Symphony turns to ‘CSI’

The television series “CSI” and its medical forensics team deal with the kinds of mayhem and mischief not normally associated with classical music.

But the Spokane Symphony has based the theme of its three Casual Classics concerts this season around such investigations and is calling the series “CSI: Spokane.”

The symphony and Symphony Chorale open the series Friday night at the Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox with a program about mysterious deaths of (or by) composers.

Resident conductor Morihiko Nakahara will lead a suite from J.B. Lully’s music for “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”; Mozart’s Kyrie in D minor (KV 341); Brahms’ “Nanie”; and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade in C, Op. 82.

Julian Gomez-Giraldo, director of the Symphony Chorale, will lead the ensemble in Gesualdo’s unaccompanied madrigal “Moro lass al mio duolo.”

The “CSI” series is the brainchild of Nakahara and music director Eckart Preu.

“Eckart and I had been talking about having a Casual Classics series based on the ‘CSI’ theme for a couple of years,” Nakahara says. “So when we were planning the 2010-2011 season, Eckart said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

For those out of touch with the important elements of popular culture, “CSI” stands for Crime Scene Investigation, and it is the name of a popular CBS series since 2000.

Originally called “CSI Las Vegas,” the series has since spun off other geographical franchises (“CSI: Miami,” “CSI: NY”), a video game and several imitations of its procedural approach to investigations.

Nakahara, in a telephone interview last week, was unwilling to tell exactly what criminality lay behind the choice of works on Friday’s program.

“Some composers in classical music have led pretty wild lives,” he said. “And others have died in strange ways. There have even been murderers out there.”

Lully, for example, was supposedly a victim of an on-the-job accident. He hit his foot with a long pole marking time during a rehearsal of a Te Deum celebrating the recovery of Louis XIV from an illness. An infection turned gangrenous, and in those pre-penicillin days he died.

Or was the Lully story more complicated? He was a notorious libertine, after all creating one scandal after another.

Similarly, there may be more than meets the casual eye in the deaths of other composers on Friday’s program, according to Nakahara.

He will provide spoken program notes for the works in Friday’s concert, illustrated by musical examples played by orchestra members.