Lansing Symphony breaks six-month silence with live outdoor concerts

The boneyard chimes of a solo marimba floated over a grassy field at the Michigan State University Federal Credit Union headquarters as trucks whooshed by on nearby I-127. Knots of concertgoers settled their bodies into carefully spaced chalk circles and settled their minds into the silent spaces between percussionist Matt Beck’s cavernous tones. The sun dissolved into a veil of wildfire smoke drifting from the west.

The Lansing Symphony Orchestra’s chamber concert last Tuesday, the first of two this fall, was a strange blend of isolation, community and a light haze of apocalypse perfectly suited to the times.

With the orchestra’s first two concerts of the 2020-21 season officially canceled, and more cancellations likely to come, it was a thrill to regain live contact with LSO musicians, even if only a few at a time.

The first notes of the evening were delivered softly but hit hard. A plaintive brass quartet by Danish composer Wilhelm Ramsöe broke a silence imposed by a deadly pandemic for over six months.

The quartet’s widely spaced members — Neil Mueller on trumpet, David Ammer on trumpet, Ava Ordman on trombone and Bryan Pokorney on bass trombone — sent tendrils of melody from their isolated chairs to embrace in the higher dimension of sound.

Beck, the marimba player, mesmerized the audience with a beautiful and mysterious reading of music by Idaho-based composer and percussionist Thom Hasenpflug. His carefully paced pauses gave each note time to resound and resolve into a dark bubble of sound that revolved in the hazy air for an unsettlingly long time. It was perfect pandemic music, a meditation on isolation and the search for a song to fill the emptiness.

Maestro Timothy Muffitt, switching up his baton for an announcer’s microphone, praised Beck for having the chutzpah to drag a marimba to the gig.

“He could have brought a tambourine,” Muffitt said.

Violinists Eliot Heaton and Ran Cheng had an unfair advantage over the evening’s musicians. Because they are married to each other, they didn’t have to distance and dove headlong into a fascinating and complex serenade by Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, joined (at a distance) by viola player Samuel Koeppe.

The keenly focused duo shrugged off the weirdness of open spaces and masks and traffic noise and amplification, imbuing the music with a supple tension that easily commanded the fields around them. Their take on the all-American “Appalachian Waltz” by fiddler-composer Mark O’Connor transformed the tended lawns and pre-fab pond of the sprawling credit union campus into a warm valley of crystal clear mountain creeks and rock-strewn trails.

The brass quartet returned at the end of the evening, joined by Beck, to rap out a jaunty Renaissance dance by Claude Gervaise, by far the oldest music of the evening. The enduring appeal of brass ensembles — their glow of nobility and Salvation Army pluckiness — ended the gathering night with a warm, hopeful benediction. The jaunty, rum-te-tum rusticity of Gervaise was a reminder that across the centuries, and God knows how many wars, plagues and pandemics, music has not stopped rocking and rolling.

A second chamber concert is scheduled for Tuesday (Sept. 29), with most of the same players. (Beck will be swapped out for Brittany DeYoung on harp.) The concert is sold out, but there is a waiting list.

Beyond that, the Lansing Symphony’s future for 2020-21 is uncertain. The Oct. 9 and Nov. 7 MasterWorks concerts, along with the Nov. 22 Jazz Band extravaganza, are officially canceled. Courtney Millbrook, the orchestra’s executive director, said a decision will be made soon on concerts scheduled past November.

In the meantime, a newly formed ensemble, the Lansing Symphony Chamber Players, is preparing a series of concerts, without live audiences, that will be recorded and made available to LSO subscribers and donors.

Last week’s chamber concert was a merciless tease that forced the audience to imagine what it will sound like when all 80 or 90 musicians cram onto a stage and make a mighty noise again  — but no one knows yet when that will be.

Over the summer, the LSO put together a “reopening task force” headed by Karen Dichoza, LSO’s director of finance and operations, and maestro Timothy Muffitt. The group includes musicians, staff members and board members.

“In August, we agreed that there was still a lot we did not know, and that it was OK to wait and make decisions about the rest of the season later,” Millbrook said.

Millbrook said the task force’s decisions are based on current state pandemic rules and the advice of health officials, with input from the owners of the LSO’s various venues. (MSU’s Wharton Center, LCC’s Dart Auditorium, and local churches all host LSO concerts.)

“Small-audience indoor performances are under consideration for 2021,” Millbrook said. “Maybe even large audiences!  We really just do not know.”

Millbrook, Muffitt and the task force members are also tracking what other orchestras across the country are doing.

“Seven months ago, in February, we had 1,600 people attend our ‘Night at the Movies’ concert at Wharton Center,” Millbrook said. “All I can say is that seven months from now, in May, I sure would like to be back in the hall with the full orchestra.  We are doing everything we can to prepare for that or whatever version of that is going to be possible.”

Lansing Symphony Orchestra Chamber Series

Sept. 29 sold out

To get on waiting list, call (517) 487-5001