January 30, 2025, by Judy Harrison
An innovative 21st century violist and an 18th century giant of classical music wove an intricate tapestry of sound using electronics and traditional stringed instruments in a Bangor Symphony Orchestra program Sunday that sent concertgoers home rethinking their assumptions about just what is symphonic music.
That questioning was prompted by Martha Mooke’s performance on the electric viola of her “Invisible Hand for Electric Viola and Orchestra.” Mooke uses what she calls her “spaceship,” a device with foot pedals similar to those used by electric guitarists. Mooke used her foot to bend and layer notes the way a pipe organist uses the stops on the instrument to add orchestral sounds in an electrifying performance at the Collins Center for the Arts in Orono.
Mooke is the director of the innovative Multi-Style Strings Program at New Jersey City University in Jersey City, New Jersey, according to the program notes. The program utilizes technology and improvisation to explore a wide variety of musical styles.
“Invisible Hands” was inspired by the 1988 public television broadcast of “The Power of Myth,” a conversation between Bill Moyers and author Joseph Campbell, Mooke told the audience Sunday.
“In this conversation, Campbell asserted that by ‘following your bliss,’ individuals will encounter kindred spirits who will open doors in unexpected ways,” the program said.
In her own life, Mooke has felt those invisible hands guide her in unseen and unexpected ways, she said Sunday.
The concert closed with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, best known as “Jupiter.” Completed in 1788, three years before his death at the age of 35, it was Mozart’s last symphony and, judging from its enthusiastic reception Sunday, a favorite of the audience and the orchestra.
The program began with Maurice Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” composed in 1917 for solo piano and revised for orchestra two years later. Ravel, who was an ambulance driver in World War I, dedicated each movement to friends who lost their lives in the Great War.
This is not a somber or grim piece of music. It is full of happy memories of the composer’s time with his friends as a child and a young man. Its tone is the “opposite of war,” composer and musicologist Gerard McBurney was quoted in the program as observing. The symphony played the piece with joy and verve.
Jacques Ibert’s “Hommage a Mozart,” a five-minute tribute to Mozart written in 1955 to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth the following year, introduced “Jupiter” to the receptive audience. Echoes of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 were woven into the piece and the short composition proved to be a perfect companion to the final symphony.
Whether Music Director and Conductor Lucas Richman is bringing rising stars such as violinist Lun Li, who amazed concertgoers in November by performing Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major at breakneck speed, or introducing an audience to innovative composers such as Mooke, he consistently challenges season ticket holders to experience classical music in new ways. Sunday’s concert was a perfect example of how he demonstrates time and again that everything old can be made new again and how the musical past perfectly illuminates its present.
Sunday’s concert is available for streaming beginning Friday through Feb. 14 at bangorsymphony.org. It will be broadcast on Maine Stage on Maine Public Classical at 8 p.m. Feb. 19.
Martha Mooke is the director of the innovative Multi-Style Strings Program at New Jersey City University in Jersey City, New Jersey. Credit: Courtesy of Matt Winkelmeyer