After several years of upheaval (including a labor dispute resolved in Spring 2023), the Springfield Symphony opened its new season Saturday night on solid footing. Mei-Ann Chen, recently named as Artistic Advisor, conducted works of two giants of American music as well as a familiar symphonic staple with super-charged electricity.
With its fanfare opening and ricocheting brass outbursts getting everyone’s adrenaline going, George Chadwick’s “Jubilee,” from Symphonic Sketches made for an exhilarating opener. Chadwick wrote “I determined to make it American in style – as I understood the term,” and its drive and vigor certainly testified to that characteristic. It sometimes sounds like passages from a Western film score, as in the cowboy-themed genre of the 1940s and 50s, although Chadwick was writing in 1895. (for instance, compare these two clips, this is done tongue in cheek)
Chadwick wrote his own poetic subtitles for three of the four sketches, and for “Jubilee” the first stanza (of two) sounds like the beauty of a perfect fall day, such as the day of the concert:
No cool gray tones for me!
Give me the warmest red and green,
A cornet and a tambourine,
To paint my Jubilee!
But the second stanza reveals it could also be spring –
For when pale flutes and oboes play,
To sadness I become a prey;
Give me the violets and the May,
But no gray skies for me.
Since Chadwick was in charge of the Springfield Festival in the 1890s, he knew the area well, and its beauty of spring and fall, both with their jubilees of color!
Amy Beach’s Piano Concerto in C Minor, op 45 (1899) had brought me to the concert. The now-notorious restrictions of Amy’s marriage in 1885 to Dr. H.H.A. Beach meant that her aspirations as concert pianist were ended and she was limited to only two public performances per year. She re-channeled much of that energy (with the support of her husband) into composition. But in writing a piano concerto (following the success of her Grand Mass, Op. 5 in 1891, and her Symphony Op. 32 “Gaelic” in 1896) she created a monumental opportunity for her musical ambitions BOTH as a pianist and a composer. She debuted the work herself with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1900.
As Mei Ann Chen mentioned in the pre-concert talk, “It is not a piece for the faint-hearted” — the solo part is extremely difficult. (I did find it on this list of the most difficult piano concertos). Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott has recorded Beach’s Piano Quintet (here on Spotify), so she knew what she was in for in taking on the Concerto, and proved herself with virtuosity and musical breadth. The somber opening of the orchestra leads to a piano entrance of great determination and torrents of ascending octaves, the first of many demanding feats. But the poignant second theme is one of moving lyricism, as Beach recalls her melody from her much earlier song, about a grief-stricken father burying his young daughter (poem by Chateaubriand) (Many years ago I posted all three poems of the songs Beach borrows from)
Tu dors, pauvre Elisa, si légère d’années,
Tu ne crains plus du jour le poids et la chaleur:
Elles ont achevé leurs fraîches matinées,
Jeune fille et jeune fleur.
You are sleeping, dear Elisa, in the lightness of your years,
You no longer fear the oppressive heat of the day:
They have finished their fresh mornings,
Young girl and young flower.
McDermott rose to the emotional level, joined superbly by concertmaster Masako Yanagita. In the Scherzo (Perpetuum mobile) Vivace, the piano spins an elaborate filigree of endless 16th-notes around the staid melody that moves through the orchestra. As Chen described it, it “completely defies gravity” with its buoyant motion. But McDermott gave us more than a stream of notes; she brought out a rich melodic line, as well as the elaboration of the piano part.
The gloomy Largo draws its mood (again) from one of Beach’s earlier songs, this time a setting of a poem by Dr. Beach:
No sun to warm
The darkening cloud of mist,
But everywhere (but everywhere)
The steamy earth sends up
A veil of gray and damp
To kiss the green and tender leaves
And leave its cool imprint
In limpid pearls of dew
The steamy veils and damp kisses are something of a miasma of shifting chromaticism, and arpeggios cascading through different keys, and it was here where the piano and orchestra were not always coalescing; after all the sense of spontaneity is essential, but hard to maintain. But anyway, the movement ends:
… night comes fast, to drop her pall
Till morn brings life to all.
And we gently move into the brightness and joy of the Allegro con scioltezza, all vigorous energy, even dancelike, an exuberant outpouring ― oh, until the Largo is briefly recalled and varied here with a piano-cello duet ― but then back to the upbeat cascades of incandescence. We were all swept away by the brilliance of the finale! The audience was quickly on its feet in applause.
Most things are spoiled by too much repetition, so I don’t partake of the Beethoven symphonies very often. In hearing the SSO in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, I could really experience afresh the overall intensity, the yearning lyricism of the second movement, in the Scherzo the mysterious searching, but then also playfulness, and then the majesty of the fourth movement (ah, but that quite unexpected recall of the playful strain from the Scherzo). You’d expect a good performance of a work like this, that the musicians know so well, but it also had a breathless drive and edginess to it, and Chen channeled the electricity through to the thrilling end.
Springfield’s Symphony Hall (one third of a Municipal Group with a campanile and a matching City Hall) is a beautiful Corinthean order temple (from the outside) and acoustically and visually elegant within. Springfield is not often mentioned as a concert destination, at least in the virtual pages of BMInt, but as the SSO gains energy and revitalizes its artistic vision, perhaps it should be. [Ed. Note: The e-journal only lists concerts within Rt. 128 during the regular season]. I certainly heard an excellent orchestra with dynamic leadership which was entirely worth the trip. AND free parking! I particularly am planning to attend the January 18th concert with Melissa White performing the Florence Price Violin Concerto n. 2, conducted by Jeri Lynne Johnson.
Liane Curtis (Ph.D., Musicology) is President of Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy and The Rebecca Clarke Society, Inc. Her website is here.