Classical Symphony plays Bernstein et al

Socrates meets William Penn

TOM PURDOM

We’ve heard plenty of good Bernstein this season, in honor of the 90th anniversary of his birth, but I think the best instrumental work anyone has programmed is the Serenade after Plato’s Symposium that the Classical Symphony played at its second outing of the season. The Serenade is completely successful, I suspect, because Bernstein wasn’t trying to be profound or religious, even though he was working with a great literary subject. Bernstein’s religious pieces, notwithstanding their merits, often sound like they’ve been written by someone who reveres pious emotions without actually sharing them.

In the Serenade, Bernstein’s announced subject is much more personal: a bunch of guys lounging around a table drinking wine and gabbing about different kinds of love— a topic that’s probably closer to Bernstein’s heart than more grandiose matters. And it passes the best test of all: Bernstein expressed his feelings by creating some very lovely music.

Hirono Oka, who doubled as concertmaster and soloist, continues to live up to the expectations created by my memories of her solo work before she joined the Philadelphia Orchestra ten years ago. She handled the whole range the solo violin part calls for, from the opening solo that sets the stage through the Bachian double stops in the third section and the showbiz jazziness of the final minutes.

Bernstein happily mixed up all his popular and classical leanings in the Serenade. When Alcibiades and his drunken buddies invade Socrates’s party, their entrance echoes the march of the teenage gangs in West Side Story.

A wife who died in childbirth

The two novelties on the program were equally successful examples of American composition. Thomas Canning’s Fantasy on a Hymn by Justin Morgan is a free development of a hymn that an 18th-Century composer wrote in memory of a wife who died in childbirth. It opens with solos for violin and cello and its first section resembles a Vaughan Williams English pastoral. It becomes more sober and intense as it continues, as befits the subject, and ultimately achieves a true majesty.

The world premiere on the program added another winner to the string of commissions Karl Middleman has presented over the last few seasons. Shakamaxon was composed by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation who normally writes music based upon the melodies of his tribe. For this commission, in response to a request by Middleman, he constructed two movements around two traditional melodies from the Lenape— the Indians who signed the famous treaty with William Penn.

A walk across a battlefield

Tate’s first movement reminded me of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices. Crumb’s symphonic tone poem evokes the feelings you might experience walking across a historical site, such as a famous battlefield. Odd instruments and interesting sound effects create sonic ghosts that run through the music as if they were passing through your mind as you looked at the sites where the infantry held its ground or the cavalry launched a critical charge.

Jerod Tate does the same thing with a string orchestra and an image of someone sitting under the tree where the treaty was signed (in the days when the tree still existed). The movement starts with a buzz from the second violins, violas and cellos. The solo violin enters playing in a very high register over the buzz. The music crescendos and recedes, more meditative voices enter, and the movement rises again to its maximum intensity. The movement is perhaps a bit long for us restless moderns but it effectively invokes the timeless lives of a people who inhabited this region for 15,000 years before the first European settlers crossed the Atlantic.

The first movement is built around a Lenape “social song.” The second employs a livelier “moccasin game” theme. The string orchestra clatters like a percussion instrument, whipped cellos create some of the sound of a Renaissance string drum, and Tate even manages to suggest the sound of bells. The volume never rises above the moderate level, but Tate still creates a driving cloud of frenzied action.

Our embattled conductor cadre

The Classical Symphony commissions will continue next season with a concerto for viola and cello written for the Curtis Institute’s new president, Roberto Diaz, and his brother Andres.

Middleman encountered trouble with funding this season and had to cancel one concert. I hope that was just a temporary glitch. Karl Middleman belongs to that small group of embattled, unpredictably idiosyncratic conductor/organizers—a cohort that includes Sean Deibler, Valentin Radu, and Franklin Zimmerman (now retired, but never forgotten)— who keep Philadelphia’s music season lively and diversified. Their successes are always memorable, and even their failures are never dull.