Magic in our midst

In old movies, cigar-chomping trainers give their boxers a brisk volley of slaps to get them into the zone.

“Bravado,” by Ann Arbor-based composer Gala Flagello, served much the same purpose at the Lansing Symphony Orchestra’s season opener on Thursday (Oct. 3). It’s a punchy little piece, with off-kilter accents and syncopations thrusting in all directions, like a bag of cats packed into a small orbiter and launched into space. The sonic splendor was spent before you knew it, but it did the trick. Suddenly, you were all ears.

With a rich sound hewn from solid oak and finished in velvet, the string sections got down to real business, taking center stage in a nimble yet grand reading of Mozart’s Symphony No. 31, “Paris.” Architecturally, the piece is buttressed by heavy, stern chords and rigid cross-bracing straight out of Beethoven’s playbook. (Beethoven was only in the single digits when the symphony was written but already building cathedrals out of toy blocks, no doubt.) Nevertheless, the overall impression was one of lightness, sunshine and bone-deep joie de vivre. Maestro Timothy Muffitt and the orchestra gave the sonic structure all the gravitas it could bear but somehow kept it aloft, flipping it like an image of a scowling man to produce a smile. The finale zoomed giddily downhill like a bobsled, and when it suddenly came to a full stop, you could almost hear the exhilarated laughter of the sledding party ringing into the air.

The LSO has a knack for bringing in compelling and charismatic soloists, but cellist Tommy Mesa is in a category all his own. Cellists generally skew toward the serious side, but Mesa had a witty, droll stage presence, even when he was just sitting there waiting for his entrance, curiously scrutinizing the orchestra and audience.

He did strange and wonderful things to the melody of Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme.” He took it on a grand walk or two in a distinctive, Buster Keaton-esque gait; he wooed it in a Venetian gondola with gorgeous, cantabile strains of song; he even chopped it up into pieces like an insect and watched the pieces walk off in several separate directions.

One minute, he seemed to be balancing a teacup on the tip of his bow; the next, he was wrangling a walrus. From subterranean cello rumbles to near-dog-whistle register, his tone was never less than gorgeous. It got extra buttery in a solo cadenza toward the end, just before the vodkas became too numerous and the music sank into melancholy. But never fear, the Russians have a remedy for that — dance it off; the faster, the better. Despite the vein-bursting Cossack tempo, the orchestra stayed in uncanny lockstep all the way through the furious finale.

To slam the night shut, Muffitt brought out an even grander set of variations. The evening’s design — a meta-set of variations on the “theme and variations” form — was not just clever on paper but made for an emotionally satisfying experience.

Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” take the listener to many different places, from meditative to mournful to whimsical, ending in an organ-like swell of overwhelming grandeur. But at the heart of it all is a modest little melody that pokes up like an early spring crocus.

Muffitt and the orchestra made sure that this melody, or the echo of it, stayed in your mind every minute despite the blizzards, hurricanes, stomping armies and other vicissitudes that threatened to overwhelm that plucky little flower. One variation was like the best day you ever had, the day you bubble up like a fresh pot of coffee and flex every muscle in your body and brain with energy and purpose. A couple of variations later, a sadly subdued variation, grim as the gray days of late autumn, seemed to presage lethargy, decay and death. Then, all of a sudden, the wheel turned again, the power surged back, and that tiny crocus grew to the proportions of a Russian mammoth sunflower.

Muffitt excels at guiding the listener through these epic journeys, not only because he has the big picture in mind, but also because he takes the time to give each shift in mood and turn of fortune his close and loving attention. It’s impossible to fix on any one molecule in a universe of orchestral details, but there was an uncanny moment late in the game when principal percussionist Matthew Beck picked up a pair of sticks and walked over to the timpani, borrowing a corner of one of the drums from the LSO’s new principal timpani player, Sarah Christianson (who kicked several species of ass that night, by the way).

Starting from silence, Beck produced a tightly controlled, spine-chilling drum roll at the threshold of hearing, as if a hissing, 400-foot-long serpent had encircled the entire hall and was about to strike. That’s the kind of detail no recording can reproduce.

On the way home from the concert, I happened to pull up next to Beck at a stoplight on Kalamazoo Street.  (How did I know it was him? The vanity plate said “PRCSSN.”) I gave him a honk and a thumbs-up. I don’t care if it embarrassed him. I was happy to find another way to celebrate the magic in our midst.