Weekend symphony concertwas a celebration of female composers.
Here is an astonishing, and chilling, fact: to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the Houston Symphony — founded seven years before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote — had never before presented a program of all-female composers until this past weekend.
Classical music, like most of the arts, is in the embryonic stages of a reckoning over inclusivity that is decades overdue. It’s true, female composers are not totally alien throughout history: The works of Fanny Mendelssohn and Nadia Boulanger, among others, have long been appreciated by connoisseurs but are at best outliers within the standard repertory. Traditions can be hard to buck unless something like, say, a global pandemic comes along.
But the orchestra, which last season programmed just one piece written by a woman, deserves credit for seizing the opportunity to plug in more diversity when much of this season’s repertoire was scratched by social-distancing requirements. Given everything going on in today’s headlines, the timing couldn’t have been much better.
The first piece on the weekend’s so-called GreatWomen Composers program dates from 2014 and was written by the Seattle Symphony’s Indian American composer-in-residence Reena Esmail. Her “Tuttarana” — a bright, busy piece for brass quintet lasting not even three minutes — fuses elements of Western classical music (and, really, jazz) with Hindustani music. It went down like a shot of Patrón — a bracing palate cleanser before a substantial meal.
At the outset, all five horns stuttered out a fluctuating rhythm, somewhat like Morse code, until a saucy theme arose out of trumpeters Mark Hughes and Richard Harris. Eventually, trombonist Allen Barnhill and
tubist David Kirk wrested away the melody for maybe a minute, with William VerMeulen’s French horn lending structural support. Three emphatic unison blasts ended the piece.
The symphony has already done one Florence Price work during its “Live From Jones Hall” livestream series, performing a movement from the Little Rock, Ark.-born African American composer’s String Quartet in G Major back in July. This weekend, it was her entire String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, from1935, with violinists Amy Semes and Sergei Galperin, violist Wei Jiang and
cellist Louis-Marie Fardet onstage.
The lengthy movement opened in a downcast but also dreamlike mood, projecting feelings of wandering or homesickness. Jiang and Fardet’s warm tonality helped dispel some of the violins’ restlessness as the piece developed, until a late flurry of violin/cello outbursts created a frenetic ending, somewhat like a movie chase scene. The second movement was calmer and richly textured, with Semas’ wistful, yearning melody cushioned and then echoed by Fardet and Jiang.
The third movement was a juba, a spirited dance developed by slaves and later injected into rock and roll by bluesman Bo Diddley. (Others might know it as a “hambone.”) Its palpably bluesy harmonies set off a succession of rapid-fire licks across all four players as the slippery melody ebbed into something more chilled out by the end. The stormy opening of the finale gave way to a bustling series of exchanges, putting the quartet through a workout, even as a true melody remained elusive.
The final piece was by Dame Ethel Smyth, the UK composer
whose “March of the Women” became an anthem among British suffragists. For Smyth’s Songs for Mezzo-Soprano with Instrumental Accompaniment, dating to 1908, Grammy-winning soloist Kelley O’Connor and conductor Yue Bao led an intriguing ensemble made up of flute, violin, viola, cello, harp and two percussionists.
Set to texts by the French poets Henri de Regnier and Leconte de Lisle, the four pieces — which commune with nature rather vividly, particularly the ode to wine — were well-suited for O’Connor’s earthy but sly vocals. The musicians, especially harpist Megan Conley, flutist Judy Dimes and concertmaster Yoonshin Song, conjured an appealing palate of fall-like orchestral colors: reds, browns, ambers.
Ultimately, the concert turned out to be as memorable for its aesthetic variety and inspired performances as the fact that all three pieces were written by women. Regardless of how they’ve come about, if the audience embraces these programming changes, no doubt, there will be more.