The three Boston Symphony concerts on the last weekend of July all celebrated the 150^th anniversary of Serge Koussevitzky’s birth. The first two emphasized his important role in his native Russia. The third, on Sunday afternoon, offered a brief but significant look at what became his important legacy in the United States, both in promoting American composers and in commissioning composers from Europe to write works for the BSO.

Already in Russia and in Paris, Koussevitzky had programmed music by his contemporaries and caused music to be composed by promising performances. Each of the weekend’s Andris Nelsons-led Shed also opened with an American piece as part of the theme of the weekend’s Festival of Contemporary Music [see our many reviews].

Sunday afternoon featured narrated works, the best-known example being Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. The first one we heard evoked the same historical period but from the viewpoint of the African American James Lee III (b. 1975), setting Frederick Douglas’s 1852 speech, “What to the slave is the 4^th of July?” The text was prepared by Wordsmith (the professional name of Anthony Parker, b. 1980). Their collaboration, Freedom’s Genuine Dawn, was jointly commissioned by the Rochester Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, and the Boston Symphony. All three orchestras have a connection Douglas or the partners: Douglas gave his speech in Rochester, Wordsmith is an artistic partner with the Baltimore Symphony, and James Lee III won a 2002 Composition Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center.

Wordsmith shaped the text with several narrative passages setting the context, but mostly using extended passages from the speech itself. The music begins in dark colors suggesting the seemingly hopeless world of the enslaved Africans who had been brought to the New World in bondage starting in 1619 and who were counted by the Constitution as 3/5 of a person. Thomas Warfield, a multi-talented actor, singer, dancer, composer, poet, and more did the narration.  His voice became rich especially when he read the actual speech. The orchestra ranged through styles of the mid-19^th century though mostly more intense, dark, and severe moods as it provided the backdrop for the ringing oratory.

Koussevitzky called the subsequent works into existence. Copland wrote his Piano Concerto, the earliest of the set, soon after returning from studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who had introduced the young American to her Russian conductor friend. Copland became the closest of Koussevitzky’s American friends and a generous and enthusiastic link to American composers until Koussevitzky’s death almost 30 years later.  The first new work Copland wrote for the BSO was his Organ Concerto, for which Mlle. Boulanger served as soloist. In 1925 came the Music for the Theater, with some of Copland’s first intimations of jazzy expression that have become a hallmark of “American” qualities.

Then came the Piano Concerto. This is not an especially well-known work of Copland’s (in a lifetime of listening to his music, I had never heard a live performance.) Coplan himself, at Koussevitzky’s invitation, appeared as soloist. On Sunday, Englishman Paul Lewis, who is generally regarded as a specialist in the central European masters Beethoven and Schubert (his last Tanglewood appearance, in 2002, featured all five Beethoven piano concertos in a single weekend) took the solo part. Copland’s concerto called for different musical qualities, which he nonetheless projected effectively: the opening slow movement begins with the orchestra in a bluesy lyrical mood taken up by the piano. Though the character aims to suggest jazz (which had already started appearing in concert works like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or the ballet Krazy Kat by John Alden Carpenter), Copland’s music is not “real” jazz, but it effectively suggests elements of its character, especially in the faster second movement, with its syncopated rhythms and the dialogue between members of the orchestra and the soloist. High time to hear it live.

To conclude the concert, Nelsons made an interesting mash-up of two Koussevitzky selections. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus filed onto the risers at intermission and began the second half with Randall Thompson’s a capella Alleluia, which he had composed at the conductor’s request for the opening exercises of the very first session of the Tanglewood Music Center in 1940. It was his conviction that the very first gathering of the Fellows should include music performed by everybody—instrumentalists, singers, and composers—all singing. Thompson agreed, and set the word “Alleluia” in a growing polyphonic setting that begins very softly, gradually soars, then settles to a hushed “Amen.” Since 1940 it has become perhaps the most often sung piece of American choral music by everyone from high school choruses to professionals.

As the last sounds of the Thompson died away, Nelsons gave a downbeat to move directly to the opening of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, one of a dozen works that Koussevitzky commissioned from composers in both the United States and Europe for the 50^th season of the orchestra, starting in 1930. This was the beginning of the BSO’s continuing tradition of making formal commissions, especially at cardinal points in the orchestra’s history (groups of commissions were extended for the 75^th, 100^th, and 125^th seasons).

Stravinsky’s work came to be recognized as one of the most important works for the 50^th season, though the critics at first were dubious. One declared that this was “not religious music.” Stravinsky responded, “There is no such thing as religious music, only religious words.” (The work frequently calls for the chorus to sing “Alleluia,” which makes evident the link to Thompson’s piece on the present program.) Koussevitzky himself reacted as he did on several occasions when a work to which he was committed was opposed by the critics: He performed it again. As a student in the 1960s, I heard one of my professors recall that, by the fourth repetition of the score, late in the 1930s, the captious critic of the premiere wrote, “Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms emerges as a modern masterpiece.”

On Sunday both chorus and orchestra gave full value to Stravinsky’s choice of orchestrating without violins or violas. Instead he penned very significant parts for woodwinds and brass, harp, piano, and percussion. The yearning cello and bass figure (E-F-E) in the first movement suggests plainsong chanting. The second movement includes an extended double fugue—first an open one for the orchestra, beginning in the woodwinds, then a darker, stern one in the chorus. The last movement includes frequent use of a figure of six repeated eighth notes that generates rhythmic energy countered by lyrical choral Alleluias and a slow processional calling for praise to God (“Laudate Dominum”) that brings the entire non-traditional “symphony” to a serene close.

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.