The audience at the Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s concert was pummeled joyously with symphonies new and familiar at the Collins Center for the Arts in Orono on Sunday.
A young composer and an emerging flutist wowed concertgoers in the first half and the musicians, led by Conductor and Music Director Lucas Richman, filled their heads with images of a spring meadow and thunderstorm in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major in the second half.
Titled Ethereal Storytelling, the concert featured a new work by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, winner of last year’s Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Composer Award, as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s only flute concerto and Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Pastorale” symphony. During intermission, the most repeated words were “wow, just wow.”
New York-based Ludwig-Leone turned to the novel “North Woods” by Daniel Mason for inspiration. The book tells the stories of the inhabitants of a New England house over the centuries.
The first movement depicts a pair of runaway Puritan lovers. The second “imagines a single beetle traversing bodies of decaying matter” and the third “is vast, imagining time from the perspective of a stand of trees,” the composer wrote in the program notes. The trees are elms, which have been nearly wiped out in New England due to Dutch elm disease, carried by invasive beetles.
The son of visual artists, Ludwig-Leone painted vivid pictures of runaway lovers, lonely beetles and a soaring but doomed forest of elm trees. An eclectic artist who has written ballet and chamber music and tours with his band San Fermin, which combines indie rock, pop and classical influences, the 36-year-old composer will have much more to say through his work.
Anthony Trionfo is a dynamic player who moves like a dancer as he plays. It’s as if Mozart’s notes lovingly enveloped him as he brought this soaring concerto to life. Trionfo wowed the audience and performed with a joyous intensity and proved the New York Times correctly praised him for his “breezily virtuosic” playing. Thunderous applause brought him back onstage for a lovely, lilting encore at the concerto’s end.
Trionfo, who grew up in Las Vegas, is with Young Concert Artists, based in New York City. The symphony has brought other rising stars to Maine through that program. In November 2024, Lun Li performed Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s only violin concerto.
Beethoven’s 6th symphony, known as “Pastorale,” was animated by Walt Disney Studios in the 1940 film “Fantasia.” Before the concert began, Lucas warned the audience that the animated frolicking centaurs and fawns along with the thunder-bolt tossing Zeus depicted in the movie might pop into concertgoers’ heads as the orchestra played.
They did, but the overwhelming images were of spring when trees and plants are coming back to life. In this symphony, Beethoven reflects on his lifelong love of nature. The musicians Sunday took the audience on a joyous journey from a cold and frozen Maine landscape to the colorful countryside around Vienna where the composer took long walks and found harmony between art and the natural world, according to the program notes.
Sunday’s concert marked the end to a collaboration between the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation and the Bangor Symphony. Ludwig-Leone’s composition is the sixth and final classical music award the foundation will make, according to Donna Marie McNeil, the Rockland-based foundation’s founding executive director.
“We have turned our resources instead to independent documentary film making,” she said earlier this week. “Residing in midcoast Maine near the Camden International Film Festival and Maine Media Workshops, we felt that was a natural offering in conjunction with the community, especially in these times when truth telling is so important.”
Many of Sunday’s concert goers, including this one, will mourn the loss.
The concert may be watched online at watch.bangorsymphony.org Friday through Feb. 20.
