BSO sextet plays to small crowd> Group fights for sound, listeners in music tent

Perhaps symphony orchestras are large because there’s power in numbers. When the Bangor Symphony Orchestra played between sets during last year’s Phish concert in Limestone, it took center stage and mesmerized a vast audience.

This year a six-person ensemble from the BSO was invited to the event and performed a quirky piece of music called “Facade” to a much smaller audience. The group performed three half-hour sets of movements that varied in length from one to three minutes.

“They looked a bit perplexed,” said Anne Pooler, the work’s narrator, of the Phish fans who wandered into the nonprofit tent set up near the main stage. The tent was among the offerings in the Garden of Infinite Pleasantries, a playground that Phish constructed for its faithful fans for its final concert of the tour. The ensemble played atop a plywood platform.

According to Peter Poliakine, BSO executive director, the concert’s organizers had asked the symphony for a small-scale performance. When the organizers described the place where the BSO would play — a sideless tent that allowed for the free flow of both wind and people — he thought “Facade” would be ideal. The piece is based on the whimsical writings of English poet Dame Edith Sitwell that she penned early in this century. William Walton, a friend of the Sitwell family, arranged Sitwell’s poems into a six-instrument work for the family’s own parlor room enjoyment.

Remaining faithful to Walton’s choice of instruments, the BSO ensemble included Liz Downing on flute and piccolo, Beth Weimann on bass clarinet, Glen Sargent on alto saxophone, Curt Brossmer on trumpet, Andrew Richter on cello and Chris Andrews on percussion. Pooler narrated the piece, which was conducted by Nancy Rowe Laite.

“It’s fun to be here,” Downing said. “It’s a smorgasbord of sounds.”

Amid the estimated 60,000 concert-goers, the sextet competed not just for the attention of listeners, but also for the very sound waves themselves. Not far from the BSO was the “junk band,” a collection of plastic and metal tubs, trash can lids and other drummable items. Dozens of concert-goers beat long and steady — just one of the infinite pleasantries available. And the BSO played on.

Between movements, a curly-shoed man wearing a fool’s cap strolled up to Rowe Laite and asked her how much longer the sextet would be playing. He was, you see, part of a fire-juggling act set to perform just outside the tent. But the BSO played on.

“People come for the whole mixture,” Downing said. “We’re usually in a quiet music hall. It’s nice to be here because there’s so much going on around you.” She pointed to a young woman sitting on the grass a few feet away from the band. “Like that girl blowing bubbles as we played. It’s all part of the festival atmosphere.”

Pooler, the narrator, had the toughest row to hoe — partly because she worked with an amplifier that was plain overwhelmed by the ambient sounds and the sextet. But just as challenging was the tongue-twisting Sitwell lyrics. For example, a line from the movement called “Horn Pipe” read, “For the minx, said she, and the drinks, you can see are hot as any hottentot and not the goods for me!”

From a movement called “Tarentella,” which Pooler told the audience was a word meaning “a dance to the death once you’ve been bitten by a tarantula,” she recited the line, “All the beauty of marrow and cucumber narrow.”

The similarity between the fast-tempo movements of “Facade” and rap music, makes one quickly realize that there’s nothing new under the sun. The piece’s internal rhymes and sudden rests are the standard stuff of rappers almost a century after Walton scored the poems.

Richter said “Facade” was not readily accepted by an English audience when it was performed early this century. In part that was because it was an unconventional work. But the piece also contained social commentary that might have met resistance, according to research Richter has done.

For example, one movement begins with the lines “Long steel grass/the white soldiers pass/the light is braying like an ass.” Bayonets? Bombs? British imperialism? It perhaps was interpreted so.

But to Sunday afternoon’s Phish crowd, the performance was calmly accepted as part of the eclectic mix of sights and sounds expected at the tour’s finale.