ISO’s percussive, significant finale | Music Features

The Illinois Symphony Orchestra’s 2025 season came to a close on May 3 with an energetic and highly rhythmic performance, which in some ways may signify the end of an era.

The University of Illinois Springfield Performing Arts Center, where the ISO has performed in Springfield for many years, will be closed for 15 months beginning in June to allow for extensive plumbing repairs. This will force the orchestra to seek other venues for the 2025-2026 season, including Springfield’s First United Methodist Church, the Illinois State Library and others.

At the same time, recent threats to the National Endowment of the Arts, one of several sources of ISO’s funding, contributes to a feeling of precariousness for always fragile arts organizations, making it difficult not to wonder what the landscape for a regional symphony orchestra will look like by September 2026, when the auditorium is scheduled to reopen.

Intentionally or not, all of the music on Friday’s “Passion and Pulse” program exuded an anxious, defiant quality, seeming to reflect an uncertainty rooted in current events. The music got underway with “Pulse,” a short piece by contemporary composer Brian Raphael Nabors, which acted as a kind of fanfare. Propulsive and wildly varied, the composition occasionally integrated instrumental ideas from modern classical music practitioners such as John Cage and even John Zorn – including the guts of the piano being played along with the traditional keyboard, xylophones at times being scraped with bows rather than struck with mallets, and quick, cinematic cuts between moods and genres (syncopated jazz-inflected cymbal work giving way to a dreamy, pastoral mood, for example) all in the course of 10 engaging and accessible minutes.

Conductor and ISO music director Taichi Fukumura described the piece during brief onstage remarks as springing forth from the composer’s “realization that everything has pulse to it, not just musical rhythm but also the universe has a relentless pattern as time keeps passing. He is also reminding us that we are all in this together.”

The night’s featured guest soloist, piano virtuoso Anna Geniushene, next entered the stage to perform “Piano Concerto in G major” by Maurice Ravel. The intricate and fast-moving 1937 composition also included jazz-influenced rhythms and major mood shifts from movement to movement. An exciting give-and-take between Geniushene and the orchestra was frequently broken down into smaller combos. The obvious enthusiasm of the musicians was enhanced by the auditorium’s recently introduced video system – complete with a large overhead screen – which allowed even audience members far from the stage a detailed view of the soloist’s hands as her playing alternated between rollicking intensity and a fragile, tender delicacy. An extended ovation brought Geniushene back for a brief, charming and whimsical solo encore.

The concert’s second half was devoted to a spirited rendition of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 5,” first performed at Leningrad in 1937. The composer had a famously testy relationship with Soviet premier Josef Stalin, who actively pressured Shostakovich to create a rousing, patriotic work in unabashed praise of the USSR. Instead, the composer delivered a complex, ironic (but still rousing) depiction of the hardships being suffered by the Soviet population along with their resilience.

“He evaded Soviet censorship to share with us what life was like,” said Maestro Fukumura. “Things can happen in life, but whatever it is, you feel the emotions together, you go on this journey and there is victory and hope at the end.”

Scott Faingold is a journalist, educator and musician. He has been an instructor at University of Illinois Springfield, founding editor of Activator magazine, a staff reporter for Illinois Times and co-host of Old School Bleep, a music-centered podcast. He can be reached at [email protected].