Taichi Fukumura is about halfway through his first season as music director of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra. So far, he has no regrets.
The young maestro is still encountering firsts in the job, like next weekend's concert at Second Presbyterian Church in Bloomington. It'll be his first time leading a chamber group with the ISO, a small, select smattering of players usually including strings, a few winds and maybe a percussionist.
It's Fukumura's first time at Second Pres, too, and a first foray into the classical canon with this orchestra.
Symphonies by Haydn and Mozart are on the program—the former from the beginning of a career, the latter from the end. The evening opens with Stacy Garrop’s baroque-inspired mini-suite, Spectacle of Light. In a rare move away from the symphony's adoration of alliteration, Fukumura titled the whole evening after it.
“I thought the title fit the whole program so neatly that we just had to go with it,” said Fukumura in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
Fukumura met Garrop two years ago in his previous job as assistant conductor for the Fort Worth Symphony. Led by Jane Glover, who also conducted Spectacle of Light’s 2020 premiere with Chicago’s Music of the Baroque, that orchestra also featured works by Mozart and Prokofiev.
“[Garrop] was there for those performances,” said Fukumura, “so it was a very nice inside window to the piece and its brief history. Even in four years of a piece, things can happen.”
The Jan. 18 concert was, in part, influenced by that 2023 program.
“That program featured Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, which was another composer who looked to a past musical style and brought it in, which is what Stacy Garrop does in her Spectacle of Light,” said Fukumura.
Garrop drew inspiration from the same painting of fireworks used by George Frideric Handel to compose his 1749 Music for the Royal Fireworks.
“It has a very interesting tie to the past, but at the same time, she really brings her own voice to it,” said Fukumura. “It’s both 2020 and Baroque.”
Fukumura selected Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 for the bill, and Haydn’s 6th, called Le Matin (The Morning). Both men are considered icons of the Classical era.
“It is the morning—another imagery of light—with its introduction very literally depicting a slow sunrise,” he said of the Haydn. “This piece, you could almost say, is also the sunrise or the dawn of the classical symphony as we know it. Early in Haydn’s career, the notion of what a classical symphony is, wasn’t established yet.”
Haydn perfected a formula that most composers, for about 300 years, didn’t think to question: a symphony is comprised of four movements, including a bright overture, adagio, something in 3/4 time and a rousing finale.
“It happened throughout Hadyn’s life, as he wrote over 104 symphonies,” said Fukumura. “Haydn No. 6 is the first of three symphonies, which is another parallel to Mozart.”
Mozart’s 39th symphony was the first of a trio he composed as a free agent, without being commissioned, near the end of his short life. But these classical works, like Garrop’s Spectacle of Light, can be viewed as extrapolations of the Baroque.
Garrop and Haydn employ harpsichord, a quintessentially Baroque instrument. The sixth of Haydn’s 104 numbered symphonies also borrows the concerto grosso style—a hallmark of Baroque composition.
“This is a program where all three composers are looking to the past, but looking to the future,” Fukumura said. “There’s some element of brilliance of light. And also, we wanted to feature the musicians of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra through all the solos you’ll hear and virtuosic playing.”
The Illinois Symphony presents Spectacle of Light January 18 at Second Presbyterian Church, 404 N. Prairie St., Bloomington. Tickets are $34 at ilsymphony.org.
