February 15, 2025
‘Symphonic Spirit’
The Lucas Theatre for the Arts
Savannah, Georgia – USA
Savannah Philharmonic; Jason Max Ferdinand, conductor; Roderick George, tenor; Savannah Philharmonic Chorus, Paul Thornock, chorus master.
Giuseppi VERDI: Overture to Nabucco
Adolphus HAILSTORK: Symphony No. 1
J. Rosamond JOHNSON, arr. Roland CARTER: Lift Every Voice and Sing
Moses HOGAN: My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord
Betty JACKSON KING/arr. Jason Max FERDINAND: Psalm 57
R. Nathaniel DETT/arr. VISSER: The Chariot Jubilee
Judith MCCALLISTER: Hallelujah, You’re Worthy to be Praised
Christopher Hill | 17 FEB 2025
Jason Max Ferdinand was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1977. His father and mother were both educators, and Dr. Ferdinand is today Director of Choral Activities at the University of Maryland, College Park. On Saturday evening, he brought to a packed house in Savannah both his conducting skills and his sense of music’s humanistic and spiritual mission.
Jason Max Ferdinand (jmaxmusic.com)
The first half of the concert was purely instrumental. It opened with Verdi’s Overture to Nabucco, an 1841 opera featuring Hebrew slaves, which the composer considered “the opera with which my artistic career really begins.” Italian overtures in this period were often potpourris of an opera’s best tunes, and Verdi’s potpourri for Nabucco is well made, with (of course) a rousing final section. The performance by the Savannah Philharmonic under Dr. Ferdinand was well played in terms of the individual musicians but a bit rough (and likely under-rehearsed) in terms of overall ensemble.
This immediately became evident with the opening of Symphony No. 1 by Adolphus Hailstork (1941–), which, from the outset, displayed a far more finished grace to the ensemble. Dr. Hailstork has, for some decades, been a professor (now emeritus) at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is currently at work on his fourth symphony; the previous three have been available for some time on the Naxos label. The composer gained wide recognition in the mid-1970s with his first orchestral work, Celebration!, commissioned by Thor Johnson and later recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra under Paul Freeman.
Symphony No. 1, first heard in 1988, can be appreciated as an appealing variety of post-impressionist French music, notable for its color, its spacious, uncongested textures, and its formal clarity. Though it sounds nothing like Copland, in its overall aesthetic and approachability, it resembles some of that composer’s pieces from the mid-1930s, though in Dr. Hailstork’s work, the outer movements (marked “Allegro” and “Vivace”) exude an unmuted positivity Copland did not find until he discovered cowboys in the 1940s.
There are no cowboys in Symphony No. 1. Instead, there’s a radiant athleticism that, in its sprightliness and use of pungent bitonality, might sound French to some ears. The music comes closer perhaps to William Grant Still than to Dr. Hailstork’s more immediate composing forebears such as George Walker or Ulysses Kay. (To be clear, Dr. Hailstork’s compositional toolkit is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than was the estimable Still’s.) Under conductor Ferdinand, the Savannah Philharmonic conveyed the color and excitement of the outer movements with admirable conviction, vigor, and nuance.
The second movement of Symphony No. 1 (marked “Lento ma non troppo”) draws deeply on our by-now-common heritage of black Spirituals. Here, the strings carry the burden of the argument, and they sound gorgeous. A central section features periodic repetitions of grating minor seconds, the “ugliest” sounds in the symphony, and enough of a contrast with the first section to aesthetically distance its return, making it sound more heartfelt rather than more sentimental. Overall, the slow movement sounds like a sophisticated extension of the idealistic aesthetic practiced by earlier composers such as Dett, Dawson, and Price, who wanted to bridge the cultural space between the authentic, direct expressions of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the complex musical narratives of post-Wagnerian romanticism. The Savannah Philharmonic played this movement beautifully.
Less beautiful was the subsequent inner movement (marked “Allegretto”), where either more practice or more rehearsal time was needed for the combination of rapid figuration and asymmetrical rhythms to come across effectively. That said, much of the “Allegretto” was well played, and at the movement’s end, the house applauded enthusiastically, as they also did after the symphony’s other movements.
The second half of the concert was predominantly choral. The mixed chorus numbered seventy or more singers, stretching from one edge of the stage to the other in three rows. In front of them, the full orchestra was arrayed in a similarly close formation. This half began with a personal statement. At a time when Google Calendar, for instance, has suddenly stopped supporting recognition of February as African-American Heritage Month, Dr. Ferdinand expressed his belief that it is more important than ever for academics like himself to reach out to social conservatives — in his case, through music.
Among his comments:
First up was a majestic expansion of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” originally a hymn written and composed in the last year of the nineteenth century by James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954). By the 1920s, the hymn was being referred to as “The Black National Anthem.” The majestic expansion for chorus and orchestra heard in Savannah is by Tennessee composer, conductor, and academic Roland Carter (1942–). It would be fair to call the audience’s response to his arrangement fervent.
At the conclusion of this anthem, Dr. Ferdinand stepped off the podium and walked to the back of the orchestra to conduct the chorus. Two a capella works followed. The first was an arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” by the gifted Moses Hogan (1957-2003). The arrangement was very much in the character of gospel groups from the 1940s and ’50s, such as the Golden Gate Quartet — interweaving each strand of four-part harmony in rhythmically coordinated patterns that are irresistible to the ear and that bring out Terpsichordian tendencies in all but the infirm. The auditorium erupted at the end, and in the din one could hear numerous whistles.
The second a cappella work was Psalm 57 by Illinois composer Betty Jackson King (1928-1994) as arranged by Dr. Ferdinand. It was a sober and lyrical work in the European classical tradition mixing inward meditations with passionate declarations, as called for by the text, and ending with a sustained full-throated shout of joy from the large chorus.
Roderick George (roderickgeorge.com)
Returning to the podium, Dr. Ferdinand announced that the next work, The Chariot Jubilee by R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), was quintessential for him. Written during the time of Dett’s studies at Harvard in 1920 and ’21, The Chariot Jubilee is a fourteen-minute work for tenor solo, chorus, organ, and piano. In Savannah, the tenor soloist was Roderick George, a friend and colleague of Dr. Ferdinand, who has made a specialty of this work for many years.
The performance also featured a full orchestration of the score attributed to a certain “Visser.” Dett was, by 1920, an accomplished contrapuntist and choral writer, and the musical fabric of the work is, in this reviewer’s mind, as well woven as that of any similar work coming out of early-twentieth-century England, then Europe’s choral capital. At the same time, the ear never forgets that the musical basis for this essay is the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” an unmistakably American piece if ever there was one. After the work’s final peroration, the Savannah audience gave it a sustained standing ovation: Dett, Ferdinand, George, and the Savannah Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra had soothed and exalted numerous souls that evening.
The final work on the program, Hallelujah, You’re Worthy to be Praised, took it into Boomer gospel territory, and a perspicuous change it turned out to be, as it served to remind the auditorium’s sea of retirees that this music is connected to their own life experiences. Many audience members did, for several minutes, indeed, clap on the backbeats. With the importance of the proscenium thus diminished, the increased energy that arises from interactive audiences and musicians brought the evening to a conclusion awash in positive energy, surely more stirring than the endings of many a classical concert. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Savannah Philharmonic: savannahphilharmonic.org
- Jason Max Ferdinand: jmaxmusic.com
- Roderick George: roderickgeorge.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.
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