FIREWORKS REVIEW : Skyrockets’ Red Glare Is as Much for the Mind as It Is for the Eyes

Once conductor Morton Gould and the Pacific Symphony got the serious music-making out of the way at the orchestra’s Fourth of July program at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on Monday, the arena was turned over to those unsung artists whose medium is high explosives.

Although fireworks have been a popular diversion stretching back thousands of years to ancient China, pyrotechnical artists have only recently begun to gain appreciation from a critical perspective. Provocatively conceived, such efficiently paced displays as Monday’s prove that meaningful attention is long overdue.

With Gould and the Pacific Symphony still on stage for an encore of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” the fireworks began simply, like the first movement of a classical symphony: individual bursts of patriotic red, white and blue, over a simple background of night sky, before moving into variation and recapitulation.

The first hint that this was more than just an eye-dazzling diversion came quickly: A rainbow-hued rocket exploded amid the separate monochromatic blasts, as if perhaps to underscore just how complex and multifaceted an issue war always is. No easy answers, no black or white, good or bad.

At the end of the Sousa, as more rockets lit the sky above, Gould dispersed the orchestra, a deftly choreographed move that showed how music--and art in general--all too often perishes helter-skelter under the stress of military hostilities.

The bomb squad also boldly timed a few skyrockets to explode at lower altitudes, from which fallout drifted ominously close to Mother Earth--a reminder that the ravages of distant battles can touch all too close to home.

One was reminded of the orchestra’s exhibition in 1984 at the Pacific Amphitheatre, where smoke clouds from exploded devices often obscured the orchestra, as if to point up the spiritual gulf between artists and the populace.

In the end, if this year’s show was more a political statement than that treatise on the artistic mind-set, it was nonetheless an appropriately thoughtful examination of one of the myriad sides of Independence Day in the 1980s.