Orchestra 2001 plays Crumb and Gorecki

The first Philadelphia International Festival for the Arts in 2011 showcased most of the city's music organizations, placing their offerings on a common, city-wide program and providing the smaller groups with a level of publicity they could never manage on their own.

That's not the case for the second Festival, now under way. Only two of the music organizations I normally cover are listed in the Festival's brochure. The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and the Mendelssohn Club commemorated the fall of the Berlin Wall on April 7. Orchestra 2001 squeezed into the lineup last weekend with a program featuring two 20th-Century pieces that could be linked to the Festival's "time travel" theme.

All the events on this Festival's programs must be connected to historical events. Orchestra 2001 met the demand by pairing two wildly disparate events: the first landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and Hitler's invasion of Poland, which launched World War II on September 1, 1939.

Cold War boondoggle?

The Berlin Wall program reflected a moment we could all celebrate (unless we happened to be members of the East German secret police). On the other hand, the first item on the Orchestra 2001 program— George Crumb's Night of the Four Moons— reflected the composer's "rather ambivalent" feelings about the moon landing.

I was living in West Philadelphia in 1969, surrounded by Penn professors and various liberal intellectuals. Most of my neighbors regarded Apollo 11 as a Cold War boondoggle that diverted resources from more important government programs here on Earth. Crumb's piece expresses attitudes that would have been common among his colleagues on the Penn faculty.

Night of the Four Moons sets four texts about the moon by Federico Garcia Lorca. If you didn't know anything about its origins, you could listen to it as a set of moon-drenched songs in the long tradition of works like Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. It begins with the idea that the Moon is dead but "reborn in the springtime"; it ends with the moon crossing the sky, "holding a child by the hand."

Like all of Crumb's works, Night of the Four Moons creates moods and expresses feelings by eliciting odd sounds from an odd assortment of instruments. Crumb is the only composer on the planet who can make a banjo sound haunting and mysterious.

Musical monument

Night of the Four Moons is individualistic and musically unconventional. By contrast, Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs utilizes a conventional orchestra and expresses a universal reaction to a public tragedy: the lives lost in World War II, not to mention all the other wars humankind has fought.

Gorecki's symphony is the musical equivalent of a public monument, and it fulfills the objectives of a successful monument: it memorializes the dead and expresses feelings we all share. Its major artistic weakness is its long opening crescendo, which starts in the basses and repeats a simple melody as the other sections join in.

That can be an effective device when it's used with restraint. Gorecki lets it last too long, and consequently it becomes monotonous.

Matthews cuts loose

The evening's treat was the chance to hear soprano Tamara Matthews sing the three Polish songs at the heart of the symphony.

Matthews was once a familiar figure in Philadelphia, but I've mostly heard her sing in Baroque oratorios. This was the first time I've heard her cut loose in a piece that displays the size of her voice and her ability to keep it under control even when she's singing at full power. Her clear, perfect soprano filled Holy Trinity with a precisely shaded passion that sounded like the voice of Mother Poland herself.

Orchestra 2001 made no attempt to link these two historical events, except to headline them as "two 20th-Century dates that changed history forever." For me, the most interesting thing about the juxtaposition is the dates themselves.

What if….

Suppose you had approached the leaders of the Western democracies on the day the Nazi tanks crossed the Polish border and told them the United States would place a spaceship on the Moon in just 30 years. Would any of them have believed you?

We talk about the pace of change in the modern world. Orchestra 2001's choice of dates provided a vivid reminder that we really do live in an era when the score is marked presto.♦


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