Orchestra program cleverly assembled
Gianandrea Noseda virtually blushed when accused, albeit gently, of abandoning Toronto for Washington.
“No, no,” the popular Toronto Symphony Orchestra guest conductor insisted, “I love Toronto. Loie Fallis is here this weekend. I’m sure we’ll find another project.”
And sure enough, there she sat in the audience at the Kennedy Centre Concert Hall the other night, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s vice-president of artistic planning, as Noseda led the National Symphony Orchestra, his new American orchestra, in the final concert of Shift, a festival of American orchestras presented by the Kennedy Centre in association with Washington Performing Arts.
Like its festival counterparts from Fort Worth, Albany and Indianapolis, the National doesn’t belong in the top tier of American orchestras. None of them, for example, plays at the level of Toronto’s band. It is a solid, middle-level ensemble, offered a high-profile showcase in large part because of its championship of interesting programming.
Noseda’s program began with Stravinsky’s Pulcinella — not the familiar suite but an expanded version of the ballet score complete with songs-continued with Alfredo Casella’s rarely heard orchestration of Mili Balakirev’s virtuoso piano piece “Islamey,” and concluded with Respighi’s orchestration of five Rachmaninov ÉtudesTableau for piano.
As this list suggests, Noseda had assembled a thematic program cleverly linking Russian music with Italian orchestrators and an Italian conductor (himself ). It was the kind of intelligently conceived yet off-beat programming all too seldom encountered in North American concert halls. And yet, it was the least off-beat program in Shift.
For its part, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under Miguel Harth-Bedoya framed Leonard Bernstein’s seldomplayed Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) with Augustin Hadelich as violin soloist, between two relatively unknown recent scores, Anna Clyne’s Rift for orchestra, performed with dancers from Texas Ballet Theatre, and Bel Canto: A Symphonic Canvas by Jimmy Lopez.
Not to be outdone, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, under its young Polish music director Krzysztof Urbanski, paired two works from his homeland, Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto, with the dazzling Alisa Weilerstein as soloist, and Penderecki’s monumental Credo, the latter with four vocal soloists, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir and the Indianapolis Children’s Choir.
Nevertheless, in some ways the most adventurous program of all came from the Albany Symphony Orchestra, an allAmerican quartet of pieces written in a conservative style within the past few years, all thematically associated with water.
Soon-to-be 80-year-old Joan Tower introduced her twomovement piano concerto Still/Rapids with breathtaking brevity, helpfully telling her listeners “it’ll last 17 minutes.”
Michael Torke produced another descriptive piano concerto, titled Three Manhattan Bridges, also featuring the brilliant Joyce Yang as soloist.
Michael Daughtery’s Reflections on the Mississippi represented yet another concerto, only this time for tuba, of all things, with Carol Jantsch hefting the enormous solo instrument.
And to cap things off, Dorothy Chang’s The Mighty Erie Canal turned out to be a children’s operetta whose text was written in part by New York school children and performed on this occasion with an army of children from Washington-area schools.
OK, I hear a voice saying, you can get away with this kind of programming in a festival, but in a regular orchestral season? This, surely, is a question for symphony orchestras in the years ahead, as they confront the public’s changing taste and a need to broaden their audience base.
Given a choice, many orchestral players would probably be happy to re-visit Beethoven and Brahms for the forseeable future. Others recognize that an orchestra is an instrument and what it gains in versatility is likely to enhance public interest.
Aside from being the capital of New York State, Albany has few claims to our attention, but its musicians may well be showing bigger cities and more high-powered orchestras the way toward the future.
Not only does it cultivate associations with and program music by living American composers, it plays host to a cutting-edge ensemble within the larger ensemble provocatively titled Dogs of Desire.
Dogs of Desire performed a concert on its own as part of Shift in the grungy cabaret setting of a once derelict church, with Theo Bleckmann declaiming a bizarre assortment of songs ranging from Charles Ives to Kate Bush.
Frankly, I found most of it about as appetizing as castor oil without orange juice, but to watch symphonic musicians tackle this stuff with obvious commitment under the direction of their music director, David Alan Miller, was to believe orchestral reform possible.
Miller, by the way, has been music director since 1992 and has an impressive record of championing contemporary music.
Leadership in orchestral reform needs to come from the top as well as the bottom. In Albany it comes from both.