French composer Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique “ is a trip.
Across an unconventional five movements, it depicts the hallucinatory experience of a lovelorn artist attempting suicide via an overdose of opium. Inspired by the composer’s desire for a beautiful actress who had rejected him [spoiler alert: and later married him], the piece starts with a reverie and ends with a witches’ sabbath. In the handmade world of its debut, two centuries ago, it was the equivalent of a blockbuster movie, a spectacle of orchestral scale and color. And it still conjures that power with a first-class orchestra and a listening audience in the vast hush of a symphony hall.
The Richmond Symphony Orchestra’s latest season is over, and it’s transformative Artistic Director Valentina Peleggi is off to conduct a Gioachino Rossini opera on the Champs-Élysées. She invited award-winning conductor Michael Repper to take her place at the podium. At just 34 years old, Repper’s career is off to a meteoric start, directing the Ashland [Ohio] Symphony Orchestra, Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, and the Northern Neck Orchestra of Virginia. He is the second youngest conductor, and the youngest North American, to win a Grammy for his work with the New York City-based Youth Symphony Orchestra [the first time a youth orchestra ever won in best orchestral performance, as he noted in his acceptance speech which you can watch below.]
Guest conducting is a challenge, if a familiar one.
“It’s an interesting dynamic,” Repper says. “Most of the time, you haven’t met any of the musicians. But I do know some of the Richmond Symphony players, so it won’t be totally new… I come in with what the music can be, and we all need to get there. The key is to make it all about the music. If you can do that, you come together as a community with everybody on the same page.”
The sonic scope of the “Symphonie Fantastique” challenges every player.
“Berlioz wanted to use every crayon in the box,” Repper explains. “The orchestration is very thick, using so many instruments in so many ways to get the maximum amount of color. One of the things that sets this symphony apart is the sharp shifts in dynamics. There are super loud moments followed by super quiet ones. Then super, super loud with no transition.”
Serving the music means not softening the edges with gentler changes. “You need to convey what Berlioz had in mind to get that hallucinogenic nature,” he notes.
Written for “a gigantic orchestra with a lot of brass and a lot of percussion,” the piece builds over time, Repper says. “The first two movements are really quite small. Most of the orchestra is not used until the fourth movement.” There is a special dimension as well. In the beginning of the third movement, a French horn duets with a behind-the-scenes oboe. In the fifth, eerie bells sound from offstage. It is the organic roots of electronic surround sound effects.
Repper says that Peleggi approved his choice of the opening pieces in the performance: Gabriella Ortiz’s “Antrópolis” recreates the experience of walking down a busy street in Mexico and hearing music from the nightclubs blending and clashing. “The percussion is crazy,” he says. “It starts with an epic timpani solo, and there are several more throughout the piece. It’s all about dance, rhythm, and movement.”
Alexander Borodin’s Western Asian-flavored “Polovtsian Dances” rounds out the program. The Richmond Symphony Chorus features on this ravishingly melodic piece, most often performed without the composer’s intended original vocal accompaniment.
Having a full chorus for a non-headlining piece is a significant investment. “I think it speaks to the sort of energy that Richmond Symphony provides the community,” Repper says. “Doing this concert [and] not cutting corners.”
From Ortiz’s streets of Mexico to Borodin’s Asian steppes to the idylls, scaffolds, and the black Sabbaths of Berlioz’s multicolored imagination, this concert covers a lot of “fantastique” territory.
Michael Repper conducts the Richmond Symphony with the Richmond Symphony Chorus in performances of Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique,” Ortiz’s “Antropolis,” and Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor” at the Carpenter Theater in the Dominion Energy Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, May 17 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 18 at 3 p.m. Tickets range from $38-80. There will be an introductory talk an hour at the theater an hour before each program.
