Solano Symphony pulls out all the stops
Rousing, crowd-pleasing annual concert Sunday at VPAT includes brassy tunes, international dances, Bond movie music
The Solano Symphony Orchestra's 2021-2022 season comes to an end Sunday, but not before it offers up its annual sonic banquet of just about everything under the musical sun and baton of conductor Semyon Lohss.
The selections for the 3 p.m. concert in the Vacaville Performing Arts Theatre include some stirring brass, international dances, Hollywood film themes, Looney Tunes cartoons music, and so much more, all of it sure to paste a smile on listeners.
If you like dance rhythms, there is the ballet music from Gounod's “Faust,” music placed at the beginning of the 1869 opera's Act 5, the scene set on Walpurgis Night, when will-o-thewisps sing and Mephistopheles leads Faust into a palace. (Walpurgis Night is the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga, an eighth-century Francia abbess and celebrated on the night of April 30 and the day of May 1.)
Still in a dance mood? Lohss will lead the regional orchestra in two of Brahms' fiery “Hungarian Dances,” 19th-century music based on Hungarian folk material.
If VPAT were a dance hall, audience members would almost certainly wear out shoe leather dancing to the infectious Brazilian rhythms of Zequinha de Abreu's “Tico-Tico no Fubá.” It's propulsive music that, once heard, sounds familiar, full of humor, plenty of percussion and hot strings, all with a driving beat, like a cha-cha on steroids. If you go to the concert, expect to at least tap your toes and bounce a little in your seat to the peppy rhythms.
Year after year, the annual Pops performance includes music or themes from some of America's best movies and this year will be no exception.
Lohss and the musicians will perform selections from the scores of several James Bond films, music from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and symphonic sendups from a number of Looney Tunes cartoons. Just close your eyes and recall the 1950s-era theme music for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester the Cat, Porky and Petunia Pig, and the Tasmanian Devil. By the way, if you are not of a certain age, some of the cartoons and the music are available on YouTube.
Bookending the program are two brass showpieces, the stately Fanfare from French composer Paul Dukas' ballet “La Péri.” It is a fanfare in a ternary form, a musical term sometimes
called “song form,” divided into three parts, or a-b-a form. Some well-known examples include Handel's familiar “The trumpet shall sound” section of “Messiah” and Chopin's Prelude in Dflat Major, or “Raindrop.”
It is a Pops tradition to end the concert with the eternally rousing American march of all marches, John Philip Sousa's “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” written on Christmas Day
in 1896 while he was aboard an ocean liner in the Atlantic Ocean.
Since a 1987 act of Congress, it is the official National March of the United States and likely to cause the audience to stand up in unison, collective hearts beating in time with the patriotic rhythms, solid harmonies, spirited tone colors and straight-ahead musical structure.
All in all, quite a way to ring in May Day, a day long celebrated the world over to symbolize a welcome the change from winter to spring.