Noah Marconi - Picture Palace
Noah Marconi - Picture Palace
Overall, Picture Palace was a fun new work for both the audience and performers. The piece is superb as long as it is never taken more seriously than intended.
Picture Palace is an exciting new fanfare for orchestra by aspiring film composer Noah Marconi. Running at around twelve minutes, slightly longer than expected for a concert opener, the piece develops in sections, with the opening material resurfacing time to time. Marconi describes the work as a "tribute to film music", which is spot on. The piece basically is a conglomeration of a series of cliches from cinematic music. As long as you take the music for what it is, a fun tribute to screen music, Picture Palace is an effective and entertaining work for orchestra (listen to it here).
Marconi opens the work with an aggressive mixed-meter introduction. Raucous strings and piercing piccolo lines calls to mind orchestral repertoire of mid-to-late twentieth-century American composers. Quickly this smoothly morphs into lyrical melodies in the horns and woodwinds. After an intense build-up, the introduction material returns for only a brief moment, before Marconi abruptly throws up for a loop with a cliché love theme; the first three notes being an actual quote from John Williams' Star Wars. While enjoyable, this whole contrasting section feels out of place compared to the rest of Marconi's writing.
The last half of the piece is comprised of one long, post-minimalist snowball using motives hidden earlier on in the work. Specifically, Marconi's orchestration and usage of percussion, the temple blocks solo is phenomenal, makes the section stand out from the rest of the piece. It is obvious that Ziwei Ma and the Hartt Orchestra are having fun and simply enjoying playing Marconi's music.
Overall, Picture Palace was a fun new work for both the audience and performers. Though a long concert opener, Marconi was able to keep the interest up through the implementation of drastically different sections before returning to previous material. The piece is superb as long as it is never taken more seriously than intended. The constant barrage of cliché musical tricks and quotations from the film world gets distracting at best and irritating at worst. But when you sit back, don't think too much, and let yourself enjoy the tonal beauty set up by Marconi, you realize Picture Palace is a well-crafted fanfare for a new age of orchestral music.
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