Over the past nine years, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s annual concert at Ebenezer Baptist Church’s Horizon Sanctuary — part of the National Black Arts Festival — has become a musical highlight of the summer.
These free shows are typically short in duration yet feel concentrated: They are packed with youth, diversity, intriguing repertoire and at least one crowd-pleasing masterpiece. What’s more, the sanctuary’s acoustics are lively and true.
Sunday evening’s performance opened with something of a rarity: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A minor, a youthful, expertly crafted work from 1898. An English composer whose father was a doctor from Sierra Leone, he was hyped as “the black Mahler” when he came to the United States as a guest conductor.
On those orchestral tours, he discovered African-American spirituals and Native American epics, met with civil rights activists and championed black freedom.
His ballade is a lovely little thing, of quick-silver passages and hearty, long-limbed melodies. The ASO, under Mei-Ann Chen, sounded under-rehearsed yet brought the music to full flower.
Next came two soloists at the start of their careers. Bryant Wright had been co-principal violist in the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra and studied in the ASO’s Talent Development Program, aimed at promising African-American and Latino students. He’s now enrolled at Harvard and Boston’s New England Conservatory.
With the ASO, he played a movement from Gyula Dávid’s Viola Concerto, another rarity that came off as a charming piece of retro, composed in 1950 but harking back to the 19th century. I liked Wright’s tone — at once warm, raspy and sweet — and found his interpretation heroic and lyrical.
Then came Tony Rymer, soloist in Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor. Another New England Conservatory student, Rymer won last year’s Sphinx Competition, a Detroit-based program for minority string players.
He’s already a seasoned pro, mature and polished. His account of the concerto held everything: At times it was sensuous and personal; elsewhere, blazing with technical razzle-dazzle and exuberance.
Beethoven’s invincible Fifth Symphony closed the program. Chen is ending her two-year term as a conducting fellow with the ASO; next month she takes a similar position with the Baltimore Symphony. In her various ASO concerts, Chen has proved herself a rock-solid musician with a touch of the theatrical.
So the surprise of how she approached Beethoven should have come as no surprise. From those famous opening four notes, she took the orchestra on a wild ride at full gallop. At breathless high speed there was at first a loss of clarity and balance, but it came with a payoff for the listener in visceral exhilaration.
Soon enough, the ASO musicians picked up Chen’s vibe and ran with it themselves. Together they shaped the second movement, andante con moto, into a remarkable statement: quick of pulse, serene in spirit.
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