Tucson Symphony Orchestra is going to be a circus — literally — this weekend.
Picture it: The orchestra musicians in their Sunday finery sitting all straight and laced on the Tucson Music Hall stage as acrobats twirl and swirl, swing and fling overhead.
And while we in the audience squeal and squirm with excitement and delight, imagine being on that stage, beneath and alongside all that very physical action.
TSO principal pianist Dean Zhang is imagining it will be pretty dang awesome.
“I think it’s going to be very fast-paced because we’re going to be playing with the dancers,” predicted Zhang, who has never performed with a cirque act in his handful of years as a professional musician. “I think you will have less room for mistakes.”
Zhang and his colleagues will have two chances to perform the TSO’s “A Cirque Holiday” concert with Los Angeles-based cirque act Troupe Vertigo. While the orchestra plays holiday classics, Vertigo’s contortionists, aerial artists and acrobats will perform on the stage and overhead, in that space above the stage that we normally just ignore.
We won’t be ignoring it this weekend.
Guest conductor Stuart Chaftetz, who led the TSO in last season’s “Let’s Dance” concert, is an old hand at marrying cirque with orchestra. He was at the podium with the TSO a couple of years ago to hold the tempo in one of the orchestra’s early forays into the cirque show genre.
And the genre is becoming quite popular, particularly around the holidays; Troupe Vertigo is performing several holiday orchestra dates, including shows earlier this month in Phoenix. The company, founded nearly a decade ago by Cirque de Soleil veteran choreographer Aloysia Gavre and her husband, creates shows that play like theater.
The Tucson show is a premier of its new “Cirque Soriee,” where audience members enter as guests to a spirited holiday party to celebrate the elegance and whimsy of the season, according to a description on Vertigo’s website.
The TSO’s Zhang, who joined the orchestra in February and also is principal keyboardist with the Southwest Florida and Canton (Ohio) symphony orchestras, said he’s excited for this weekend’s concerts — the first time he will see or perform in a cirque symphony show. Having all that action flying around the music “will enhance our musicality,” the China native said, as well as broadening the show by adding a physical dimension that is normally absent from symphony concerts.
“It definitely will help the musicians to have another angle of the art we’re creating, to see the dance movements from ‘Nutcracker’ while we’re playing it so we can see what the music was originally written for,” he said.
