The National Orchestral Institute + Festival Philharmonic gave a sold-out performance at Washington National Cathedral last night, playing Beethoven's Symphony No.
9 in D Minor with the Heritage Signature Chorale and a quartet of soloists, the Washington Post reports.
The cathedral has hosted more than 1,000 performances of Jennifer Higdon's "blue cathedral," a piece about her younger brother, Andrew Blue, who died of skin cancer in 1998.
The piece is "an attempt by Higdon to evoke ''a journey through a glass cathedral in the sky'an effect achieved through a sustained lightness and translucence in the music's textures," writes Peter Dobrin in the Post.
"The cathedral blurs, but it also rustles: I've never heard the trumpets in this movement sound quite so distant (or full of character), or a single timpani sound so cavernous (or more like a void)."
Alsop " masterfully marshaled focus and nimble from her players, the spectacular heights of the space sometimes made for a sonic soup'long tails of reverb that complicated intentions; fluid passages of strings often frothed into the equivalent of white water; and a powerful Heritage Signature Chorale couldn't help but overrun the orchestra's banks."
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