ARTS REVIEW

In new shell, D.M. symphony sounds better than ever

Michael Morain
mmorain@dmreg.com
Des Moines Symphony conductor and music director Joseph Giunta.

“Well, how do we sound?”

Des Moines Symphony conductor Joseph Giunta tossed that question to the audience early in the orchestra’s 78th season opener Saturday night at the Des Moines Civic Center. And judging from the responding applause, they sounded pretty good.

Better than good, actually. The orchestra sounded better than ever in its handsome new acoustical shell, part of a $1.5 million renovation that took place this summer. The bass bulked up, the cut-offs bounced off the back wall, and the distance from the stage to my seat way up in Row AA felt much shorter. The overall sense of “envelopment” the maestro described at an early rehearsal was easy to hear. (They’ll repeat the program at 2:30 p.m. today.)

It’s too bad the stage crew couldn’t have set up the old white fiberboard shell for a pre-concert demonstration and then replaced it with the new one made from smooth maple. The contrast might have been striking, but I confess my “ear memory” from the last concert, in May, isn’t sharp enough to let me say whether the new changes sanded off the edges of the high notes or clarified the middle register, as the acousticians hoped they would.

A towering acoustical shell clad in maple veneer is part of a $1.5 million project to improve the acoustics at the Des Moines Civic Center. "It's the next best thing to building a new concert hall," Des Moines Symphony Executive Director Richard Early said.

But I can tell you this: The musicians played as if they could hear one another better. There was an energy there, beyond the usual new-season excitement. They performed like pent-up racehorses released from the gate.

After the traditional “Star-Spangled Banner” sing-along, with its familiar drum roll, Giunta spurred the ensemble through a jaunty reading of Copland’s hoe-down from “Rodeo” – all brass and clip-cloppy woodblocks. From there the orchestra sauntered through a suite from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “State Fair,” with a gorgeous horn solo in “It Might as Well Be Spring” and lush, lyrical, old-Hollywood strings in a merry-go-round waltz.

Similar sounds ran through the world premiere of “Symphony On a Stick” by Peter Hamlin, who used to cover the state fair for Iowa Public Television and had always wanted to capture it in music. The resulting work is a 25-minute suite with 10 movements, which the orchestra performed Saturday under video-projected images by Screenscape Studios.

The combined effects were funny, during the contrabassoon’s lumbering solo for the Big Boar; heartwarming, during a montage of grinning kids; and even reverent, during a “Hymn Sing,” when the orchestra slid in underneath a recording of fairgoers singing “The Little Brown Church in the Vale.” The opening “Sunrise” movement called to mind Copland, while the hefty brass power of “Nothing Grooves Like a Deere” reminded me of the dinosaurs in Disney’s “Fantasia” version of “The Rite of Spring.”

It was a crowd-pleaser, for sure. But even if the crowd was predisposed to enjoy it – folks do like the fair, after all – Hamlin managed to elevate the material into something a bit grander. It made us Iowans seem almost noble, even when we’re eating corn dogs in our jorts.

The concert's second half featured a rollicking performance of Berlioz’s “Le Corsaire” overture and a fresh, vital take on Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Major.

Pianist Natasha Paremski.

The dazzling Russian-American soloist Natasha Paremski played with such gusto that half the audience stood for an ovation after the first movement – either because they didn’t realize there were two more to go or because they just wanted to cheer her on. In any case, she glided through the slower second movement – under fine sighing solos from the flute, oboe and cello – and then set some sort of land-speed record in the heavily chorded finale. She probably should have worn a helmet.

“I’ve had a little too much coffee,” she confessed afterward.

For an encore, she raced almost as fast through the last movement of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7, maintaining a fierce left-hand ostinato while tossing off rhythmically intricate melodies in the right hand. Technically, all we heard was a series of tiny hammers striking skinny metal strings, but it sounded more powerful. The piano seemed bigger under the new shell even by itself.