LSO folds time with world-premiere trumpet concerto

It’s rare for an instrumental piece of music to live up to the “program” imposed upon it by its creator.

Friday’s (Jan. 12) world premiere of “River of Time,” Michigan State University composer David Biedenbender’s new trumpet concerto, by the Lansing Symphony Orchestra and principal trumpeter Neil Mueller more than fulfilled its stated goal of probing the essence of time. To begin with, it made 20 minutes go by in an eye blink.

The concerto not only taco-ed the clock as brazenly as a canvas by Salvador Dalí; it raised gooseflesh with its urgent clarion calls to seize every precious moment of life.

In the beginning, there was no big bang. The questing sound of Mueller’s trumpet drifted simply into the event horizon like an astronaut embarking on a spacewalk, offering cosmic questions to a twinkling backdrop of harp and winds. With frightening intensity, Mueller’s trumpet quickly spiraled out of control as massive, spiky brass chords blasted away in the firmaments above and below.

Just when the chaos became almost too disorienting to bear, the string section resolved into warm, tender chords, and Mueller was on solid ground, playing a very earthly song. The music became achingly lyrical, like a scene in a Terrence Malick film where the sun is shining, bugs are buzzing, a woman is hanging laundry in the sun and the beauty of it all is too painful to bear. Can we ever live up to the gift of time given to us by the universe, the everyday miracle of existence? Music is one way to give it a shot.

This was the heart of the concerto, and Mueller played his heart out, as if he could capture time itself in majestic, searing arcs of melody.

Before long, the orchestra clamped down on his moment of ecstasy with massive chords, and Mueller’s tone got darker, as if he knew it was time to bow to the inevitable. Nothing lasts forever.

Or does it? Let’s just say that the last movement, a bold foray beyond the bounds of time, really put the “bend” in Biedenbender. Suddenly, Mueller was more like a particle than a wave, zipping deftly through a relentless set of battering orchestral bumpers like a cosmic pinball. To take the soloist on this cosmic journey, the orchestra morphed through numberless shifts in color, tempo and volume with amazing rapidity and logic. This part must have been a real bear to master, but the music’s unity of vision and exhilarating freshness made it worth the effort.

The ending was as unorthodox as the beginning. The orchestra wound up darkly for a classic crack-of-doom ending, until — zzzip! A final, glassy note rocketed off somewhere, perhaps to the other side of infinity.

After a standing ovation, maestro Timothy Muffitt and the orchestra reprised the last few pages, basking deservedly in a ringing triumph and a decade highlight for the LSO.

The end of time is a hard act to follow, but the evening ended with another pleasant surprise: a confident, sun-soaked romp through Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C Major.

After going on such an intense Biedenbender, the musicians seemed to play with an extra zing, an operatic gusto that was missing in its dutiful slog through Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony at the start of the evening. Whether all that quantum energy from the trumpet concerto flipped everybody’s “on” switch or Bizet’s kicky grand-opera melodies put them in a party mood — or both — the performance instantly swept the audience to a warmer, brighter place. Even the smallest moments and in-between bits were infused with panache and skill. Among these fleeting gems were golden, burnished horn dee-da-doo-bas and woodwind deedle-dees that tumbled like a bubbling stream over a juicy bed of pizzicato strings.

Bizet’s precociously masterful orchestration — he was only 17 when he wrote it — popped from one bustling episode to the next. The dazzling seam work almost outshined the dress itself.

Everybody seemed to get a turn in the spotlight. The second movement’s famous oboe solo got a mysterious, alluring reading from principal oboist Stephanie Shapiro, supported by misty, moody atmospherics and birdlike echoes from the woodwinds and strings.

In the third movement, the cellos instigated a whole new party vibe by digging into a rustic, bagpipe-style drone that stung as pleasantly as wood smoke and a sip from a hip flask of rye. There are a lot of overly fussy, prissy performances of this symphony out there, but Muffitt and the orchestra kept things bumping hard all the way through the finale, without sacrificing an ounce of musicianship or attention to detail.