Orchestra tells a story

Concert
Amazing Adventures
Manoel Theatre

The last of Malta Philarmonic Orchestra’s Music Education Programmes, entitled Amazing Adventures, was primarily meant as a children’s introduction to orchestral music, with a variety of works to express different moods and themes linked by a background story.

John Williams’s Overture from his Star Wars Orchestral Suite perhaps marked the orchestra’s peak for the evening- John Anthony Fsadni

The combination of narrative, music and visual special effects was received very well by the families present in the audience, whose turnout to the event was high. The concert also showcased an orchestral suite by young Maltese composer Steve Joseph Psaila, entitled Whispering Winds.

Lasting less than an hour, the programme followed a simple storyline narrated in English by Sarah Spiteri. A schoolboy named Jomola seeks four particles, loosely representing the four elements, which, when combined, released the mysterious essence of CISUM, which turns out to be music itself. The orchestra, conducted by Joseph Vella, opened the show by playing the overture from Mr Psaila’s Whispering Winds.

Its dramatic passages on strings were meant to describe concepts and imagery inherent in the story such as ascent and descent, forest and earth. The overture concluded with an oboe solo, while Nicholas Critien’s visual projections turned the theatre into an attic where Ms Spiteri looked for and chose a book to read. While the salient parts of the story were read, the orchestra performed other excerpts from Whispering Winds as incidental music.

The orchestra’s performance effectively brought out the excitement of the story. Igor Stravinsky’s Finale from The Firebird Suite stood for centre of the earth, to which Jomola descended to retrieve the particle of lava, while the forest was represented by Beethoven’s Fifth Movement from Sixth Symphony in F major; both played very well. The woodwind passages sounded somewhat muddled during the opening of Vltava from Smetana’s collection of tone poems Ma Vlast. This was the only dull moment in the performance, but the strings’ entrance brought the piece back to life.

John Williams’s Overture from his Star Wars Orchestral Suite perhaps marked the orchestra’s peak for the evening, being received extremely well by the audience, who did not refrain from a sponataneous applause.

When Jomola and the audience realised that CISUM was music itself, with Mr Critien’s projections making it obvious that these two words were anagrams, the orchestra played Farandole from L’Arlesienne Suite No. 2 by George Bizet. The triumphant nature of this piece made it clear that throughout the story the quest was for music itself, the orchestra having been the real protagonist.

The educational merits of the programme cannot be dismissed. Children participated by answering the narrator’s questions.

Moreover, seeing the young composer Mr Psaila in person might have triggered a more immediate sense of admiration, especially when considering the good quality of his work.

However, Maltese-speaking children would definitely have felt more involved if the story had been told in Maltese.