I am medically advised to be cautious about attending crowded public events, including Richmond Symphony concerts. The orchestra is making video streams of its mainstage Symphony Series performances available to ticket-holders. The stream of this program became accessible on Nov. 15.
Valentina Peleggi & Chia-Hsuan Lin conducting
with Lara Downes, piano
& Richmond Symphony Chorus
Nov. 11-12, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center
In its latest mainstage concerts, the Richmond Symphony presented music of struggle and aspiration, bringing African-American and South Asian accents to European symphonic and choral forms, and forming a compelling spiritual narrative out of three works as distinct as they were complementary.
Singling out a highlight is impossible, so I’ll address the three pieces in reverse chronological order, starting with the premiere of Adolphus Hailstork’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (“The Peaceable Kingdom”).
Hailstork, a longtime Virginia resident and professor at Old Dominion University, is perhaps the most prominent living Black American composer, certainly among the most prolific. He has been on a roll in the past few years, introducing, among other works, a Fourth Symphony; “A Knee on the Neck,” a requiem cantata on the 2020 murder of George Floyd; and “JFK: the Last Speech” for soprano, narrator and orchestra, which recently received one of its first airings by Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra.
The 82-year-old composer has described himself as a “cultural hybrid” – a boy chorister at an Episcopal cathedral who went on to study European classical composition (Nadia Boulanger was one of his teachers). During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he began to absorb influences from African-American folk and vernacular music. His works have sometimes gravitated toward one or the other tradition, but more often have reflected both. “I think some future musicologist will be pulling his hair out trying to figure out who this Hailstork guy was, and that’s OK,” he told San Francisco Classical Voice’s Michael Zwiebach in a 2020 interview.
Hailstork was induced by pianist Lara Downes to write a Second Piano Concerto (his First was written three decades ago); what he calls her “gentle style” brought to mind the painting by the early 19th-century American folk artist and Quaker minister Edward Hicks after which the concerto is titled.
Hicks’ iconic painting (housed at Washington’s National Gallery of Art) depicts a cluster of animals, predators and prey peaceably assembled by angels, while in the background a group of American Indians and European colonists exchange greetings and gifts. Hailstork’s concerto is a somewhat comparable sonic encounter, in which formerly colonized and/or enslaved cultures express themselves within a European classical format – the rondo, fast-slow-fast with interpolations.
A recurring rhythmic-tonal figure, rising from a vibraphone, bathes the orchestration in a resonant sound recalling Indonesian gamelan music. Dance rhythms, as well as melodies and harmonies, recall Black American and other African-diaspora styles. This combination is unusual, if not unique. The orchestra is modestly scaled – strings, single woodwinds, tuned percussion – and the piano is less a solo protagonist than a participant in the ensemble.
Hailstork’s future musicologist, between hair pulls, might liken “The Peaceable Kingdom” to the decorously festive and tuneful sinfonia concertante, a popular form among the early classical composers of 18th-century Europe.
That was the spirit of the performers in this premiere. Pianist Downes, aside from some harmonically crunchy solo passages, was a discreet presence alongside or within the orchestra, and the symphony, led by Valentina Peleggi, its music director, maintained a balance between animation and lyricism, as agreeable as the music itself.
Peleggi was joined by Chia-Hsuan Lin, the symphony’s associate conductor, on pairs of podiums as they led the orchestra and Richmond Symphony Chorus in Roxanna Panufnik’s “Across the Line of Dreams.” The work was introduced in 2019 by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and University of Maryland Concert Choir, conducted by Marin Alsop and Peleggi. Edward Maclary, the chorusmaster in the premiere, prepared the Symphony Chorus for these performances.
With a text by Jessica Duchen, Panufnik’s cantata-like work celebrates of the lives of Harriet Tubman, a leading figure in the Underground Railroad that rescued Black Americans from enslavement before the American Civil War, and a contemporary of Tubman’s, Rani Lakshmibai (Rani of Jhansi), an Indian princess who was killed while leading an 1857 rebellion against the British East India Company. (Victorian Brits called the conflict the Sepoy Mutiny; Indians call it the First War of Independence.)
The two women are represented by separate orchestras, Tubman by winds, brass and percussion (conducted here by Lin), Rani by strings, harp and piano (led by Peleggi), with separate choirs joining each instrumental group. The orchestras and choruses combine in a dialogue in an assertively triumphant finale. Panufnik’s score echoes melodies from Rani’s India (including a lament on her death) and the spirituals that Tubman would have known.
Peleggi and Lin managed their forces expertly, finely attuned to contrasts of sounds and styles as well as the tricky cross-rhythms of the final section. The singers, declaratively songful in the portraits of Tubman and Rani, rhythmically pointed and energetic in the finale, sounded fully conversant with styles that symphonic choruses rarely encounter. (Having a director who took part in the premiere no doubt helped.)
Among the many ”freedom” works composed during the sexual and racial reckoning movements of recent years, “Across the Line of Dreams” stands out, both for its challenging stylistic contrasts and combinations of instruments and voices and for its treatment of conflict and resolution.
The program opened with William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony,” introduced in 1934 by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall that was broadcast on the CBS radio network. Acclaimed at the time, the work soon disappeared from concert programs, heard mainly on a 1963 recording by Stokowski, which used Dawson’s revised version heard today. Only in the last 20 years has it been played with any frequency.
Dawson created what may be the most explicit “answer” to Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony (No. 9 in E minor), the manifestation of the Czech composer’s belief that the music of African-Americans could be the wellspring of a distinctively American classical style. Black composers – Dawson, James P. Johnson, William Grant Still, Florence Price – and a few Whites, notably George Gershwin, realized Dvořák’s prophecy; but for most listeners, it found its voice mainly in blues, jazz and more recent popular styles.
The “Negro Folk Symphony” represents the Black American experience in three movements titled “The Bond of Africa,” “Hope in the Night” and “O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star!” Dawson’s themes evoke spirituals, work and play songs, and the rhythms of the piece reflect his exploration of traditional African music.
Peleggi led a reading that was soulfully lyrical and rich, at times sultry, in atmosphere, the tone established at the outset by Dominic Rotella’s French horn solo, and subsequently by Lucian Avalon on English horn, playing a melody in “Hope in the Night” reminiscent of the “Goin’ Home” theme of the largo in Dvořák’s “New World.” Flutist Jennifer Debiec Lawson was a key voice in all three works on the program, and the orchestra’s percussionists audibly relished their essential roles.
The stream of this program remains accessible until June 30, 2024. Access: $30. Details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX); http://richmondsymphony.com
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