I didn't see any foreign dignitaries in attendance (though in the Salt Lake Tabernacle one can never be sure). Nor, thankfully, did I hear any gunshots.
Otherwise Saturday's performance by the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus of Arthur Benjamin's "Storm Cloud Cantata" - written by him for Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 film of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" - came remarkably close to capturing the drama and suspense of the assassination sequence it was designed to accompany.Indeed so effectively did it serve that purpose that the piece was recycled, with minor modifications, for the director's own 1956 remake. For that film the music director was Bernard Herrmann, and it was his edition of the score that was used Saturday, to the point where it was his biography the printed program focused on, with scarcely a word for poor Benjamin.
Nonetheless the latter did his work well, and so did the orchestra and chorus under their director, Robert C. Bowden.
From the ominous fanfare that opens the cantata to the orchestral climax that concludes it, the mounting tension of the writing was memorably caught.
Sometimes in the more lyrical pages ("Yet stood the trees") that writing seems like a warmed-over version of Vaughan Williams' early choral piece, "Toward the Unknown Region." But as things become more turbulent in "The storm clouds roll" section - and here Bowden kept the screw tight - the music takes on a momentum of its own. Still, it's the Hitchcockian pause right before the climactic cymbal crash that makes the piece. Nor did it hurt to have a truly large complement of performers in an acoustical setting that, even more than the two films, really did approach the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall.
Soloist in the Benjamin cantata was mezzo-soprano Marjo Burdette, whose diction was almost as good as the chorus'.
Just before that it was Larry Whipple, whose firm-voiced tenor would have shown to more ethereal effect in the "Sanctus" from Gounod's "St. Cecilia" Mass had it not been so closely miked. Still, the chorus in particular brought a devotional swell to this gorgeous piece, building expansively to its billowing climax.
Earlier it was the orchestra's night, beginning with the splashy sweep of Shostakovich's "Festival Overture," to which they brought an almost Tchaikovskian elegance, then moving to the world premiere of the Symphony No. 4 ("Country Scenes and Meditations") of Wyoming's William Call.
Here the playing might have been more disciplined and the interpretation sharper-edged. But the music itself doesn't really generate the highest level of commitment.
Laid out along strictly formal lines, it recalls nothing so much as the 19th-century Leipzig school, from the Mendelssohnian vigor of the first and third movements ("At Play" and "Far Away Lands and Places") to the Schumannesque lyricism of the fourth ("The Circus Parade").
At the same time the lengthy second movement ("At Home") contains more than a hint of early Charles Ives and the last is notable not only for a pair of "Turkish" episodes, a la Mozart and Beethoven, but maybe two or three false endings, again recalling the latter.
I guess they have circus parades in Germany too.