Symphony draws a diverse crowd with first 'CSO Roadshow'
More CSO Roadshow performances are scheduled for May 5 and June 21
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on April 29, 2024. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. And check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger.
Review: New Charlotte Symphony mobile stage made its community debut in east Charlotte with a Latin themed program that felt like a block party
The Ultima Nota septet performed in front of Charlotte Symphony musicians in east Charlotte as part of the symphony’s first CSO Roadshow concert. (Photo by Lawrence Toppman)
by Lawrence Toppman
The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra achieved its audience-building dream Sunday: a crowd whose faces really reflected the city in which it plays. On a pleasantly warm afternoon, a racially and ethnically diverse crowd soaked up sun and musical rhythms from south of the U.S. border.
And all it took was to pack up the players, truck them five miles east of Belk Theater, and plop them down on a mobile stage in a parking lot off Central Avenue. CSO Roadshow made its smooth bilingual debut behind the Latin American Coalition building, performing for the most diverse classical music audience I’ve seen here in years.
Symphony CEO and president David Fisk has said the drop-down stage takes less than 90 minutes to get ready and can visit virtually any neighborhood. It’s likely to appear in six under-invested sections the city calls corridors of opportunity, one of them the Central-Albemarle district where it turned up Sunday for “Musica con Amigos” (“Music with Friends”).
The afternoon felt like a block party. Food trucks served pupusas, empanadas and burritos. Enormous multihued butterflies, a symbol of the coalition’s ongoing fund-raising campaign, decorated walls and trees and offered opportunities for selfies. Kids and the occasional dog sparked happily around the fringes of the parking lot, which was filled with chairs a respectful distance from the stage and a large projection screen adjacent to it. Even the coffee came from Colombia.
Any party warms up slowly, and this one began with kids from Charlotte Bilingual Preschool “playing” violins made of macaroni boxes with paper bows. Classes there teach them rhythms, proper posture and bowing technique.
Some of them may carry over into Project Harmony, the CSO’s tuition-free after-school program at four Charlotte-area schools. Winterfield Elementary, which sits within walking distance of the coalition, sent students to “Musica con Amigos” to demonstrate the progress they’ve made since first contact with their instruments last fall. A gently supportive string trio from the symphony backed both sets of youngsters.
Then resident conductor Christopher James Lees took the stage for the main part of the program. Did he play Latin-ized music, however well-intentioned, by non-Latino classical composers? Happily, no. Copland’s “Latin American Sketches” and Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture” turn up on pops programs, but not this one. Even serious classical composers from Spain, Mexico and South America — Manuel de Falla, Carlos Chávez, Alberto Ginastera — didn’t suit the relaxed mood.
Instead, Lees led pieces such as Peruvian songs adapted by Gabriela Lena Frank (whom the CSO has played in its main classical season) and a sinuous dance number by Afro-Cuban composer José Silvestre de los Dolores White Lafitte. A few hardy souls then stepped onto the pavement to dance, one of them Rosalia Torres-Weiner.
She painted the energized, multi-hued murals on cloth that adorn the mobile stage when it travels. (The pianist on them, she confided, is Fisk.) Torres-Weiner owns a 24-foot truck that can serve as a portable gallery, and she envisions driving in tandem with the musicians eventually. (The Roadshow appears next at Mayfield Memorial Missionary Baptist Church on May 5 and Ophelia Garmon-Brown Community Center on June 21. Another spring date may be added.)
Though the stage can reportedly accommodate 30 musicians, about half that many played for Lees on Sunday. After half an hour, they became an elegant back-up band for Ultima Nota, a septet whose twin percussionists and Spanish-language vocals had even non-Latinos grooving.
Will this kind of outreach lead to an influx? Will audiences newly experiencing the fun and professionalism of the city’s largest performing arts group flow into its mainstage concerts? Maybe not — and maybe that’s not the point. Perhaps sunny afternoons of musical brio matter as much to the community as somber evenings of Brahms.
Want to go? Upcoming free CSO Roadshow concerts are scheduled for May 5 at Mayfield Memorial Baptist Church and June 21 at Ophelia Garmon-Brown Community Center. Details here.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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