Orchestra 2001 and New Philadelphia Classical Symphony

The premieres keep coming

TOM PURDOM

Earl Kim belonged to the Ernest Hemingway school of composing. As one of his former students explained when she introduced three of his songs at the latest Orchestra 2001 concert, Kim believed that a composition shouldn’t contain one unnecessary note.

His setting of three poems by Paul Verlaine offered a good example. The poems spoke of love and yearning, and Kim gave them a crooning, very French vocal line that soprano Jodie Karin Applebaum sang over atmospheric murmurings by a string quartet. It was a simple, effective setting, with no false dramatics, that Kim varied with brief solos for all four instruments, interludes when the instruments played without the voice, and a faster, accented tempo in the third song.

The program’s main event— the moment most of us had been looking forward to— was the premiere of a new piece by Luis Prado.

Prado scored a big hit two seasons ago when the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia unveiled the concerto for the left hand alone that he wrote for Gary Graffman. Most composers nowadays play a subordinate role to performers, the true alpha gorillas of the music world. Yet when Prado joined the post-concert chat session that afternoon, the audience obviously felt he was the man of the hour, even though shared the stage with a major league pianist, Gary Graffman, and a rising young powerhouse, conductor/pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn.

Prado’s new work is a smaller piece— two poems by the contemporary poet Joan Hutton Landis, set for soprano, piano and string quartet. The trickiest part of the first song, The Rainforest, is the last line. The poem leads up to the general idea that things you love often betray you, then suddenly switches to a very personal outcry with the final words “like a husband.” Prado preceded that final phrase with a brief instrumental passage and gave the vocalist a finely calculated musical line that cracked the whip without bombast.

Sado-masochistic fantasy

The second poem, Parceque, starts with a sado-masochistic fantasy that may or not be a dream, shifts to memories of a father who abused his dog and his child, and ends with an evocation of a world “unsparing, violent, and dumb.” This is intensely dramatic material, and Prado appropriately gave it a setting that includes passages in which the soloist shifts into rhythmic semi-speech over intense whirring from the strings and a pounding drive from the piano.

Do these settings add anything to the poems? For me, that’s the major critical issue raised by a musical setting. If the music doesn’t enhance the poem in some way, why bother? In this case, the answer is a definite yes. Prado’s music has the same impact as a reading by a good actor. It intensifies the text and highlights implications a reader might have missed.

Ligeti the experimenter

The second half of the Orchestra 2001 program was devoted to a 1992 violin concerto by the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, with Jennifer Koh as the hard-working soloist. Orchestra 2001 is presenting a Ligeti piece at every concert this season. Director James Freeman planned the series as a retrospective devoted to the work of a living composer, but Ligeti died unexpectedly before the season began, and the performances have become a memorial tribute instead.

Ligeti was an experimenter who explored the possibilities of tone color and texture. His violin concerto begins with a first movement in which the violin engages in a continuous frantic churning over sound effects from the orchestra— an opening that raises the unpleasant suspicion that the concerto will be another essay of the kind academic composers used to inflict on us.

Fortunately, Ligeti had better things in mind. The second movement is dominated by a long, beautiful melody in the darker sections of the violin register, accompanied by chords played on two flutes and other pairs of instruments. The melody is temporarily interrupted by a frantic passage in which several of the musicians blow on slide whistles and ocarinas, followed by a return to the melody.

Ligeti could write violin melodies that would satisfy anyone who loves Tchaikovsky or Brahms, and he proved it again in the third movement. The concerto conforms, in fact, to the overall pattern of the traditional concerto, complete with a big finish and a cadenza— the unaccompanied section in which the soloist engages in a display of virtuosity (though Jennifer Koh had, in fact, been displaying considerable virtuosity throughout the whole exercise).

The experimental novelties are mostly housed in the orchestral accompaniment, which contained, in addition to ocarinas and whistles, an unbroken, constantly surprising parade of effects that I will make no further attempt to describe. I can assure you, however, that Ligeti’s inventions are always effective, even though it’s safe to say Tchaikovsky and Brahms would never have thought of any of them. The concerto’s five movements created an exciting, completely satisfying finish to one of Orchestra 2001’s best concerts.

A cluster of Philadelphia composers

Prado was born in Puerto Rico and now lives in Spain, but he’s a Curtis graduate and has spent half his life in Philadelphia— as he noted during his remarks at the Orchestra 2001 concert. No one has made any noises about a “Philadelphia school” as yet (and perhaps no one should), but Prado belongs to a cluster of Philadelphia composers that includes nationally renowned young stars like Jennifer Higdon, older composers like George Crumb and Phillip Maneval, and a number of other figures whose work has become a regular feature of the Philadelphia concert scene. Five days after the Orchestra 2001 concert, Karl Middleman’s New Philadelphia Classical Symphony unveiled another success, a concerto for horn and orchestra by Kile Smith, a veteran Philadelphia composer who is the Curator of the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library.

The soloist was Jennifer Montone, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s new principal horn, and Smith gave her a score worthy of her abilities. His Exultet for Horn and String Orchestra is based on a liturgical ceremony that some churches hold on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. The ceremony consists of a candle-lighting ritual outside the church, a procession into the darkened sanctuary, and a climax in which the lowest ranking cleric steps up to the pulpit and proclaims Exultet— rejoice!

The first two movements of Smith’s work evoked the subdued mood of the candle-lighting and the procession. In the finale, the horn led the orchestra in a big, swaying dance— a celebration, as Smith explained in his remarks, in which even the angels are supposed to join the ball.

Pairing composers with musicians

Smith’s concerto is the latest entry in a series of commissions that pairs Philadelphia composers with principal players from the Philadelphia Orchestra. Last season, Middleman presented a new oboe concerto by West Chester’s Chuck Holdeman that featured Richard Woodhams playing all three members of the oboe family, jauntily cycling from oboe to oboe d’amore to English horn and back to oboe. Next season, Roberto Diaz and his brother will premiere a new concerto for viola and cello by Richard Wargo.

Concertos written for specific players are a fruitful musical tradition. Mozart’s four horn concertos were written for a friend, Ignaz Leutgeb. Montone finished the evening with a 1951 concerto that British composer Gordon Jacobs dedicated to Dennis Brain, the legendary horn virtuoso whose 1953 recording of the Mozart concertos is still the standard for all recordings of those particular masterpieces and is still available on CD, even though it’s a monaural recording taped at the very beginning of the long-playing record era.

Jacobs was an imaginative, creative composer who tried to write accessible music in a period when many composers seemed to feel they should completely disregard the feelings of the musical audience. His concerto contains all the elements Mozart and his Baroque predecessors would have included— soaring arias, exuberant forward drives and impressive displays of special skills. It was played, like the Smith, by a musician who understands the essentially poetic nature of her instrument and possesses all the necessary qualities of power and control.