Category Archives: Concert

With a Riddling Program, Sphinx Virtuosi Youthfully Inspire Symphony’s Gala

Review: Sphinx Virtuosi @ Charlotte Symphony’s Annual Gala

By Perry Tannenbaum

October 9, 2024, Charlotte, NC – It’s always encouraging when an annual gala at least partially sheds its patrician aura of black ties, ball gowns, and champagne toasts. So I heartily applauded Charlotte Symphony’s musical director emeritus Christopher Warren-Green when, instead of mentioning crass sums of moneys raised or needed, he notified us that a part of tonight’s proceeds would be sent to those in dire straits in Western North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene. In an even more unexpected gesture, the evening’s guests, Sphinx Virtuosi, announced that they would linger in Charlotte to play an additional concert on Friday at Charlotte Preparatory School – free if you bring a Hurricane Helene contribution.

They all worked well, together and apart, in gifting the gala audience at Belk Theater with a fine show, though not exactly what was initially planned. Or even what was listed in the printed program. Instead, a series of changes to the program were announced by email before and after the program went to press. Even then, a couple of new wrinkles emerged after the lineup seemed to be settled in the last inbox update on September 19. Maybe the plutocrats who dined and toasted earlier at the pre-concert cocktail and dinner sessions got a heads-up.

As a result of the first alteration, changing the title of LA-based composer Levi Taylor’s from American Forms to Daydreaming (A Fantasy on Scott Joplin), the opening segment of the concert became an explicitly extended tribute to Joplin. Actually, the Overture from Joplin’s only surviving opera, Treemonisha (1911), was nearly as new as Taylor’s offering and similar in length. The orchestration chosen by Warren-Green, arranged by Jannina Norpoth with Jessie Montgomery (a Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner in 2020), was premiered last year in Toronto as part of a “reimagining” of Joplin’s opera, so it didn’t quite sound like any of the handful of versions that Spotify can offer. Principal clarinetist Taylor Marino was brilliant playing the catchy recurring theme, an instrumental assignment that Norpoth reaffirms, but principal trumpeter Alex Wilborn’s spot struck me as a lively improvement upon Norpoth’s predecessors.

In a shorter, no-intermission program, it was nice to have a proper mood-setter leading into Taylor’s premiere – and Sphinx Virtuosi’s entrance – rather than a genial throwaway aperitif. Paradoxically, the Joplin overture, aimed for an opera house, was not as raggy as Taylor’s new work, an homage to the Joplin music we’re most familiar with. Personably introduced by cellist Lindsey Sharpe, the piece had an engaging solo spot for principal cellist Tommy Mesa and a refreshing jauntiness. Amazing how much more highbrow and classical the Joplin idiom sounds when you ditch the piano so justifiably associated with the “King of Ragtime.” Taylor took a well-deserved, enthusiastically applauded bow when concertmaster Alex Gonzalez pointed him out in the audience.

Sphinx’s outreach to Helene victims is quite natural when you consider its DNA. Conceived in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan in 1997, Sphinx quickly became an important of young Black and Latino talent with its annual junior and senior competitions, open to musicians up to age 26, and its Performance Academy, a competitive boot camp, where faculty members include Norpoth, Gonzalez, and second violinist Rainel Joubert – who would play in the Delights and Dances string quartet when the Michael Abels composition, commissioned by Sphinx, had its Charlotte premiere.

The full ensemble departed – all too briefly – as Warren-Green and CSO delivered a more familiar Leonard Bernstein overture to his opera, Candide. If Sphinx had lingered offstage longer, the CSO performance might have been more prudently paced. Dynamics were OK, but when piece started off too swiftly, there was little room for Symphony to speed up when the piece thundered and thrust to its climax. The whole acceleration plus crescendo effect, so exciting in multiple Rossini overtures, was never even a possibility, surely the nadir of Warren-Green’s work with CSO as far back as I can remember.

Then the listed world premiere of Curtis Stewart’s Drill went AWOL, along with guest percussionist Britton-René Collins. This surprise was less of a disaster than the lackluster Bernstein, for the Sphinx Virtuosi returned instead with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Allegro Moderato, the opening movement from his Four Novelleten (1903) for string orchestra. So many of Coleridge-Taylor’s principal works have yet to be recorded that it’s probable that this excavation, listed as Op. 59 in Wikipedia, has yet to get a hearing outside of Sphinx’s orbit – another gladdening example of the ensemble’s vital and generous outreach.

All the remaining works were glorious, throwing the Bernstein blooper far into our rearview mirrors. It helped a little to know your Vivaldi when Sphinx moved upstage to merge with the CSO as tango king Astor Piazzola’s “Verano Porteño (Buenos Aires Summer)” movement from his Four Seasons of Buenos Aires filled the stage with violinist Adé Williams as guest soloist. For those who saw Aisslinn Nosky playing the complete Vivaldi at the Charlotte Bach Festival, the Piazzola Four Seasons evoked some pleasant nostalgia, especially since the Festival Orchestra, like the Virtuosi, often performs without a conductor.

Williams, a winner of the Sphinx Junior Division back in 2012, still played with youthful vitality and joy. Both Symphony and Warren-Green were obviously fond of her playing, her swooping glisses, and the tango twists Piazzola brought to his baroque inspiration. Controversial in Argentina for his modifications of the trad tango – cab drivers often turned him away! – this summer piece was popular enough for Piazzola to draw encouragement for him to complete his seasonal cycle. The Belk audience responded favorably as well, with their first standing O of the evening.

The Abels piece was an even longer, grander gatherum, with the string quartet arriving upstage where Williams had just stood. Joubert and CSO principal second violin were to Warren-Green’s left opposite CSO principal viola Benjamin Geller and cellist Gabriel Cabezas, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence winner in 2016. The Delights were rather delicate before the composer, who famously co-wrote the acclaimed Omar with Rhiannon Giddens, gradually ramped up to the Dances.Cabezas was more than able to eloquently launch Abel’s slow-building piece, which tacked leftward after his engaging solo with additional solo spots for the rest of the quartet members.

Nor was Abels in any hurry to layer on the orchestra, for their first contributions were background pizzicatos behind the full quartet before they picked up their bows. The piece is no less than the title work on a 2013 album recorded by the Harlem Quartet and the Chicago Sinfonietta conducted by Mei-Ann Chen. Definitely worth a listen if you missed the gala – and Abels’ Global Warming leads off the Sphinx Virtuosi’s recent Songs of Our Times release, their first album. Some rousing fiddling embroidered the loud and lively climax of Delights & Dances, easily the most epic piece of the night, programmed in exactly the right spot.

Mexican composer Arturo Márquez’s Conga del Fuego Nuevo (1996) was no less appropriately placed in the encore slot, starting up white-hot and danceable without lowering its flame. Fully recovered from his Bernstein misadventure, Warren-Green not only led the combined ensembles zestfully, he exhibited some winsome showmanship of his own, not only bidding Wilborn to stand up for his solos on muted and unmuted trumpet, but also commanding the winds and the brass to rise when moments came. How can a piece we’ve never heard before sound so familiar? Maybe via discreet borrowing and insistent repetition. No matter, CSO’s jolly encore became a curtain call at the same time – and a wonderful welcome to the 2024-25 season. Hopefully, the Coleridge-Taylor and the Abels were previews of the next Sphinx recording.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

EMF’s Symphonic Triptych Overflows With Virtuosity and Enthusiasm

Review: Symphonic Triptych at Eastern Music Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 20, 2024, Greensboro, NC – You could almost hear the consternation behind the scenes as Gerard Schwarz and the Eastern Music Festival deliberated over what to call their most recent Saturday evening concert, the penultimate fourth of five offerings in this season’s Joseph M. Bryan Jr. concert series. All four of the pieces on the program could have been a headliner, beginning with Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto for Lute and Strings, played on guitar by the estimable Jason Vieaux. At this banquet, Vieaux’s virtuosity and soul would merely be an appetizer, whetting our palates for Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler symphony, and Ludvig van Beethoven’s Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and piano – with three more virtuosic guests, violinist Chee-Yun, cellist Amanda Forsyth, and pianist Marika Bournaki.

With all the many opportunities for headshot placement in print and in an epic digital program booklet, the spotlight was more than ample enough for all four artists to get at least one four-color nod in a key location. In what might be taken as a tiebreaker, Schwarz listed Forsyth along with Béla Fleck as the most stellar EMF guests for 2024 in his seasonal welcome inside the printed festival program. So after what must have been extensive brainstorming, the cryptic “Symphonic Triptych” emerged in all caps as our concert title.

At first blush, the reference seems to be an oblique nod to Beethoven’s Triple, but it more solidly evokes Hindemith’s symphonic distillation of his opera. Mathis der Maler, for which Hindemith also penned the libretto, chronicled the struggles of painter Matthias Grünewald for artistic freedom during the German Peasants’ War, more than four centuries before its 1938 premiere. By that time, Hindemith had escaped Nazi Germany with his partly Jewish wife and was living in Switzerland, so the Zurich premiere was actually played three years after the composition was complete.

From a symphonic standpoint, the Mathis symphony was the highlight of the evening, providing the most sensational musical moment. Schwarz seemed to have rehearsed the piece even more meticulously than the Don Juan, for the mammoth student/faculty EMF orchestra at Guilford College occasionally overwhelmed Dana Auditorium with its ebullient volume. When the third and final movement of the Mathis exploded, where Hindemith evokes the hellish onslaught depicted by Grünewald in his Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons, the detonation could hardly have been more impactful and delightful – powerful yet deftly controlled.

The éclat of this final movement, which shuttles to Grünewald’s Visit of Saint Anthony to Saint Paul the Hermit before returning to turbulence, may have been too much for the Greensboro audience. The number of satisfied – or dissatisfied? – ticketholders who did not return after intermission was shocking.

Did they not know that that Beethoven’s Triple – with a visual triptych of Chee-Yun, Forsyth, and Bournaki – was still to come? Were they so delighted that they feared the Beethoven would mar the perfection? Or was the worry that Beethoven’s mighty Triple, which is actually shorter than most of his piano concertos, might keep them up past their bedtimes? The other explanation that occurs to me is the most unfortunate: audience members presumed that the Symphonic Triptych was complete after three works had been performed.

Whatever explained the exodus, it wasn’t a good look when the three ladies made their regal entrances.

All three were rather entrancing afterwards. One of the challenges Beethoven posed to himself when he started on this behemoth was allotting all three soloists with ample parts – and letting all three achieve parity in how they measured against the orchestra. This goal obliged Beethoven to make adjustments and accommodations for the cellist and his or her background accompaniment.

The most noteworthy adjustment, playing the instrument in a higher register than usual, is a laudable last step that works beautifully in live performance as the cellist frequently introduces new melodies and themes that will be repeated by the pianist and the violinist. But this last graceful touch tends to disappear on recordings, where we often get the illusory impression that it’s the violin that’s leading the way.

All of the volleying back and forth gets its beautiful balance restored when we enjoy the Beethoven Triple live. Alternately facing each other and the audience, Forsyth and Chee-Yun delivered the chief revelation of live performance with the chemistry between them. Facing away from the string soloists, Bournaki divided her attention between the keyboard and Schwarz’s baton.

There were moments, especially during the epic outer movements of the Triple, when Bournaki and the orchestra were answering proclamations by both string players playing simultaneously, and there were moments when the whole trio was pitted against the full ensemble. These were most electric in the opening Allegro and in the closing Rondo alla Polacca, a finale that was absolute magic at the Dana. In between these two tidal waves was a pleasant paradise of a Largo, where the Forsyth/Chee-Yun chemistry took root almost immediately, preceding a gorgeous blossoming from Bournaki.

When you saw Forsyth leading the charge so frequently, that was only half of the revelation, for the agility of her cello became the equal of the violin while the sound invaded its range. Chee-Yun met these repeated challenges ruthlessly, passionately, emerging particularly triumphant in the whirlwinds of the Rondo, where her violin reached the highest peaks at the end of the thrilling, accelerating ascents.

Vieaux could never reach the decibel levels of the soloists who followed him, but he didn’t vie with nearly the same amount of heavy artillery behind him in the Vivaldi. Nor was there any type of boost in front of him like the mini-amp Sharon Isbin brought to her 2005 Zurich Chamber Orchestra concert in Charlotte. Here the outer Allegro movements, summoning scintillating technique from Vieaux, were not as memorable as the middle Largo, maybe the most beautiful flowering of melody that Vivaldi ever wrote. The mellow sounds Vieaux coaxed from his guitar were infused with glimmering sublimity.

While the Don Juan that ensued didn’t match Vieaux’s finesse, we weren’t looking for subtlety in Strauss’s heroic tone poem. Yet it was in the quiet, intimate passages where the faculty-student orchestra was most controlled. Even if it occasionally overflowed, the enthusiasm of this mammoth band was contagious, overpowering any quibbles one might have about discipline. This youthful enthusiasm and élan may be a prime reason why Schwarz might look forward to returning each summer to Greensboro, why the faculty revels in playing the old warhorses along with challenging outré pieces, smiling onstage with pride after long days of rehearsals and private lessons.

Playing with the new generation is likely exhilarating and rejuvenating for the guest artists as well. Every one of them at this concert also hosted a masterclass in addition to their valuable rehearsal time.

Charlotte Bach Festival Travels Back to the Future With “Bach, the Next Chapter”

by Perry Tannenbaum

CHARLOTTE, NC – With the departure of the two people most instrumental in establishing Bach Akademie Charlotte and the Charlotte Bach Festival, artistic director Scott Allen Jarrett and chief exec Mike Trammell, we couldn’t help wondering how radical changes might be at the 2024 festival. The new artistic leaders filling in for Jarrett have actually been with the Bach Festival since the first Charlotte celebration in 2018. All three – concertmaster Aisslinn Nosky, cellist Guy Fishman, and keyboardist Nicolas Haigh – have made significant contributions in performance season after season. The new executive director, Garrett Murphy, began his hosting chores last spring at the Venetian Vespers concert, prior to the last year’s Bach Fest that featured marathon offerings of Johann Sebastian’s Christmas Oratorio.

The changes for 2024 were somewhat telegraphed by the first glimpses we had of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 in that spring concert last year. For the first time, the headline works for the opening and closing concerts at Charlotte Bach are not by Bach. The laurel for the big opening at Sandra Levine Theatre was Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, with Nosky fronting a string reduction of the iconic score that reprised her triumph as guest soloist with the Charlotte Symphony a few months before the inaugural festival. Stamping and mugging, red-headed Nosky brought the Red Priest’s electricity back. But with two afternoon sessions devoted to demonstration concerts of the Vespers, the closing concert with Monteverdi’s gem has been clearly designated as this year’s top highlight.

Not that Johann has been totally neglected. He had some play when Peter Blanchette, inventor of the 11-string archguitar, unofficially opened the festival with a “Bach at the Brauhaus” event at the temporary Pianodrome constructed at the Brooklyn Collective. And in the wake of The Four Seasons, where Bach’s “Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden” served as a handsome preamble, Jonathan William Moyer‘s Organ Recital was all-Bach, an earth-shaking German Organ Mass that may be the best organ concert in the festival’s history.

In this year of transition, the “Bach, the Next Chapter” concert instantly stood out for me as the most telling event in this year’s lineup. Not only was the festival looking at Bach’s predecessors and contemporaries to explore their influence, it was now guiding us forward to examine his legacy – beginning in his own family with his most illustrious son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. That extra stretch of the envelope – at a new venue, the Kathryn Greenhoot Recital Hall, never before called into service at Charlotte Bach – made “Next Chapter” a little more fetching than the half dozen other festival events scheduled at sites making their CBF debuts.

“Next Chapter” began with Johann Sebastian’s Magnificat, but only a small taste of its Canon Perpetuus – played by Nosky, Fishman, and oboist Kristin Olson – enough to establish the Leipzig master’s achievement as a jumping off point. Then before playing CPE’s Sonata for Oboe in G minor, Olson discussed how the younger Bach was intent on diverging with his illustrious father. Without the modern oboe’s metal keys, the baroque oboe would prove to be a fussier instrument, requiring more frequent swabbing, and its tone was noticeably thinner in the opening Adagio movement, with a litheness that seemed even better suited to the middle Allegro. The wide leaps of the closing Vivace were effortlessly navigated, and Olson’s tone grew slightly richer.

Johann Gottleib Graun’s Trio Sonata in B-flat for Violin and Viola actually brought four musicians to the fore. Harpsichordist Jennifer Streeter teamed with Fishman on the continuo while violist Maureen Murchie shared the title roles with Nosky. Introducing the piece, Nosky emphasized the new tendency of composers to give the spotlight to multiple soloists. Yet the promised parity between violin was only confirmed in the opening Adagio before it was discarded in the middle Allegretto, where Nosky was clearly the superior among equals in drawing technical challenges. Murchie had more of a chance to shine in the closing Vivace, where she had the first run at the theme.

All five hands came on deck for Johann Adolph Hasse’s Sonata for Oboe, Violin and Viola, though we were cautioned that Hasse was likely not the true composer of this charming piece. Olson drew most of the spotlight, with Nosky her chief responder, but Murchie had more challenges here than in the preceding piece. Nosky and Murchie withdrew for the next work by Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, and Olson had the joy of announcing the discovery of a woman composer in the generation that followed Bach. Nosky’s excellent program notes offered only a slight clarification, reminding us that Anna Amalia studied with a student of Johann’s, distancing her musically from Bach by an additional generation.

Olson also confided that the piece was originally written for flute before possessing it in scintillating fashion with her oboe. The beauties of the opening Adagio drew even richer sounds from the oboist, yet Olson had to pause before the ensuing Allegretto “so all the notes will come out,” explaining the troubled relationship between her instrument and moisture as she swabbed. Fishman sat by patiently before upstaging his colleague, helpfully quipping that it was the same with his cello. Not to worry, Olson more than answered back with dazzling work on both the Allegretto and the concluding Allegro ma non troppo.

Nosky and Murchie returned for the evening’s finale, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch’s Quadro in G for Oboe, Violin and Viola, but once again Olson more than justified her top billing – in a four-movement crowdpleaser that was the most radical break with the Baroque Era that we heard. Once again, we had a swabbing pause between movements as Olson primed her instrument for the final fireworks of the Vivace non troppo. If you think of the baroque music canon as a cavalcade of perpetual motion machines, this last salvo was a shocker. Olson excelled yet again, laying down the gauntlet on multiple occasions and, rather than merely repeating, Nosky and Murchie fired back their flaming responses – after dramatic silences that crackled with tension.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

Charlotte Bach Is Breaking Out All Over

Preview: Charlotte Bach Festival 2024

By Perry Tannenbaum

Since 2018 – with a pandemic hiatus – singers, musicians, and ancient instruments have been gathering to greet the summer at the Charlotte Bach Festival, a nine-day celebration of the Baroque Era’s best. Well, once again, the assembly has gathered, but they’re branching out. Embracing new locations, new composers, and venturing beyond the baroque.

Neither of the headline pieces at the festival’s big Saturday night concerts is by the great Bach patriarch, Johann Sebastian. The big kickoff features violinist Aisslinn Nosky, who first dazzled the Queen City in 2018 playing Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons at Belk Theater with the Charlotte Symphony. Now the redhead is offering a Red Priest encore with authentic baroque instruments at the Sandra Levine Theatre at Queens University.

Of course, Vivaldi was a contemporary of Bach’s, and Johann will share the bill with Antonio, launching the Opening Concert in Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden, a church cantata based on Giovanni Pergolesi’s famed Stabat mater – only with a new text based on Psalm 51. On the other hand, Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, more commonly known as the Vespers of 1610, was premiered 40 years before Bach’s birth. Or maybe 414 years before its Charlotte premiere at Charlotte Bach’s Closing Concert on June 22, also at the Levine.

Bach Akademie Charlotte, the festival presenters, performed a teaser of the complete Vespers last March at an all-Venetian concert.

“That was the one we did at Myers Park Presbyterian,” recalls Akademie president Garrett Murphy. “We had quite a good audience for that, and a preview movement of the Monteverdi Vespers. We knew at that moment we were going to do that whole piece, so the artistic leadership team designed a whole festival around that theme of what was happening in Italy.”

Vespers also gets the biggest build-up with a sequence two noonday demonstration lectures, “The Monteverdi Experience” I & II, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on Thursday and Friday – both free with the purchase of Vespers tickets. Clearly the festival climax.

Plus the entire piece hasn’t been played here in ages, if at all.

“Our musicians are most excited about that,” Murphy confides. “For them, that’s the festival, and they are coming together with great excitement to perform the Monteverdi Vespers and are really hoping that folks will come out.”

Leadership of the festival is also branching out in the wake of artistic director Scott Allen Jarrett’s departure. A triumvirate now reigns as artistic leaders, including Nosky, cellist Guy Fishman, and keyboardist Nicolas Haigh. While they craft the festival’s programming – and a burgeoning season of Akademie concerts between festivals – Haigh’s spouse, soprano Margaret Carpenter Haigh, corrals the talent.

Each of the four will also headline a festival concert. After Nosky’s Vivaldi on Saturday, Margaret Haigh teams up with theorbo master William Simms for Lagrime mie: Songs of Lamentation, Disdain, and Renewal next Monday at the McColl Center on N. Tryon Street. She’ll naturally be singing songs by Italians, including Giovanni Kapsberger, Luigi Rossi, Monteverdi, and of course Barbara Strozzi’s “Lagrime mie,” for she has privately labeled the entire 2024 festival “Bach Akademie Goes Italy.”

But not before she and Simms begin in the Renaissance and Elizabethan England with a sheaf of songs by renowned lutenist composer John Dowland.

Nicolas, a fixture on harpsichord and organ at past festivals, steps into the spotlight as he leads the Bach Akademie Charlotte Choir and the festival’s four vocal fellows in “The Renaissance Motet” with compositions by Giovanni da Palestrina, Giaches de Wert, Nicolas Gombert, and the marvelously innovative Englishman, William Byrd. This Wednesday night concert and the Tuesday night “Vocal Fellows Recital” preceding it bring a new site into play, both for the festival and the QC.

Apparently, the Holy Comforter Episcopal Church on Park Road is ready for its closeup.

Fishman opens another new frontier for the festival at Trinity Presbyterian on Providence Road in what promises to be one of the season’s most revelatory programs “The Cello, Ascending.” Leading an assortment of Akademie Choir and Orchestra members, Fishman will illustrate what he subtitles “The Rising Virtuosity of the Baroque Cello” as the instrument shed its subsidiary timekeeping role of providing an ensemble’s bass line and emerged as a major solo voice. The mix of composers will include Vivaldi, Handel, and Gabrielli along with less familiar names.

Arguably the most trailblazing of all the Bach Festival concerts is the Tuesday event, “Bach, the Next Chapter,” staged at a previously undiscovered underground treasure: the Kathryn Greenhoot Recital Hall, below the Levine at the Sarah Belk Gambrell Center.

Nosky leads a tight-knit group in guiding us into the influence JS had on the generation after him, including Princess Amalia of Prussia and his own most famous son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Spoiler: Johann was a very popular name in the Bachs’ day.

“Since the first time I toured Queens,” Murphy remembers, “I’ve been excited about using that Katherine Greenhoot Recital Hall downstairs, which I think is a perfect size venue for something like this. It’s beautiful, about 150 seats, I think. And very modern and a nice little space. But this is something we’re excited to share with Charlotte and are hopeful that we can continue to grow a following for C.P.E. Bach as well.”

ImaginOn almost gets its Charlotte Bach concert debut as it hosts “Lunch and Learn” at noon on Tuesday. Carolina Pro Musica’s multi-instrumentalist mainstay Holly Maurer and Weber State University professor Esther Jeehae Ahn will go over some Baroque basics and explore the influence Italian composers, from Monteverdi to Vivaldi, had on J.S. Bach in a casual bring-your-own-lunch setting. Sorry, kids, this freebie is “sold” out.

Which brings us to Charlotte Bach’s guest celebs and another free event. Peter Blanchette, the virtuoso inventor of the 11-string archguitar takes the festival’s popular Bach@The Brauhaus series to The Pianodrome on S. Brevard Street in The Historic Grace at the Brooklyn Collective. Blanchette has arranged hundreds of Bach compositions for his invention, but his repertoire ranges from medieval and Renaissance to contemporary and world music. Already this Friday’s revels are sold out.

But perhaps in honor of Simms and his many-stringed theorbo, you’ll also find a cash bar Monday night at the McColl for the Lagrime mie concert.

St. Peter’s mighty organ gets a workout as virtuoso Jonathan William Moyer plays J.S. Bach’s complete German Organ Mass – with an intermission – on Sunday evening. Then on Monday afternoon, Moyer offers an Organ Masterclass at Providence United Methodist, listening to and critiquing local organists, then showing how it’s done. This freebie, open to the public, starts at 2:00 PM.

“He is now the professor at Oberlin, and a consummate artist, doing recitals all over the world,” Murphy says about Moyer. “He’s doing the complete, as they call it, Organ Book Three, but it has a lot of familiar tunes, and it’s a pretty epic thing to hear all at once. He is just delighted to be coming and playing that organ at St. Peter’s, one of the few, I’m told, in the country that can really do that piece justice.”

Planning by the new Nosky-Fishman-Haigh troika has already begun for the 2026 Bach Festival and beyond. Meanwhile, they will be tag-teaming Bach Akademie’s upcoming regular season, just announced this week. Lift-off is set for September 7 when Fishman will play all six Bach Cello Suites, split into afternoon and evening concerts with three suites each.

A new and different kind of split happens when Nicolas Haigh leads the Bach Akademie Choir in October. They’re breaking out of town! On successive nights, October 25-27, Akademie’s choral concert will be performed in Asheville, Charlotte, and Lancaster. Fishman returns for a single concert, leading the Akademie Ensemble in Charlotte on January 25.

Then before the 6th Charlotte Bach Festival returns in 2025 on June 14-21, the regular season climaxes with another three-day marathon. Nosky and Margaret Carpenter Haigh will co-lead the Akademie Charlotte Choir & Orchestra on another Asheville-Charlotte-Lancaster tour, May 9-11.

Bach Akademie is definitely spreading the music around, even into the Palmetto State. Spread the word!

Down at Spoleto USA, the Vibe Is Shifting

Review: Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston

By Perry Tannenbaum

‘Song of Rome’ at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston. (Photo by William Struhs)

Looking down benignly at his Dock Street Theater audience, the newly anointed host of Spoleto Festival USA’s chamber music series, Paul Wiancko, gave us a slight ceremonial nod. “You have chosen wisely,” he said sagely.

But he wasn’t exactly speaking to me, since this was already the fifth program in the noonday series – the backbone of Spoleto – that I was attending this year. Nor was he speaking to the “eleven-ers” in the audience who were signed up for the complete set of programs down in Charleston through June 9.

He was speaking directly to those in the audience who would only attend one of the concerts. Today. And he would go on to ask us all to participate in making the experience special and unforgettable.

It would be very special – beginning with a Beethoven piano trio that showcased Amy Wang at the keyboard, Benjamin Beilman on violin, and Raman Ramakrishnan on cello. How’s that for diversity? My love affair with Wang’s artistry and demeanor had begun just two hours earlier when she played the Schumann Violin Sonata, teamed up with the Slavically expressive Alexi Kenney.

Enough to mightily crown most concerts, the Beethoven was merely a satisfying appetizer. For Wiancko had cooked up a powerful combo, calling upon two living composers that I was barely familiar with, Jonathan Dove (b. 1959) and Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937).

Our contribution to the magic would be to withhold our applause between the two pieces. It was easy enough to maintain stunned silence after In Damascus, Dove’s heartfelt setting of Syrian poet Ali Safar’s grieving – and aggrieved – reaction to a senseless car-bombing in his nation’s war-torn capital.

The prose poems were achingly and angrily sung by tenor Karim Sulayman, perhaps most indelibly after an extended instrumental interlude, turbulently delivered by a string quartet that included Kenney, Beilman, Wiancko (on cello), and violist Masumi Per Rostad.

“We will be free,” Sulayman sang in Anne-Marie McManus’s ardent translation, “of our faces and our souls – or our faces and our souls will be free of us. And the happy world won’t have to listen to our clamor anymore, we who have ruined the peace of this little patch of Earth and angered a sea of joy.”

Sulayman was visibly in tears as the lights went down on In Damascus and pianist Pedja Mužijević entered with his iPad and sat down at the Steinway. In the dimness, Mužijević played Silvestrov’s Lullaby, an appropriate coda to a song sequence that began with the children of the Zuhur neighborhood in Damascus who would never wake from their sleep – or survive a bogus “holiday truce” – and ended with the evocation of mothers and loved ones who would always await their return.

Amazingly enough, this isn’t the only instance where Sulayman is singing about children caught in the web of brutal war and barbaric terror, for his wondrous voice also figures at Spoleto in the world premiere of Ruinous Gods, a new opera with exotic music by Layale Chaker and libretto by Lisa Schlesinger.

Co-commissioned by Spoleto, Nederlandse Reisopera, and Opera Wuppertal, Ruinous Gods is a fantastical deep dive into the mindworld of Uppgivenhetssyndrome, a rare traumatic response to living in the limbo of displacement. It was first observed in children detained in Sweden, but the syndrome has now been observed in refugee camps around the world. Hopeless children simply go to sleep in reaction to their endlessly unresolved status. Some die, others lapse into coma – sustained only by a feeding tube.

Encased in a surreal bubble over a grassy bed from scenic designer Joelle Aoun, that is how we find our sleeping-beauty protagonist, Teryn Kuzma as H’ala, when the opera begins. Mezzo-soprano Taylor-Alexis DuPont as her mom, Hannah, is stressing and blaming herself while two doctors, Overcast and Undertow, hover over their patient, unsympathetic researchers hoping to analyze and classify the disease.

Meanwhile, Sulayman is decked out in a feathery all-black outfit as Crow, the mentor who, like Dante’s Virgil, guides all these comatose children from around the globe into a common underworld dreamscape where all are free. Is that a spaghetti rainbow dropping down across the Sottile Theatre stage from the fly loft as the imprisoning globule lifts off H’ala, or is there an unfathomably large jellyfish floating above?

Sinuous, jazzy, and sensuously obsessive, Chaker’s music resurfaced in the jazz sector of Spoleto 2024 – at Charleston Music Hall, a venue never used by the festival before. Bigger than Spoleto’s customary hall for chamber jazz (and eccentric modern music), the Emmett Robinson at the College of Charleston, the Music Hall was an acoustic revelation and a welcome escape from the Robinson’s clean-room sterility. Bonus points for the stars that lit up on the black backdrop.

Attendance was astonishing, more than could ever be seated at the Robinson, as Chaker, leading her Sarafand quintet on violin – with an occasional vocal – delved into her two most recent albums, Radio Afloat (2024) and Inner Rhyme (2019). Having worked with Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Chaker has created a jazz equivalent in Sarafand with Phillip Golub on keyboards, Jake Charkey on cello, John Hadfield on drums, and Sam Minaie behind the bass.

Compared to her opera, Chaker’s jazz and her Sarafand personnel made subtler political points. But this wasn’t the only jazz gig that came loaded with extra cargo. Terri Lyne Carrington returned to Cistern Yard for a pointedly themed concert under the moon and the live oaks – with political firebrand diva (and NEA Jazz Master) Dianne Reeves as her special guest.

Carrington’s cargo was collected into her Grammy-winning album of 2022, New Standards, Vol. 1, the first studio sprouting of her pathfinding songbook collection, New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers. So without much preaching, her set was a celebration of Geri Allen, Gretchen Parlato, Eliane Elias, and – at a high summit where Reeves duetted for the first time with Christie Dashiell – the great Abbey Lincoln and her mesmerizing “Throw It Away.”

All these greats joined together again on Allen’s “Unconditional Love,” with Kris Davis on piano, Matthew Stevens on guitar, and trumpeter Etienne Charles all getting in their licks, plus spoken and dance stints from Christiana Hunte. Wow.

Theatre at Spoleto this season is densely messaged. Or not. The Song of Rome was deeply immersed in issues of immigration and sexism, with an overarching interest in the fate of republics, in ancient day Rome and 21st century USA. Cassette Roulette, on the other hand, was pure frivolity, barely deeper than its title and whole lot bawdier.

After starring in An Iliad last season, Denis O’Hare could be logically expected to follow up that one-man conquest with An Odyssey. Well, he has, sort of. O’Hare co-wrote A Song of Rome with Lisa Peterson, his Iliad writing partner, but this time he doesn’t appear onstage, handing over the acting chores to Rachel Christopher and Hadi Tabbal.

Christopher is Sheree in modern times, a grad student striving to learn Latin, and Octavia, Emperor Augustus’s sister at the dawn of the Roman Empire. Tabbal is Azem in present day, Sheree’s immigrant Latin tutor – and our overall storyteller – and the poet Virgil during the reign of Augustus.

So O’Hare is skipping over the rest of Homer to engage with Rome’s great epic, The Aeneid, knowing full well that Virgil based the first six books of his masterwork on The Odyssey and the last six on The Iliad. As a thematic bonus, O’Hare and Peterson discovered during their research for this world premiere that Virgil himself was a refugee, forced out of his ancestral home in Northern Italy by Roman avengers of Julius Caesar who got Dad’s estate for their prize.

Although Virgil’s epic was likely commissioned by Emperor Augustus, aka Octavian, doubt remains whether The Aeneid is a work of propaganda justifying the Roman Empire as divinely ordained – tracing Octavian’s ancestry back to Aeneas and Venus as meticulously as the New Testament traces Jesus back to King David, son of Jesse – or a subversive work by an immigrant genius settling a score. While getting handsomely paid to do it.

Octavia and Virgil go back and forth on this point because the Emperor’s sister is both an admirer and a keen reader, but both are critical of Octavian, who is hell-bent on buttressing the legitimacy of Rome while closing off its path back to a glorious Republic.

“The Republic is over,” they agree. And how about ours?

While Sheree is learning about the Roman issue that comes up as Virgil delivers more and more manuscript pages to Octavia over the years, Sheree must face the issue in American terms when Azem receives a deportation notice. Does she instantly jump to his defense and rescue, or does she immediately suspect him of criminal activity?

Meanwhile, Sheree is reading The Aeneid differently from Azem and Octavia. Why is Octavia left out of literary history if she played such a key role? Why are Virgil’s women, particularly Dido and Lavinia, so passive and pathetic while the strong woman, Camilla, is a she-devil?

Finding this insidious neglect and defamation rampant in literary history and beyond, Sheree comes up with a radical, shocking solution that she announces on her podcast. She will pour fuel over every single book piled on the Dock Street stage and burn them all.

When will all this vicious animosity end? Citing the end of Virgil’s epic, where Aeneas, the immigrant from far-off Troy, killed the vanquished Turnus instead of offering peace, conciliation, and mercy, Sheree answers us curtly lighting the flame: it won’t. Opting for chaos, she almost says it aloud – to hell with the immigrants. (Or give it to the immigrants, if you’ve heard of the Goths.)

Moments like that land hard at Spoleto. Deep in Trump Country, at the Sunday matinee of Ruinous Gods, there was a loud boo among all the lusty cheering as the singers took their bows. Good. The nurturing point of the opera, gushing with empathy toward immigrants worldwide, had hit home, no matter how you feel about it.

Depending on whether you were attuned to John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch cache, or whether you resonated with Amber Martin’s worship of Reba McIntyre, Bette Midler, and Stevie Nicks, Cassette Roulette was hit-and-miss, redeemed or further cheapened by Martin’s bawdiness. Nicks’ “Rhiannon” was the crowd fave and mine on the night I attended, getting a far more epic performance that you’ll hear on AM radio or an elevator. But neither David Bowie nor Midler got much of a rise. The diet of ‘70s and ‘80s hits didn’t draw much of a youth crowd to Festival Hall, which was made over to a quasi-cabaret setup.

Trombone Shorty slayed far more decisively at TD Arena, where his outdoor revels with Orleans Avenue were abruptly moved when rain threatened. At the height of the indoor bacchanale, Shorty paraded through the audience at the home of College of Charleston basketball with key members of the band (none of whom were named in Spoleto’s fabled program book). They slashed up the rear aisle of the stadium, swung around to the side of the gym and came down along the side.

Snaking through the stadium, Shorty & Orleans reigned over the reigning pandemonium. The prohibition against photography was washed out to sea in a riptide of glowing cellphones.

Shoot, the band was taking selfies! And through it all, the sound remained perfect, Shorty and his brass perfectly aligned with the rhythm section on the TD stage, absolutely distortion-free. Sure, a few dissenters and defectors also trickled through the aisles, accompanied by true believers seeking and returning with beverage.

The most pathetic sufferer sat right across the aisle from my wife Sue and me, hunched over, elbows on kness, with his hands tightly cupped over his ears. Probably needed a ride to escape. Maybe he would have fared better in the open air, where at least some of the sound could have escaped skyward through the live oaks of Cistern Yard.

Final week highlights: Bank on it, the Bank of America Chamber Music series has four more different programs to offer – and a dozen performances – before Spoleto wraps up on Sunday. The Wells Fargo Jazz lineup continues strong, with an all-star Latin twist. Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenón and Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo bring their Grammy-nominated El Arte Del Bolero albums to life at the Dock Street Theatre in a three-day, five-performance engagement (June 6-8) while Cuban percussionist extraordinaire Pedrito Martinez lights up Cistern Yard with an Afro-Cuban stewpot of infectious rhythm, Echoes of Africa (June 7).

After distinguishing themselves in Mahler’s Fifth, the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra returns to Gaillard Center with Beethoven’s Third (June 5), plus a Rachmaninoff concerto for piano + trumpet and composer-in-residence Reena Esmail’s “Testament” for tabla and orchestra. Upstaged by a visitation from the Charles Lloyd Sky Quartet this past weekend, the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus rebounds with a two-performance run of The Heart Starts Singing (June 6-7), sporting another Esmail piece that will feature Wiancko’s cello – and an eclectic mix of works by Tomás Luis de Victoria, Rachmaninoff, Irving Berlin, and more.

The Festival Finale of yore is gone this year, but there’s more folk, funk, Americana, and alt-country in this year’s Spoleto lineup. Still to come are Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz’s latest partnering, Watchhouse (June 5), with their own band-backed experiments in folk-rock playing at Cistern Yard; Grammy Award winner Aiofe O’Donovan (June 7) returns with the SFUSA Orchestra to Sottile Theatre; and Jason Isbell (June 8-9) headlines the final weekend with a two-night stint at the Cistern.

Theatre continued during Spoleto’s second weekend with sharply contrasting shows, the wholesome Ugly Duckling from Lightwire Theater and the savagely satirical send-up of the American West, Dark Noon, from the Danish fit + foxy company in its US Premiere. A similar dichotomy prevails this week as Australian company Casus Creations takes over Festival Hall with Apricity (June 6-9), a family-friendly mix of aerial and acrobatic astonishment, with sprinklings of comic shtick and moody music.

On the edgy side, RuPaul’s Drag Race fans can rejoice greatly as Season 9 champion Sasha Velour deigns to bring her presence to Gaillard Center with The Big Reveal Live Show! (June 6). Is Charleston’s big house big enough for drag’s Queen of Queens? The Holy City and Spoleto haven’t been so sensationally desecrated since Taylor Mac ruled the festival.

Wiancko Takes the Baton at Spoleto’s Fabled Chamber Music Series

Review: Spoleto Festival USA Chamber Music at Dock Street Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

When Geoff Nuttall died of pancreatic cancer in October 2022, Spoleto Festival USA lost its most distinctive personality, the “Jon Stewart of chamber music,” before any of us had noticed a single gray hair on his glorious mane. Replacing him as director of the festival’s noonday chamber music series, the backbone of Spoleto, seemed like sacrilege last season to those close to the ebullient violinist. However, Nuttall’s stylish hosting chores still needed to be done.

Fittingly, a cavalcade of other chamber music players stepped into the role, for hosting at Dock Street Theatre had always been handled by musicians who contributed to the playing. Esteemed harpsichordist Charles Wadsworth had passed the baton over to Nuttall after many years as Spoleto’s most recognizable personality and the series’ jovial noonday host. Nobody would say whether the parading pinch-hitters were auditioning for the role of Nuttall’s successor. Still, it felt that way, especially since the festival’s general director, Mena Mark Hanna, had declared that the musician-host tradition would go on in Charleston.

And Charleston is a very traditional city.

So for cellist/composer Paul Wiancko, 2023 was an auspicious year. In late winter, before his fourth appearance at Spoleto, Wiancko became the new cellist with the pioneering Kronos Quartet, and in early fall, he was named SFUSA’s third chamber music director. Changes to the series have been noticeable: nine of the 22 performers in the 2024 festival are making their Spoleto debuts, and there are 50 percent more pieces by living composers in the program lineup.

Coupled with the abrupt terminations of resident conductor/director of orchestral activities John Kennedy and his Music in Time series, Wiancko becomes not only Spoleto’s chamber music guru but also the festival’s chief purveyor of contemporary classical music.

And he’s doing it with his own unique style.

Wiancko is more about theming each of the 11 concerts in the chamber music, more about the Zen of each program. Nuttall was very laid-back and West Coast in his attitude toward programming and concertgoing, stressing variety in his repertoire choices and encouraging his audiences to be at ease. If you want to applaud between movements, go right ahead. At a couple of concerts, Wiancko took what seemed like a Far Eastern approach, requesting that we withhold applause – to magnify the cumulative effect of two pieces he was presenting in tandem.

The first time Wiancko employed this tactic, it became emotional on the Dock Street stage. In retrospect, we can understand why. For this coupling, Wiancko led off with an unfamiliar work, Marejada, created during the 2020 pandemic by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón, and then in the silence segued to Franz Schubert’s posthumous String Quintet in C, perhaps the most-played chamber work in Spoleto history – for many years, the last piece performed in the lunchtime series.

Written for string quartet, assorted percussion, and pre-recorded ocean waves (referenced in Negrón’s title), performers for Marejeda included Wiancko, violinists Alexi Kenney and Livia Sohn, and Wiancko’s spouse, violist Ayane Kozasa. Kenney would leave crumpled paper onstage after the piece as he exited along with Wiancko and Kozasa, respectively carrying a conch shell and a can – plus a spoon to hit it with.

That left Sohn and her gong onstage as Owen Dalby entered to take over the first violin chair, Lesley Robertson replaced Kozasa place on viola, and cellists Christopher Constanza and Ramakrishnan spelled Wiancko. It was quite possible to overlook the fact that three of the four members of the now-defunct St. Lawrence String Quartet – Dalby, Robertson, and Constanza – were now reassembled, minus their first violin, Geoff Nuttall. Or it was until, more than a half hour later, the sweetly mournful, fiercely and achingly turbulent second movement Adagio concluded and Sohn, Nuttall’s widow, broke down momentarily.

Dalby understood as the delay continued, softly clutching Sohn’s bow hand until she could go on. More of us would have shed tears, I believe, if they had reprised that Adagio.

More tears flowed more predictably three days later when Wiancko coupled two contemporary composers, Jonathan Dove and Valentin Silvestrov, in his next hold-your-applause tandem. Another string quartet was augmented by a fifth voice, this time tenor Karim Sulayman in Dove’s In Damascus, set to the prose poem sequence by Syrian poet Ali Safar, as translated by Anne-Marie McManus.

Eclipsed by Rhiannon Giddens’ Omar when he brought his Unholy Wars to Charleston in 2022, Sulayman has been indelible this year, first in the world premiere of Layale Chakar’s new opera, Ruinous Gods, which embraces the most vulnerable refugee children from war and terror worldwide, and then in this absolute Dove-Safir stunner.

Two days ago we were standing where the long line of Syrians trying to leave the country waited… Nothing happened, except that we saw a nation where the sun had burned out. Over time, no spark remained for its residents except the sparks of their eyes, which were fading… Like tears…

After Dove’s 11-part cycle – only the sixth part was wholly instrumental, featuring Wiancko, violist Masumi Per Rostad, and violinists Alexi Kenney and Benjamin Beilman – the lights dimmed as Pedja Mužijević entered from the wings to play Silvestrov’s touching Lullaby at the Steinway. But the funereal gloom and Mužijević’s entrance at stage right weren’t sufficient to distract us from Sulayman, still standing at centerstage, weeping profusely before he daubed his eyes.

Preceded by Beethoven’s Piano Trio No. 3, with Beilman playing violin, Ramakrishnan cello, and newcomer Amy Yang at the keyboard, this was surely one of the greatest of the many great chamber music concerts ever performed at the Dock. Yet just two hours earlier, I’d witnessed Yang’s debut at Spoleto, definitely one of the most sensational in recent years as she teamed with Kenney on Robert Schumann’s majestic Violin Sonata No. 1, the best and most passionate live performance I’ve seen of a violin sonata since Daniel Hope and Sebastian Knauer played Beethoven’s Kreutzer at the Savannah Music Festival in 2011.

Both Yang and Kenney can be regarded as among Wiancko’s inner circle, Kenney along with Kozasa being fellow members of Owls, an “inverted string quartet” with two cellists, and Yang being one of the artists Wiancko has composed for. They seemed to be kindred spirits from the opening bars. With admirable subtlety, Wiancko themed this concert as a “Celebration of Resonance,” never mentioning that Yang’s debut solo album of 2019 was Resonance, including pieces by Bach, Caroline Shaw, and Schumann.

Of the 11 programs presented during the lunch hours at Spoleto in 2024, I only saw seven, so I cannot offer an authoritative judgment on whether Yang’s big splash was surpassed by any of the other debuts. But two strong contenders emerged in Program VII on my last day in Charleston, cellist Sterling Elliott and percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, both of whom made their debuts in Program VI the previous day.

Elliott had slipped in among a string septet that played the original 1978 version of John Adams’ breakthrough piece, Shaker Loops, where fitting in was a prime objective. Standing out became the mission when the cellist sat down with Mužijević to play William Grant Still’s Mother and Child – Elliott’s transcription of Still’s 1943 Suite for Violin and Piano, Part II. It really sounded like his own piece, the tenderness of the composition darker and more aching and the affirmation nearly as joyous.

Rosenbaum’s debut had kicked off Program VI, more high-profile since he was paired with Wiancko on Andy Akiho’s 21 for cello, marimba, bass drum, tambourine, and electronics. Plucking strings, clapping, tapping the top and sides of the cello, and pedaling the big drum – as well as plain bowing – Wiancko garnered most of the attention at the beginning and end of the piece, though the percussionist was also performing some extracurricular antics behind the marimba, switching mallets, rapping the tambourine, and triggering the electronics.

Played on steel pans as it was originally written, Akiho’s piece looks and sounds a little better, particularly when the sides of the pans are struck. But the marimba version was still spectacular, building to a pounding climax, four instruments and electronics sounding simultaneously. Almost as spectacular, Christopher Cerrone’s Double Happiness, with Rosenbaum playing vibraphone and a small array of malleted instruments in duet with a prepared piano, was far more sublime. We watched over Wiancko’s shoulder as Yang prepared the Steinway’s innards.

Nor did Wiancko disappear after he and Yang delivered their play-by-play of the piano prep, retreating to one wing to operate electronics on cue. At a somewhat hypnotic pace, Yang was obliged to stand up at the keyboard, plucking or strumming or dampening the strings inside the Steinway, sometimes while playing the keys with her free hand. Usually wielding two mallets in each hand, Rosenbaum performed similar wonders at his instruments, occasionally striking both the vibraphone and a smaller instrument behind it with mallets wielded by the same hand.

Paradoxically, the prerecorded electronics and reverb effects layered onto Double Happiness added the echoey steel pan aura that was missing the day before. The cathedral of sound at Dock Street Theatre was magical, like nothing I had experienced since I first heard A Genuine Tong Funeral,composed by Carla Bley, on Gary Burton’s memorable CD with quartet and orchestra.

Wiancko may not be a perfect fit for the Jon Stewart label, but there’s something in each of his programs that reminds me of the Comedy Central shows I once watched regularly. More than Nuttall ever did, Wiancko makes it his business to interview at least one other musician or composer during every program. More often than not, he frames these encounters like a podcast. Very entertaining.

When composer-in-residence Reena Esmail made her debut on the same program where Rosenbaum and Elliott made their bows, Wiancko greeted her like a starstruck fan. The build-up stood up as Yang and longtime Spoleto stalwart Todd Palmer gave a very fine account of Esmail’s Jhula Jhule for clarinet and piano.

Falletta and Wilborn Dazzle at the Knight

Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Wagner + Strauss

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 22, 2024, Charlotte, NC – Charlotte Symphony’s latest concert pairing, Wagner + Strauss, is logical and cohesive enough, but with the two Germans represented by the “Liebestod” (love-death) from Tristan and Isolde followed by the great Death and Transfiguration tone poem, abundant jollity seemed unlikely at Knight Theater. Wedged between these famed titans of 19th and 20th century music, however, were two lesser-knowns, Richard Strauss’s contemporary Oskar Böhme (1870-1938) and American composer Julia Perry (1924-1979). Thankfully, these composers, especially Oskar, lightened things up. Originally scheduled to perform with Symphony in August 2020, renowned conductor JoAnn Falletta returned for her first guest appearance with the orchestra since 2002, and principal trumpeter Alex Wilborn, similarly postponed by the pandemic, made his solo debut in Böhme’s Trumpet Concerto.

When former Symphony music director Christof Perick last performed the “Liebestod” at Belk Theater – almost precisely 15 years ago – he also paired the piece with a revered Strauss tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathustra. Strauss was one of Perick’s prime passions, and the Friday evening performance reaffirmed that the ardent Prelude and Liebestod remains deeply embedded in the ensemble’s DNA. Falletta’s reading, gradually peaking to a lovers’ climax, with delicious peeps at the hypnotic love theme that blossomed with promise, made me feel afterwards like asking if anybody else in the audience craved a cigarette.

Musically, it seems like a trumpet is a better post-coital sequel for Symphony than a cigarette when they finish the Liebestod, for who can contemplate Strauss’s Zarathustra without recalling its trumpet heraldry? Now that Wilborn is in the principal chair, he could bring us a virtuosic account of Böhme’s Trumpet Concerto with a surprise bonbon afterwards. The opening Allegro moderato brought forth a beautifully burnished tone from Wilborn’s horn and delectably supple phrasing, hardly seeming to challenge his technique, while Falletta emphasized the massiveness and lyricism of the orchestral accompaniment. That foundation segued nicely into the middle Adagio religioso movement, which began with stately dignity from the strings and brass and peaked with soaring aspiration from the soloist, no less pleasing than the melodic opening movement. It was only in the closing Rondo that we could savor anything close to Wilborn’s full virtuosity. Some real jollity here.

Perhaps both Wilborn and Falletta felt that the fireworks were all too brief in Böhme’s finale, for after the audience ovation, the trumpet virtuoso returned with perhaps the lengthiest encore ever heard at Knight Theater. Jean-Baptiste Arban’s “Variations on The Carnival of Venice” had all the virtuosic challenges and exploits you could ask for, with merciful orchestral interludes between the clusters of variations so that Wilborn could catch his breath. It wasn’t just speed that was demanded: in the most intense variations, we needed to make out the main melody amid a blizzard of relatively quiet filigree. The effect was sensational, exhilarating, and exhausting. Falletta showed us how much fun she was having long before she could rest her weary arms and face us again, and Wilborn, in a gesture that promised both him and his audience some respite, jokingly signaled to us when there were only three variations remaining.

Sadly, it would be an understatement to say that African American composer Julia Perry’s work has been neglected in her homeland. Only a handful of recordings – and no full-length CDs – exist from her voluminous output, which included 12 symphonies and four operas. The work unveiled in Charlotte, A Short Piece for Orchestra (1952), has only been recorded once, 14 years ago by the Imperial Philharmonic of Tokyo.

Falletta’s helter-skelter reading of the work made it feel far more modern and audacious than the more lyrical and legato Tokyo take under William Strickland’s baton. A live performance certainly brought out more textures after the raucous opening, including some dreamy reeds from principal clarinetist Taylor Marino and acting principal oboist Erica Cice. From the rear of the ensemble, a snare drum’s tattoo and some noodling from a celesta crept in. Really lovely stuff. My first exposure to Perry came just three days before her centennial birthday might be celebrated (apparently, there’s a half-billion-dollar bond deadline that’s considered to be a bigger deal).

The crisp dynamics that distinguished A Short Piece made a difference once again as Falletta turned to Tod und Verklärung. There was thunder like Perick brought to the work plus a little more electric crackle. In the more sweeping passages, the orchestral blend was as exquisite as ever, yet there were also ample opportunities for Cice, Marino, principal flutist Victor Wang, and concertmaster Calin Lupanu to shine in the hushed moments. Perick’s interpretation had more narrative cohesiveness and continental flavor, while Falletta’s took the piece in a more American direction, almost exiting the realm of a tone poem and crossing over into a concerto for orchestra. Opening up the dynamic range was certainly an intriguing and exciting approach. After waiting an extra four years, Falletta clearly triumphed in her return.

Charlotte Symphony Heralds the New Year in All-American Style

Review: Koh Plays Mazzoli at Knight Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

January 19, 2024, Charlotte, NC – Just a little more than a year after Kwamé Ryan guest directed an all-American program at Belk Theater featuring violinist Bella Hristova, Charlotte Symphony (after naming Ryan as the music director designate for 2024-25) greeted guest conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya to the Knight Theater podium, with violinist Jennifer Koh making her debut in another all-American program. This year’s explosion of Americana came four days after MLK’s birthday instead of two days before. The Adams-Korngold-Copland program of 20th century pieces could be counted as a bold advance in 2023, but the current offerings, with two 21st century compositions by American women, Jennifer Higdon and Missy Mazzoli, getting equal playing time with the 20th century composers, Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland, is arguably even more diverse and inclusive.

Distilled from Higdon’s opera, Cold Mountain, of 2015, and co-commissioned by Charlotte Symphony, the new Cold Mountain Suite could credibly be categorized as a concerto for orchestra by virtue of its length, variety, and profusion of solo instrumental passages. Like many opera suites you may have heard, Cold Mountain takes a serpentine route through the score rather than a sequential path, using the opening of Act 2 and the close of Act 1 as its bookends in repackaging eight snippets from the score.

On my first hearing, I could distinguish seven distinct sections and some fine soloing not only from string principals – cellist Jonathan Lewis, violist Benjamin Geller, second violinist Oliver Kot, and associate concertmaster Joseph Meyer – but especially from acting principal oboist Erica Cice and principal trombonist John Bartlett. The most memorable section of the piece was the “Storm Music” with its swirling strings and the atonal whistling of the high winds, but the ending, launched by the reunion scene between Ada and Inman was authentically stirring, with soaring work by principal trumpeter Alex Wilborn heralding the closing crescendos.

Since Mazzoli’s Procession Violin Concerto was commissioned by Koh, the music remained in-house until intermission. Notwithstanding her outré blue hair, Koh is actually a few years older than the composer, with a recording career extends more than 25 years. The former Chicago prodigy still plays with a youthful zest and a frenetic edginess – but not immediately in “Procession in a Spiral,” the opening section that unfolds slowly in a keening treble and increases its tension about 3/4 of the way into the section. The thinnest ethereal note from Koh’s violin bridges the gap into the unexpectedly calm beginning of “St. Vitus,” but the onset of intensity comes sooner here, still without the manic speed we might have expected from this title. The weepiest of the sections, “O My Soul,” has the most sustained of Koh’s thin harmonics and she hangs out with the flute and piccolo before breaking into more neurotic bowing.

A nice orchestral swell transitioned us to “Bone to Bone, Blood to Blood,” the most dramatic section, spiced with a series of whipcracks and a sprinkle of percussion. Jollity never prevailed in this rather somber concerto, nor was there an Allegro. “Procession Ascending” began rather unexpectedly for a finale with some lovely solo work from principal bassoonist Joseph Merchant, dramatizing how high Koh would need to ascend on her violin. If I were Koh, I’d pay Mazzoli a few more bucks to extend her struggles to take flight, blocked by the cellos and the double basses. She seems to clear this viny undergrowth too soon and too easily for the music to reach its full dramatic intensity, but I loved how briefly her freedom lasts and how cruelly it ends.

While there is a fine Baltimore Symphony account of Barber’s Second Essay for Orchestra in my collection, I cannot confirm ever hearing the piece performed live, though it was scheduled for a Symphony concert in April 2008. Hard to imagine that I snubbed it in my review, though Dvorak’s New World, ballet excerpts from Mozart’s Idomeneo, and Barber’s Violin Concerto were also on the bill. The music really is sumptuous, with oboe and clarinet illuminating the opening, viola mixing into additional oboe action later on, and some tasty propulsive percussion triggering its climax. It came across as a fresh and welcome discovery for me.

Of course, Copland’s Billy the Kid Ballet Music was the most familiar nugget on the program, revived at the Knight after an absence of less than four years. We’ve all been through a lot since February 2019, so I suspect more of the mournfulness of Copland’s “Introduction: The Open Prairie” and more of the fleeting, elegiac pathos of the penultimate “Billy’s Death” will land on listeners. Merriment is similarly magnified, with the clopping woodblocks of “Street in a Frontier Town” and even more heartily in the marching band energy, fueled by the woodwinds, of the gala “Celebration (after Billy’s Capture).” For the youngest buckaroos, the warring timpani and snare drum tattoos of “Gun Battle” will likely be the hugest delight.

“Christmas: Home” Shows Off Charlotte Master Chorale and T. Oliver Reid in Sublime Light

By Perry Tannenbaum

December 8, 2023, Charlotte, NC – We’ve reached that season when the arts calendar fills with a cluster of productions that reprise Dickens’ Christmas Carol, Handel’s Messiah, and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker – a rather traditional season not noted for novelty or wild innovation. So it’s nice to survey the Yule schedule and find events that even gently push the envelope and attempt to trailblaze with new styles like cirque or soul, or entertain the possibility that, come December, we’re not completely averse to secular fare.

Better yet, amid a thicket of Nutcracker and Christmas Carol variants, we could find Charlotte Symphony venturing beyond its customary Holiday Pops medleys to a “Soulful Christmas” or Charlotte Master Chorale taking a thematic approach with “Home.” Although I prefer the acoustics at Symphony’s venue, Knight Theater, over First United Methodist Church, guest artist T. Oliver Reid tipped the balance for me in favor of Chorale’s “Home,” where he shared the pulpit with the choir, conducted by Kenney Potter, and pianist Philip Biedenbender.

Very likely, I’d seen Reid long before he took over the role of Hermes in the Broadway production of Hadestown for nearly three months in 2022, since he figured in productions of Thoroughly Modern Millie, La Cage aux Folles, and After Midnight that I had witnessed over the years (in 2002, 2004, and 2014) during my pilgrimages to the Great White Way. A native of Metrolina who appeared in Shenandoah at Little Theatre of Gastonia long, long ago, Reid may have traveled far to participate in this holiday gig, but he could certainly identify with the homespun theme. In his bag of goodies, Reid brought a couple of songs from The Wiz, including his opener, “Soon as I Get Home,” and his finale, “Home.” With a silken voice that stretched lower and more richly beyond my expectations, Reid hit home runs with both these songs that are usually belted by Dorothy.

Potter’s programming for “Christmas with the Charlotte Master Chorale: Home” consistently accommodated this kind of generous latitude. Of course, there were seasonal favorites tailored for the theme, including “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song,” and – presented as a Biedenbender instrumental – “Home for the Holidays.” Nobody onstage at First United displayed any liking for the Christmas songs I dread and loathe, so we were never assaulted with the annoying fun of “Jingle Bells” or the torturous tedium of “The Little Drummer Boy.” Nor were the unexpected readings from Reid overladen with saccharine or sentimentality. Sara Teasdale’s “A Winter Night” and Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “The Year” were both somber and seasonal. Even the excerpt from the Dickens classic, “Ignorance and Want,” refrained from depicting a vapid, gleeful wonderland.

“Christmas Dreams,” “Be Born, O God,” “Lost in the Night,” “Prayer of the Children,” and “Music in My Mother’s House” were all new to me. Similarly, I doubt that composer Alan Menken figures prominently on many Spotify songlists for Christmas, but Potter, Biederbender, and the Chorale dipped into his catalogue twice, for “God Bless Us Everyone” from his musical version of A Christmas Carol and – far more unexpected – “Someday” from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, written with Stephen Schwartz.

For me, Schwartz actually upstaged his collaborator with his other selection, “Through Heaven’s Eyes” from The Prince of Egypt, since it sprinkled the program with the right amount of levity along with Jerry Herman’s “We Need a Little Christmas” from Mame. Musically, “Through Heaven’s Eyes” took us closer to Jerusalem than Rome, for the sound had unmistakable klezmer flavoring. “Simcha” from the same musical where Moses is the protagonist, might have had a little more Jewish flavor and the liberating spirit of Chanukah, but “Through Heaven’s Eyes” was the most extravagant entertainment of the evening – and the Master Chorale clearly delighted in backing Reid up with their syncopated, klezmer-kissed la-las.

After an acapella rendition of “The Christmas Song” by the Chorale – with Reid repeating the final bars – the program built to a simple and sublime climax as Biedenbender accompanied Reid in a fervid rendition of Adolphe Charles Adam’s glorious “O Holy Night.” I’d never known that the song had three stanzas in English, compared to just two in the original French lyric by Placide Cappeau that inspired Adam. We can thus forgive a Celine Dion for only singing two, but for Reid to sing a second and a third stanza provided a wonderful surprise and a singular experience.

Goodbye Tokenism, Charlotte Symphony Is Embracing True Diversity – NOW

By Perry Tannenbaum

October 20, 2023, Charlotte, NC – Face it: in the wake of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and COVID-19, we’ve entered a complex cultural transition. Charlotte Symphony, never the most daring nor the most timid of orchestras in their programming, serves as a useful barometer. Their current program, with works by Emilie Mayer and William Grant Still, is even more impressively diverse – judging strictly by the playing times of these pieces – than their season opener, spotlighting the music of Valerie Coleman and The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto by two modern Chinese composers, Chen Gang and He Zhanhao.

But in 2023, these are not yet household names, or even widely known among Symphony subscribers. Accordingly, the season opening concert was titled “Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony No. 3” and the current offering is billed as “Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2,” pragmatically restoring balance and marketability. We haven’t reached the Promised Land in claiming our full musical heritage, but we’re definitely beginning to cross the Jordan.

As recently as 12 years ago, when I purchased The Gramophone Classical Music Guide for the last time, there was no mention of Mayer (1812-1883) in that doorstop nor in the Penguin Guide, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, or The NPR Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music – all upstanding residents on my bookshelves. Indeed, the earliest recording of Mayer’s work that can found on Spotify, Apple, or Amazon was released in 2000, and the earliest that can be streamed came out in 2010, seven years before the first recording completely devoted to her compositions – pretty remarkable for a 19th century German composer who wrote eight symphonies, six of which have now been recorded. We had a nice taste of Mayer’s handiwork in her Faust Overture with resident conductor Christopher James Lees on the Knight Theater podium.

Recorded twice in the past two years and topmost among suggestions when I type the composer’s name in a Google search, the work has unmistakable gravitas, build, and power, welling up in the strings and releasing from its somber Adagio opening with a tattoo from the timpani that shifts us more lightheartedly into an Allegro colored by the wind section and easing into waltz tempo. Of the two name-brand pieces lurking in the program, Chopin’s Concerto and Antonín Dvořák’s The Noonday Witch, the Faust pairs best with Dvořák and his storytelling. Mayer’s work became more volatile and episodic past the halfway mark, a palpable struggle between good and evil as sturm and drang sections alternated with milder retorts from the winds, which gradually more assertive, with more sinew, before the antagonists merged majestically in the climax. Lees’ tempos and dynamics could have been more restless and spasmodic, but none of the walloping power was lost.

My last sightings of pianist Orli Shaham were at Spirit Square in 2002 at the Brightstar Music Festival, so I had no live experience of her full voltage beyond her exploits in a Brahms Piano Quintet, a Prokofiev flute sonata, and a Poulenc trio. Any doubts that Shaham and Symphony had the muscle and finesse needed for an optimum Chopin 2 vanished by the time the pianist finished her first kaleidoscopic turn in the opening Maestoso, after a spirited orchestral intro. Shaham’s delicacy, already convincingly established in this epic opening, became even more ethereal – and personal – in the sublime larghetto that followed. Neither Shaham nor Symphony was as captivating as the winsome 1999 recording by Christian Zacharias, where both the pianist and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra honed in on the lilt of the waltzing rhythms that are so emblematic in Chopin’s work. But there are plenty of other flavors to Chopin, as the many master recordings of this concerto readily attest, and Shaham merely chose a different journey, rousing enough to trigger an ovation that demanded an encore.

When Lees picked up a microphone after intermission, it was to summarize the story of Polednice, the Czech poem by Karel Jaromír Erben, for the maestro maintained that Dvořák’s The Noonday Witch – one of four tone poems set to Erben’s ballads – followed the story bar-by-bar. Whether or not Lees’ claim can be verified, the piece offered Erica Cice, in her first outing as Symphony’s acting principal oboist, a swift opportunity to shine just 13 days after her predecessor, Hollis Ulaky, made her farewell appearance in the Eroica.

Here the oboe represented the misbehaving boy who was threatened with a visit from the fearsome by his frustrated mom in repeated attempts to quiet him – until she loses it and issues her fatal summons. Enter Allen Rosenfeld with his bass clarinet as the wicked visitor, who surprises and alarms both mother and son with her arrival. Much orchestral tumult ensues as the witch implacably chases her prey – until the tubular bells chime 12 times and the witch disappears at noon. Ah, but the story isn’t quite finished, with more orchestral turbulence on the horizon.

With a brief paragraph in the Oxford Dictionary and a more respectful entry in the NPR Encyclopedia, we can’t tout Still (1895-1978) as newly-discovered. As Lees hinted in his intro, however, the “Dean of African-American Composers” has been unconscionably neglected. The appearance of work in the clean-up spot on Symphony’s program, mighty orchestral works by brand-name Europeans usually dwell, may be unprecedented. With all of Symphony’s artistry and enthusiasm behind it, Still’s “Afro-American” Symphony No. 1 proved worthy of its esteemed position on the bill, even after Shaham dazzled us. In the bluesy opening movement of this 1930 work, “Longing,” you may actually catch a violinist or two smiling as she plays. You might have the same reaction. The middle movements, “Sorrow” and “Humor” retain a residue of ethnic flavoring, but here it’s less a part of the mix with traditional orchestral writing all-American strike-up-the-band jubilation. The sheer majesty of the closing “Aspiration” movement took me by surprise, for I’d never heard it before in live performance. America is very much carved into this closing, encompassing the swagger of our cities, the grandeur of our mountains, the serenity of our prairies, and maybe a few echoes of Native Americans we took it all from.