So much civilization

The passage of time was the key theme in the Lansing Symphony Orchestra’s cosmically scaled season opener Saturday evening (Oct. 4).

Despite the impressive choral and orchestral forces on stage and eye-catching visual input from two screens, music director Timothy Muffitt maintained a hushed, almost painful pulse of wonderment at the vastness and intricacy of the universe, and the tiny window of time we get to take it all in.

It’s a good time to contemplate time. Saturday’s concert kicked off Muffitt’s 20th and final season as LSO maestro. 20 years? How is that possible?

Muffitt and the orchestra treated each movement of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” as a profound meditation as well as a sonic showpiece, but “Saturn” was the black hole at the center of this generally jolly galaxy. The message of “Saturn,” at least until the very end, is that time sucks. The terrifying tick-tock of the ultimate clock in your deepest mind drives the music from beginning to end. The tick-tocks floated gently into audibility with flutes and harps, seductive and narcotic, until an ominous undertow of cellos signaled the awareness of mortality.

Bit by bit, each section and soloist merged delicately into the mesmerizing mindscape. A somber brass fanfare made death seem sad, but manageably so — rather distant and noble — until the tick-tocks took over again, intensifying to the urgency of an oncoming train. Merciless percussion clangs, echoed by a hyperventilating string section, reached into the audience’s guts to yank out and reveal the panic we usually keep squirreled away, somewhere near the large intestine, when thoughts of death intrude. Five percussionists flitted from one piece of hardware to another to put the twinkles, booms, slaps, swishes and glimmers on top of this stupendous soundscape. Two sets of timpani, led by thundering principal timpanist Sarah Christianson, hastened the cataclysm.

The roof-rattling rumble of an organ, manned by keyboardist Patrick Johnson (who also provided celestial twinkles on the celesta), merged with a peaceful, angelic melody in the strings, hinting at a final reconciliation with death.

Might as well reconcile. Do we have a choice?

If time was a key theme of Saturday’s music, timing was the key element in its execution. As some of Muffitt’s greatest hits roll again this season, he again showed his mastery of compressing, accelerating or pausing big moments just long enough to let them hit home. “Jupiter,” the most fun of all the planets, is the musical equivalent of a kids’ bounce house, bulging with exuberant dance moves that don’t even try to line up with each other. Muffitt and the orchestra gave each body its own trajectory, dialing the gravity up or down according to mass, density and velocity. Special mention should be made of the horn section, which was called upon to deliver one spectacular fanfare after another.

But fun isn’t everything. At the end of “Mars,” the maestro whacked out the famous five-to-the-bar military march with dryly disciplined sadism the Greek god of war surely would have appreciated and stretched out the concluding chords of fiery disintegration until your eyes watered.

Perfect timing was even more crucial to the success of the opening work on the program, Minnesota-based composer Jocelyn Hagen’s “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Images from the notebooks, gently enhanced with animation, were synced up with Hagen’s uplifting, lyrical music, along with film clips of a male model embodying da Vinci’s famous “Vitruvian Man” and scenes from the natural world.

It was exhilarating to see so much science, so much music, so much poetry — in short, so much civilization — crowding the Wharton Center stage.

The da Vinci visuals were crafted differently from the visuals that accompanied “The Planets,” a set of film clips from various rovers and orbiters specially made by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to accompany Holst’s music.

Venus, the goddess of beauty depicted in Holst’s glowing horn tones, is not quite the same entity as Venus, the superheated, sulfurous, hellish crusher of Earth-based landers.

But there was no such discrepancy in “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.” When a drop of water fell in slow motion on the screen, the percussion plinks and the woodwind ripples were perfectly synced up.

A wordless, all-orchestral movement cranked with assembly-line vigor and Baroque intricacy through da Vinci’s amazing sketches of flying machines, gears, optical experiments and other forms of fantastic apparatus.

The Michigan State University choral forces sang with passion, tenderness and, when the moment required, high drama. They articulated the words with great care, but choral people sometimes forget that even when a text is sung in English, with impeccable diction, ordinary schmoes like me still can’t understand a lot of what is being sung. I suspect that no text was included in the booklet, and no subtitles projected, to keep the audience focused on the music and visuals on stage, and it was a choice to be respected. Besides, when it really counted, the chorus made its point clear, giving its all to the thundering declamation “the greatest good of all is knowledge,” with a cheek-rippling thruster on the word “all.”

No subtitles were needed to absorb the weird and exhilarating sight of a giant, animated da Vinci eyeball, blinking and checking out the audience as the chorus sang of wonderment beyond words: “Oooo-ooo-ooooh.” When the sopranos surged upward in a spectacular spray of sound, and the ocean did the same on screen, it was enough just to get soaked in it all. These were not short pieces of music, but it was over too soon.

As usual, Muffitt made no remarks at the beginning of the concert, preferring to let the music speak for itself, but it was tempting to read a deeply coded message from all this: “With or without me, the journey continues.”

Might as well reconcile ourselves to it. What other choice do we have? Or did I say that already?