Knoxville Symphony Orchestra: "Petrushka"

To be sure, no one can accuse Maestro Lucas Richman of not taking risks in his programming choices for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, despite having to satisfy a diverse audience whose members run the gamut from the very traditional to the super-adventurous.
Case in point is the pleasant and welcome audacity of this week’s Masterworks Concert, which Richman will open with one of his own works, An Overture to Blanche. On the heels of the use of his incidental music to A Streetcar Named Desire in the recent Clarence Brown Theatre production, Richman offers this 11-minute concert piece, an expansion on parts of his full score that is full of bluesy-jazzy theatrical impressions of New Orleans’ French Quarter.
Falling into the category of “really wonderful pieces that are rarely heard” comes Antonin Dvorak’s The Golden Spinning Wheel, op. 109. Based on a rather grisly fairy-tale story by Czech poet Karel Jaromir Erben, this symphonic poem is a feast of impressionistic themes and variations: brass fanfares, spinning motifs, and eerily repeating passages.
The featured work of the evening is Petrushka, the second of three ballet scores by Igor Stravinsky for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. After the success of The Firebird in 1909, Diaghilev persuaded Stravinsky to turn his ideas for a work based on the story of a puppet that comes to life into a ballet. Despite its orchestral roots in the romanticism of the late 19th century, Petrushka, produced in 1911, gazes straight toward the new century of orchestral colors, non-traditional harmonizations, and modern polytonality. Concertgoers, as well as horror-film buffs, should keep an ear open for the infamous “Petrushka chord,” a combination of clashing harmonies that, no doubt, opened the door on a useful expressionistic tool for many contemporary film composers. (Alan Sherrod)