The news out of France was heartwrenching as the Tucson Symphony Orchestra was taking the stage at Tucson Music Hall Friday night.
Terrorists carried out as many as six attacks in Paris, hitting a soccer stadium, a concert hall, two restaurants and three bustling streets. The death toll topped 100 people as of late Friday.
Inside Tucson Music Hall, TSO guest conductor David Alan Miller sent Tucson's condolences and then answered the terrorists' bloodshed with the best weapon he and the musicians gathered on the stage had: music.
Miller quoted Leonard Bernstein's famous declaration: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Then he and the TSO did just that.
Miller and the orchestra made a powerful statement with Elgar's "Enigma Variations on an Original Theme," playing it with emotional intensity and a sense of urgency, as if they were sending a message directly to the gunmen who attacked Paris hours earlier.
Strings soared, percussion rattled and boomed, pristine brass echoed after the final note was blown. The winds evoked a sense of calm while the strings rattled the cages with the intensity that Bernstein demanded in his declaration.
Miller turned Elgar's love letter to his friends into a nationalistic anthem concerned more about uniting human beings under one umbrella of humanity instead of divided by borders.
Miller played the Enigma loud and bold and purposefully, bringing out the emotional intensity of every note and nuance. It was breathtaking.
The concert's first half was equally intense sans any mention of Paris.
Critically acclaimed violinist Elena Urioste performed Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D minor, a workhorse of a piece that allowed the 29-year-old Sphinx Competition winner precious little time to stretch her fingers before she was called back into action.
Urioste's technical prowess was matched by her instinctive sense of expressive phrasing. She made the devilishly difficult passages look simple as she danced at a breakneck pace along the fingerboard, scaling it end to end. Her fingers seemed at times to leap frog one over the other. She was going so fast at times that you didn't dare blink for fear of missing out on a mystical moment of music-making.
Miller opened the night with Joan Tower's percussive romp "Tambour," which the TSO had never performed in concert before Friday night. The piece has a lot going on a once, but Miller delivered it in an orderly fashion with crushing drum beats countered by the baritone quake of the tuba and shimmering interruptions by the cellos and violins.
Several times during the piece, Miller stepped back on the podium, allowing his left foot to dangle off the edge. A few times, as he bopped to the percussive beat, he looked like he might just fall backwards. But then he would take a few steps forward in time to the beat and end up back on steadier ground.
