On February 22, at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea, the Queer Urban Orchestra (QUO) introduced its new Artistic Director Ian Shafer and its new openly transgender Assistant Conductor Luke Nosal, leading QUO in their spectacular, sold out, standing room only debut concert. The season’s theme is “Hope is Eternal” and the concert was billed as “Soliloquy of Dreams.”
Shafer summoned forth the most gossamer sound possible, from the full forces of QUO, for Claude Debussy’s idyllic, lyrical, and haunting “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” to conjure up Pan, the faun(e), and other forest creatures of antiquity and mythology.
Nosal, who uses the pronoun they, guided the brass and horns in a brightly upbeat “Canzon per sonar septimi toni a 8,” a Renaissance work, by Giovanni Gabrieli.
Shafer returned to the podium for turn-of-the-19th-20th century gay New York composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ “Poem for Flute and Orchestra,” a late-Romantic pastoral piece, with guest flutist Justin Lee, expressively playing the delicate, folksy, and florid flute part, backed by the strings and French horns. Griffes died prematurely at the age of 36, of pneumonia, Lee told Q on Stage, in 1920.
In the second half of the evening, Shafer led a vivid realization of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Sheherazade,” making for an orchestral tour-de-force, with Concertmaster Phong Ta responsible for the romantic violin solos. In this exotic, highly colorful, lush, and stormy work, based on “The Arabian Nights” and marked by Middle Eastern and Russian flavor, QUO’s sound was booming then shimmering, buoyant then bouncy, and ringing throughout.
The performance boded well indeed for QUO’s new regime.
QUO’s season continues at Holy Apostles, at 296 Ninth Avenue at 28th Street, on April 25 with “Hope Remains,” featuring Ruth Crawford Seeger’s “Music for Small Orchestra,” Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto Number Four, with guest soloist Spencer Myer, and Jean Sibelius’ Symphony Number Two, and on June 20, “Alternative Energy,” the annual QUO Gayla, hosted by Molly Pope, and featuring Samuel Barber’s “Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance,” Griffes’ “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” and Mason Bates’ “Alternative Energy.”
Visit www.queerurbanorchestra.org for further information.