Cirque de la Symphonie returns to Honolulu, featuring aerial derring-do above the musicians

Artistry will be up in the air and down on the ground this weekend when the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra performs at Blaisdell Concert Hall. The symphony enters the home stretch of its fifth season this weekend with its now-common double bill of pops and masterworks on a single weekend.

Saturday features the return of Cirque de la Symphonie, which two years ago had a capacity audience oohing and aahing over its aerialists, who often came swooping over the crowd, as well as balancing acts and contortionists.

That’s followed Sunday by a more grounded but also energetic performance of classical music, with Beethoven’s lively Piano Concerto No. 1 featuring the charming pianist Zhang Zuo, and Schumann’s Symphony No. 3, nicknamed “Rhenish” and inspired by a trip the composer took through the picturesque Rhineland region of western Germany.

Cirque at the Cinema

The 2015 Cirque performance featured music by classical composers such as Bizet, Mendelssohn, Strauss and Khachaturian, with the Cirque performers timing their routines to match phrases and emotions of the music. Sibelius’ “Finlandia,” a rousing tone poem, provided an ideal backdrop for amazing feats of strength by strongmen Jarek and Darek.

This year’s performance will present Cirque performances set to movie music.

Much of the music will come from action flicks, including the original 1989 “Batman,” James Bond movies, “Mission: Impossible” and plenty of John Williams-scored films. There will also be heartthrob tunes, including theme songs from “Dr. Zhivago” and “Titanic,” and flashy dance numbers from “Chicago.”

That’s right in the wheelhouse of guest conductor Stuart Chafetz, who has conducted many movie-themed concerts here over the past few years. He knows this program particularly well, having conducted a similar program at its debut in Seattle.

“It’s the full gamut of Hollywood,” Chafetz said. “We wanted it to be musically stunning as well as visually stunning.”

The show is choreographed by Aloysia Gavras, a prize-winning aerialist who has starred in Cirque du Soleil productions and other circuses. She partners with Sagiv Ben Binyamin in a duet balancing act performed to a tune from “Scent of a Woman.”

“It’s a flirtatious tango that’s taking a ride down that sort of sensuous route,” Gavras said. “We play back and forth with a hat. My partner wears a fedora, and we place it on different parts or our body in complex balancing poses. It’s very theatrical.”

Gavras, who will also perform an aerial work to pieces from “Chicago,” said performing to music while hanging over an orchestra is a unique experience. “Those of us who are spinning, it changes our understanding of the music and where we are as well, so it’s lots of different challenges that are constantly happening. But that’s also what makes it such a thrilling experience as performers, because each symphony is a new experience for us. Nothing is the same.”

For Chafetz the experience is one of “the fear of God.” He is busy watching for various cues and setting tempos, and he’s “terrified” to look up at the Cirque performers, especially the aerialists who often hang directly over him.

“I don’t want to look, because it’s intense watching this stuff flying around above the orchestra,” he said. “I can’t look. No. 1, I’d get lost, for sure; but No. 2, I’d just be terrified.”

Overall, however, Chafetz said the production is good family fun that enchants at many levels.

“It’s just beautiful,” Chafetz said. “It says something with the music. It works with the music. It’s not just put together with it; it’s actually choreographed around the music.”

Masterworks: Beethoven and Schumann

Pianist Zhang Zuo, 28, who solos on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the symphony Sunday, truly represents the international nature of classical music today. Born in the southern Chinese city of Shenzen, she started piano lessons at age 5 in Berlin. Returning to China after three years, she continued her studies in Shenzen and won her first major competition in the United States at age 11, at the Gina Bachauer International Youth Piano Competition in Utah.

Zuo — who goes by the nickname ZZ — went to the Juilliard School in New York, living there for another nine years. For the past two years, she’s again been living in Berlin, as demand for her artistry has mostly come from Europe.

She considers her training training in China as providing the basis for artistry, recalling it as being “intense.” “I practiced a lot, maybe from seven, eight, sometimes even 10 hours a day. It was like Olympic training,” she said. “I went to an arts school, so I didn’t even realize it was a lot. I just thought that was how it supposed to be.”

ZZ’s career took off after winning the 2013 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Europe, honoring the Belgian queen, and getting a residency afterward with the BBC in London.

As good as her training was in China, she perceives that there were significant cultural obstacles to her learning Western music. She notes the difference now that she is living in Germany again.

“Bach is like the national anthem here,” she said. “Classical music is like a language, and within the music itself there are different nationalities. And of course as a Chinese, the ear for it was not innate.”

She’s in demand for her performances of the standard classical repertoire, often being asked to perform the Beethoven concerto that she will perform here. In part, she credits that to audiences seeing her as carrying on the tradition of one of her current teachers, Alfred Brendel, the great German pianist who is considered a giant among Beethoven interpreters.

“This piece has always been there for me,” she said of Beethoven’s first piano concerto. “I started first learning it very young. I remember the first time I heard it, actually I was in Berlin as a little girl. The third movement is kind of a jazzy part, and that really fascinated me, so I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the piece I wanted to play.’

“Every time, coming back to it at a different stage of my life, it’s a completely different story. Sometimes it’s very difficult, and sometimes it gives me an ease. I can break through it.”

The orchestra will perform Schumann’s third symphony, considered a majestic, powerful work that has references to the German countryside and also the magnificent cathedral in Cologne. Schumann had witnessed the installation of the archbishop of the cathedral as cardinal, and instilled a ceremonial tone to the music.

Maestro Jun Markl, a frequent conductor of orchestras in Europe, leads the orchestra.