MSO’s new hall
Musicians get the spotlight in symphony’s first performance.
The season the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra planned to show off its new concert hall could turn out to be one that celebrates its musicians.
In a typical orchestral arrangement, brass players are behind the strings and winds. But during the MSO’s opening concert in the new AllenBradley Hall in the Bradley Symphony Center, trumpeter Matthew Ernst, trombonist Megumi Kanda and horn player Matthew Annin stood alone in the center of the gleaming stage, playing Poulenc’s sprightly Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has been a burden on all performing artists, it has been uniquely discombobulating for the Milwaukee Symphony, which in a less bizarre world would have been enjoying a massive public celebration of its new digs by now.
The MSO has spent $90 million to transform a 1930s movie house on West Wisconsin Avenue into its new concert home, retaining as much of its Art Deco splendor as possible while outfitting it with 21st-century amenities to ensure future revenue streams. But during the past 10 months of preparing the concert hall for its debut, the musicians have been unable to play in public for subscribers.
“It’s been almost like a death … the unknowing, the uncertainty, the unpredictability of all of this … it’s led to a lot of anxiety for musicians,” principal oboist Katherine Young Steele said in a recent interview.
Musicians in the limelight
The pandemic and city health regulations have not made it possible for the MSO to open the building with 1,650 subscribers in their seats. So music director Ken-David Masur and artistic vice president Bret Dorhout have crafted a season of 12 classical and four Pops programs featuring small groups of musicians that subscribers can watch online.
If it comes off as planned, it will grow from a single musician onstage — oboist Steele playing a solo Telemann fantasia — to a full ensemble playing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 on June 19. That gradual buildup will give many less-heralded orchestra members a day in the limelight.
Saturday’s concert was prerecorded to minimize possible opening-night snafus. But the MSO eventually hopes to live-stream these programs on Saturday evenings. Once they’ve debuted, all 16 programs will be available on demand to subscribers through June. A virtual subscription costs slightly less than $210, or about $13 a concert, which is not too shabby. At this time, only subscribers can watch these concerts.
What subscribers saw and heard Saturday was chamber music played by a total of 18 MSO musicians, with no more than six musicians on stage at a time, in socially distanced arrays with string players wearing masks.
Rather than dominate the stage visually as conductor, music director Masur served as genial TV host, providing background on the works and sometimes explaining why he chose them. The five works performed Saturday all had something of a fantasia about them, Masur said, explaining they tended to sound like they were being created in the moment.
This made-for-TV approach centered the performances of the musicians.
Instead of hearing 21 orchestral violinists en masse, the audience saw two string quartets, with violinists Ilana Setapen and Jennifer Startt, violist Robert Levine and cellist Susan Babini playing Danish composer Niels Gade’s gentle, Romantic String Quartet in F Major (“Willkommen und Abschied,” inspired by a Goethe poem); and violinists Jeanyi Kim and Michael Giacobassi, violist Erin Pipal and cellist Madeleine Kabat performing contemporary composer Jessie Montgomery’s “Source Code.”
Black composers in focus
Montgomery’s piece is the first of many the MSO will play this season by Black composers past and present. She has described it as drawing its genetic material from Black spirituals. A few of the fiery phrases played by Kim and Kabat made me think of Gershwin, a reminder that white composers also used spirituals as source code.
The bill also included German composer Carl Reinecke’s Wind Sextet in B-f!at major, performed by flutist Heather Zinninger Yarmel, oboist Kevin Pearl, clarinetist Todd Levy, bassoonist Rudi Heinrich and horn players Dietrich Hemann and Darcy Hamlin. Reinecke spent much of his life in Leipzig, Masur’s hometown. As the son of famous conductor Kurt Masur and as someone who grew up in the heart of the classical music world, Ken-David Masur can find a personal connection to nearly every piece of music. So when he talks about them with enthusiasm, he can sound like he’s talking about friends and ancestors rather than ink marks on scored paper.
Jeremy Tusz, the MSO’s in-house director, included many shots of the theater itself, including its high balcony and its elaborate interior décor, which retired architect David Uihlein has described as a “crazy mix of Beaux Arts, Rococo, Baroque.” While conducting a video phone interview with composer Montgomery, Masur walked her and the home audience from the adjacent new glass-enclosed pavilion through a “secret” door into the concert hall as though he were walking through a time portal.
While the musicians were identified at the end of the program, I hope that on future broadcasts the MSO will provide text IDs as they begin to play.
We won’t know the full impact of the Allen-Bradley Hall until audiences can hear musicians playing in it in person. Even then, it may take some time to learn the nuances, just as the Milwaukee Brewers had to play some games in their new ballpark to figure out the angles. But today we can feel grateful that neither the hell of a pandemic nor the high water of a basement flood could stop the music.