Category Archives: Concert

CSO and the JCSU Concert Choir Lift Every Spirit at Brayboy

Review: Johnson C. Smith University and Charlotte Symphony

By Perry Tannenbaum

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March 21, 2023, Charlotte, NC – You might have thought that a symphony orchestra performing in a college gymnasium would prove to be an odd coupling. Sure, there can be satisfying concerts staged at coliseums where a city’s basketball team plays, but those are usually performed by rockstars, pop icons, and the occasional Cirque du Soleil troupe when every note is processed electronically. My curiosity was certainly piqued when Charlotte Symphony Orchestra announced that its “In Concert with Johnson C. Smith University” program would be happening on campus at the Brayboy Gymnasium. Led by resident conductor Christopher James Lees, Symphony would be joined on the court – the hardwood covered with bright blue tarpaulin – by the JCSU Concert Choir, led by soprano Shawn-Allyce White and accompanied by pianist Frank Williams.2023~CSO at JCSU-13

A hookup between Symphony and JCSU at a more established concert venue should have seemed inevitable as long ago as 2015, when the leadership of Spoleto Festival USA visited the campus to announce that the Concert Choir would be participating in the high-profile production of Porgy and Bess the following year, celebrating the festival’s 40th anniversary. Yet when Lees picked up a microphone to greet the crowd, he reminded us that Symphony hadn’t been on campus for 13 years – indicating that this was his first time on campus and implying that CSO’s last musical director, Christopher Warren-Green, had never gotten around to the inevitable before his tenure ended. Were the optics or the acoustics the obstacles that had forestalled a return visit? Or was the idea simply slept on after Opera Carolina enlisted the men of the Concert Choir for their production of Cyrano in 2017, followed by the full choir’s appearance in I Dream in 2018?

Any questions about the Brayboy’s acoustics were swiftly dispelled. The sound from Lees’ microphone was crisp and present, nothing like the muffled sound from a faraway galaxy that emanates from PA systems at some basketball arenas or outdoor stadiums. As the brass heralded the assault of Franz von Suppé’s “Overture from Light Cavalry,” the sound remained bright and forward for all sections of the orchestra, not at all like an echoey gymnasium. French hornist Robert Rydel and principal flutist Victor Wang stood out sharply from the ensemble in their little cameos.

Rather than the controlled gallop and fury of Karajan’s recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, Lees seemed to favor the frantic onrush of Paul Paray’s recording with the Detroit Symphony, which shaves more than a minute off the Berliners’ 7:38 timing. The strings could show off their fast fingering as well as their lush tone, and when the familiar big tune surfaced, four percussionists sprang into action to make the cavalry charge more thrilling. Maybe more impressive – and surely boding well for the 14-member Concert Choir standing by for their pieces – was the syrupy sweetness of principal clarinetist Taylor Marino’s eloquence during a lull between two of the Cavalry dust storms.2023~CSO at JCSU-23

Fortified by two floor-standing mikes, the Concert Choir, eight women and six men on this occasion, were as stirring and powerful as ever at Brayboy, opening with William Henry Smith’s acapella arrangement of the traditional “Walk Together, Children.” Mostly tinted with treble and infused with jubilation, the main takeaway from the Choir’s performance wasn’t the urging of walking together but the excitement of “a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.” Richard Smallwood’s “Trust Me” was statelier, more equally weighted between the men and the women, never deteriorating into the sluggishness or singsong repetitiveness of other performances I’ve heard. The pause midway was particularly dramatic, daring to linger in silence long enough for the first smatterings of applause to break out before returning with thunder.

In between these two righteous chorales, Lees slipped in Jessica Meyer’s Slow Burn, reminding us in his intro that the composer was a violist and to be on the lookout for principal CSO violist Benjam2023~CSO at JCSU-07in Geller’s pivotal solo – but somehow neglecting to mention that the 2018 composition was written for a burlesque dancer. The piece was wonderfully apt when Symphony first performed it in early 2021, when wind players weren’t yet allowed back in concert halls due to pandemic restrictions, and the worldliness of this all-strings piece was a fine fit at the Brayboy. Bluesy strings did all of the sensual slitherings, while a pair of double basses provided percussion via pizzicatos, hand slaps, and vigorous thwacks of the bow on the necks of the instruments, accentuating Meyer’s jazzier passages. Most alluring was Geller’s suggestive glissando triggering the key swell of the strings that most vividly evoked Meyer’s title. Nor did Geller’s subsequent solo disappoint.

The two orchestral pieces that followed were more like what we expect from a city’s Symphony, but a pleasant surprise lurked in the first of these, a work dating back to the days of Haydn and Mozart, the Symphony No. 2 by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. A champion swordsman, military leader, and political revolutionary, Saint-Georges was the son of a French planter and an African slave who would be called “The Black Mozart” because of his varied musical output, including orchestral works and operas. Saint-Georges played a key role in commissioning Haydn’s Paris Symphonies and may have mentored the younger Mozart. The outer movements, Allegro and then Presto, reminded me instantly of Mozart’s symphonic pieces, while the inner Andante brought Papa Haydn to mind. Violins dominated throughout, subtly backed by French horn and oboe in the opening movement, then by pizzicatos from the lower strings in the finale.

Some Slavic coloring had peeped into the Cavalry overture, but the performance of Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance No. 8 was the pure essence, a percussion orgy driving the main theme and the high woodwinds taking the spotlight. Anything less would have been anticlimactic in the wake of Dr. White’s stirring vocal on the Hall Johnson arrangement of “Ride on, King Jesus,” accompanied by Williams at the keyboard and crowned with a flurry of vocal fireworks. White was only slightly less impressive after the Dvořák, taking the lead vocal on the Moses Hogan arrangement of “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit,” backed by the full choir with Williams conducting.

Lees stated the obvious when he declared that we were all waiting to see Charlotte Symphony and JCSU Concert Choir perform together. Would we get the Gershwin brothers or the Johnson brothers? Nothing less than the “National Black Anthem” would do at this point of the evening. While there are many YouTube examples of Dr. Roland Carter’s arrangement of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” none on my radar sport more than a piano and an organ for their instrumentation. So Charlotte Symphony may have broken some new ground here with its uncredited orchestration.

The effect was electrifying as the entire audience rose to their feet to honor the anthem. In Carter’s arrangement, there are instrumental sections before each of the three stanzas where James Weldon Johnson’s lyrics are set to J. Rosamond Johnson’s music. Each of these interludes affording sufficient space where an orchestra can shine while providing an orchestrator with engaging new melodic material. Of course, you also want the orchestra to actively support the choir each time it enters, so the new CSO orchestration added a dimension that has always been missing in the YouTube versions. Together, Charlotte Symphony and the Johnson C. Smith Concert lifted the impact of “Lift Every Voice.”2023~CSO at JCSU-29

We weren’t quite done even now. Lees had hedged a bit in announcing that a surprise awaited us, probably remembering as he spoke that the JCSU Drumline, alias the Funk Phi MOB, was already mentioned in the digital program. But before they brought on the rhythm and the funk, we were all invited to participate in a lighter CSO-JCSU hookup. After a brief rehearsal of the seven-note melody, we all joined in on cue for vocal sections of Daniel Bernard Roumain’s La, La, La, La. Needless to say, the lyrics were not a challenge.

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Amid this glee, Funk Phi MOB came marching in with their purely collegiate pandemonium, carrying me back to long-ago Saturday afternoons at the University of Iowa, the University of Oregon, and Williams-Brice Stadium where my shivers were alleviated or intensified by the fortunes of my hometown college football teams. This drumline was a bit more up-to-date than the drum corps I remember stationing themselves at midfield. Beside the customary bass drums and snare drums, a couple of these percussionists were outfitted with some sort of Yamaha hybrid, five or six flat shiny surfaces arrayed like a cross between timpani and a xylophone. If you’ve experienced how a stadium rocks during halftime, you can imagine the gymnasium version, peaking at a sensible 94dB according to my Apple Watch.

Topping off this mighty2023~CSO at JCSU-38mayhem, a drum major arrived with all his spirited, ceremonial, and high-stepping antics. Thanks for being here had been expressed long before this all-American climax, so without further adieus, the drum major could end the concert by leading the Drumline, Dr. White, and Lees out of the hall. When my wife Sue and I managed to navigate from our seats through the exiting audience and folks still milling on the court – conversing, posing for photos, and taking selfies – we emerged from the Brayboy Gymnasium and found that a drum party was still going on outside the entrance. Fortunately, I had brought my camera. Sue wouldn’t let me proceed to the parking lot until I took a few shots.

Monteverdi Validated at Myers Park With Venetian Vespers

Review: Venetian Vespers with Bach Akademie Charlotte

 By Perry Tannenbaum

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March 4, 2023, Charlotte, NC – You might gasp audibly upon learning that The Oxford Dictionary of Music proclaims that Claudio “Monteverdi’s place in the history of Renaissance music can justly be compared to Shakespeare’s in literature.” That high regard was echoed stateside by Ted Libbey in The NPR Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music: “To paraphrase his contemporary Shakespeare, he bestrode the musical world like a colossus.” Yet many at the Myers Park Presbyterian Church; where Bach Akademie Charlotte presented their latest concert, Venetian Vespers conducted by Scott Allen Jarrett; were probably witnessing a live performance of Monteverdi’s music for the first time. Others had likely never heard Monteverdi anywhere but in church and/or on recordings in their entire lives.

As far as I can tell, the Renaissance colossus has never had a hearing at Belk Theater or Knight Theater in Charlotte. I’m fairly certain that my first live encounter with Monteverdi was at Spoleto Festival USA in 1991, when L’Incoronazione di Poppea was presented at Dock Street Theatre. Before then, my revelations had happened at local libraries in Columbia and Charlotte, where I could borrow and fall in love with vinyl recordings of Monteverdi’s Madrigals (there are nine books of them) followed by my discovery of L’Orfeo, the first masterpiece in opera history.

In keeping with the tone of the venues where Bach Akademie usually performs – and the liturgical spirit of their marquee composer – Jarrett, with a small chorus of six voices and an instrumental quintet, focused on two major sacred works that bookended Monteverdi’s career, his Vespro della Beata Vergine (1610) and his Selva morale e spiritual (1641). Sensing a general unfamiliarity with Monteverdi’s music and his importance, Jarrett spoke at length on both, stressing the cultural eminence of Venice at the peak of the Renaissance and Monteverdi’s towering influence over how composers would write for voice after he upended traditional practice by prioritizing text over music.

The texts that Bach Akademie performed were mostly scriptural and liturgical Latin, but Jarrett and his musicians also dipped into the “moral madrigals” found in the Selva collection, with Italian texts written by Francesco Petrarch and Angelo Grillo. In fact, Jarrett’s selections were admirably proportional to the original collections: we had twice as many excerpts from the Selva as we heard from the Vespro, and the Italian songs gave us a balanced representation of the larger collection, which on complete recordings is just over twice the size of the 1610 Vespers.

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We began and ended the concert with full ensemble pieces from the Selva, starting with “Laudate Dominum” (second version). Sopranos Margaret Carpenter Haigh and Arwen Myers blithely chimed the opening exhortation – “let us praise” – over and over, interspersed with full choral and instrumental passages, along with a couple of merry exchanges between tenors Nick Karageorgiou and i. Four of the six Selva selections were originally for accompaniment by two violins, slots ably filled by two mainstays of Boston’s exemplary Handel and Haydn Society, concertmaster Aisslinn Nosky and Fiona Hughes.

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Replacing the four trombones in the score as well as playing their own parts, Nosky and Hughes figured more prominently in the “Gloria” that followed Jarrett’s impressive disquisition. This larger-scaled composition also offered more opportunity for the vocalists to shine, the tenors declaiming the title word most often before the sopranos dominated with their filigree on the recurring “Domine.” Thanks to Jarrett’s intro, we were also on the lookout for the heavenly harmony lavished on the stately “peace on earth” passage, enriched by Edmund Milly’s bass-baritone, cellist Guy Fishman, and organist Nicolas Haigh.

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Accompanied solely by Deborah Fox on theorbo, Myers and Margaret Haigh gave us a marvelous first sampling of the Vespro, “Pulchra es,” set to two amorous verses from the Song of Solomon, delicately straddling the borderline between chastity and seduction as they sang from opposite sides of the chancel. Both sopranos rejoined the male vocalists as we returned to the Selva with “Laudate pueri” (first version). The men harmonized sweetly to launch this setting of Psalm 113 before the sopranos quickened the tempo and lifted the music to joy and jubilation.

I wondered how Jarrett and Bach Akademie planned to handle “Duo Seraphim,” the next Vespro selection, since it was written for three tenors, according to the program booklet, and the conductor deployed Karageorgiou and Wilson to opposite ends of the stage. Akademie’s artistic director must have also anticipated some suspense in the room, for it wasn’t until halfway through the piece that the third tenor walked to his place upstage, behind organist Nicolas Haigh – Milly, the bass! While Milly’s tessitura didn’t need to reach quite as high as the two other tenors’, he did quite well, actually sounding louder than his comrades on a few notes. Of course, there’s another way of construing the drama of Jarrett’s staging. At the exact point where the text departed momentarily from its familiar Isaiah 6 refrain, and the heavenly witnesses to the seraphs’ “Holy, holy, holy” call were cataloged as “the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit,” Milly took his spot upstage before the three were said to be one.

Composed while Monteverdi was still in service to the Duke of Mantua, the “Dixit Dominus” for six voices and instruments seemed to be specially crafted for the acoustics of the Venetian Basilica of San Marco where he would later serve as the chapel maestro. John Eliot Gardner’s recording of the complete Vespro at San Marco with the English Baroque Soloists in 1986 implicitly made that point, and Jarrett, both in his introductory remarks and with the ensemble’s performance, made that point explicitly at Myers Park Presbyterian.

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Although she didn’t get much of the vocal spotlight, alto Laura Atkinson picked up a microphone to preface the remaining three Selva selections. Both of the poems that followed, written by Monteverdi for the other five voices, proved worthy of the pulpit, as their translated titles indicated: Petrarch’s “O blind ones! What use is all your toiling?” and Grillo’s “This life is a flash of lightning.” Reminding us that this was Bach Akademie and that the Charlotte Bach Festival is slated for its return on June 10-17 (if interim managing director Garrett Murphy’s fundraising goal is met), Jarrett and company gave us a small-scale preview of the plenty to come with Johann’s “Sanctus in D.” Not the swiftest version you’ll ever hear, but light, lively, and irresistible.

“Beatus vir” (first version), set to Psalm 112, was an apt finale to this Venetian Vespers concert, carrying forward the festive mood of the penultimate Bach with invigorating vocal counterpoint – Monteverdi writing here for six exactly voices at last – and providing Nosky and Hughes, as the two violinists also prescribed by the score, with their best opportunities to shine. But it wasn’t until the music slowed down, where the Psalmist spoke on the steadfastness of a god-fearing man in the face of evil tidings, that the finale became truly grand. The sheer massiveness of the sound summoned up the church to mix its harmonies, reminding us that we were in a house of worship.

Mei-Ann Chen Rocks the Knight in CSO Debut

Review: Bruch’s Violin Concerto with Charlotte Symphony

By Perry Tannenbaum

2023~Bruch Violin-18We’ve been hearing about numerous identified and unidentified flying objects in recent weeks, emanating from numerous sectors of the globe, crossing over our nation’s territorial waters and seeking all sorts of military and meteorological intelligence. Less mysteriously, there have been precise predictions in recent months of astral objects whistling through our solar system, one of them brushing closer to dear Earth than the moon.

But until now, not a word about the meteor that struck the Knight Theater in the heart of Uptown Charlotte. Her name is Mei-Ann Chen, and we can only hope that the guest conductor now in our midst is vying for the vacant music directorship at the Charlotte Symphony. It would be grossly unfair, no doubt, but it wouldn’t a bad idea to sign her up before she left town.

Chen’s impact on – and appeal to – the Symphony’s musicians and subscribers was nothing short of electric.2023~Bruch Violin-09_Export

The orchestra had never performed Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Overture in C Major before, yet they attacked the work zestfully, conveying its sharp contrasts and drama with unmistakable fervor. Flutist Amy Orsinger and principal oboist Hollis Ulaky excelled, jointly and separately, in the piece’s gentler moments. Although we had heard the CSO play the BRUCH VIOLIN CONCERTO as recently as 2016, Chen ignited the ensemble with fresh fire rather than receding to a subsidiary role behind concertmaster Calin Ovidiu Lupanu.

Instead of deferring to the soloist – or even seeking an agreeable balance between orchestra and violinist – Chen laid the gauntlet down to them both, so that Lupanu and Symphony spurred each other to greater heights vying for supremacy, achieving a higher level of parity through their combat. More adventurous now than I can recall, Lupanu was nearly note-perfect all the way through the treacherous terrain of the Allegro energico finale while his attack, confidence, and feeling were never better. His command was certainly impressive throughout the opening Allegro moderato, with a transition to the slow middle movement that was amorously smooth. Principal flutist Victor Wang helped to make this Adagio extra exquisite.

As the concerto climaxed, it might have been a toss-up to many in the audience whether Chen was inspiring the CSO or vice-versa. In respect for your colleagues, you’re not going to urge an orchestra too insistently to give us more during a performance – that has to have happened behind the scenes in rehearsal.

Our first glimpse of what that might have been like came right after the concerto, when Chen gestured to the audience to give Lupanu more love for his sterling performance. After the break, our impressions grew more vivid as Chen picked up a mic at the podium and greeted us. Not satisfied with our “Good evening!” Chen urged us to make a second try, somehow infusing this tired old emcee shtick with new energy and spontaneity – and getting results.2023~Bruch Violin-23

Speaking about the works on tonight’s program, Chen included info we could have gleaned from the program – a practice that Christof Perick and Christopher Warren-Green staunchly resisted – and made an effort to link the pieces together with a common theme. Faced with a crowd that was significantly more numerous than the crowd I’d seen three weeks earlier, but still significantly short of Knight’s capacity, Chen declared that Charlotte should be more supportive toward its Symphony.

That was a more compelling statement after delivering two examples of our musicians performing at their peak.

Chen rightly surmised that the main draw of the evening was the Bruch, since the César Franck Symphony in D minor, originally slated for its revival last March, hadn’t been heard in the Queen City since November 2003. Now that was a pitifully attended concert at Belk Theater, after striking CSO musicians had settled on a new contract and returned to work, so Symphony subscribers can pat themselves on the back for improving on that turnout.2023~Bruch Violin-10_Export

The main link between the two Francks that I’ve seen was the fine work by Terry Maskin on the cor anglais solo in the middle Allegretto movement. In the outer Allegro movements, our brass proved its mettle once again, though we’ve surely seen a Chening of the guard during the intervening decades. Associate concertmaster Joseph Meyer distinguished himself in the early Lento of the opening and principal French hornist Byron Johns had outstanding moments when the music quickened.

Chen improved most on the Perick performance of 2003 in the Allegretto, livening the effect of Maskin’s soulfulness on the English horn with more standout work from Johns and Andrea Mumm Trammell’s delicacy on the harp. Before the brass brought the finale to its brash climax, CSO’s principal harpist bubbled up tellingly in the symphony’s last calming episode.

Obviously content with her musicians’ handiwork, Chen gave the audience opportunity after opportunity to show the appreciation she had previously asked for. With unmistakable cues, Chen called upon us – already giving them a standing O – to really let the musicians hear it as she prompted them individually and collectively to take their well-earned bows. We did.

[If you missed Mei-Ann Chen in Charlotte, you can catch up with her on June 7, when the Chicago Sinfonietta music director conducts Antonín Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” at Spoleto Festival USA.]

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

Parameswaran Delights With Eclectic Mix of Moderns

Review: Sibelius No. 5 with the Charlotte Symphony

 By Perry Tannenbaum

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Maybe subscribers to Charlotte Symphony’s Classical Series aren’t as invested in choosing a successor to music director Christopher Warren-Green as I had presumed, or maybe the weather was too darn wintry for the wusses. Whatever the cause, the audience that came to see guest conductor Vinay Parameswaran perform a program that included music by Gabriella Smith, Benjamin Britten, and Jean Sibelius – while launching CSO’s celebration with a fine example of William Grant Still’s artistry – didn’t come close to filling Knight Theater to capacity.

Nor could anyone who looked over the stalwarts who braved the Arctic cold have called us diverse.

Could be that we’re complacent, self-satisfied, and spoiled. After hosting a musician as renowned and prestigious as Warren-Green, we may have forgotten that the candidates parading before us, seeking to impress in order to land a job offer, might just need to be sufficiently impressed by us to accept.

So it was interesting to watch how Parameswaran reacted when he looked out at the crowd, pocked with empty seats, and met us for the first time in his Charlotte debut. A rather sober look on his face abruptly turned to shock, surprise, and gladness as he heard our outsized enthusiasm.2023~Sibelius 5-02

He was rather charming, then, when he picked up the mic at the podium and described Smith’s piece, Field Guide, along with the works that followed. Any misgivings that concertgoers who stayed away could have harbored about his foreign-sounding name would have been instantly dispelled by the ease with which he spoke and the ease with which we understood – even if it was outré for him to describe Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations, the text for Britten’s song cycle, as “nonsensical.” I could hardly believe my ears.

Fortunately, the boldness of the San Francisco Bay Area native didn’t end there. He and the orchestra dug into Field Guide with gusto. Or tapped in, for the lower string players tattooed a sustained ostinato at the beginning of this pictorial voyage, delivering the sounds of insects, birds, animals, and swirling waters that Smith had recorded in the field and given new orchestral color. Cacophony was also mixed with the woodland stealth, and a look at the digital program booklet confirmed, in stray passages reminiscent of Debussy’s La Mer, that Smith had also taken her recording equipment to the ocean and under the sea.2023~Sibelius 5-24

Surreal, visionary, and hallucinatory though they might be, Rimbaud’s landmark prose poems are neither indecipherable nor dated. Canadian soprano Alexandra Smither, also making her Queen City debut, was evidently eager to share the wonder and variety of Britten’s settings, though she seemed as taken aback and gratified by our lusty greeting as Parameswaran had been. To fully savor the rightness of the music and the subtly crafted lucidity of Britten’s discreetly edited text, you’ll want to download the digital program booklet (via QR code) and follow along on your smartphone.

They do ask that you turn down the brightness of your screen as you’re reading the English translations of the French. Savor the irony as you reduce the illumination for Illuminations.

Our CSO thinned out during the transition from Smith to Britten, for the song cycle was written for strings and voice – with its intimacy compounded when concertmaster Calin Lupanu and principal cellist Jonathan Lewis play solos. Taking for a refrain a line of Rimbaud’s “Parade,” which concludes with “I alone have the key to this savage parade,” Britten turns his entire cycle into a savage parade – or as Duke University professor Wallace Fowlie translated it, “this wild circus.”

“Parade” doesn’t actually occur until the penultimate song in the 10-part suite, and both Smither and Parameswaran fully savored its climactic orchestral exuberance, appropriately rendered in marching tempo. Unlike Rimbaud’s masterpiece, which ends by scaling to a blasphemous pinnacle in “Genie,” Britten goes from “Parade” to a devastatingly subdued “Départ” (Departure), perhaps expressing empathy for the tragic gay poet. The effect was more powerful because Smither and the CSO had partnered in mostly uptempo songs until then. Excitement had been fairly intense from the beginning, when tremolos from the lower strings flowed into the first vocal scoring of Britten’s surreal refrain in “Fanfare,” taken by Smither at an infectious poco presto tempo with all her characterful ebullience.

Okay, so I’ll confess that I had slept as soundly as anybody on William Grant Still until Parameswaran brought him brashly to us. We’re catching up with him comfortably ahead of the centennial of Still’s ascension to the title of “Dean of African American Composers,” when he was the first black composer to have his work performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1930. The Naxos label and Apple Music are fairly woke to Still, woker than my first Spotify searches could confirm, though I found the same recording of Poem for Orchestra – by the renowned Fort Smith Symphony – at both streaming services.

With a helter-skelter cacophonous opening, Symphony and Parameswaran were far bolder and more modern than their Fort Smith counterparts as the full ensemble returned after intermission. Even when the CSO settled down and we could see the Brahms-and-Gershwin bloodlines of Still’s composition, with occasional soured passages paralleling Shostakovich’s wartime works, the music sounded more vibrant and contemporary. After that startling first onslaught, I very much liked what I heard.

There’s also plenty more for us to experience live after dipping into the streaming goodies we can sample. Still wrote at least four more symphonies after the NY Phil breakthrough, a fairly copious amount of piano and chamber music, and numerous memorable elegies, including one for “The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy” and a “Threnody for Jean Sibelius.”

Following the Poem for Orchestra with Sibelius’ most admired and recorded symphony didn’t sound random, either. Last played at Belk Theater by the CSO and Warren-Green in the spring of 2015, the brassy Tempo molto moderato opening movement made itself immediately welcome, cresting with a grandeur that almost brought me to tears. The delicacy of the Andante middle movement, beginning with waves of pizzicatos and morphing convincingly into an Allegretto scherzo, was also brilliantly calibrated.

Perhaps because those pizzicatos sound so much more vivid in live performance than on recording, the deficiencies of the closing Allegro molto – Misterioso were more apparent compared to the CDs in my library, including the definitive 1997 interpretation by Osmo Vänskä. Parameswaran didn’t push the pace as thrillingly to start the movement, so the big tune from the brass didn’t arrive as majestically in repose. But the orchestra delivered amply on the restless, mysterious aftermath, and the six hammering whomps at the end, half of them spiked with timpani, satisfied everyone.

–Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

Ryan and CSO Launch 2023 in American Style, with a Wisp of Freedom-Fighting Ukraine

Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Copland’s “Great American” Symphony No. 3

 By Perry Tannenbaum

January 13, 2023, Charlotte, NC – Kwamé Ryan was slated to make his Charlotte Symphony debut at Knight Theater last March in a program that included Errollyn Wallen’s Mighty River, César Franck’s Symphony in D minor, and Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto with soloist Jinjoo Cho. Cho showed, but Joshua Gersen from the New York Phil and the New World Symphony filled in for Ryan. We could have speculated that Ryan had withdrawn his name from consideration as Symphony’s next music director, giving way to Gerson as a hot new prospect for our upcoming vacancy. Earlier that same week, however, the native Canadian was announced as one of 10 guest conductors for the current season, so it was clear that Ryan’s hat remained in the ring – but he and Symphony would need to fashion an entirely new program.

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This time at Belk Theater, the program would be all-20th century – John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D (1945), and Aaron Copland’s “Great American” Symphony No. 3 (1946) – and even more American, since Korngold, revered for his many Hollywood film scores, became a US citizen four years before his concerto premiered, with Jascha Heifetz wielding the fiddle. Bella Hristova, making her local debut in the Korngold, was apparently booked after Ryan and the concerto piece had been placed in the 2022-23 lineup.

If you haven’t Adams’ brisk orchestral bagatelle, the title describes it well. Marin Alsop, recording the piece with the Bournemouth Symphony, appears to hold the land speed record for her Fast Machine among the seven samples I’ve tracked down, clocking in at 3:58. At the other end of the spectrum, Michael Tilson Thomas with the San Fran Symphony and Kurt Masur with the New York Phil are the sluggards among the conductors on record, leaning more toward Adams’ subtitle, Fanfare for Orchestra, than to the work’s speed. Tilson Thomas made the best-sounding recording, though Stephen Mosko’s performance with the Netherlands Wind Ensemble is definitely worth a listen, even if the woodblock opening the piece – and its insistent marking of time afterward – is tuned higher in the treble. Here the crisp woodblock over the pulsing brass may not have worn out its welcome before giving way to a richer timekeeping shaker when the brass began to soar.

We’ve heard Charlotte Symphony in this music at least a couple of times before, with Alan Yamamoto at the Belk podium in 2006 and Jacomo Rafael Bairos in an all-American KnightSounds concert in 2013. My review of the Yamamoto performance cruelly credited him with thinning the crowd during intermission, but with Bairos, I could happily note how far our subscribers had progressed in accepting Adams. There was a little helter-skelter in Ryan’s reading, maybe a good thing in warding off minimalist monotony, but the audience was downright enthusiastic when the rollercoaster abruptly shut down. Latecomers who were ushered to their seats in the wake of this tasty appetizer could be legitimately pitied for missing out.

Between the evening’s two fanfares – for the Copland Symphony famously repackages his well-known Fanfare for the Common Man – Korngold’s Concerto made for a lyrically lush contrast. Hristova was more precise than Vadim Gluzman, who introduced the piece to Charlotte with Christof Perick at the Belk in 2005, five years before his fine recording on the BIS label. But Gluzman was more ardent, personable, and charismatic in his playing. You can tell a lot in the opening bars of the Moderato nobile about which direction the soloist intends to take. There’s the richer, lusher approach taken by Gil Shaham and James Ehnes that opts for the alluring path I prefer, and then there is the thinner, more gilded approach favored by Sophie Mutter and Itzhak Perlman that aims toward the exquisite and ethereal.

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Hristova most resembled Mutter among these four, but I felt that Ryan and the CSO outshone her in the opening movement. She wasn’t playing enough with the orchestra’s swells, so their oceanic responses to her episodes weren’t like majestically crashing waves, and her climactic cadenza lacked fire and confidence. Reaching the middle Romance-Andante movement, Hristova achieved parity with the orchestra, growing tenderer and richer in tone with heightened expressiveness. Better still, she was outstanding in the rousing Allegro assai vivace that climaxes the concerto, fairly dazzling with her ricochet bowing and pizzicatos. Here she was meshing well with the folksy ensemble as they reached the spirited series of cymbal smashes that signal the onset of the finale.

Although Copland’s most familiar fanfare doesn’t get its Symphony 3 rebirth until the concluding Molto deliberato movement, Ryan certainly understood the fanfare kinship of the opening Molto moderato with the more familiar Common Man proclamation that awaited us three movements later. More in keeping with Leonard Bernstein’s CD version than with the initially mopey takes by the San Francisco and Minnesota Symphonies, Ryan threw the themes into an echo chamber spin cycle before emerging at the conductors’ common summit: a cathedral of sound that fell away into quiet, mellow sublimity. With a bass drum alarm blast and fresh brass annunciations that dribbled away into comical clockwork pulses of woodwind and percussion, the Allegro molto sounded like a scherzo at first. But when Ryan brought back the heraldry from the brass and drums, the orchestral response was pointedly mellower and mature, cuing us to expect steady grandeur when the artillery returned once more.

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Where Bernstein was weepy and wistful, Ryan and CSO applied a gloomy, brooding patina to the other inner movement, an Andantino quasi allegretto. He didn’t find the same range of grandeur and folksiness that Lenny unveiled in 1986, but as the piece transitioned without pause into the stately Molto deliberato, there was a wonderful mix of forlorn wilderness and divinity as the quiet woodwinds introduced the familiar Common Man phrase. The brassy orchestral repetition came with all the éclat and majesty you’ll ever hear in the similarly crowning moment of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, gloriously tattooed with timpani, cymbals, and drums. There was plenty left to do before the second and third series of heraldic salvos, beginning with Hollis Ulaky’s magical oboe, escalating to some pre-dawn tweedling from the higher winds, and some shiny “Frère Jacques” tolling from the brass and strings. CSO continued to excel as new variants of the “Common Man” theme mixed with the recurring tolling, simulating an awesome and propitious post-war sunrise. In his apt introductory remarks, Ryan turned our attention – and the ultimate optimism of Copland’s symphony – to the current battle for freedom in Ukraine. We could hear and understand the relevance.

Rhiannon Giddens Returns to Charlotte and Leaves Plenty of Music in the Air

Review: Rhiannon Giddens with Charlotte Symphony

By Perry Tannenbaum

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November 5, 2022, Charlotte, NC – Since the long-anticipated world premiere of her new opera, Omar, at Spoleto Festival USA back in May, composer-singer-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens has hopscotched the worlds of folk, jazz, and classical music. Her Spoleto apotheosis down in Charleston was embellished with a sit-down interview event and an outdoor concert with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, her collaborator on They’re Calling Me Home, the 2022 Grammy-Award-winner for Best Folk Album. Among Giddens’ many gigs since then, she has headlined at the San Francisco Jazz Festival and Carnegie Hall before entering downstage at Belk Theater for a rendezvous with the Charlotte Symphony and resident conductor Christopher James Lees. As you might presume of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens is not easily pigeonholed.

2022~Rhiannon Giddens-23Yet the Greensboro native co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops, her first Grammy Award exploit, and now has an opera firmly rooted in the Carolinas to her credit, so an audience studded with black ties and tuxes had no difficulty embracing the polyglot Giddens as their own – even as she navigated a songlist that included Parisian and Celtic selections. They may not have realized that Giddens had played Charlotte before, as far back as 2008 when I caught her with the Chocolate Drops at Northwest School of the Arts. Turrisi and bassist Jason Sypher, who shared the Cistern Yards stage with Giddens at the College of Charleston in May, accompanied her once again, though Lees and Symphony lightened their load. Nor was it obvious that Turrisi would be playing piano until late in the concert when he insinuated himself upstage.

As soon as my QR code scanner brought up the evening’s program, I could see that the Symphony offerings would be more eclectic, accessible, and daring than the set Giddens performed at Spoleto. Even before Giddens led her trio onstage, Lees and the orchestra demonstrated that they would not be content to trot out the stale and familiar, following up on John Williams’ brassy Liberty Fanfare with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Overture to Hiawatha, referencing a half dozen episodes from the composer’s trilogy of Longfellow-inspired cantatas. In the wake of the fervid Fanfare, a little more finesse could have been applied to the opening of the African Britisher’s evocation of the primeval American classic, letting the harp sound more clearly, but Lees was certainly simpatico with the shifting moods and tempos afterward. Violins were gossamer-light in “The Wooing” section, the waltzing section that followed had admirable propulsion, and the cello corps warmed the tenderest episode, before the big build in the “Reunion” finale.2022~Rhiannon Giddens-31

The truly treasurable experiences began when Giddens strode onstage and picked up her banjo; for her first song, “Spanish Mary,” was co-written with Bob Dylan, with a fine orchestral arrangement for Lees and Symphony to luxuriate in. Shedding the banjo, Giddens followed up with “Julie’s Aria” from Omar, co-written with Michael Abels, reminding us of her own capabilities as an operatic soprano. Yet within minutes, Giddens was delivering a smoking-hot version of “Water Boy,” the pile-driving prison song immortalized in recorded versions by Paul Robeson, Odetta, and Harry Belafonte.

No doubt, Giddens has listened repeatedly to all three of these cultural touchstones, for the simple hammering arrangement was borrowed from Odetta and Belafonte while the lyrical clarity hearkened back to Robeson. The Odetta recordings of “Water Boy” are unparalleled, particularly when it caps a medley begun with “I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain,” shot through with explosive grunts and gasps from the hammer-wielding prisoner. But Giddens has found her own path toward heightening the intensity at the end, and the orchestra beats delivered by Symphony added jolts of electricity throughout the piece that simple guitar strums couldn’t match. Better still, Giddens’ preamble, “At the Purchaser’s Option,” was certainly a coupling with “Water Boy” that civil rights champion Odetta would have appreciated, repeatedly delivering a “you can take my body, you can take my bones, you can take my blood but not my soul” mantra.

2022~Rhiannon Giddens-19“Mouth Music” was all we needed to hear if we needed assurance that Giddens could make a credible showing at a jazz festival, and there would be more to follow. Lees ceded the stage to the guest trio, lightening the vibe, and Giddens picked up a viola and yielded some of the spotlight to her bandmates, especially Turrisi when he sizzled on his accordion during one of the fiddle tunes. The merriment faded when Lees returned to the podium, replaced by the romance of “Autumn Leaves” en français until Giddens favored us with the English lyric as well. If you hadn’t glimpsed the program, just the tropical sway of the violins was enough to announce our return to the Carolinas and “Summertime” from the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, sweetly sung. Plenty of space was afforded to both Giddens and Symphony in the arrangement of “La Vie en Rose,” and the singer did not seem to be straining to sound like Edith Piaf, which was more than OK with me.2022~Rhiannon Giddens-15

Homing in on the end of the evening, Giddens and Symphony tacked toward the spiritual. With Turrisi at the keyboard, Giddens embarked on this final journey with “He Will See You Through,” followed by “Wayfaring Stranger,” opting to travel through this world “alone” rather than “below” or “of woe” as others have sung. These songs of faith certainly cleared the way for the affirmation and joy of Giddens’ final two selections, an irresistible pairing of “That Lonesome Road” and “Up Above My Head,” a perennial YouTube favorite that can’t be found on her albums. The last of these was memorably inspired. We all heard so much “music in the air” that we could leave more than satisfied, even without the planned encore.

New Charlotte Symphony Season Brings New Sounds and Welcome Echoes

Review: CSO Plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Strauss’s Aus Italien

2022~Elgar Cello-05By Perry Tannenbaum

October 7, 2022, Charlotte, NC – Charlotte Symphony’s conductor laureate, Christopher Warren-Green, had been gone nearly a full week, but the echo of his presence remained at the kickoff of the 2022-23 season at Knight Theater. Once again, the Orchestra fired off the “Star-Spangled Banner” to inaugurate the new season, and once again, the ensemble achieved lift-off with Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto – just like they did in 2012 at Belk Theater in Warren-Green’s first concert as musical director. Now Andrew Grams wielded the baton, his first guest shot with Symphony since 2016, and the soloist making her Charlotte debut was Israeli cellist Inbal Segev rather than Alisa Weilerstein.

Both artists have recorded the Elgar, Bloch’s Kol Nidre, and the complete Bach Cello Suites, so they may be described as kindred spirits. Perhaps Segev gets the nod over Weilerstein in being more simpatico with Grams, who began his program with PIVOT by British composer Anna Clyne. Not only did Segev commission a new Clyne concerto, DANCE, but she also premiered it on the same 2020 album where she plays the Elgar. Grams returned after intermission with Richard Strauss’s rarely-heard Aus Italien, arguably a more outlaw piece than the composer’s Don Juan.

Always forthcoming and charming when he addresses an audience, Grams likened the transitions of PIVOT to pressing the “previous channel” button on a TV remote control. True enough, shifts back and forth from the slow to the fast sections of the piece were often abrupt, incongruous jumps, sometimes startlingly so. But compared to the premiere performance, recorded at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2021, Grams seemed a bit heavy-handed in making his point. Instead of reveling in the contrasts, I found myself longing for the return of the calmer, quieter interludes – a sad waltz, a lazy Irish reel, and an Eastern European lament flavored with paprika – because Grams was more inclined to make the dominant loud sections raucous rather than catchy, though I was certainly delighted by the double-bass section providing whip-crack percussion, snapping their strings. I found myself rehabbing my appreciation for Clyne by listening to Segev’s recording of DANCE the following morning.2022~Elgar Cello-26

In person, Segev’s playing on the Elgar moved me far more than her excellent recording. Clearly, she was as comfortable with the orchestra as Grams and his musicians were with her. Hardly showy at all, her relaxed and dignified manner welcomed the audience and musicians to immerse themselves in the music along with her. Technical obstacles and difficulties never fazed Segev, so instead of capping strenuous journeys, we seemed to arrive more suddenly and dramatically at peak moments, where the cellist and Grams simultaneously turned up the voltage. The outer movements, the opening Adagio and an epic closing Allegro with no less than five sections, were teeming with rich contours and vivid contrasts. The more homogeneous middle movements, a Lento followed an Adagio, were object lessons in how an accomplished artist keeps our interest between musical tempests.

Although the Knight wasn’t filled to overflowing, a robust crowd was wildly appreciative of Inbal’s grace and verve. Nor was her encore, the Courante from Bach’s Suite No. 3, chosen to reconcile us to her departure. The standing ovation for this sparkly gem was every bit as enthusiastic as the reception for the Elgar. Deservedly.2022~Elgar Cello-22

Somewhere in Germany or possibly Austria, Christof Perick, Charlotte Symphony’s most ardent champion of Strauss, must have been smiling when Grams deftly navigated the many delights of Aus Italien. This youthful symphonic poem, premiered in 1887 while Strauss was in his early 20s, committed the folly of stealing “Funiculì, Funiculà” for the cornerstone of his final movement when composer Luigi Denza could readily sue him for the theft. But the inventiveness of the young genius is unalloyed in the previous three movements. Opening Strauss’s travelogue, “In the Country” isn’t bucolic in the manner of Copeland or Beethoven. Its serenity, filled with gravity and sadness, builds to yearning drama and then to majestic triumph. Surprisingly, for a movement titled “Amid the Ruins of Rome,” the music becomes livelier and turbulent, more like Strauss’s later heroic tone poems – for as he wanders amid the remnants of the past, he conjures up the glories.

Most impressive and precocious for me was the penultimate “At the Shore of Sorrento” movement, written more than a quarter of a century before Claude Debussy’s La Mer and no less accurate in sketching seagulls with the woodwinds and rippling waters with a harp. Grams had the Charlotte Symphony as immersed in Aus Italien as they had been in the Elgar, and the ebullience of the Orchestra in the closing “Neopolitan Folk Life” was irresistible, no matter how cheesy you might find Strauss’s “Funiculì” thievery. Hearing this still familiar tune played on bassoon and then as a march was just plain fun.

Delayed More Than Two Years, Saint-Saëns’ “Organ Symphony” Gets a Powerhouse CSO Performance

Review: Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Organ Symphony” No. 3 with the Charlotte Symphony and Paul Jacobs

 By Perry Tannenbaum

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October 1, 2022, Charlotte, NC – When Christopher Warren-Green took over as music director of the Charlotte Symphony in September 2010, nobody could foresee that his transition to conductor laureate a dozen years later at the Orchestra would coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Charlotte chapter of the American Guild of Organists – and the 55th anniversary of the mighty M.P. Möller pipe organ at the First United Methodist Church on Tryon Street. As this confluence became manifest, so did an auspicious event to celebrate it, a partnering of the Symphony with the Church in a concert showing off the magnificence of the Möller pipes in action. These dual anniversaries provided Warren-Green with his first opportunity to return to Charlotte and perform in his new role, and the glitter of a prestigious occasion was enhanced with Grammy Award-winning organist Paul Jacobs at the console.

The choice of repertoire for this special event was especially enticing, including Camille Saëns’ thunderous “Organ Symphony” No. 3, George Frideric Handel’s most familiar Organ Concerto, and a prodigious Bach encore from Jacobs that decisively upstaged Felix Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony No. 5. With the remnants of Hurricane Ian keeping many subscribers away from the opening night performance on Friday night, the Saturday sequel filled the hall – down below and up in the stately balcony – to the bursting point.

For all of us who have felt a pang of frustration each time we gazed upon the vestigial organ pipes at Belk Theater, keenest when the Saint-Saëns Symphony was presented there with a piddling electronic substitute, this concert provided rich consolations. There were also redemptive aspects to this special program, for both Symphony subscribers and the Orchestra’s musicians, since the last time that the “Organ Symphony” was programmed at Belk Theater on March 20, 2020, it was one of the first musical cancellations of the COVID pandemic. All of those rehearsals were not in vain after all.

My own enthusiasm for organ recordings goes back to the vinyl days of Daniel Chorzempa’s performances of the complete concertos and Peter Hurford’s renowned compilation of Bach’s organ works, later reissued as a 17-CD doorstop. Recordings of the “Organ Symphony,” on the other hand, were always earmarked in audiophile reviews as demo treasures that could prove the mettle of cream-of-the-crop loudspeakers far beyond my budget. With the advent of the Charlotte Bach Festival four years ago, we’ve been able to hear live performances of the Bach solos by topnotch organists, a rare enough blessing. But I’d never hoped to hear a live rendition of a Handel Organ Concerto, even on a piddling portable at the Belk.2022~Saint-Saëns-06

If your concept of classical organ has been shaped by Bach, who inspired countless grandiose organ compositions by notables of every generation since – and the ginormous instruments around the world built to play them – then the sunny, playful sound of Handel’s concerti could take you aback. Of course, the nickname of Concerto No. 13, “The Cuckoo & the Nightingale,” would have provided a broad hint if you picked up a program entering the sanctuary. Although marked Larghetto, there was nothing solemn about the opening movement, which began with Jacobs parroting the orchestral intro. The true merriment of the piece became evident in the ensuing Allegro, where cuckoo-clock sounds proliferated. As Jacobs took greater command, he played a little duet with himself, those plodding cuckoo sounds facing off with some nightingale filigree in the treble.

The middle movement was marked Organo ad libitum in our programs, in contrast with the Chorzempa version, where the “ad libs” were split into two tracks explicitly adapted from two movements of a Handel violin sonata. In the penultimate movement, another Larghetto, Jacobs finally gave us a hushed foretaste of the grander churchly sounds he would offer up in his Bach encore. Nearly as virtuosic as his crowdpleasing cuckoo-nightingale counterpoint, the closing Allegro was the most jocund and celebratory movement of this concerto – and arguably the best incentive for seeking out the other 15 on recordings. Adding to the pleasure, the silky Symphony violins were as cheery as the organ, and Jacobs crowned this confection by soloing with his feet on the Möller’s pedals.2022~Saint-Saëns-14

There’s little shame in not identifying a Bach organ work when it’s played – unless it’s the famed Toccata and Fugue in D minor with its instantly recognizable opening and Gothic drama. Not knowing the precise title, key, and BWV catalog number certainly didn’t deter the First United audience from showering worshipful admiration on Jacobs’ dazzling performance. For the record, it was Bach’s A Minor Fugue BWV 543. The roar from the crowd in their protracted standing ovation was nearly as stunning as the performance. You couldn’t question this massive communal judgment when Jacobs had given life to the idea of “pulling out all the stops,” but we could wonder whether anything afterwards would measure up.

Reduced in number for the Church’s oratory platform and hampered by an acoustic environment less friendly to visiting orchestras than to the house organ, Charlotte Symphony gave Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” the old college try for their former maestro. There was an unmistakable contrast in the opening movement between the sublimity of the Andante introduction and the turbulence that follows in the dominant Allegro con fuoco section. Mendelssohn’s middle movements retained their engaging contrast as well, though the sanctuary’s sonics stole a bit of their sparkle. It helped that the Allegro vivace presented the work’s most familiar melody and that Symphony played the penultimate Andante so tenderly. Most impactful, however, was how Warren-Green shaped the closing Chorale with its joyous sunny components, the woodland purity of the Andante con moto and the conquering march of the Allegro vivace. Brassy, stately, and triumphant, the “Reformation” ended grandly with the stamp of Rose Lipham’s timpani.2022~Saint-Saëns-07

While Symphony’s performance of the Mendelssohn did not match the éclat of Jacobs’ exploits with the Bach, the verve of their assault on the Chorale boded well for the Saint-Saëns masterwork when Warren-Green and the organist returned after intermission. A few more musicians fortified the strings onstage during the break, but the full thunder of the “Organ Symphony” isn’t unleashed until the Maestoso section midway through the second (and final) movement, a sudden onslaught that must have snapped more than a few heads back. At last, this was the prime reason why it was worth hearing this massive work live with the might of a true church organ, an unforgettable experience. But that sforzando can be simulated in your living room easily enough if you wish to startle yourself without the more unique experience of feeling a whole sanctuary, with a congregation of over a thousand, trembling to its foundations. What most loudspeakers cannot deliver at home came earlier in the piece, when the opening movement Allegro moderato gave way to an almost serene Poco adagio.

Here Jacobs and the Möller organ produced a more primal subterranean sound, eerie and uncanny in its force, an octave or more below what most loudspeakers can audibly reproduce with anything approaching this power. Sitting in the second row, I felt like a monster whale or a legendary Leviathan was about to surface from directly below me. Warren-Green and his orchestra were in top form in the first halves of Saint-Saëns’ two movements, particularly appealing in the ominous Allegro moderato that opens the second movement, surely the most familiar melody in this score. Most thrilling was when the orchestra vied in sheer volume with the pipe organ and Symphony’s new conductor laureate sleekly accelerated the tempo into the rousing Allegro finish. Coming at the end of an evening suffused with music from the “king of instruments,” these moments had all the grandeur of a coronation.

Spoleto Roars Back, Honoring Africa, Arabic, and Alice (Coltrane)

Review: Jazz @ Spoleto Festival USA

 By Perry Tannenbaum

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It’s difficult to imagine what the stage and the audience would have looked like at Gaillard Center if Rhiannon Giddens’ new opera, Omar, had premiered as scheduled at Spoleto Festival USA in May 2020. #BlackLivesMatter and the COVID-19 pandemic have affected the trajectory of our lives since then, also deflecting the course of the Festival. Leadership of the Festival has changed, with Mena Mark Hanna replacing retired general director Nigel Redden, while Giddens added a half hour to her new work and ditched her stage director over artistic differences.

So when we saw more masks and dashikis in the audience than we had ever seen at Gaillard before – and more Arabic script on the scenery and costumes of Omar than I could remember in all my previous 29 years at Spoleto – it really felt like the Festival had taken a hairpin turn under Hanna’s leadership. But if you look at the past three Festivals dispassionately, including the canceled 2020 edition, you must also realize that the past two years have also been, to a large extent, a timed-release rollout of the Festival that didn’t happen two years ago.2022~Spoleto-202

At the abbreviated Festival last year, held mostly outdoors, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, The Cookers, and the Two Wings retrospective on The Music of Black America in Migration produced by Jason and Alicia Moran were all rainchecks from the previous year. Similarly, this year’s concerts by Linda May Han Oh and Fabian Almazan, Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, and The War and Treaty were all holdovers from 2020, as were the appearance of Machine de Cirque and the staging of Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood.

If the back-to-back appearances Youssou N’Dour and Nduduzo Makhathini during the Memorial Day weekend at The Cistern seemed like a spirited invocation of Mother Africa in response to #BlackLivesMatter, it should be remembered that Abdullah Ibrahim and Eyaka were also signed up for Spoleto 2020 months ahead of their scheduled June 2 concert, which would have happened a mere eight days after George Floyd’s murder.

Since Redden had cited #BlackLivesMatter as a key reason why he had decided to resign after Spoleto 2021, it really did feel like opening weekend in 2022 – with the opening of Omar followed by back-to-back-to-back concerts by Giddens, N’Dour, and Makhathini – was both an endorsement of that movement and a delayed, but still powerful, denunciation of the 2017 Muslim Ban. Giddens’ Omar dramatized The Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, the only known account by an African slave written in Arabic, placing special emphasis on Omar’s Islamic faith, his spirituality, and the Christian proselytizing he was subjected to by even his most benign master.

Another layer of Black spirituality graced the Festival during its second weekend when Ravi Coltrane paid tribute to his mother, Alice Coltrane, and her pathfinding Universal Consciousness album of 1971. That universality embraced India, Egypt, continental Africa, and the Holy Land according to the original Turina Aparna (Alice Coltrane) liner notes, and the all-star quintet assembled by the son included harp sensation Brandee Younger and keyboardist David Virelles as the chief conjurers of the mother.2022~Spoleto-139

What a wondrous concert that was at Cistern Yard, concentrating on the seminal works the elder Coltrane composed and released in the 1970s, including the title pieces from Universal Consciousness and Journey in Satchidanada (1971) served up with prime cuts from Ptah, The El Daoud (1970) and Eternity (1976). Perhaps the summit of that experience was when Ravi extended his mom Alice’s ethereal “Journey in Satchidanada” with a reverent excursion into John Coltrane’s “Alabama” from 1963, saluting his dad.

Younger was a constant delight, especially sublime when she was spotlighted in Alice’s “Turia & Ramakrishna,” while Virelles at the piano reminded us that the Coltrane matriarch’s sound at the acoustic keyboard was not that distant from McCoy Tyner’s, the pianist in her husband’s famed quartet. While there was no organ onstage to fully replicate the range of instruments that Alice played on Universal Consciousness, Virelles did double with an electric piano, occasionally playing both keyboards simultaneously.

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Raindrops kept falling intermittently during the concert, becoming an issue near the end, when Ravi allowed the audience to coax him into playing an encore, “Los Caballos.” Stagehands did not appear panicked about the sound system, but it looked like Virelles turned off his electric to be extra careful. Meanwhile, Coltrane switched from tenor to soprano sax for the closer and gave the other members of his rhythm section, bassist Rashaan Carter and the ebullient Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums, extra space for some fine soloing. Carter cooled us off after Ravi and Virelles brought their fire, and then Watts turned back the heat.

It was Younger, of course, who made the concert experience so unique, the sprinkling of her runs and glisses more refreshing than the raindrops.

There was no downpour the following night when we showed up early at Cistern Yard, but this time Spoleto officials decided to be more cautious with percussionist/composer Tyshawn Sorey, the second big star at the Festival – and, following Giddens, the second MacArthur Genius. Two days after his jazz gig, Sorey was slated to conduct a symphony orchestra at Sottile Theater in a program completely devoted to his classical compositions, so the abundance of caution was warranted, and the backup site, TD Arena, proved to be perfectly calibrated sound-wise.Screenshot 2022-06-27 at 19-27-22 The Spoleto Festival USA Roars Back

Sorey’s jazz trio, featuring bassist Matt Brewer and the estimable Aaron Diehl on piano, linked the pieces on their program together more frequently than Coltrane had done the night before. For those of us who didn’t pick up Sorey’s new Mesmerism release after the concert, already sold-out in its first limited vinyl edition, we can only guess whether the performance differed significantly from the recording in its length and nearly seamless format. Diehl marked the borderline between Horace Silver’s “Enchantment” and Bill Evans’ “Detour Ahead” clearly enough, but the hand-offs between Diehl and Brewer, who took an epic-length solo, piled detour upon detour, so it was difficult to determine when – or if – we had crossed over to “Autumn Leaves.”

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Diehl barely grazed the familiar Joseph Kosma melody, so it was helpful that, after Sorey paused – “Are you still with us?” – he let us know where we were amid the titles he had announced at the start. The boundary between Paul Motian’s “From Time to Time” and Muhal Richard Abrams’ “Two Over One” was far more easily discerned, yet the onset of Duke Ellington’s “REM Blues” was like coming out of an impressionistic tunnel into sunshine, Diehl reveling in his mastery of a totally different idiom and Sorey at last unleashing his full artillery.

Linda May Han Oh had actually recorded with Sorey on a Vijay Iyer session for ECM just before Spoleto’s 2020 slate was announced, so the separate appearances of bassist and the percussionist over the same weekend could be seen as serendipitous. Or merely premature, for they will be touring with Iyer in Europe – and playing Newport – during July. It sounded like parenthood happened for Oh and her pianist husband Fabian Almazan sometime between the date their debut was supposed to take place and when it actually did. Oh described herself and Almazan as new parents – just not brand new.

While their household might have been changing, the venue where they would perform – six sets over five days – definitely changed, moving them from the Simons Center, on the College of Charleston campus, to Festival Hall. A welcome shift for most festivalgoers, since the setup now included cocktail tables, changing the vibe from clinical to cabaret.

Bracing myself for the “postmodern sonic disruption” touted in Spoleto’s 2020 season brochure, in its pull quote from The Boston Globe, I happily found – attending two of the six sets – that NPR’s description in the 2022 preview, citing Oh’s “gift of liquid dynamism” was far more apt. Though Almazan had installed some electronics on Spoleto’s house piano that could alter the sound, it would be a gross exaggeration to declare that they were employed more than 5% of the time – or that the disruptions he created were more virulent than the sounds of a growling ogre the first time we heard him playing on “Una Foto.”

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Almazan proved to be rather charming and self-deprecating as he introduced another of his originals, “Pet Steps Sitters Theme Song,” freely admitting that it was rejected within his own family for advertising purposes, “and for good reason.” That good reason turned out to be the ample chops he lavished upon his melody in embroidering it, not as dark or thundering as McCoy Tyner but definitely devoid of saccharine.

Playing electric bass as well upright, Oh would have surprised those on hand who were only familiar with her through tracks that are readily searchable on Spotify. YouTube followers are more likely to have experienced Oh’s liquid on her Fender Jazz Bass and her original songs. Oh’s notably vibrato-less vocals certainly covered a broad topical spectrum, ranging from anchovy innards in “Ikan Billis” to “Jus ad Bellum,” dedicated to people who find themselves caught up in the Ukraine conflict.

Almazan’s compositions were mostly instrumental, which Oh usually played on acoustic bass, “Sol Del Mar” and “The Vicarious Life” impressing me as much as the composer’s abortive foray into advertising. He also challenged Oh with an original song of his own, “Everglades,” which resulted in a pleasing overall balance of Oh vocals and instrumentals.

Programmed midway during the Memorial Day weekend celebration of Africa and Islam, Youssou N’Dour was closer in spirit to the true jazz of pianist-composer Nduduzo Makhathini, who followed him the next night, than he was to Rhiannon Giddens singing and playing banjo, with the spare accompaniment of Jason Sypher on bass and her husband Francesco Turrisi on accordion and piano. Nearly 40 years into his career, N’Dour’s voice is still sensational and strikingly expressive. The interplay between his incantatory chants and the mbalax rhythms of his percussion-heavy 12-man band often paralleled the sound of Latin jazz vocalists volleying back and forth with their orchestras – minus the brass.

Dive In by Leigh Webber leighwebber.com

With Lonnie Plaxico filling in as his bassist on short notice, Makhathini and his quartet seemed buoyed and refreshed rather than tentative or nervous, bringing noticeably more energy to their performances at Cistern Yard than you’ll hear on his recent studio recording, In the Spirit of Ntu, which isn’t exactly tame. The percolating Bitches Brew aspects of that new release, along with the coolness of Robin Fassie-Kock’s flugelhorn and trumpet, were dispelled by this more compact combo, with alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw vying for dominance with the leader’s powerful keyboard style, a meshing of Ibrahim and Tyner.

No less than three tunes came from Spirit of Ntu, including “Emlilweni,” “Amathongo,” and “Unonkanyamba.” Going back a couple of years, Makhathini unearthed “Umyalez’oPhuthumayo,” a jagged gem from Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworld, and gave it a fresh polishing so that it no longer sounded influenced by Ornette Coleman, though Francisco Mela’s pounding and thrashing on drums retained plenty of bite.

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Tenderest of the selections was “For You,” reaching back to Makhathini’s 2015 album, Listening to the Ground, and offering Plaxico his best opportunity to shine. Among the three vocals in the set, “Amathongo” was probably the leader’s most impressive, his quicksilver soloing on piano as delightful as his incantatory singing while Shaw switched briefly to soprano sax. As for the most prodigious face-off between Shaw on alto and Makhathini, that was “Ithemba” from the 2017 Ikhambi album, a groovy powerhouse noticeably influenced by the John Coltrane Quartet.

In. the wake of last year’s abbreviated jazz lineup, headlined by Preservation Hall and The Cookers, this year’s not only felt vaster but also younger, more audacious. Spoleto was resoundingly back in 2022, appealing to a newly energized audience, with Sorey, Ravi, and Makhathini especially demonstrating they have more to give us in years to come.

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum and Leigh Webber

Charlotte Bach Festival Ends in Splendor, With Roaring Trumpets and a Double Dose of Oratorios

Review: Bach’s Easter and Ascension Oratorios

By Perry Tannenbaum

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June 18, 2022, Charlotte, NC – Founded in 2017 with the North Carolina Baroque Festival, Bach Akademie Charlotte presented a precocious and ambitious first edition of the Charlotte Bach Festival in June 2018. Unmistakably modeled after the renowned Oregon Bach Festival, where Akademie artistic director Scott Allen Jarrett has frequently performed, Charlotte Bach figured to flourish in a soil that is rich in churches and choirs. The second Festival in 2019, bookended by Orchestral Suite No. 2 and the St. Matthew Passion, was even more bodacious than the first, which had opened with the Orchestral Suite No. 1 and closed with the Mass in B Minor. These two acts would be tough to follow at a third Festival, but until COVID struck in 2020, nobody knew how tough. Barely three weeks after I had seen the Festival schedule for June 2020, the pandemic cancellations began, eventually including Charlotte Bach III. By the time Charlotte Bach 2022 opened at Myers Park Presbyterian Church on June 11, the Festival had been in hibernation longer than it had been live, soldiering on online with abbreviated lineups in a virtual format.

During the hiatus, there was some notable reorganizing and rebranding within Charlotte Bach, but instead of suffering any attrition, the overall lineup for 2022 was actually more robust than the one announced for 2020 – with numerous additions, one very logical substitution, and no sacrifices. Instead of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 on opening night, Aisslinn Nosky played Bach Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, BWV 1041 – the same piece she had played and conducted in her Charlotte Symphony debut in January 2018.

The performance highlighted Nosky’s installation as the concertmaster of Bach Akademie Charlotte Orchestra. After announcing Nosky’s new role at the Festival (she had been a guest artist at the 2019 fest), Jarrett announced that Guy Fishman (a guest artist at the inaugural 2018 Festival) had signed on as principal cellist with the BA|Charlotte Orchestra. Not to be overshadowed, Fishman reappeared in a midweek “Bach in a New Light” concert, playing a Domenico Gabrielli morsel and Bach’s first two Cello Suites, accompanied by laser light projections from Salty Robot Productions.

Duplicating its opening and closing concerts, respectively, in Asheville and Winston-Salem, Charlotte Bach also widened its reach within the Queen City, proving that the McColl Center could be an edgy and funky enough site for the Fishman light show and that the spectacularly renovated Sandra Levine Theater, on the Queens University campus, was acoustically attuned to the splendors of Bach’s Easter and Ascension Oratorios. Maybe there was some doubt whether the Easter and Ascension pairing at the Levine sufficiently upstaged the Violin Concerto and Dixit Dominus combo at Myers Park Presbyterian to definitively rise to the loftiness of the Festival’s finale placement and Masterwork billing. Whatever the reason, Handel’s Zadok the Priest was added to the already ample triple-trumpet heft of the Bach oratorios. Thank you!

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Even before the BA|Charlotte Festival Choir stood for the first time, the trumpet triumvirate – Steven Marquardt, Perry Sutton, and Josh Cohen – held forth brilliantly in the Easter Oratorio Sinfonia, gracefully counterbalanced by oboists Geoffrey Burgess and Margaret Owens. Tension and anticipation before the choral outbreak of resurrection jubilation were further sustained as Burgess lingered as the sole solo voice, playing a lovely intervening Adagio. Joined by timpanist Jonathan Hess, the trumpet trio then returned at full throttle, heralding the Chorus and its hearty “Kommt, ellet und laufet” (Come, hasten and run) invitation. Tenor Steven Soph and bass Jason Steigerwalt, so imposing as the Evangelist and Jesus (Steigerwalt singing the baritone role) in the Festival’s three midweek lecture-concerts devoted to Bach’s St. John Passion, then sang a duet, clarifying that it is the resurrection that has gladdened their hearts.

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Appropriately enough, newly rising talent took over most of the arias and recitative that followed, demonstrating the prestige of gaining a spot with the Festival Choir as Vocal Fellows. Bass Chris Talbot as John, in the first Recitative section that followed the huge chorale, and soprano Addy Sterrett as Mary Jacobi, subsequently drew their own solos. But tenor David Morales also reappeared as Peter in the Recitative following Sterrett’s lovely “Selle deine Spezereien” (O Soul, your spices) Aria, by far the longest Aria of the night, and alto Eliana Mei-Xing Barwinski also returned as Mary Magdalene.

Yet it was charming to see Festival Choir regulars also in the spotlight, Soph backed by Owens and Burgess (both switching to recorders) and alto Sylvia Leith accompanied by Owens on oboe d’amore. Marquardt, Sutton, and Cohen returned to the stage with their elongated plunger-less trumpets to join the Festival Choir once again, which had found something fresh to celebrate in their finale after much grieving, yearning, and sighing from the vocal and instrumental soloists during their absence: Jesus had conquered Hell and the Devil, and Heaven’s gates were opening for the Lion of Judah.

Alternately known as Coronation Anthem No. 1, Zadok the Priest also creates tension and anticipation with a churning crescendo of strings that could remind you of Philip Glass minimalism if you didn’t see the thunder and lightning of chorus and brass standing onstage, readying for action. In an instant, understatement flipped to overstatement when the storm broke loose at the Levine, for neither Zadok nor the prophet Nathan is exactly an Old Testament headliner of the magnitude of Solomon, held at bay until the end of the opening line.

2022~Charlotte Bach Fest-132Handel certainly packs plenty of into the brassy choral payload, less than five minutes long, that pounces upon us after the relatively quiet preamble that gurgles along for more than 25% of the composition. Bach might have dispatched a solo vocalist to narrate the prose of Zadok and Nathan anointing Solomon as King of Israel, saving the exclamations – “God save the King!” “Amen!” “Alleluia!” and “May the King live for ever!” – for the Choir. No such middle ground applied to this Handel masterwork, and Jarrett, the brass, and the Festival Choir all reveled in firing away at us in unrelenting fortissimo. Collectively, they were thrilling.

Shorter than the Easter Oratorio, Bach’s Ascension Oratorio was sensibly paired with Zadok after intermission, showcasing the Festival Choir more intensively. The more compacted – and more symmetrical – scheme has its choral segments evenly spaced at the beginning, middle, and end of the oratorio, rather than merely as two massive bookends, while discarding the two instrumental preambles that ushered in the Easter story. Instead of the same vocalists we had seen before, four more permanent members of the Festival Choir handled the two Arias and six Recitatives evenly distributed around the midpoint chorale. More satisfying than this architectural symmetry, of course, was the sustained excellence of the singing, underscoring the awesome depth and quality of the ensemble.

2022~Charlotte Bach Fest-115Three of the four featured Ascension vocalists have been with Bach Akademie since the beginning, except for tenor Gene Stenger, the Evangelist, who signed up in 2019. The Evangelist role gave Stenger the lion’s share of the scriptural verses in this Oratorio’s libretto, stitched together from Luke, Mark, and Acts, with bass Edmund Milly, no less dignified, standing in for the Two Men in White Apparel who promise the Apostles that Jesus will return from Heaven “in like manner” as they have just seen him go. Besides that key passage, Milly drew a more poignant Recitative earlier in the narrative, “Ach, Jesu, ist dein Abschied schon so nah?” (Ah, Jesus, is Thy parting now so near?)

Bach’s plum Arias here both went to women, alto Kim Leeds poignantly following Milly’s recit with “Ach, bleibe doch, mein liebstes Leben” (Ah stay, my dearest life) and following him again in Part 2, after the angelic promise, with another lovely plaint, the “Ach ja! So komme bald zurück” (Ah yes! So come back soon again) recitative. Stegner’s final recitative, concluding the narrative with a brief mashup of Acts 1:12 and Luke 24:52, sufficed to flip the mood from gloom to joy, giving soprano Margaret Carpenter Haigh the opportunity to rejoice greatly in the final Aria of the evening, vying with Sterrett and Soph and Leeds for the mightiest vocal conquest of the night, surpassing them only in charisma.

Enhancing the dramatic contrast between sorrow and celebration, Haigh could draw upon the ample instrumental support of three wind players playing contrapuntally behind her – oboist Burgess, and two flutists, Colin St-Martin and Rodrigo Tarrazza – the first musicians to rise up during the entire Ascension. Switching places with co-principal Marquardt, Cohen played lead trumpet in the latter oratorio. All three brass players returned from the wings for the final Chorus, an earthshaking fantasia set to a stanza from a Gottfried Wilhelm Sacer hymn, summoning the Christian savior to reappear.

He may not have quite reigned for ever and ever yet, but Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) seemed to have retained much of his power 272 years after his death, thanks in part to better playing and singing at the Charlotte Bach Festival than any performance this imperishable genius may have actually heard in his lifetime. Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759) has also had a pretty fine run, as the two baroque greats, born less than a month apart, close in on their 340th birthdays. It was good to have the elder Handel take his place in the Charlotte Bach programming for 2022, helping the to enhance our delight this year and to sharpen our eagerness for Festivals to come.

Originally published on 6/21 at CVNC.org