First Stage Teams Up with the MSO for Frederick’s Fables
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: 2024.25 Season, Family, Partners
The Milwaukee Symphony’s upcoming family concert represents both its first-ever collaboration with First Stage and an original fusion of words, music, and images.
On Sunday, March 16, “Frederick’s Fables” will present stories by children’s author Leo Lionni, with orchestral music by composer Michael Abels. The narration will be performed by an adult actor and four young actors from First Stage, with projections of Lionni’s pictures.
“It’s a delightful piece of music, and it uses the full copy from the books,” said Rebecca Whitney, the MSO’s director of education. “But for whatever reason, it’s not performed very often.”
During initial conversations about possibilities for the concert, Assistant Conductor Ryan Tani brought the Abels suite to the MSO’s attention. Tani said that Abels’s work had already been on his radar, and when he went through the full score, “it was so colorful and groovy and virtuosic,” he said. “I loved the idea of bringing this to Milwaukee.”
Abels wrote the suite of music to go with four Lionni stories in the 1990s, before he became more famous as the composer of scores for films such as Get Out and Nope and the opera Omar, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023.
Tani said that the music brings out more in Lionni’s stories and pictures. “There’s a lot of life and harmonic color,” he said. “What does a party at Mardi Gras sound like? What does a chase scene sound like?” But the music is new and different enough that Tani said it will be a challenge to prepare for the concert in one rehearsal.
In addition to the family concert, “Frederick’s Fables” will also be the program for the symphony’s educational concerts for young children in May. As a leadup to the concert, MSO musicians also made ten appearances at branches of the Milwaukee Public Library to present books and music together.
This collaboration is the first between First Stage and the MSO, but both sides hope that it won’t be the last. First Stage have been “great partners to work with,” Whitney said. “It takes a lot of planning to put a show like this together.”
“I hope it’s the first of many,” said Jeff Frank, the artistic director of First Stage. “We’re honored that the Milwaukee Symphony thought of us. The emergence of Michael Abels as a composer is a wonderful connection.”
Abels wrote the music to be performed with only narration, but the First Stage team had productive discussions about “how to breathe life into the piece,” Frank said. The five actors will divide the narration and the character voices between them, mostly standing still, due to the limited space at the front of the stage. “It’s not quite like reading a bedtime story, but a little bit,” Frank said.
While the actors and the orchestra perform, the illustrations will be shown on a screen above, with some slight enhancements and movement.
The production is more elaborate than the MSO usually does for in-house family concerts, but Whitney said that a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts helped make it possible. And in the future, it could be exported for performance by other orchestras.
With the combination of music, words, and pictures, “I think it’s going to be different for each audience member, what draws them in,” Frank said. “I’m confident that every young person and every family member will have a different favorite moment.”
