The American Way

DRUM CRASHES OPEN THE PIECE, giving way to the low brass and a rising figure then picked up by the strings. It seems to dissipate in some filigree from the winds, but almost immediately the brass is back with another portentous figure. Orchestral texture is a key to this piece, titled “1920/2019" and written by Joan Tower. She has a long history with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, which means that we know her work through this local connection and welcome each new example of what she’s writing.

The Albany Symphony has been championing music by American composers – and new music in general – for far longer than I’ve been writing about them, which itself takes us back some 40 years. May we therefore conclude that it’s not some kind of gimmick? In fact, it’s what should be the mission of every classical-music performing group. It’s easy, both as listener and performing entity, to get mired in the popular repertory, but the purpose of this kind of music has long been both to entertain and challenge the listener. And this is what the ASO accomplished nicely in the pair of concerts I attended during their annual American Music Festival.

The Albany Symphony Orchestra with
flutist Brandon Patrick George.
Photo by Gary Gold

The full orchestra performed on Saturday, June 8, offering a well-contrasted array of works in the acoustically benevolent EMPAC Concert Hall. Tower explained, in a pre-concert intro, that the title of her work salutes the year in which women got the right to vote and the year the saw the height of the #MeToo movement. “But the title really has nothing to do with the piece,” she concluded in a characteristically humorous way.

Don’t take her joke seriously. There is a vigorous sense of empowerment as the piece builds to its finish. The big moments are gloriously big, the small – as when a solo violin muses over the throb of some winds, or a clarinet is mocked by a trumpet – have a nervous intimacy. But each of these episodes flows into the next with a sense of inevitability, a sense that builds to a satisfying finish.

Michael Gilbertson’s Flute Concerto, here receiving its premiere performance, adds chorus to the three movements, first worldlessly, then in an adaptation of Kipling’s poem “If.” Written for soloist Brandon Patrick George, it takes full advantage of the flutist’s virtuosity by asking for runs and leaps in the fabric of a piece that explores beautiful partnership effects, often in percussion and strings. The poem’s text begins the third movement over shimmer of winds before the solo flute enters with its own deft commentary. And the uplifting ending of the verse is paralleled by the concerto’s fast, hopeful finish.

A different choral group assembled after intermission to sing “On the Bridge of the Eternal,” composer Christopher Theofanidis’s setting of text from St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” The Tantalus Chamber Choir is based in New Haven, where the composer is a professor at Yale. The piece opens with chorus alone presenting long beds of sound on top of which the lyrics are placed, often in a crunchy, cascading manner. Tympani announce the orchestra’s entrance, with strings picking up qualities of the choral section. Although the text is a contemplation of time and, by extension, eternity, the music often suggests the natural settings of forest and water. They complements excellently.

Cecile Assad with the ASO
Photo by Gary Gold

Water is a theme of an upcoming ASO series, and was on the mind of Clarice Assad when she wrote “Flow” for piano and orchestra, here receiving its premiere. Born in Rio de Janeiro and surrounded by a famously musical family, she’s a multi-instrumentalist and singer who has written music for a vast variety of performing groups. Assad played the solo part, which began its virtuosic journey over busy, syncopated cellos.

American music is no stranger to Brazilian rhythms, but Assad’s concerto offered a tight-enough integration to prove that there’s always room for more. The middle movement, “The Last Song,” features a sentimental, melodic exchange between soloist and orchestra, before “Rhapsodic Dance” launches us into a happy, Gershwin-esque (shades of “Second Rhapsody”!) finish.

David Alan Miller conducted the orchestra and various other forces with his usual mastery and aplomb, also leading a pre-concert discussion with the composers in a helpfully informative manner.

We saw him at the helm the evening before, when the Dogs of Desire, a chamber ensemble drawn from the ASO ranks, presented five world-premiere performances. Composers were challenged to observe the bicentenary of the Erie Canal, and Juhi Bansal explained that her piece, “Refuge,” focused on what’s now the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge in the Finger Lakes area. Her text gently but unambiguously notes the wide meaning of the word “refuge,” and her music was liquid in its motion, peppery in its use of percussion, saxophone, and viola accents. Soprano Britt Hewitt and mezzo Devony Smith sang the texts for this and subsequent works with what seemed to be nice technique, although the lyrics were often obscured. Amplification was one problem – there was far too much, especially for a hall as small as the EMPAC Theatre. Orchestration was another, as it’s important to give aural room to a singer.

The concert also featured interstitial songs by NY-based songwriters, arranged by Jack Frerer, another old friend of the ASO. The first, “Just the Two of Us,” has lyrics by Bill Withers, who sang it on Grover Washington Jr.s’ 1980 album “Winelight.” Here the lyrics were completely intelligible, and I suspect it’s because Frerer know his way around that kind of scoring.

Nicky Sohn, a student of Theofanidis, took as her text for “Crossways” a poem by her brother, Justin Son – a poem written, she explained, “in the midst of a romantic breakup.” It’s a text likening love to entities in Nature, especially a river, “because you can’t predict the path of water, like the path of human relationships.” Accents of bells and a sprightly middle section helped drive the piece, as did its rhythmic shifts from two to three and back to two.

The two singers, often singing in parallel, were still difficult to understand, and that persisted in Francisco del Pino’s “Memorial,” even with the voices alternating solo lines to start. Repeated notes on the piano and violin tremolos underscored the chant-like nature of the text, which lamented the loss of landscape items and that which we’ve destroyed or allowed to decay. Gentle, persistent, the music brought the concert’s first half to a melancholy end.

David Alan Miller conducts the
Dogs of Desire. Photo by Gary Gold

Composing a piece for avant-garde chamber ensemble is made to order for JURAKHAN, who has written for an amazing range of genres and instruments. “Underneath the Structure” combines narrative and recorded sounds with the music of the ensemble, opening with a plaint from oboe and clarinet under a crowd recording before adding flute, bassoon, and saxophones and livening the brew. “Calm down,” the text intones, with a final warning: “Don’t forget the violence here / It has stayed and remained” as the up-tempo music grows Ellington-like in its accomplished use of the instruments.

Dai Wei’s “All on a Summer’s Day” also added a recording, this one of a bright vocalise that played above a legato melody from the ensemble. Her text, a hopeful water journey cataloguing the passing sights, is a journey of healing, sung over music growing more rhythmic as if in escape from heartache, then slowing again to underscore the lines, “I will embrace every day and myself, and I will shine. I am shining.”

We heard more Jack Frerer arrangements along the way, including songs from Jean Ritchie and Lana Del Rey, but the biggest crowd-pleasers were saved for the end, I hope not in apology for the sometimes difficult music that had preceded them. Both “Minnie the Moocher” and a Dixieland-style “If I Had a Hammer” came with invitations for the audience to sing along and sing along we did.

Again, David Alan Miller was conductor and moderator, and his enthusiastic presence reminded me that he’s been championing the cause of living composers for as long as he’s led this orchestra – 32 years! This is the most important mission any orchestra can pursue, which makes these concerts all the more significant. They deserve all the celebration they can get.