June 8, 2025
Leafmore-Creek Park Club
Decatur, Georgia – USA
“Music Under The Moon”
Alice Hong & Sissi Zhang, violins; Yiyin Li & Catherine Allain Price, violas; Isabel Kwon & Brad Ritchie, cellos.
Max RICHTER: On the Nature of Daylight *
Bart HOWARD: Fly Me To the Moon *
Hans ZIMMER: Theme from Interstellar *
Claude DEBUSSY: Clair de Lune *
Sherman KELLY: Dancing In The Moonlight *
Henri MANCINI: Moon River *
Arnold SCHOENBERG: Verklarte Nacht
*arranged by Alice Hong
Mark Gresham | 15 JUN 2025
A projected canopy of stars and a program of moonlit melodies set the tone for “Music Under the Moon,” a concert held June 8 at Leafmore-Creek Park Club, part of this year’s Classical Remix Festival. With a mix of cinematic favorites, sentimental pop, and canonical 20th-century works, the evening highlighted the spirit of musical fusion that defines the festival’s genre-blurring ethos.
Although the Moon theme might have easily led one to expect a casual outdoor setting, the concert took place in a small room on the bottom floor of the main clubhouse, with windows covered to darken the room. Given the start time of 7:30 pm, there would be yet another hour and 15 minutes of daylight remaining, which allowed for sufficient light abatement to suit the theme and for allied projections.
There were projections on a screen behind the performers, plus computer-generated projections on the room’s conspicuously low ceiling—wispy clouds and rapidly moving lights abstracting either random meteors entering the atmosphere or a swarm of fireflies—in what seemed a goal of making the evening’s experience immersive for the packed audience that was pushing the edge of too large for the tiny room.
The event brought together an accomplished ensemble of Atlanta-based musicians: violinists Alice Hong and Sissi Zhang, violists Yiyin Li and Catherine Allain Price, and cellists Isabel Kwon and Brad Ritchie. Their program traced a luminous arc from soft-focus sentimentality to Expressionist density, offering the audience both comfort in the first half and a little more challenge in the second.
The group opened the evening with Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” casting a wistful spell with long, gently swelling phrases that filled the crowded room with its pulsing chords.
From there, the ensemble segued seamlessly into a trio of moon-themed popular works: Bart Howard’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” Hans Zimmer’s “Interstellar” theme, and Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” Though differing in origin, Hong’s arrangements served as common ground among them.
The nostalgic mood continued with “Dancing in the Moonlight,” the 1970 soft rock hit by Sherman Kelly (made popular by the band King Harvest), with its breezy syncopations. Henri Mancini’s “Moon River” theme closed the lighter portion of the evening with a touch of cinematic romance, delivered with tenderness but never sentimentality.
However, the concert’s final phase took a dramatic turn with Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”), a demanding work that requires deep ensemble cohesion and emotional commitment. Composed in 1899, the piece prefigures Schoenberg’s later atonal style but remains rooted in the late Romantic tradition. Inspired by Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name, it tells the story of a woman confessing a secret to her lover during a nocturnal walk and his acceptance of it.
One of the intended visual assists was a projection of the poem as supertitles on the screen behind the performers. However, while this was not true for some of the audience, the projector and the stand on which it was placed completely blocked any view of the words for those of us seated in the middle. Perhaps a long-throw lens for the projector was not available or considered, which would have made placement behind the audience practical so as not to block the view of the words. But while desirable, they were ultimately not necessary.
The ensemble navigated the work’s dense harmonic terrain with admirable focus, conveying the work’s psychological tension and eventual resolution across the work’s nearly 30-minute span. It was a fitting programming choice—the “night transfigured” of Schoenberg’s title aligned with the festival’s mission of reimagining classical performance through unexpected juxtapositions, striving to carve out a space where musical borders blur, and providing a notable cap to the program’s overall arc of lunar connectivity. ■
Isabel Kwon, Yiyin Li, Brad Ritchie, Sissi Zhang, Catherine Allain Price, and Alice Hong. (credit: Scott Turner)
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Luxardo Entertainment: facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563043837009
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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