Jonathon Heyward opened the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s new year with a striking concert of mostly contemporary fare, heard Saturday night in the Music Center at Strathmore. The program, set at the midpoint of Heyward’s second season as music director, combined music inspired by three different kinds of revelatory arcana: Biblical, folkloric, and astrological.
The evening began with Sukkot through Orion’s Nebula, a piece from 2011 by James Lee III, this season’s BSO composer-in-residence. Lee, who lives in Maryland and has had a long association with the ensemble, drew on his faith as a Seventh-Day Adventist for inspiration. The piece, he has written, evokes “celestial images of the Messiah coming down out of heaven through the Orion constellation first, the redeemed saints traveling through the constellation, and finally the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven.”
Lee’s style, mostly tonal, often sounded akin to a film score, and the alluring central section of this score, awash with celesta and mysterious metallic percussion, might have accompanied a science fiction scene set in outer space. From earth, the Orion Nebula is often perceived as the middle star in the sword of the constellation Orion. Called Kesil in Hebrew, the constellation is referenced in the Bible, most prominently in the 38th chapter of the Book of Job, where God answers the accusations of Job…