NEW
YORK, United Stated — Pity the 19th-century American composer, toiling
away in the shadow of
Beethoven in search of a homegrown sound, only to be
overshadowed by yet another European: Antonin Dvorak, whose “New World” symphony
is played far more often than anything from the New World that preceded it.
اضافة اعلان
Visiting
the US in the 1890s, Dvorak prophesied a future of American classical music
founded on Black and Indigenous melodies. To an extent, that came true in the
20th century, but orchestras tended to overlook composers of color in favor of
white, male ones — some of whom would come to be seen as national heroes, while
their lesser-known compatriots would rely (and continue to rely) on passionate
champions.
And
Europeans still haunted concert programming — a product, historian
Joseph Horowitz has asserted, of a cultural shift in American classical music from a
focus on composers to performers that, fueled by the rise of radio broadcasts
and recordings, calcified the repertoire of our largest cultural institutions.
I’m
being reductive, but the broad truth of this is that the myopic approach of
much orchestral programming today — Eurocentric, with living composers rarely
given the same pride of place as a Beethoven or
Mahler — is nothing new.
Then
there are artists like Leon Botstein, an indispensable advocate of the unfairly
ignored, who brought his ensemble The Orchestra Now to Carnegie Hall on
Thursday for an evening of works that, despite covering a range of nearly 150
years, felt as fresh as a batch of premieres.
The Orchestra Now performs "Symphony No. 4, Arcadian,” at Carnegie Hall in New York, November 18, 2021.(Photo: NYTimes)
Botstein
belongs to a class of conductors and artistic directors — including Horowitz,
as well as
Gil Rose of the
Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ashleigh Gordon and
Anthony R. Green of Castle of Our Skins, and more — who bring an endlessly
curious and almost archaeological mind to their programming. They operate on
such a small scale, they can hardly reverse the course of American classical
music history; but each concert, each recording, is an essential step in a
better direction.
On
Thursday,
Botstein and
The Orchestra Now, a capable and game group of young
musicians, took the latest of those steps with Julia Perry’s “Stabat Mater,”
written in 1951, early in that composer’s short life;
Scott Wheeler’s new
violin concerto, “Birds of America,” featuring Gil Shaham; and George Frederick
Bristow’s Fourth Symphony, “Arcadian,” from 1872.
Perry’s
work, an episodic setting of the classic Latin text that has inspired composers
for centuries, seems to rise from the depths, awakening slowly with the sounds
of gravelly cellos that eventually give away to the brightness of a solo violin
and the entrance of the vocalist: here, mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter, who
navigated her part’s surprising turns and plunges with smooth and characterful
ease.
The
score, like many American works from the mid-20th century, strikes a balance of
dissonance and tonality. With a brief running time and modest scale, it is
nonetheless dense, with thick textures emerging from its all-string ensemble
and an affecting ambivalence in the final section of instrumental darkness and
vocal ecstasy.
Wheeler’s
likable concerto, which the orchestra premiered last weekend at the Fisher
Center at Bard College, has elements of timelessness — its lyricism akin to
that of Barber and Korngold’s famous violin concertos — but also postmodernism,
with snippets of classics like Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.”
Despite
the avian title, Wheeler doesn’t emulate birdsong as Messiaen famously did, but
he does take inspiration from the calls of distinct voices, with brief,
repeated phrases attached to specific instruments — such as the whistling runs
from a piccolo and flute that open the piece.
Shaham,
one of our sunniest violinists, entered accordingly with a singing melody on
his highest string, and brought abundant warmth throughout. But he was also
grippingly virtuosic in tricky, Sarasate-like passages of lyrical double-stops
and left-hand pizzicato. In the finale, he engaged in a musical Simon Says,
knocking on the back of his instrument and cuing the second violins to do the
same, then setting up col legno tapping in the violas and high-pitched bird
calls in the first violins. By the end, the winds joined in to evoke a
wondrously bustling aviary.
Without
an intermission, Botstein continued with Bristow’s burly symphony, one of those
works that is more heard about than actually heard. But when it premiered, in
the midst of 19th-century debates about the direction of American classical
music — documented, with an analysis of the “Arcadian,” in musicologist
Douglas W. Shadle’s revelatory 2015 book, “Orchestrating the Nation” — it enjoyed the
rare success of repeated programming.
And
Thursday, you could hear why. With late-Romantic grandeur and American
inspiration, the “Arcadian,” played at Carnegie in a new edition by
Kyle Gann,
charts an imagined journey westward with a changing musical landscape; a serene
pause that conjures communal entertainment with a quote from Tallis’ “Evening
Hymn;” a troublingly naïve and chauvinistic “Indian War Dance” that’s more of a
European danse macabre; and a festive celebration upon arrival.
As a
document of history, it is an embodiment, ripe for interrogation, of Manifest
Destiny’s sins. But as music, Bristow’s score holds its own alongside European
Romanticism while transparently aiming for a new, more distinct path. He was
hardly alone in this effort.
There
was a moment when New York’s concert halls resounded with 19th-century American
symphonies. It’s time they did again.
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