The Philadelphia Orchestra presents Julius Eastman, John Williams, and Mendelssohn with Dalia Stasevska

Rediscovering Eastman

Eastman’s musical career began with great promise. He studied piano at Curtis with the legendary Mieczysław Horszowski, and after making composition the mainstay of his career, he joined the faculty of SUNY Buffalo in the late 1960’s, which at the time was at the epicenter of American musical modernism. His luminous and highly original music was acclaimed by his colleagues, if not achieving wider attention. But at the same time Eastman’s fragile mental state was deteriorating, worsened by drug and alcohol dependency.

He was defiantly proud of his Blackness and his gayness, but racism and homophobia hastened his emotional and corporeal demise. He died homeless and impoverished on the streets of New York City in 1990. His Symphony No. 2 was written in his last tragic years, although only a sketch of it was completed. Not surprisingly, it is a dark work, bitterly anguished but deeply expressive in the manner of a Shostakovich slow movement. It is in one movement, full of great swells of rich sound punctuated by piercing harmonies, closing with a mournful brass choir.

The trouble with the tuba

Tuba player extraordinaire Carol Jantsch debuted Wynton Marsalis’s Tuba Concerto with the Philadelphians a few years ago, a work that did little to promote the concept of the tuba as a concerto instrument. Williams’s 1985 Tuba Concerto works a little bit better in that regard, but it cannot overcome the inherent difficulty in getting this deep-voiced, softly articulated instrument to meld comfortably as a soloist with an orchestra. In the rapid passages of the outer movements, one could see Jantsch’s fingers racing across the valves, but producing blurry passages aurally.

It was only in the central Andante that she had the opportunity to make her horn sing, in music of harmonic daring that seemed a world apart from the composer’s ubiquitous and copious movie scores. But then Jansch, joined by a kit drummer and electric organist, played an encore, now at the side of the stage, that made her tuba sound noticeably more coherent. Was it the music (an arrangement of the funky song “New Beastly” by the band Vulfpeck)? The smaller ensemble? Her position on the stage? All of the above? It was certainly a brilliant display of her virtuosity, but as Woody Allen demonstrated in Take the Money and Run, when he sadly recollected playing the cello in a marching band, there are places where it simply isn’t practical for some instruments to reside. For now, that seems to be the case for a tuba as solo in a symphonic concerto.

A fresh and buoyant chestnut

The music of Eastman and Williams featured in this concert would have been new to nearly all of the audience, while Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony should have been mother’s milk to nearly everyone, making it a great way to measure the chops of a conductor relatively new to the orchestra. That Stasevska managed to make this evergreen chestnut sound fresh and buoyant was an impressive achievement. She moved the music forward with energy and consistent tension, yet never made it sound rushed. Timbral colors were layered like an artisanal tiramisu, while Stasevska still retained an effervescent sense of spontaneity, and a full-throated delight with the sumptuous score. This was truly joyous music-making. Let’s hope she will back often in the Philadelphia Orchestra seasons ahead.