April 27 & 29, 2023
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Michael Francis, conductor; Nicole Cabell, soprano; Lucas Meachem, baritone.
Lera AUERBACH: Icarus
Richard WAGNER: “Dawn” and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” from Götterdämmerung
Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: A Sea Symphony
Mark Gresham | 29 APR 2023
The desire to go beyond boundaries is as essential to human nature as it is to create them, perhaps more so. Thursday night’s concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus exemplified that theme, featuring music by Lera Auerbach, Richard Wagner, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Guest conductor Michael Francis, music director of the Florida Orchestra, led the program impressively. He was a late replacement for the scheduled guest conductor Nicholas Carter, who had encountered visa delay issues, according to a spokesperson for the ASO. That problem is neither specific to Carter nor new but is becoming observably more frequent across the classical music industry.
The program opened with Lera Auerbach’s Icarus, a 12-minute tone poem that premiered in 2011 as a standalone work. However, its origins go back to 2006, derived as it was from the final two movements of Auerbach’s Symphony No. 1, “Chimera” (movements 6. “Humum mandere (To bite the dust)” and 7. “Requiem for Icarus”) taken out of context. Even that symphony itself was born of the music for Auerbach’s 2004 ballet in three acts, The Little Mermaid (hence the symphony’s “Chimera” nickname).
Composer Lera Auerbach. (credit: Rafael DeStella)
Born in 1973 during the Soviet era in Chelyabinsk, Russia, just east of the Ural Mountains, Auerbach came from a musical family and learned to read music at the same age she learned to read words and is a skilled wordsmith in addition to being a composer, conductor, and pianist. Auerbach is also a visual artist, notably creating sculptures in bronze that have associations with her music. She also developed an early love for Greek mythology, so the nicknames for her music are not surprising. But we should heed Auerbach’s own statement that “The title Icarus was given to this work after it was written. All my music is abstract, but by giving evocative titles, I invite the listener to feel free to imagine, to access his own memories, associations.”
However, much of human knowledge and thinking involves allegory. When a piece of music is tagged with an evocative title, listeners will try to find symbolic connections between them. The mind abandons abstraction.
In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of Daedalus, a master craftsman who was the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. King Minos suspected the father and son had revealed the labyrinth’s secrets to his enemy King Theseus of Athens, so he imprisoned them. They escaped using wings Daedalus constructed from feathers, thread, cloth, and beeswax. Daedalus warned Icarus to fly neither too low nor too high, but Icarus flew too close to the sun, melting the beeswax in his wings. He fell from the sky into the sea and drowned.
It would be easy, then, for the listener to associate episodes of ascending figures with the efforts of Icarus to fly higher, closer to the sun, an act of both freedom and hubris.
It was a brilliant and colorful aural experience with a wide dynamic and expressive range. Busy opening strings set an initial tone that seemed anxious and fearful, but passages were frequently beautiful, often with a mysterious air. Auerbach effectively incorporated into the orchestration a Theremin, an electronic instrument controlled by body capacitance through the proximity of the player’s hands to its antennae invented by Leon Theremin and patented in 1928. Whether combined with other instruments (passages in unison with violins were especially convincing) or with its own unique and prominent part (such as a long glissando down to the depths of the orchestra’s lower range), it afforded the music an eerie, somewhat supernatural glow. The Theremin player (alas, not credited in the program) was Arturo Fernandez, from Boston.
The program turned a second time to mythology with “Dawn” and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” an abridged orchestral excerpt from the Prologue of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, without the singers. You can drop the idea of “abstract music” as Wagner intended the music to portray the drama fully. Wagner held the ideal of unifying all art forms, an aesthetic cause culminating in his four-opera Ring Cycle. Rooted in Norse and Germanic mythology, the epic cycle follows a magical ring that grants its owner the power to rule the world. Wagner employed leitmotifs representing characters, objects, emotions, and ideas to convey literary symbolisms and meanings, synthesizing music and storytelling in a unified whole. Allegory is everything.
The ominous “Fate” motif opens the music, and the sun rises. A horn call announces Sigfried; Brünnhilde’s passionate theme arises in the clarinet. They pledge their love, Brünnhilde gives Sigfried her horse, and he gives her the magic gold ring. She casts spells to protect him, and he embarks on his heroic journey, and as the music nears its end, the “Ring,” “Curse,” and “Fate” motifs weave together in a foreshadowing of doom.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform “A Sea Symphony” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (credit: Raftermen)
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ expansive 1909 setting of texts by American poet Walt Whitman, A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1), quickly established a solid place for him among English composers. It is a true choral symphony, using the chorus more in just over an hour than Gustav Mahler’s much longer Symphony No. 8, which premiered in the same year (1910).
It is also undoubtedly the ASO&C’s signature post-Shaw-era choral work, a piece they never performed under the great choral master, winning three 2003 Grammy Awards for Best Classical Album, Best Choral Performance, and Best Engineered Album (Michael Bishop, engineer).
The first thing heard was stunningly precise and majestic fanfare in trumpets and horns on a B♭ minor chord, equaled in impact by the opening fortissimo chords of the chorus on the words, “Behold, the sea itself,” with that remarkable shift to a D major chord on the word “sea,” as if opening up the sky as the swirling tutti orchestra entered, launching the first of the symphony’s four movements: “A Song for All Seas, All Ships.”
What an enormous contrast from the St. Mathew Passion performance of March 20! Here, with A Sea Symphony, we heard what the Atlanta Symphony Chorus should sound like, prepared by director of choruses Norman Mackenzie and led on this evening under the clearly capable baton of Mr. Francis.
Baritone Lucas Meachem and soprano Nicole Cabell. (credit: Raftermen)
Baritone soloist Lucas Meachem got the lion’s share of the solo work; his voice was bright, solid, and lucid, conveying Whitman’s texts in a powerful, appealing manner.
American soprano Nicole Cabell, last heard by ASO audiences in the orchestra’s November 2019 performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, demonstrated her ease of vocal production and lovely rounded sound in her solos.
The two together (e.g., in the fourth movement at “O we can wait no longer,/Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas”), whether in counterpoint or joined on the same melodic line in octaves, made for a good combination of different vocal timbres.
Of the four movements (“On the Beach at Night, Alone;” “Scherzo: The Waves;” and “The Explorers.”) the final one is by far the longest, not quite half of the entire symphony, although it can feel like it is, given a compositional habit of Vaughan Williams continuing to extend a form beyond where one might musically expect a conclusion to take place. He keeps spinning it out. After all, the composer does have to fulfill the musical setting of his chosen words and their message and finish telling the story; in this case, Whitman’s allegory between the journey of a ship and the metaphysical journey of a soul, a common theme for the poet. Here the programming ties back in with the heroic but ill-fated flight of Icraus, and the similar doomed heroic journey of Sigfried, but with Whitman’s poetry (and perhaps Vaughn Williams’ music) pressing to transcend both metaphysical and humanist perspectives of life and death.
Important and relevant to both the Icarus and Sigfried stories, there is one line of Whitman’s text that is curiously left out of the ASO program book, although it appears near the end in both the full orchestral and the vocal score: “And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.” (cf. starting page 117 of the vocal score, second system, introduced in the solo soprano). The poetic context:
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
It’s only one line of text, perhaps easy to overlook casually, but one with significance for tying this ASO program’s unified allegorical theme. ■
The ASO will repeat this program this evening, Saturday, April 29, at Symphony Hall.
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: aso.org
- Michael Francis: michaelfrancisconductor.com
- Nichole Cabell: harrisonparrott.com/artists/nicole-cabell
- Lucas Meachem: lucasmeachem.com
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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