American music
The Milwaukee Symphony’s new season celebrates Bernstein, Gershwin and homegrown composers.
This season, the Milwaukee Symphony will have a strong American accent. ♦ A celebration of Leonard Bernstein’s centennial year, combined with symphony leadership’s desire to celebrate American repertoire, has led to a season with 17 different classical programs featuring at least one American composition. Those programs include revered works by Bernstein, Aaron Copland and George Gershwin as well as music by living composers. ♦ “It is somewhat extraordinary,” said composer Patrick Castillo, the creative consultant who helped Milwaukee assemble this season. ♦ “Whatever you can say distinguishes American culture finds its way into our orchestral repertoire,” Castillo said, citing jazz and immigrant communities as two examples. ♦ “It’s the variety, it’s the dynamism, it’s the experimentation, all those things that we consider quintessentially American make our music quintessentially American, too.”
Please don’t misunderstand: This season the Milwaukee Symphony also will play many great European works that constitute the backbone of the orchestral tradition, including Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth” and Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony. For complete information on the symphony’s scheduled concerts, visit mso.org.
Here is a scouting report on the music by American composers the Milwaukee Symphony will play during this season’s classical concerts. Unless noted, all concerts will take place in the Marcus Center’s Uihlein Hall.
Sept. 15-17: Along with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, the orchestra performs Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture, the curtain-raiser to his popular comic operetta; and contemporary composer Jake Heggie’s “Moby-Dick” Suite, drawn from his opera. Guest conductor Cristian Macelaru, who was assistant conductor for the world premiere of “Moby-Dick,” was instrumental in making the suite happen, Castillo said. “I think our audiences will grasp that dramatic sense and theatricality of the opera” in the suite, he said.
Sept. 22-23: Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F (1925) features guest conductor Jeffrey Kahane at the keyboard. The fast-paced final movement of Gershwin’s concerto is the subject of Oscar Levant’s memorable daydream in the movie “An American in Paris” (1951), in which Levant’s character imagines himself playing all the the parts, including conductor.
Sept. 29-30: When this season was announced in February, principal flutist Sonora Slocum told Elaine Schmidt that Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question” (first performed in 1946) was high on her list of anticipated music. “The solo trumpet asks the unanswered question, about the meaning of life and existence. … It’s a great depiction of life — we’re always looking for answers.”
Nov. 10-12: Composer Nico Muhly (born 1981) moves fluidly between the classical and pop/rock realms; Milwaukee will perform his “Mixed Messages,” a single-movement piece that the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered in 2015. “The urgency of the piece carries you along, even when unexpected things happen,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in his New York Times review.
Nov. 17-18: Pianist Joyce Yang, a frequent Milwaukee Symphony guest soloist, plays Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (”The Age of Anxiety”). In spite of its formal name, it’s “basically a piano concerto,” Castillo said. “He calls this work “quintessentially Bernstein,” because it reflects the composer’s “completist impulse” to put everything in a piece of music. Inspired by W.H. Auden’s long poem of the same name, “The Age of Anxiety” was premiered in 1949 with Bernstein playing the piano. But it was first recorded in 1950 with Bernstein conducting and his friend (and future Milwaukee Symphony music director) Lukas Foss at the keyboard.
Jan. 12-13: Music director emeritus Edo de Waart conducts this all-American program, anchored by John Adams’ “Harmonielehre”; de Waart conducted the world premiere of this three-movement work in 1985, which Adams was a little-known composer. “Edo had a big hand in launching John’s career,” Castillo said. The composer has written fondly about their collaboration. Citing the recording de Waart made of “Harmonielehre” three days after that premiere, Adams wrote “the recording can testify to the rare instances when a composer, a conductor, and an orchestra create an inexplicable bond among each other.” This program also offers Bernstein’s Serenade (after Plato’s “Symposium”) (1954), which will showcase violin soloist Philippe Quint; and Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City” (1941), adapted from the music he wrote for an Irwin Shaw play about a man who hides his true self, but is haunted by the sound of his brother’s trumpet playing.
Jan. 20-21: This all-American bill will include some of the most recognizable notes in American classical music, because Copland’s Symphony No. 3 (1946) draws on his unforgettable “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Trying to explain why we say that Copland’s music sounds American, Castillo pointed out that the composer “voices chords more spaciously than what we’re accustomed to in the classical repertoire. To hear that spaciousness, to me that’s the Americanness of Copland’s music.” This program also features “Study for Orchestra” (1965) by Julia Perry, an African-American composer, which Castillo calls an uncompromisingly Modernist composition; Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (1947), sung by soprano Susanna Phillips, a work Castillo praised for the lyrical beauty of Barber’s music; and Bernstein’s “Divertimento” (1980), which he composed for the Boston Symphony’s centenary and in which he incorporated musical shout-outs and inside jokes for the Boston Pops crew.
Jan. 26-27: The Milwaukee Symphony performs “Fancy Free” (1944), Bernstein’s lively score to a Jerome Robbins ballet (which would later be adapted into the musical “On the Town”).
Feb. 16-17: Milwaukee was one of several orchestras involved in commissioning a new Violin Concerto from composer Pierre Jalbert, which the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra premiered in June. “By turns haunting and menacing in the early going, the two-movement concerto became an absorbing meditation,” wrote Rob Hubbard in his Pioneer Press review. (Watch a video of the SPCO performance at thespco.org.)
March 2-4: “My original concept of ‘Bump’ was akin to ‘La Valse’ meets Studio 54, but as it was ultimately to possess neither waltz nor disco elements, I chose to fashion it as a ‘nightmare konga,’ wrote composer Christopher Rouse of “Bump,” the short piece he completed in 1985. Yes, fellow children of the disco era, the title refers to the dance.
March 9-10: Mequon native Emily Cooley made a striking impression in 2014 with “Green Go to Me,” which the Milwaukee Symphony performed during its Young Composers Institute in 2014. “It seemed like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus,” Castillo said, summing up the glowing institutional reaction. Now the orchestra will perform Cooley’s composition on a subscription classical program. For dessert: Gershwin’s stirring Rhapsody in Blue (1924), a jazzy concerto for pianist and orchestra. “That’s the piece that gave American music entrée into the orchestral world,” Castillo said. “It’s a strongly conceived score, it’s not derivative of European music at all, it sounds unmistakably like the composer who wrote it.”
April 7-8: John Luther Adams won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for “Become Ocean,” a 42-minute composition that, New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote, “may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history.” Describing the music, Castillo said “you hear in a very evocative way the … rolling of waves, one over the other.” The symphony will perform this work at the Basilica of St. Josaphat, 2333 S. 6th St.
April 21-22: A Bernstein centennial season wouldn’t be complete without evoking Lukas Foss, his friend and frequent collaborator — especially here, because Foss was music director of the Milwaukee Symphony from 1981-’86. Born in Berlin, Foss escaped the Nazis as a boy and became an American citizen in 1942. Some of his compositions can be challenging, even forbidding. But “Three American Pieces,” which will feature violinist Bella Hristova, is from Foss’ lyrical side. Foss wrote that he composed them “at a time when I was in love with my newly adopted country.”
April 27-28: Samuel Barber’s “Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance” (1956) is adapted from music he wrote for a Martha Graham ballet. This program also includes a great Americaninspired work by a European composer, Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony. In an article for The Guardian that quotes Dvorák’s letters, Tom Service analyzes how “American” the symphony actually is, finding a connection “between the tunes of the piece and a broader community of folk melodies, tunes that come from Celtic, European, as well as indigenous American forms.”
May 19-20: Todd Levy will play Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, which jazz giant Benny Goodman commissioned and first performed in 1950. Its two movements are bridged by a challenging cadenza; it concludes with a virtuosic glissando. “It remains one of the most expressive and popular 20th-century works,” writes Albert R. Rice in “Notes for Clarinetists: A Guide to the Repertoire.” The symphony also will perform contemporary Chicago composer Augusta Read Thomas’ tone poem “Radiant Circles.” “She is specifically notable for her ear for orchestral color,” Castillo said.
June 9-10: The symphony will perform Bernstein’s score to a screening of “West Side Story” (1961), keeping the film’s original singing voices intact.
June 15-17: Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” (1986) responds to Copland’s famous work, using the same instrumentation he did. The symphony concludes its season of celebrating Bernstein with his Chichester Psalms (1965), named for the English cathedral that commissioned it. Sung in Hebrew, this choral work in three movements is often performed with a boy treble singing Psalm 23, as though he were the young David. These Psalms draw not only on Jewish liturgical music, but also on jazz and Bernstein’s Broadway music, Castillo pointed out. Like the masterpiece that ends this program, Beethoven’s 9th, Chichester Psalms has “a message of hope and optimism,” he said.