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Carnegie Hall, Here We Come
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Contemporary classical music has evolved into a highly contingent art. The more you’ve heard the stuff, the more attuned your ears will be to the latest offerings.
But that poses a problem for casual concertgoers, who spend their energy purchasing a ticket and expect the music to reach out to them, not the other way around. In recent decades, the wall between living composers and general-interest audiences had grown forbiddingly tall, such that even tuneful, accessible composers were said to dwell in the “new-music ghetto.”
But that barrier is starting to vanish, thanks to composers like Christopher Theofanidis, a 40-year-old Texan who teaches in Baltimore. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra commissioned Theofanidis’ “The Here and Now” and gave its premiere in 2005, then cut a Telarc recording.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, conductor Robert Spano and the ASO and Chorus revisited the oratorio, preparing it for an April 5 concert in Carnegie Hall, a high pressure gig.
The score brims with energy and imagination and communicates directly, seemingly aimed at the first-time listener — contingencies be damned. Theofanidis was inspired by 13th century Sufi poet Rumi, as popularized in the reworkings by Coleman Barks, a former University of Georgia professor.
Almost every one of its 13 short movements includes a splashy bit of scene painting. Stratospheric violin harmonics illuminate a mention of “the light of the stars.” In the most appealing section, “Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you,” the chorus voices cascade softly downward, as petals carpeting the grass under a cherry tree.
Theofanidis’ command of the orchestra and chorus is often brilliant, yet the Rumi fragments selected by the composer edge towards new-agey mysticism and its accompanying banality. Baritone Nathan Gunn, with a voice as sturdy and tightly grained as a tall old oak, sang the “narrative” interludes, bits of hackneyed folk wisdom. One movement, “The urgency of love,” is a duet for soprano and tenor with a swaying Caribbean rhythm, sung here by the vocally fetching Hila Plitmann and Richard Clement.
If the oratorio’s grandiloquence makes it feels longer than the 30 minutes that actually ticked by, it’s perhaps because everything sounded bunched up and at the surface — expertly crafted music in two (but only two) expansive dimensions.
Still, “The Here and Now” fills a valuable niche. So many modern classics are as challenging as they are rewarding, and thus they don’t help refresh the general-interest concert-hall audiences. Theofanidis’ approach, his ear-catching gestures and pale harmonies, earned a sincere standing ovation. The crowd seems poised to think, “I enjoy contemporary classical music.”
The evening’s two other works, Sibelius’ “Tapiola,” a tone poem on the forest god of Finland, and Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe,” on shepherds, shepherdesses and the age of innocence, celebrate the romantic spirit through the neo-pagan. It wasn’t lost that they are also orchestral show-pieces designed to highlight the ASO’s progress.
In the final years of Sibelius’ creative life, his music turned darkly inward, somehow conveying the cycles of life and death and thus a connection to nature primeval. In Spano’s tense reading, I got the feeling that a gardener gets from scooping out compost for a plot of vegetables, where the thick, airy, intense black soil is rich in nutrients, full of the organic decay that yields new life.
The ASO’s playing of “Daphnis” Thursday was less perfect. For Spano, it’s the sort of music where he excels: sophisticated, emotionally neutral, requiring extreme finesse and a sense of rhythm so taut it allows for supple swaying with the breeze.
The ASO Chorus, prepared by Norman Mackenzie, sang the wordless “oos” and ahs” with the force of personality and nuance fully equal to any instrumental section of the ASO. It’s here the Atlantans will likely dazzle the New Yorkers most.
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By Al
March 31, 2008 10:23 AM | Link to this
I thought your review caught the evening’s bill of fare from Maestro Spano and company that I attended on Thursday night.
Ironically I was drawn to the “Here and Now new piece” more than the depressing Sibelius — I can see why it has never been played in Atlanta — or Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe that seemed to go on terminally.
Bravo for whetting the appetite of the potential Friday and Saturday attendees.