New Year traditions: Orchestra v. Mummers

For the Thomas Eakins crowd, it’s the Philadelphia Orchestra’s New Year’s Eve concert, a dressy feel-good evening in which some of the world’s best professional musicians let their hair down long enough to perform schmaltzy Viennese waltzes and other flights of musical fancy, followed by the singing of “Auld Lang Syne.”

For the Rocky crowd, it’s the Mummers Parade, an unintentionally profound testament to the futility of human ambition in which hundreds of amateur musicians who earn their daily bread as contractors, plumbers, and roofers spend 12 months sewing elaborate costumes and rehearsing intricate musical ensembles and dance routines, only to awaken on New Year’s Day to ingest huge quantities of booze to fortify themselves for the eight freezing hours they will spend staggering up (or, this year, down) Broad Street, an endurance feat that dedicated Mummers interrupt only every hour or so to answer nature’s call in the city’s countless quaint adjacent alleys.

I speak as one Philadelphian who adores both traditions and rarely misses either. The common links between these two events are music (still going strong) and a past history of social exclusivity (now happily vanishing). This year’s Mummers Parade welcomed the first black and Hispanic bands — although, covered as they were from head to toe by those gaudy costumes, who could tell? For that matter, who on the sidelines could tell the Quaker City String Band from Hegeman or Pennsport, given the bands’ disregard for their own self-promotion?

Travolta’s people

This egalitarian spirit broke down at the Sansom Street performance area, where the reviewing stand was restricted to members of the Union League, creating a crush of humanity outside the stand area while many seats in the stand itself went empty.

So, yes, after 115 years the Mummers Parade, like everything else in the world, remains a work in progress. But for me, the bottom line about the Mummers is this: In most blue-collar communities, status is measured by who can best hold his (or her) liquor or who can best hold his (or her) place in a bowling alley or on a dance floor (think John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever). In South Philadelphia, uniquely, status is accorded to those working men (and, yes, now women) who’ve mastered the banjo or the saxophone sufficiently to march on New Year’s Day. Nowhere else in America is music held in such high regard by the supposed lower classes.

Surprise choice

The previous night, in the loftier recesses of Verizon Hall, Yannick Nézet-Séguin demonstrated yet again that he is surely the most joyful music director in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s history, and consequently the ideal conductor not only for New Year’s Eve but also for an age in which symphony orchestras are threatened with extinction. (Stokowski, Ormandy, Muti, Sawallisch, and Eschenbach were formidable leaders, but “joyous” isn’t the first word you’d associate with any of them.) For Thursday’s concert Yannick appeared before an uncharacteristically full house in a maroon velvet jacket and bantered with the audience about his sartorial tastes as well as a phone call he had with God about the evening’s program (an “Italian winter,” featuring works by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, et al).

The choice of the evening’s soloist — the astonishing soprano Angela Meade — was more surprising. Meade may indeed possess, as Yannick put it, “one of the gorgeous voices of the universe.” But New Year’s Eve would seem to call for a singer capable of connecting with an audience on more than a vocal level — someone like, say, the playful veteran mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who appeared with the Orchestra last New Year’s Eve, or the Broadway musical star Kristin Chenoweth, who, programmed against type, appeared with the Orchestra in a serious concert Saturday night. Angela Meade, by contrast, is a performer whose appeal is tied up entirely in her magnificent voice — or so I thought until Thursday, when Meade revealed a more playful side.

Bogus opera

The first hint occurred when she sang “Sempre libera,” which closes the first act of Verdi’s La Traviata. In the opera, Violetta’s aria is answered at its close by the offstage voice of her tenor lover, Alfredo. In concert performances, that voice is usually played by one of the horns. But Thursday night a tenor in the audience stood up from his seat to sing the four necessary lines, to the delight of everyone seated around him. The tenor, Meade later explained, was her real-life husband of seven months, John Myers.

Meade’s second gag was more elaborate — so elaborate, I fear, that it passed over the heads of just about everyone in the hall. Her final aria was not listed on the program, but as soon as the musicians struck up the first chords I (apparently alone among the audience, to judge from my random post-concert survey) recognized it. The aria, “Ah, Cruelle," comes not from a real opera, but from Salammbô, the bogus opera that Bernard Herrmann composed for Citizen Kane in 1941. That film, you surely recall, concerns (among other things) a powerful newspaper publisher’s quest to remake his sweet-voiced soubrette wife into an operatic diva. Salammbô is itself a brief but hilarious parody of the pretensions of grand opera — pyramids, palm trees, choristers in grass skirts, the whole schmear — but as Meade sang it, even I was taken in: I found myself wondering, “Was Salammbô a real opera?”

It turns out I was right the first time. Salammbô was indeed a joke, but that hasn’t prevented some of the world’s great divas, like Kiri Te Kanawa and Eileen Farrell, from performing “Ah, Cruelle.” (Farrell is said to have included it as an encore to her recitals, no doubt enjoying the audience’s confusion at hearing a bravura performance of a piece that none of the cognoscenti recognized.)

In Citizen Kane, the unfortunate Susan Alexander Kane’s reedy voice (memorably mis-sung by Dorothy Comingore) is drowned out by the orchestra at the climax. No such thing occurred, of course, when Meade tackled “Ah, Cruelle.”

At the tender (by operatic standards) age of 38, Meade can now claim her first appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra as well as mastery of an opera that was deliberately written not to be mastered. How better to usher in a new year?