A REFRESHING LA JOLLA SYMPHONY & CHORUS PROGRAM FEATURING WORKS FROM TWO UNIQUE AMERICAN WOMEN
The repertory of American orchestras is largely dedicated to music by dead, White, European males. Two weeks ago, the La Jolla Symphony & Chorus happily ignored that programming demographic.
On April 23 at the Good Samaritan Episcopal Church, Sameer Patel conducted substantial works by two American women: Florence Price (dead but African American) and Jennifer Higdon (White but very much alive).
As recently as 14 years ago, Price’s music was neglected by everyone except scholars and performers specializing in African American music. The 2009 discovery of dozens of her unpublished manuscripts in a ramshackle Illinois house led to the most extraordinary revival of a composer’s music since the 1990s re-examination of Viktor Ullman, Pavel Haas or Erwin Schulhoff.
Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor was her first orchestral work. It won a composition contest, which led to a performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
Her accomplishment cannot be denied: It was the first symphony by an African American woman to be performed by a major orchestra. The pentatonic melodies and syncopated rhythms found within are some of the African influences that made the symphony a novel hybrid for its time.
However, her third and fourth symphonies and her concertos are more tightly composed. Symphony No. 1 has a lopsided form with the unduly long first two movements, and the short third and fourth movements.
Patel and the orchestra gave it their best effort, but this symphony needs an interpretive finesse beyond the reach of these valiant musicians. Nevertheless, I was grateful to hear a live performance.
Few living American composers are programmed as frequently by symphony orchestras than Jennifer Higdon. Her Viola Concerto provides plenty of evidence why this is so.
It is written in an accessible, tonal style that engages listeners without insulting their intelligence. Higdon looked at other viola concertos and realized they were dark in tone, inspiring her to write an upbeat work instead. The scoring is clear, always keeping the constantly playing soloist in front. The rhythms are bouncy with unpredictable groupings. I detect the inf luence of Samuel Barber, but the continuously developing viola line owes more to John Adams or Roy Harris.
The violist was Pearl de la Motte, the winner of the La Jolla Symphony’s 2019 Young Artist Competition. She produced a lovely tone that was always on pitch, all the more astounding given that she is still in her teens. She played the entire work from memory, and most importantly, she has a firm grasp of Higdon’s rhetoric and conveyed that with an authority of someone twice her age. She possesses exceptional talent, and I suspect we will hear more from her.
Patel and the orchestra were supportive of de la Motte and boisterous when her silence permitted more noisy animation.
There was one dead, White male on the program, but Charles Ives was decidedly not European. The experimentalism of “The Unanswered Question” — music simultaneously played in unrelated keys and tempos — was unmatched by anything composers like Bartók or Schoenberg did in 1908.
Here the orchestral playing was at its finest, the strings glacially serene and the wind quartet (representing the “answer” to the trumpet’s “question”) cooed and bristled. Off in the left rear corner of the church, f lutists Joey Payton and Erica Gamble, oboist Carol Rothrock, and clarinetist Paul Miller had more presence than when heard in the usual orchestral hall, a welcome concert experience.