Conductor Lee Mills wants to challenge the way observers think of orchestral music. Mills will conduct the Elgin Symphony Orchestra March 4 and 5 in performances of Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” Juan David Osorio’s “El Paraiso según María,” Arturo Márquez’s “Danzón No. 2,” and Dvořák’s “Cello Concerto.”
The pieces, all by composers living in North America or South America at the time of their writings, showcase how “musicians and composers across the globe have adapted, modified, and expanded the tools of traditional orchestra music to let their own voices come through,” Mills said. They may make audience members ponder what defines American music, and perhaps, what it means to be American.
Mills, who is a candidate in the ESO’s music director search, lived in Rio de Janeiro, 2014-2019 when he was the resident conductor of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra. There, he realized there is a vast amount of classical music being composed in Latin America that is not performed on stages in the United States.
“Composers have constantly been evolving and stretching the boundaries of orchestral music,” Mills said, noting that it was considered exotic when Mozart added the bass drum and cymbals to his works, as those instruments were new to Europeans.
The March concerts at the Hemmens will begin with U.S.-born Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” a piece composed in New York City in 1908 that uses music to search for deeper meaning.
“Ives’ music often takes on large philosophical subjects with a twist of humor, and his music is wildly experimental,” Mills said. “I’ve placed this piece at the beginning of the program to set the mood. Listeners may find that the question, asked repeatedly by the trumpet, is only met with increasingly convoluted answers from the woodwinds. Meanwhile, the strings are completely indifferent to the question being asked, as if to say that the universe doesn’t seem to care about what questions our human minds seek to ask and answer.”
Born in 1985, Juan David Osorio is the youngest composer featured in the concert. His “El Paraiso según María” was inspired by the famous Colombian novel “María,” by Jorge Isaacs, and draws upon the folk music and sounds of this region.
Folk tradition is the impetus for Mexican composer Arturo Márquez’s “Danzón No. 2.” The danzón dance style originated in Cuba and has been adopted into the folklore of Mexico.
Czech native Antonin Dvořák was in his final year as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York when he composed one of the most acclaimed cello concertos of all time. This piece, composed in 1894, is the most traditional of the orchestral pieces in Mills’ concert, and will feature Cuban-American cellist, and winner of the 2016 Sphinx competition, Thomas Mesa.
It is “wildly different,” from Ives’ concert opener, Mills said, even though the two pieces were composed just 12 years apart in the same place.
“We have a full spectrum of orchestra music on this program, from highly abstract to concrete, popular music. All of this is American music, and all of this is classical music.
“I suppose in the end, the purpose of this program is to invite the audience to think about the boxes we confine things in – American, classical, elite, popular, immigrant, old, new, etc. – and perhaps consider blurring those boundaries a little bit,” Mills said. “As the strings in the Ives piece suggest, the universe is indifferent to our human categories and classifications—our endless search for answers—sometimes we need to appreciate what’s in front of us and just let it be what it is: Beautiful; harmonious; life.”
Tickets for the March 4, 7:30 p.m., and the March 5, 2:30 p.m. concerts at the Hemmens Cultural Center in Elgin, Ill., start at $20. Student tickets are $10 and youth age 17 and younger are free with an accompanying adult. Purchase tickets on the ESO’s website, www.ElginSymphony.org, and, from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, by calling its box office at 847-888-4000.
—Elgin Symphony Orchestra