Dramatic new programming for Philly Orchestra
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s SPAC season lasts only four nights this summer (Wednesday through Saturday, Aug. 11-14), but that’s enough time to see a dramatic new programming direction for the ensemble. To honor tradition and hopefully sell oodles of tickets, there are still symphonies and concertos by Bach, Mozart and Brahms plus the final night features the Beethoven Violin Concerto with superstar soloist Joshua Bell performing his own original cadenza. Music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin will be at the podium for the duration.
What’s new and fascinating is that of the eight composers whose works are to be performed, four of them are women representing three different centuries. Three out of four of those women can be described as BIPOC (black, indigenous or people of color).
At this point, I hasten to acknowledge that tallying up statistics and checking boxes for diversity aren’t the only ways to examine a musical program. The number one priority is the quality of the music and the level of performances that it inspires. While I’ll be rendering my own judgement night by night, at a base level I trust the Philadelphia Orchestra to deliver the goods. Taking a look at their truncated post-shutdown season in Philadelphia and also what will be happening there during the fall, it’s obvious that the orchestra has a strong commitment to these composers.
In store for Wednesday’s opening night is Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 with NezetSeguin conducting from the keyboard, followed by Florence Price’s First Symphony. Price was an African American composer, relatively unknown during her own time, who died in Chicago in 1953 at age 66. The orchestra, which will also perform her short work “Adoration” on the closing night, is taking a lead in the Price revival that’s already been underway for a few years now. Currently in the works is a recording of her symphonies for Deutsche Gramophone. She wrote four numbered symphonies in all, but the second has been lost.
Thursday night at SPAC opens with Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” a piece that couldn’t be more timely. Before turning to full-time composing, Coleman was a longtime member of the quintet Imani Winds. She’d already had a commission and premiere with the orchestra when the maestro asked for something new to meet the moment. “Shout,” despite the exclamatory title, is lyrical and full of Americana all to pay tribute to front-line health care workers. The piece debuted at an online gala and has become the orchestra’s anthem for the COVID era.
If there had been a SPAC
season in 2020, I’d have written a similar column to this, unpacking and probably extolling a project called Beethoven Now. Nezet-Seguin was to have performed the complete symphonies over four nights, with each program including a new work written as a response to Beethoven. For obvious reasons, the project didn’t happen at the Kimmel Center where it would originate, nor in Saratoga, but a spokesperson for the orchestra said the whole thing is going to be rescheduled for an upcoming season.
The driving force behind the Beethoven commissions and much of the Philly’s emphasis on new and neglected voices is Gabriela Lena Frank, who has been the composer in residence since 2017. The Friday night program at SPAC will include selections from her “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout,” one of the many works that reflect her Latin American heritage.
Frank was born in Berkeley and currently lives in Mendocino
County, California. Considering that her parents met as Peace Corps volunteers during the ’60s, activism is in her blood. Her father is of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent. By exploring her cultural roots, Frank also found her voice as a composer.
Prior to taking the post with the Philly, Frank served as composer in residence with the Houston and Detroit symphonies. Using the term “cultural witness,” she says that there’s much more to the job than delivering a good piece or two: “It’s not just showing my chops in writing fugues. In order to say something of value, I have to listen and have dialogue with the orchestra and the larger community.”
Frank has a broad and encompassing view of a musician’s role in society and she’s sharing that model with younger generations. In 2017, she founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, in which young musicians of all persuasions (not just classical) come together on her rural property for informal concerts, master classes and the like, as well as experiences in “arts citizenship” by working with low-income community organizations.
The attendees also get extensive instruction in fire safety protocols, since Frank’s 20 acres are in the endangered redwoods. “We’ve been living with the effects of fires since 2017. One neighbor died. It is a constant threat,” she says.
Through Frank’s efforts, the Philadelphia Orchestra has provided opportunities to participants of her Creative Academy. For the Beethoven Now project, maestro Nezet-Seguin selected three composers from a shortlist provided by Frank of alums of the Academy. The fourth work, a response to the “Ode to Joy,” is by Frank, who usually turns to images and stories as inspiration for her pieces. In this case, it’s an imagined story that reveals one of her most important concerns, climate change.
“My work for choir and orchestra is a response to climate crisis,” says Frank. “It’s a fantasy — what if Beethoven was brought to Peru during his lifetime and could experience the first evidence of climate decay brought on by the industrial revolution?”
The expansion of the repertoire that’s happening at the Philadelphia Orchestra is indicative of a new direction for the industry. Symphony orchestras are large and complex organizations that are normally incapable of making change quickly. But the pandemic shutdown provided an unusual opportunity to rethink priorities. The rise of Black Lives Matter, as well as the Me Too movement, pointed to a new direction.
“There’s been much change after George Floyd. It’s too bad it had to be such a violent reset,” says Frank. Asked if things in the classical music field were getting better for women and people of color, she takes a waitand-see attitude, saying “I’m going to wait about 5 years before making an assessment.”
The Philadelphia Orchestra with music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin performs at 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, Aug. 11-14, at SPAC. Ticket are $30-$105. Call (518) 584-9330 or visit spac.org.
Joseph Dalton is a freelance writer based in Troy.
“
My work for choir and orchestra is a response to climate crisis. It’s a fantasy — what if Beethoven was brought to Peru during his lifetime and could experience the first evidence of climate decay brought on by the industrial revolution?”
— Gabriela Lena Frank