October 9 & 10, 2024
Peace Center Gunter Theatre
Greenville, SC – USA
Greenville Symphony Orchestra: Lee Mills, conductor; Mimi Wyche, narrator; Mark Waldrop, revised narration.
Edvard GRIEG: Peer Gynt
Sergei PROKOFIEV: Peter and the Wolf
Paul Hyde | 15 NOV 2024
Let’s start with the duck.
In the Greenville Symphony Orchestra’s charming new version of Peter and the Wolf, the duck lives.
He lives! Oh, sorry, I guess I was supposed to say, spoiler alert!
But this is great news. I’ve always thought Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, subtitled “A Symphonic Tale for Children,” was a bit grim – shades of Brothers Grimm — for kids.
The mostly lighthearted story-with-music follows a young boy, Peter, who joins forces with his animal friends to trap a wolf. But — spoiler alert! — the duck usually gets eaten by the wolf. In a macabre turn, the duck survives at least for a short time, moaning pathetically from the belly of the wolf.
See what I mean? That narrative, I’d wager, is a bit disturbing for children of all ages. However, in the new version of the story by Broadway writer and director Mark Waldrop, the outcome is sunnier. The wolf is offered a cup of Alka-Seltzer and he burps up the duck, who is none the worse for having been eaten.
The wolf, for his part, is saved from some hunters and spirited off to the Greenville Zoo. Waldrop’s engaging narrative, commissioned by the Greenville Symphony, includes several references familiar to Upstate South Carolina residents. It’s a great gimmick — localizing the story — that other orchestras should follow.
In Waldrop’s updated narrative, for instance, the action takes place near Peter’s house in Walhalla, S.C., a small town in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The bird in the updated story is a tiny Carolina chickadee.
Greenville Symphony music director Lee Mills led a buoyant account of Peter and the Wolf on Nov. 9. (Two more performances of the same program were offered on Nov. 10.) With the orchestra in fine form, Mills offered a warm and vivid reading of the score that brought out the color and detail of the music.
Mimi Wyche, a prominent Greenville actor and visual artist, was a superb narrator — articulate, animated, and thoroughly engaged with the text as she mimicked the various characters in the two works. The audience seemed to love the local references.
Mimi Wyche (credit: Will Crooks)
The piece spotlights several elaborate solos, with the flute representing the bird, the clarinet the cat, the oboe the duck, and the bassoon Peter’s grandfather. The orchestra’s principal players delivered these with easy virtuosity: Caroline Ulrich (flute), John Sadak (clarinet), Virginia Metzger (oboe), and Allen Jiang (bassoon).
This was Mills’ second program with the orchestra as its new music director, having kicked off the season with a thrilling performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony earlier in October in the Peace Center 2,000-seat concert hall.
If Beethoven’s Ninth was a meaty program, the second program was dessert, a treat for the whole family. Less than an hour long without intermission, the program was presented in the Peace Center’s Gunter Theatre, a fine, intimate venue with only about 400 seats.
The performances coupled Peter and the Wolf with Edvard Grieg’s music from Peer Gynt, though with a new original story also by Waldrop and in the same relatively gentle spirit as his Peter and the Wolf narrative.
Grieg originally wrote Peer Gynt as incidental music for Ibsen’s fantasy play of the same name. Waldrop reimagines the story as The Adventures of Rae Lynn and Luke, about two young siblings who journey into the South Carolina woods and have an encounter with ogre-like creatures called “gobblewalkers.” As with Peter and the Wolf, this narrative is suitable for younger audiences.
Thus, the suite’s familiar “Morning Mood” movement depicts Rae Lynn and Luke setting off on a trail in Caesar’s Head State Park and relishing the sights and sounds of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The “Aase’s Death” movement, originally written as incidental music for the death of Peer Gynt’s mother, represents in Waldrop’s new narrative a somber episode in the woods of a beautiful stag that had been killed apparently by the gobblewalkers.
“Anitra’s Dance” evokes a magical scene of fireflies, while “In the Hall of the Mountain King” depicts the children’s frightening encounter with the gobblewalkers. At the end of Waldrop’s narrative, the “Morning Scene” movement returns to signal that the children have returned home safely.
Mills drew lustrous, expressive playing from the orchestra in the earlier episodes of Peer Gynt and generated a satisfying frenzy in the famously fierce “In the Hall of the Mountain King” movement.
The concerts took place on the same weekend as Fall for Greenville, the outdoor festival that brought thousands of revelers to downtown Greenville to enjoy music, food, and children’s activities amid well-nigh-perfect weather. It was a glorious weekend in this gem of a city. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Greenville Symphony Orchestra: greenvillesymphony.org
- Lee Mills: leemillsconductor.com
- Mimi Wyche: mimiwychestudio.com
- Mark Waldrop: concordtheatricals.com/a/3074/mark-waldrop
- Greenville, SC: visitgreenvillesc.com
Read more by Paul Hyde.
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