Led by founder and artistic director Darin Atwater, the program features Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, coupled with Duke Ellington’s jazz arrangement of the same work. Also on the program is David Baker’s Jazz Suite for Clarinet and Orchestra, with clarinetist Nicholas Lewis, and the premiere of Atwater’s arrangement of Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante defunte. See below for complete program details.
In true Soulful Symphony style, the program blends classical and jazz idioms, pairing Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 with Duke Ellington’s jazz orchestration of the work. Originally composed as incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s play of the same name, Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites are among the composer’s most enduring and popular works. Based on Scandinavian legend, the story chronicles the adventures of the rogue Peer Gynt, who leaves his mother and sweetheart to embark on an epic journey around the world, encountering trolls, the devil, and other fantastical creatures along the way. Two movements in Suite No. 1 have taken on iconic status, having been used in countless commercials, cartoons and movies: “Morning Mood,” with its lyrical depiction of daybreak, and “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” with the pizzicato strings that accompany Peer as he sneaks through caves and encounters a nasty band of trolls.
Just as Ellington re imagined classical masterpieces, Darin Atwater will give the world premiere of his own jazz arrangement of Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante defunte. One of the most brilliant orchestrators of his time, Ravel wrote Pavane first as a piano piece, which was so well received that he arranged it for orchestra several years later. Atwater’s orchestration takes the rich orchestral hues of Ravel’s original work and sets them against a jazzy backdrop. Atwater, himself an accomplished pianist, conducts Soulful Symphony from the keyboard.
Among the most renowned jazz composers of this era, David Baker wrote his Jazz Suite for Clarinet and Orchestra: Three Ethnic Dances as a combination of jazz and classical forms. According to Baker, the work is “heavily indebted to and influenced by dance issuing from the black aesthetic. Movement I, ‘Jitterbug,’ is an obvious reference to a dance popular in the Swing Era…Movement II, ‘Slow Drag,’ is a melancholy blues that attempts to evoke the smoke filled after hours exoticism of a club or dance hall in Harlem or on the South Side of Chicago. The final movement, ‘Calypso,’ is my attempt to capture the gaiety and playful jauntiness of the music of my Caribbean cousins.”
The program opens with Arturo Marquez’s Danzon No. 2, one of the composer’s best known works. Based on a formal Cuban couple’s dance, the work evolves from a mournful clarinet solo into sensual Latin rhythms and ebullient colors. -- www.baltimoresymphony.org
