Lansing Symphony Orchestra infiltrates REO Town’s Robin Theatre

MONDAY, Feb. 28 — So, this guy walks off the street into a Bar…tók concert.  Then he goes on a Biedenbender. 

Forgive the composer puns, but the Lansing Symphony Orchestra is also trying to grab your attention, albeit more artfully, by doing something new in its 92-year history Thursday (March 3) and Thursday, April 7. The orchestra’s first-ever pair of concerts at the intimate Robin Theatre in REO Town will feature high-energy modern and contemporary music. 

LSO maestro Timothy Muffitt promises an “adventure.” 

“We want to play music of our time, present it in a way that is very inviting, that presents no barriers to the audience,” Muffitt said. “We’re hoping that if someone were to walk in off the street, which we hope they will — people that maybe didn’t have any background in classical music — would come away thinking, ‘That was amazing, and I want more of it.’” 

A protean ensemble of six top LSO musicians will play in several different combinations. 

The concerts follow up on a popular series of virtual recitals that not only helped keep the symphony active during the pandemic, but also featured smaller ensembles and unconventional repertoire Muffitt has wanted to offer the public for a long time.  

A few weeks ago, LSO executive director Courtney Millbrook contacted Robin Theatre owners Jeana-Dee Allen and Dylan Rogers to arrange a tour with Muffitt. 

“They had me at ‘hello,’” Muffitt said. “It’s the perfect venue for this.” 

Both concerts will draw from Michigan’s strong hand of living, working composers. “Viaje,” by Michigan State University composition professor Zhou Tian, evokes the surging growth and strange melancholy of spring, as a trio of flute, cello and piano conjure up a bright garden crowded with blossoming melodies and spare, meditative spaces. Tian will be there to talk about the music. 

“Staying the Night,” a luminous duet for flute and clarinet by MSU composition professor David Biedenbender, plumbs the mysteries of love, time and memory with delicate echoes that spiral upward into impassioned cries of mourning.  

Biedenbender will be at the concert, along with Robert Fanning, a widely published poet and professor at Central Michigan University. The notes to Beidenbender’s score declare that the music would never have been written without Fanning’s tender and moving poem, which describes how ordinary objects like a box of spaghetti or a pear take on a sacred quality when the loved one who touched them dies. 

In a stunning solo viola work by Oberlin College composer and sound designer Jesse Jones, LSO principal violist Sam Koeppe will flit up and down the scale like a moth on a moonflower, melding the virtuosity of Bach with the austerity of modern European composers like Arvo Pärt. It’s a short piece, but it’s intense and gorgeous — the kind of music a delighted Muffitt could never work into a full-scale LSO concert. 

“Who was expecting to see a solo viola work on March 3?” he asked, not waiting for a show of hands. 

The evening’s anchor is a set of three dances by African American composer Adolphus Cunningham Hailstork III, a 1971 MSU grad who bucked the avant-garde trends of his day with an unpretentious, blue-collar attitude toward music making and is now “one of our nation’s most important composers,” in Muffitt’s estimation. 

Hailstork’s dances for string trio are energetic, lively and surprisingly delicate for a guy whose name belongs on a Great Lakes freighter. 

The concert will begin and end with showstoppers from well beyond the shores of Michigan. Demonic eddies of melody flow into a weird lagoon of greenish harmony and re-erupt in a grand fountain of nervous energy in the evening’s opener, the final movement from Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s “Contrasts” for piano, clarinet and violin. The piece was commissioned by swing clarinetist and big band icon Benny Goodman. 

For a finale, Muffitt huddled with LSO composer-in-residence Patrick Harlin to come up with an arrangement that would harness the take-no-prisoners thrust of Argentinian tango master Astor Piazzolla. 

Harlin not only arranged Piazzolla’s fever-dream “Libertango” for Thursday’s (March 3) ensemble, but also helped Muffitt put the whole program together. 

The lineup for the April 7 LSO concert at the Robin has not yet been finalized, but Muffitt said the ensemble will be “totally different” than that on March 3, with a full slate of music by Michigan-based composers. 

“When you look at the number of composers, it’s really remarkable, the talent we have,” Muffitt said. “We expect that in New York and California, but we have a lot to be proud of in Michigan, where we have one of the richest musical cultures in the nation, and these concerts are a celebration of that.”