The Quad City Symphony Orchestra promises a tour of four international destinations you can visit without leaving your concert seat this weekend – a global Quad Cities, including our own backyard.
For its “Cityscapes Home & Abroad” Masterworks program Saturday night at Davenport’s Adler Theatre and Sunday afternoon at Rock Island’s Centennial Hall, there are three QCSO premieres and the one that’s not by a living composer.
The classical hit parade will feature:
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 31, “Paris” (1778)
- Franz von Suppé’s Overture to “Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna” (1844)
- Duke Ellington’s “Harlem” (1950)
- Jim Stephenson’s “CitySpeaks,” premiered by the QCSO in April 2019.
It was QCSO music director and conductor Mark Russell Smith’s clever concept to program this quartet of cities, with the Stephenson tone poem as a 23-minute sonic tribute to the QC, presented in multimedia format (with visual and spoken-word elements).
The program notes relate how the composer came up with five “blocks of sound” surrounding the orchestra, whereas each block represents a city, and the orchestra (woodwinds) represent the river.
The blocks are: Davenport (2 trumpets/trombone); Bettendorf (timpani/percussion); East Moline (horn, trombone, bass trombone); Moline (strings); Rock Island (3 French horns). Furthermore, each group would play rhythmic fanfares that rhythmically emulated that of their respective city, Stephenson wrote. Throughout this process, the woodwinds flow along, representing the river in the middle.
“We have a tradition, at least since Mark was music director, where we do try to commission a new work at least once a year,” Brian Baxter, orchestra executive director, said this week, noting this season that will be a new Michael Abels cello concerto next spring.
“So we're always presenting something brand new, something happening now. And in this particular year, Mark was interested in working with Jim Stephenson,” Baxter said of the 2018-19 season. “Jim is based in the Chicago area, so he's not too far away. And he's pretty well-known, especially among musician circles. He's a trumpet player himself."
Stephenson liked to write music that's really directly relevant to the people he's writing it for or the community it's for. “It was kind of a really fun interaction, and he was really excited about, how can I feature this unique place, the Quad Cities, where there's five cities, and how can I feature that?” Baxter recalled.
“That's how he came up with ‘CitySpeaks.’ It's a single movement work, so we're all one community, but he has five sections where he features the five major Quad Cities,” he said.
Both times the QCSO is doing the work, it’s paired with a large screen projecting locally generated artwork that reflects each city – Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline, Rock Island and East Moline – and coordinated with their respective section of the music.
Chelsea Sammons, QCSO director of education and community engagement, oversaw the process this time and got about 100 submissions (drawing, painting and photography) that reflect the individual’s hometown or favorite place, Baxter said.
“So to bring those in, and then we are featuring that imagery throughout the piece, but paired with the part of the piece you're in,” he said. The program will feature 37 pieces of art and photography, all by local artists.
“That's a really cool thing because then it's a nice way of connecting with the community, featuring local artists, some are student artists too,” Baxter said. “It's kind of a mix of different things, and they will all be revealed at the concert in performance. So that's really exciting.”
Spoken-word portions of “CitySpeaks” will be a reading of the Dick Stahl (former QC poet laureate) poem “Mississippi River, My Compass” by Jim Niedelman, and poems by spoken-word artist Altease Ramsey (both original and from QC young writers).
Altease was part of the 2019 premiere, and unlike the visual artwork, the spoken text in “CitySpeaks” doesn’t change, Baxter said. The poet’s bio says he seeks to uplift, inspire and connect with audiences.
“Altease blends poetry, music, and authentic storytelling to create meaningful experiences that encourage hope, healing, and change,” the QCSO program says. “His artistry is rooted in the belief that words and music have the power to bring people together.”
“We had a lot of positive responses to it. I think people were really intrigued by it,” Baxter said of the “CitySpeaks” premiere over seven years ago. “They thought that, anytime you have a visual element, people tend to get excited about that. It's not too frequently that you hear a lot of music about the Quad Cities, so that's a really fun thing to have.”
Naturally, there’s a shout-out to one of the QC’s most famous sons – Davenport native and legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931), with a brief excerpt of his “Davenport Blues” recording, and then QCSO principal trumpet Chris Hass joining in on an original Bix cornet (from Davenport’s Putnam Museum).
“We did this last time around too, but we're working with the Putnam Museum, and we will be incorporating that solo, performed by our principal trumpet, as a part of that section,” Baxter said. “So I think that's really neat.”
“It's a really neat texture and a neat thing that I think will surprise people who haven't heard it before,” he added.
Stephenson wrote that an actual recording of Bix and his band play, while slowly the orchestra begins to comment, but in music of the present day (quasi hip-hop). The text for the spoken-word artist comes from “The Atlas,” a book of prose compiled by QC writers from the Midwest Writing Center’s Young Emerging Writers summer internship program. “Finally, we launch into full-fledged contemporary music, as edgy commentary is delivered about modern-day life,” the composer wrote.
“The orchestra can do anything. I know I say that all the time, but that includes music about our time, music that's inspired by our time, and music that's inspired by our place here in the Quad Cities and interacts with that space,” Baxter said of “CitySpeaks.” “We are really thrilled to feature this piece.”
While Duke Ellington’s “Harlem” hasn’t been done by the QCSO before, the composer (who lived from 1899 to 1974) actually stopped in the QC several times in his impressive career.
“He did a little lecture recital at St. Ambrose and playing at the Rock Island Armory. He's played in basically all of the Quad Cities in his time,” Baxter said. “If you were touring in the middle of the 20th century, like you would have stopped here.
"So it's kind of cool to think a legend like that, you know, set foot here not once, not twice, but like at least about a dozen times.”
Surprisingly, each of these other pieces this weekend – Ellington, Mozart and Suppe – have never been played in the 112-season history of the QCSO.
The new Michael Abels cello concerto (commissioned with other orchestras) will be performed by the QCSO April 3-4, 2027. Abels – a close friend of Mark Russell Smith, famous for writing the film soundtracks to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and “Nope” – had his “Omar’s Journey” performed by the QCSO Feb. 1-2, 2025. That’s a concert adaptation of the opera “Omar,” which the composer co-wrote with Rhiannon Giddens and won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
This weekend’s concerts are Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Adler (136 E. 3rd St., Davenport), and Sunday at 2 p.m. at Centennial Hall (3703 7th Ave., Rock Island). Tickets are $8 to $70 on Saturday, and $8 to $45 on Sunday, available HERE.
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