Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Musical scale
Orchestra tour begins with massive concert.
The South Florida Symphony Orchestra will perform a huge program during its regional tour, which opens Sunday at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
The concert is so big that music director and conductor Sebrina Maria Alfonso has titled it “Ubermensch,” a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, the inspiration of Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” which opens the performance. The “Sunrise” fanfare section was famously used by Stanley Kubrick in the 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Also included will be the world premiere of “Legend of Bird Mountain,” composed by Fort Lauderdale’s Tom Hormel for a ballet. Guest artist Tessa Lark, playing a 1683 Stradivarius violin, will join the orchestra for Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto.
“I would say it’s normal for us to do ambitious programming, but this is a really ambitious program,” Alfonso says. “Strauss’ tone poem is not heard a lot ... it was written for such a large orchestra. It calls for more players than we normally have . ... There are more woodwinds and brass and a very large string section. There are two musicians for every stand; each stand has its own part. There could be 44 or 45 different parts being played. That’s the scary part about this piece.”
Hormel composed “Legend of Bird Mountain” in 1990 to win a contest put on by Sun Valley Summer Arts Festival and the visiting New York City Ballet. Hormel won with a then-4-minute piece.
“They said, ‘We didn’t really want your music. We just wanted you,’ ” Hormel recalls. “They said [they] wanted to create a ballet and create the music at the same time. We did, like, a minute every day for five or six days and came up with a five-minute ballet.”
Over the years, he has added to the piece, which was named after the Idaho landscape (a stipulation of the contest). It now is 23 minutes long. An associate working with Hormel on another project suggested it was time to debut the new and expanded work.
Alfonso was so impressed with “Legend of Bird Mountain” that she used her contacts to get the composition back on the stage. Next January, a ballet set to the music by the Martha Graham Dance Company will be performed with the South Florida Symphony Orchestra.
Alfonso also used her connections to bring in Lark for the concerts. Lark won the Naumburg International Violin Competition in 2012, but it was taking silver at the 2014 Indianapolis International Violin Competition that earned her access to the Stradivarius violin for four years.
A 30-minute, pre-concert chat about the program will be given by Ian Fraser, a patron of the Symphony. He will address how Nietzsche’s philosophies in the 1883 book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” were appropriated by the Nazis and how the meaning of “Ubermensch” changed from the author’s original intent.
“Ubermensch” by the South Florida Symphony Orchestra will be performed 5 p.m. Sunday, at Carole and Barry Kaye Performing Arts Auditorium on the campus of Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Tickets cost $30-$60. To order, call 561-297-6124 or go to SouthFloridaSymphony.org or Ticketmaster.com.
The concert will also be performed Tuesday at Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale; Wednesday at the Arsht Center, 1301 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; and Thursday at Key West Theater, 5901 College Road.