The Eastern Michigan University Symphony Orchestra concert on Friday featured music composed by an EMU professor and two other equally impressive pieces.
The band performed three songs in total: “Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra,” “Dancing on Vesuvius” and “Symphony No. 5.”
“The concert was fantastic,” junior engineering major Robert Drumm said. “I’ve been playing percussion since middle school, but I’ve never heard music this amazing before.”
The first of the three crowd-pleasing pieces was “Concerto for Clarinet,” composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which featured clarinet soloist Ivan Ivanov, a master’s of music student at EMU. He competed in the Concerto/Aria Competition before the Symphony Orchestra concert on Friday and was one of three winners.
During the piece, Ivanov performed his solo lines right next to the conductor, Kevin Miller, giving a sense of authority. His fingers flew effortlessly across his clarinet as he played difficult sixteenth-note runs and was able to project over an entire orchestra of players. The first violinist awarded Ivanov with flowers after his amazing performance.
“We had to practice three times a week for two hours all semester to get these pieces right,” said Wesley Fritzmeier, a junior double bass player. “We get the music on the first day of class and hammer them out for the rest of the semester until we perform them.”
The second piece of the show, “Dancing on Vesuvius,” was composed by EMU professor Anthony Iannaccone. Teaching at EMU since 1971, Iannaccone’s body of work includes approximately 50 published pieces. The program notes paralleled the dark feeling of the piece and Miller’s brief summary of those notes before the orchestra performed the song.
The piece was written about the infamous volcano, Vesuvius, and the program notes included the quote from composer Alban Berg: “They’ve been dancing and stamping all through the night…Dancing on a volcano!”
The piece was commissioned for the Dearborn Symphony Orchestra and had its premiere performance Nov. 14, 2008.
“Dancing on Vesuvius” created a hush of silence from the audience as they waited anxiously for the next melodic line. The fierce violin and viola lines helped create the dark, ominous tone of the piece. The mixed meter, going from a simple meter to a more complex meter and back, produced a tense feeling mirrored in the back-story. Iannaccone did a superb job creating a piece of music that actually sounded like a volcano erupting and the horrors that follow after.
The audience agreed with a standing ovation, and Anthony Iannccone ran onstage to shake Kevin Miller’s hand. Iannaccone was presented with flowers as well, and he looked entranced by the orchestra’s performance of his work.
“[Dancing on Vesuvius] was definitely my favorite piece on the concert,” Senior music major Wade Calvert said. “I’ve been to all of the [Symphony Orchestra’s] concerts this year, and this was one of the best.”
The third and final song of the concert, Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 5,” had four impressive movements, each one even better than the one before it. This song featured more from the brass and woodwinds than the other two, which focused primarily on the strings. The piece featured solos from the flute, clarinet, trumpet and others.
