Any short-list of composers to call upon to celebrate our nation’s semi-quincentennial must include the two giants on Interlochen Arts Academy’s gala on Sunday at Symphony Hall.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) — America’s arch-maverick — wrote fearless, tumultuous, sprawling works, craftily jumbling Brahms with Yankee marches, folk songs, and shape-note hymns, and wrestled with intricate polyrhythms and brash bitonality years before Stravinsky.

Wynton Marsalis (1961—), the bad-boy New Orleans trumpet genius who joined Art Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers at 17, won (his first of 7) Grammies for jazz and classical albums at 22, led bands (early with talented siblings) and has headed Jazz At Lincoln Center for 40 years. From this bully pulpit, a youthful firebrand (who’d penned and recorded preachy and prolix multi-hour suites for ensembles small and large) mellowed into a humble[i], tireless craftsman, a wildly popular international spokesman (nearing the wide adulation of Louis “Pops” Armstrong), and genial educator for jazz – Black America’s premier contribution to world music. His Cello Concerto, commissioned by IAA and written for Yo Yo Ma (a fellow cultural ambassador), is premiered in this four-city tour climaxing today. Both Ives and Marsalis are astonishingly prolific, empathetic composers; schooled by musical fathers with brilliant erudition, adventure, and wit, they stand as peerless spokesmen for American individualism, spirituality, and unity.

A third voice is that of composer Reena Esmail (1983—). Educated at Juilliard and Yale, the Angeleno specializes in Hindustani music and is Co-founder and Artistic Director of Shastra, promoting cross-cultural musical traditions of India and the West. She has served as composer-in-residence at Tanglewood, Marlboro, and Spoleto festivals.

Cristian Măcelaru (1980—) was a natural choice to guest-conduct with his long-standing ties with Marsalis and cellist Yo Yo Ma.[ii] A Romanian violin prodigy (at 23 he was Miami Symphony’s youngest concertmaster) he currently conducts the Cincinnati Symphony and is artistic director of the durable George Enescu International Festival. In 2015 he led the Philadelphia Symphony in recording Marsalis’s Violin Concerto with the composer’s wife Nicola Benedetti as soloist.

The Interlochen ensemble fused works of Ives, Esmail, and Marsalis into a daring multi-media extravaganza, “Imagine US: Celebrating America at 250” that is cogent and timely. Dancers and moving video images interacted with the musicians in a carefully constructed, largely successful, and ultimately triumphant performance. And here’s how it all unfolded.

Prior to tune-up, the blue-lit proscenium, with atmospheric electronica abuzz behind, screened dozens of exhortatory quotations from statesmen: “Be the change you seek.” (B. Obama) “America was not built on fear.” (H. Truman) “Americans don’t settle.” (M. Romney)

As the concert’s prelude and postlude, Sydney Lee Kassekert played guitar and sang her hope-tinged “Imagine”, accompanied by Yo Yo Ma, gamely improvising cello counterlines.

Ives explained the Fourth[iii] – his second shortest at 30′ and most ‘religious’ – as “the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life.” Unanswered questions plagued him and drove his lifelong fraught quest through imponderable scores.

The four-movement work stands as a spiritually searching monument of American music, weaves intricate, multilayered textures with richly allusive camp songs, “Nearer My God To Thee”, all-out hell-fire ‘n’ brimstone band clashes that emerge somewhat tamed in Thomas Brodhead’s edition. The mise-en-scène, if complex, seemed harmonious.

Argentinian-Mexican Alex Amsel joined Măcelaru onstage as assistant conductor to navigate tricky cross-rhythms (2/4, 5/4, and 6/8 from page one of the stern Prelude: Maestoso). The 30-strong choir formed double lines in the aisles for key climaxes. Dancers ranged the footlights in graceful pairings. The orchestra played with accuracy and vigor, even if the winds sometimes waxed pale and the strings were a bit muddied. Video images flashed incessantly across the screen that covered the gilt organ pipes. Most arresting were the locomotives marching inexorably across the landscape, the shooting of buffaloes, and the fluttering Audubon-like bird lithographs imprinted with the faces of Black historical figures: Frederick Douglass on a snowy owl, Phyllis Wheatley on a robin. The Fugue layered the strings’ hymnic themes with French horn, trombone, flute, and clarinet and a monologue that evoked Walt Whitman.

After an unusually lively, conversational intermission – with interactive audience scribbling post-it wishes and chatting loudly in the lobby – came the PSA: an upbeat address by Interlochen Center President Trey Devey and trumpeter DJ Parson.

Then IAA’s Imagine US Company screened a short film called “US” that took us to a Jazz Quartet rehearsal and a spin around campus.

Esmail’sRE|Member, an energetic if mysterious work, seeks togetherness during pandemics. As Julianne Choe’s warm lone oboe and Reese Martin’s graceful gestures were framed on video in a glass studio with a snowscape beyond, the orchestra burst with playful echoes of Bernstein’s Candide, wisps of Lawrence of Arabia, a flurry of woodblocks and marimba, and whistling wind glissandi.

“A Promise”: Addison Hill led the Imagine US Company (Diana Wyenn, Creative Director) in groups of 5, the women decked in dresses prettily flecked with raptor silhouettes[iv]. In turn each proclaimed favorite things they “cherish.”

Marsalis built his Violin Concerto like a church: four pillar movements raising a free-form, ethereal roof-of-the-world cadenza. (Tai Murray, bless her!, fiddled it over the moon and back with the Yale Symphony.) Yet his Cello Concerto is more tightly woven, like a Geechee quilt: five bright, polygonal, dancing homespun patches stitched not-so-seamlessly with needle-sharp cadenzas of pizzy, glissy ditties that Ma tackles with his usual fire and glee. He’s Betsy Ross, Hugo’s Tricoteurs, those Gullah ladies with bone needles, stitching away with his bow, ineffably links the swatches: a strutting, staccato Journey to Freedom; a reverent Spiritual, its tolling bells and flute echoing Ives; a jocular March Caribe (when Macalaru snaps fingers, Ma snaps strings!); a Ballad with vamping winds and bass-walking Blues; and the un-tuned “Rodeo” hoe-down of a Cake Walk.

Măcelaru explains: “It is always important for Wynton to make statements that both remind people of who they are, and at the same time, show them a path forward.” In his kitbag are the jazz idiom’s syncopation and blues scales, a judicious array of glisses, snaps, keening harmonics, col legno effects, Appalachian folk ditties. I can imagine this Concerto catching on with cellists world-wide like global wildfire.[v] One quibble: the video images chosen to parallel this work misfired, the endless whirling circles and white-on-black squiggles mere aimless distractions. I wish I’d worn a brimmed cap to block it all out.

As a coda after the curtain-calls, Sydney Lea and Yo Yo reprised “Imagine”, this time with the Choir, lined up in the aisles as for the Ives, chanting an “aaah” we participants shared.

And there you have it. Saith Ecclesiastes: “All those who are among the living have hope.”

An after-party in the Cohen Room welcomed audience members, IAA families and well-wishers. The menu was French —crémant de Loire , madeleines, petit-fours – but the music was homegrown jazz and pop apropos thematically. The IAA Jazz Quartet – trumpeter Parson, guitarist Annie Meyer, bassist Wesley Stoker, and drummer Margaret Morton, plus Chris Glassman, Jazz Director, on trombone — jammed blithely on “Now’s The Time” (Charles “Yardbird” Parker, 1920-56) and, as two pre-teens twirled ecstatically, “Isn’t She Lovely?” (Stevie Wonder, 1950—).[vi]

IAA, the third visiting orchestra presented by the Boston Symphony Orchestra this season, is a well-known, beloved entity in these parts. Current BSO members who are IAA alumni number a grateful fifteen[vii] .

See related interview HERE.

[i]                 Benedetti’s first reaction to Marsalis’ Violin Concerto score “was that it wasn’t challenging enough violinistically, and that he had to make everything more difficult.” Other composers might have been offended by this request, but Marsalis seems to have taken it in stride. “I’m always trying to become clearer with my compositions, mainly with orchestration because I didn’t really study it formally,” he says. “I learn as I go along.”

[ii]         [ Interview with CM in BMInt]

[iii] Ives’ last numbered symphony (1916) was followed by the phantasmagorically ‘patriotic’ A Symphony: New England Holidays (1919), and the persistently percussive, doom-scrolling Universe Symphony (1928). Not to mention his dozens of ‘sets’ and marches, hundreds of piano pieces and songs.

[iv]          Emily Dickinson famously pronounced, “Hope is the Thing with feathers.”

[v]            Historically, perhaps less with the sticklers (M. Rostropovich, A. Bylsma) than with the free spirits (J. DuPre, S. Mayes).

[vi]        A Stevie Wonder quote among those that appeared on the marquee stage screen at the outset asked: “Can we fix America’s broken heart? Are we brave enough to try?” Not unanswered questions, I hope.

[vii]          [Boston Interlochen Alumni]