Orchestra has lift-off with astronaut aboard

By Felix Hoover

For YourNewsColumbus.com

An enthusiastic audience came loaded with anticipation and appreciation at last night’s season opener of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra.

A nearly-packed house applauded just about everything – an apology for the program’s late start (due to so many folks braving the rough weather); a plug for the sponsor, AEP; and, of course, the musicians and conductor Peter Stafford Wilson.

Strong applause rewarded the first part of the program, which consisted of Javelin, an Olympics inspired piece by American composer Michael Torke, and three dance episodes from Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town.

But much of the audience came to applaud an American hero, astronaut and former U.S. Sen. John Glenn, and did so with gusto following the intermission.

He provided narration the second half of the program, a multimedia presentation of Gustav Polst’s The Planets, which blended the orchestra’s music with a symphonic film that showed NASA images on the seven planets described in the suite.

At least one audience member said that the film fell short of his imagination.

Others might have thought that triggering the imagination was a sign that the performance accomplished what was intended.

Glenn added his own closing thoughts, which incorporated part of his message to a joint session of Congress following his orbit of the Earth in 1962.

As the audience exited Veterans Memorial, overcast skies deprived them of starlight as if the cosmos demanded another ovation for the planets.