Fans take centre stage

Lightning struck twice Tuesday when the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra presented its sophomore offering of From the Inside Out, an all-immersive concert in which wide-eyed — and eared — audience members sit cheek by jowl with professional musicians.

The brainchild of WSO music director Daniel Raiskin, who introduced its inaugural concert last January, the first of three nightly performances welcomed back to the podium former WSO associate conductor Julian Pellicano.

The maestro’s skyrocketing career has been on fire since leaving his WSO position in 2024. Recently appointed music director and conductor of the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra, Pellicano also continues to serve as principal conductor for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, as well as a staff conductor with the National Ballet of Canada. The tireless musician also guest conducts throughout North America, including marking his San Francisco Symphony Orchestra debut last weekend.

As with last year’s Inside Out performance, the 90-minute (no intermission) show had more buzz than a beehive, with a sold out crowd of 315 people eagerly snapping “selfies,” chatting with musicians and streaming onstage before curtain to find their respective seats. One might even forgive the show beginning an unprecedented, nearly 20 minutes late, with WSO performances usually running like a tightly wound Swiss watch right down to the last split second.

Programming is always a curious alchemy of disparate forces, with the concert’s maiden voyage last year offering a satisfying, balanced program of crowd-pleasers, including Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake: Suite from the Ballet, that still rings in this writer’s ear.

This time around, the heavily Germanic bill that included four excerpts from Wagner’s The Ring cycle of epic-scale operas, proved a tougher sell.

While there’s never any need to “dumb down” a program for audiences, or make it so overly accessible that it can teeter towards boredom, it’s suspected that many in the house were witnessing the joys of live symphonic music for their first time.

These very much-welcomed newbies need to be gently enticed, not bombarded with longer, more densely orchestrated pieces, not to mention a dearth of tuneful melodies one might sing in that proverbial shower.

Lushly lyrical works — such as Tchaikovsky’s Waltz last winter — also never go out of style, with their siren call of lilting tonality perennially irresistible.

It’s also problematic featuring five pieces from the same genre, i.e. opera that creates overall homogeneity. The program itself could also have been whittled by at least 15 minutes; 90 minutes under blinding stage lights and without being able to stretch one’s legs became another challenge for the mostly older crowd.

Having said all this, a rousing opener of Carl Maria von Weber’s Overture to Der Freischütz immediately enthralled, beginning in the lugubrious depths before building towards an ebullient close.

Pellicano artfully cued each section’s entries with expansive, sweeping gestures, swivelling on his larger-sized podium while good-naturedly quipping afterwards

“I didn’t expect the workout this would be,” he said, later deadpanning, “We don’t normally play this way.”

A feisty performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks followed, propelled by particularly crisp winds and bold brass. While one can’t really comment on “balance issues” when plunked in the middle of an orchestra, the thundering timpani made its presence known as did the snare drum, both performed with militaristic zeal.

Then it was time for Wagner, a composer rarely heard on this stage in recent years. Following Entry of the Gods into Valhalla from Das Rheingold, Pellicano, who summarized each of the operas in the proverbial 25 words or less prior to each downbeat, launched into Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walkure. Bravo to these physically distanced musicians — many seated only with their stand-mates — for holding these works together, that nonetheless suffered from a lack of overall cohesion at times.

Still, this iconic prelude further immortalized by film scores, including Apocalypse Now, offered a thrilling joy ride into sonic climes, underscored by the strings as whistling winds, the brass as galloping winged horses and dramatic lightning strikes conjured by the percussion.

After the penultimate Forest Murmurs from Siegfried, featuring effervescent, birdlike solos in the winds, the finale of Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from Gotterdammerung ended the evening on a triumphant note, with kudos also to principal horn Patricia Evans for her sonorous leitmotif of Siegfried’s Horn Call.

After the maestro and his players took their final bow, the audience also leapt to its feet, now becoming one, big happy music-loving family in which all traditional lines of the classical concert going experience simply blurred and melted away.

The Inside Out finale takes place tonight at the Centennial Concert Hall. Visit wso.ca for more information.

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