sounds are usually synthesized these days (as in Houston), the overture has been a fixture of Independence Day concerts since 1974, when legendary Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler and a friend concocted a plan to goose flagging attendance by programming a piece that would allow “all hell to break loose” at the end.
That is exactly the sort of outcome Sabol would expect if, for whatever reason, the orchestra should one day decide to drop “1812.” Therefore, she’s happy to heed the advice that Michael Krajewski, Reineke’s predecessor, once gave her.
“He said, ‘One time we tried to change it, and it was a disaster,’ ” she recalls.
“We got letters and complaints and all sorts of problems. So now we choose not to mess with it.”
Chris Gray is a Houston-based writer.