Sinfonia da Camera is stepping away from the concert hall for a unique opportunity to perform in an intimate setting under the dome of Staerkel Planetarium at Parkland College.
The resident chamber orchestra at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will give four performances at an immersive audio-visual concert on Sept. 20. The event is part of the PYGMALION 2025 festival.
The ensemble usually performs with more than 40 musicians, but because of the limited space inside the planetarium, its principal musicians will play as an 18-member chamber group. Ian Hobson, the music director and conductor of Sinfonia da Camera and a pianist, said it is easier for the chamber group to play music in an intimate setting than it would be for a symphony orchestra, and he looks for such opportunities.
"This is an up-close, visceral experience," Hobson said. "We can accommodate much more variety and many more possibilities for different kinds of music-making, and we relish that."
The choice of music for the event was inspired by the planetarium setting, the cosmos and the initiation of ideas, Hobson said. The centerpiece of the concert is the performance of "La Création du Monde," or "The Creation of the World," by French composer Darius Milhaud. Sinfonia da Camera recorded the music and other works by Milhaud in the mid-1980s.
The jazz-infused ballet score was written at the dawn of the jazz era in the 1920s and is a based on an African myth of creation, Hobson said. Instead of a string quintet, the piece calls for replacing the viola with an alto saxophone, and it includes a battery of percussion, including timpani and piano, he said.
"It's a very haunting and captivating work," Hobson said. "It's perfect for the planetarium."
The performance will be accompanied by visual projections designed by Jacob Pinholster, the dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts whose expertise is digital media and projection design. Pinholster previously has designed projections for domes, planetariums, panoramic screens and 3D spaces.
"I was looking for a way to get involved artistically," he said of the project. "I wanted to be able to share my creative self with the community and have a place to participate as an artist, because so much of what I do is administrative."
His visuals are inspired by folkloric tales of creation stories from around the world. They include images found in illustrations, tapestries and other sources from Christian, Indigenous and Asian cultures. He also was inspired by evolutionary biology, blending notions of scientific and religious understandings of creation, he said. His visuals resemble the style of continuous line drawings, and he created animations that move across the screen on top of the illustrations.
"I wanted to bring something painterly to the piece, something more organic and less digital than normal planetarium content," Pinholster said.
The illustrations are done in high contrast, with white lines on black backgrounds, to stand out in a space where ambient light is necessary for the musicians.
Sinfonia da Camera also will perform the world premiere of a new work by Stephen Taylor, a professor of composition-theory in the U. of I. School of Music. "Orbital" is a five-minute work based on the Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name by Samantha Harvey, about a day in the life of astronauts living in the International Space Station. Taylor was reading the book when Hobson asked him to compose a short piece for the concert.
As the space station orbits the Earth at an angle and the Earth spins on its axis, the astronauts constantly get a view of different parts of the globe. Each of the book's chapters cover a 90-minute orbit of the Earth. Taylor said he wanted his composition to reflect these ascending and descending orbits. The music begins fast, with a high flute note, then gradually slows down and descends to the lowest note on the string bass, before gradually speeding up and rising again.
"I decided to have the piece do quite a bit of these motions, both in the big picture and in individual phrases," he said. "That's kind of what life is like. Music can be ideally a way of holding up our lived experience and looking at it in a different way."
Taylor will conduct the ensemble when it plays his music.
The performances will open with "Sinfonietta" by British composer Benjamin Britten. The music is Britten's first composition of his career, written when he was 18. It is rarely performed, Hobson said, but it is a "very bold statement and exciting exposition of his young ideas." It is designed to be played by woodwind and string quintets and so it fit well with the limited number of instruments that can be accommodated for the concert, he said.
"Orbital" and "Sinfonietta" will be accompanied by astronomical imagery from the planetarium.
