Hubble images set to music

East Allen Times:

FORT WAYNE — Many people have viewed Hubble Space Telescope images in books, IMAX theaters, on television and the Internet. But a new relationship with those images can be experienced at the Philharmonic’s second Masterworks concert of the 2010-2011 season, Saturday.

As composer Christopher Theofanidis’ enthralling “Rainbow Body” is performed by the orchestra, more than 20 images from deep space will be shown on a 19-foot-by-25-foot screen suspended over the Embassy Theatre stage. The images will be synchronized to the music. Planets, stars, nebulae and galaxies showing the universe in all its dazzling complexity will bring new meaning to the concert’s theme — “The Color of Music.”

Narrator Martin Fisher, executive director of Science Central, will set the stage for the program, which marks the 20th anniversary of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope launch, guiding us through the journey of the Rainbow Body piece. Deployed into orbit April 24, 1990, from the Space Shuttle Discovery, the Hubble’s discoveries “have forever altered our knowledge of the universe,” according to the official Hubble Web site.

Under the baton of music director Andrew Constantine, the concert will open at 8 p.m. with French composer Maurice Ravel’s Rapsodie Espangol, a four-movement suite written in early 20th-century Paris when Spanish music was all the rage in Paris. Rainbow Body and the Hubble images will follow, and the concert will end with Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition. This colorful, 33-minute suite is a set of musical pictures, literally. Each movement is linked to a drawing or painting by the Russian artist Victor Hartmann, who died in 1873. An admirer of his work, Mussorgsky composed this suite as a tribute to Hartmann.

Tickets, starting at $18, can be purchased by calling 481-0777, online at fwphil.org, or at the Embassy Theatre box office.