For James Agee, the summer of 1915 remained a golden memory. Sitting on blankets on lawn grass with his family, he took in the sights and sounds of his native Knoxville. Street cars dinged their bells as the passed horse-drawn carriages and automobiles sputtering along the busy road. But family made the scene most idyllic. “May God bless my people,” he wrote in 1949, “my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father. Oh remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.”
These words, part of Agee’s prose poem “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” stirred composer Samuel Barber to set it. It proved a serendipitous pairing as Barber’s lyrical turns captures all the tenderness of this childhood recollection. But there’s another way to hear this music, one that invites bittersweet nostalgia, as if the moment were remembered from an older age.
The Horizon Ensemble made both of those dimensions palpable at the Church of the Covenant this past Sunday. Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 served as the frame through which music by a host of familiar and unfamiliar composers came into the light.
Though a community orchestra, at least in name, the Horizon Ensemble felt securely at ease with Barber’s angular melodies and sweep textures. Conductor Julian Gau drew out the svelte curves of the opening French horn and woodwind calls. Other details, like the woodwind phrases, rose to the fore with the right amount of Technicolor clarity. Through it all, soprano Julia Pottinger lofted Agee’s text with clarion assurance.
Florence Price’s The Oak complemented those bygone memories by turning to weight and introspection. This attractive tone poem, with its dark chromaticism, stands apart from Price’s usual penchant for optimism and folk-flavored flair, at least as evidenced in her symphonies. And like those works, The Oak made it onto the stands of orchestras owes much to serendipity: the score was discovered in the basement of the library at Eastman in the 1990s.
This welcome rediscovery proved a showcase for the musicians. Cellos and basses open with deep undulating figures, a nod, perhaps, to the introduction to Wagner’s Das Rheingold. As in that work, violins bring a splash of light. Gau’s smooth waving gestures caught every resulting shape and color in the lines that emerged.
Gabriela Lena Frank’s Elegía Andina delivered an equal amount of timbral variety. Composed in 2000, it is part rhythmic fun and part lyrical musing on Frank’s ethnic heritage, encompassing folk elements as far afield as Peruvian panpipes and Chinese song.
But a searching pathos holds this heady mix together. A dark serenity played by lower strings and winds serve as springboards for icy dissonances to rise to the fore. And even heard through Gau’s fluid direction, Elegía never quite settles into a calm.
The same can be said for Yangfan Xu’s Liang Si, heard in its world premiere. A doctoral student at NEC, Xu took initial inspiration from the mobile game Hay Day. That in turn led her to reflect on the Chinese agricultural tradition lived by her ancestors.
Yet this is a memory rife with inner tension, and the music channels both the highs and lows of rustic life well beyond any cottagecor cliche. But because of its ever-churning textures, the Horizon musicians had a little trouble pulling it off. Tutti attacks often sounded ragged and caused Xu’s mercurial lines to frequently fall out of sync.
Jackson Carter’s A Moment of Everything, also heard for the first time, fared better. A recent graduate of Tufts, Carter composed this piece—his honor’s thesis—as a musical tribute to John Page, conductor of the Tufts Symphony Orchestra and Tufts Youth Philharmonic.
It begins simply, with piano plucking out a steely pulse out of which mournful lines rise and fall. That soon gives way to a tuneful melodic grandeur that is interrupted by cadenzas played by violin, flute, viola, and cello—the latter being Carter’s own instrument. Like an autobiographical essay, A Moment of Everything makes personal remembrances feel warm and special. Gau and the Horizon Ensemble performed it with conviction.
Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess filled out the concert by again showing these musicians at their best. Gau worked his usual magic, drawing out supple dynamics to allow for this music’s yearning tones to resonate fully.
The afternoon also turned the spotlight onto two local poets, Farah Masud and Chia Lam. Their reflections on childhood, refracted through age and experience, echo Agee. Memories of those times may be warm, yet they remain, painfully, just out of reach.