Rhiannon Giddens combines history, music in fine style

A founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an Americana string band, Giddens was guest artist on the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra’s season-opening pops concert Saturday. The award-winning singer went back in time to feature three songs by early 20th-century composer Will Marion Cook. An African-American and musical-theater pioneer of the 1920s, Cook found it easier to make music on Broadway than in the more segregated classical realm.

Giddens brought vocal exuberance to Cook’s “Swing Along!,” in which the lyrics touch on the era’s race relations. “Lift your heads and heels mighty high,” exhorted Giddens with a twinkle in her eye, but the song also notes, “White folks watchin’ what you do.”

Cook’s fast-paced “Rain Song” showed off Giddens’ formidable vocal acrobatics and winking humor, although the combination of speed and high soprano left some words in an aural netherworld.

Giddens’ unique voice – operatically trained but rooted in a traditional Southern sound – lends itself to a wide variety of styles. She galloped though a Scottish boot-stomper; hit the heights on Gershwin’s “Summertime,” and delivered the spiritual “Round the Mountain” with the passion of a true believer.

Giddens picked up the banjo for “Spanish Mary,” with lyrics by Bob Dylan. That song provided the best example of how the orchestra can enhance traditional songs, with the strings hitting jagged accents over the banjo strumming.

The deepest emotion flowed from the darkest songs. “At the Purchaser’s Option” was inspired by the sale of a young slave woman, her baby an “option” on the deal. Under Giddens’ impassioned voice, the orchestra added drama with uneasy chords and Cindy Qin’s poignant harp.

On Joan Baez’s “Birmingham Sunday,” an elegy for the young victims of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, her voice was heavy with emotion while the orchestra added a ritual-like formality.

If that number evoked somber memories, the orchestra brought 1930s Paris to life in jolly style with a sparkling rendition of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.”

The hustle and bustle of Paris was ably reflected, but so too was the City of Light’s romantic side, with a tenderness in the strings, a smoothness in principal trumpet Colin Seig’s melodies and even a lovely lightness in the baritone phrases of Robert Carpenter’s tuba.

The concert closed with a tribute to Leonard Bernstein, born 100 years ago. His “West Side Story” music, presented as “symphonic dances” was full of delightful rhythmic surprises, deftly kept under control by conductor Eric Jacobsen. Mambo!