Don’t miss the Marine Chamber Orchestra performance at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 19. The concert will pay homage to America and all its natural wonders by performing Olivier Messiaen’s monumental Des canyons aux étoiles... (From the Canyons to the Stars), which was commissioned and performed for the United States bicentennial in 1976. Additionally, the winner of the annual Marine Band Concerto Competition, Olivia Shidler, will perform with the orchestra.  

View Program

Shidler, a junior at Millburn High School in Short Hills, New Jersey, will perform Claude Debussy’s Danses sacrée et profane on the harp. Shidler has played the harp for ten years and has performed under the batons of Adam Glaser, Xian Zhang, Daniele Rustioni and Gustavo Dudamel with the New York Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.  

Debussy’s Danses sacrée et profane perfectly captures his tell-tale compositional style, with melodic and harmonic ambiguity. The Danses sacrée presents many technical challenges to the performer and utilizes harmonic planing, or parallelism: a technique where chords move up and down the scale freely. The Danse profane presents an airy, cheerful waltz in a more standard tonal expression. This work remains a standard in harp repertoire to this day.  

Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles... is the centerpiece of this performance. With three parts broken down into 12 total movements, it is one of Messiaen’s grandest compositions. While preparing the work in 1972, he visited Utah, where he was inspired by the animals and the landscape, specifically at colorful Bryce Canyon. He took a particular interest in birds, being a self-taught ornithologist. As a result, many of the movements are named after birds and include transcriptions of their songs.   

Messiaen aimed to create a story using musical themes and elements that reflect each movement’s namesake. The piece is scored for orchestra and brings four intentional instruments to the spotlight: piano, horn, glockenspiel and xylorimba. Each play their own special role, and the orchestra as a whole adopts Messiaen’s signature “modes of limited transposition” where whole-tone and semi-tone intervals form the structure, as opposed to the diatonic scale. This results in a floating tone structure that is flexible and vast, reflective of the environments Messiaen sought to honor.  

The performance will take place at Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center Northern Virginia Community College. The concert is free; no tickets required.