Fire, Song, & Spirit

Fire, Song & Spirit moves from raw energy to something deeply personal, bringing together music that hits fast, lingers, and stays with you. Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances open with bold rhythm and striking color, launching the program with undeniable force. Violinist Ilana Zaks takes the spotlight in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, a piece that shifts between dream and brilliance — delicate one moment, electric the next. Two works by Christopher Marshall bring the center inward. The world premiere of Presence, written in memory of John Endemann, offers a quiet, powerful reflection on loss and the feeling that someone never truly leaves. Te Rerenga follows, drawing on Māori tradition and natural sound to create something atmospheric, spiritual, and deeply human. The program closes with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a series of musical portraits filled with personality, warmth, and one of the most moving finales in the repertoire. This is music that moves — physically, emotionally, and completely.

Fire, Song & Spirit is a program about transformation — the way rhythm becomes energy, melody becomes memory, and sound becomes something deeply personal.

Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances begin with movement. The music is filled with sharply defined rhythms, sweeping melodies, and vivid orchestral color, but its real power comes from contrast. Lyrical passages seem to float freely, only to be pulled back into an insistent pulse. What sounds spontaneous is, in fact, tightly constructed.

Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto turns that tension inward. The solo violin enters almost weightlessly, with a dreamlike line that seems suspended above the orchestra. But the calm never lasts. The music can become angular, restless, even biting before returning to the fragile world of the opening. What makes the concerto so compelling is that the return does not feel the same. The music has changed because we have traveled through something with it.

Christopher Marshall’s Presence, written in memory of John Endemann, explores a quieter kind of transformation. Memorial music often speaks not only of absence, but of what remains — the way a person continues to exist through memory, influence, and the lives of others. Rather than simply asking us to feel sadness, the work invites us to listen for the persistence of connection.

In Te Rerenga, Marshall widens the frame. The music draws our attention toward atmosphere, space, natural sound, and a sense of something larger than the individual. It asks us to listen differently — not only for melody and rhythm, but for the way sound seems to inhabit the world around us.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations brings the program to its most human conclusion. Each variation is a portrait of someone in the composer’s life, yet the work is more than a gallery of personalities. Elgar takes shared musical material and reshapes it again and again, suggesting how every relationship changes the way we see, remember, and understand one another.

Across the program, the music keeps returning to the same essential idea: sound can move us physically, but its deepest power may be what it leaves behind.