American Symphony Orchestra opens season with lively dances from different domestic drummers
True to its name, the American Symphony Orchestra has done well by American composers, especially during the 33-year tenure of its current music director, the archaeologically-inclined Leon Botstein.
Unafraid to tackle ambitious projects—see last season’s Gurre-Lieder at Carnegie Hall—the ASO opted instead to open its 2024-25 season Saturday afternoon in a lighter mood, with American (or American-inspired) dance music for a modest-sized orchestra. The venue for the free concert was modest-sized too, though its name was not: LeFrak Concert Hall of the Aaron Copland School of Music in the Kupferberg Center for the Arts at Queens College, City University of New York.
Conductor Botstein introduced each of the program’s five brief selections with illuminating, often humorous remarks that seemed almost as long as the pieces themselves. Although most of the music was composed for the stage or a film, Botstein warned listeners against being overly literal-minded. “The storyline the composer was thinking of isn’t important for you to know,” he said. “Listen to the music and make up your own story.”
A subtext of the program was immigration, either forced (the African ancestors of composers Scott Joplin and Florence Price) or voluntary (Kurt Weill, and the Ukrainian Jewish parents of Bernard Herrmann and Leonard Bernstein). The African-Americans had the first word and Bernstein had the last laugh in Saturday’s jazzy journey.
Like Franz Schubert, Joplin was celebrated in his short lifetime for his songs and dances, but aspired to achievement in larger forms. The many virtues of his opera Treemonisha, set in the Texarkana, Arkansas of Joplin’s youth,went mostly unnoticed until the 1970s, when the ragtime revival brought it to stages in the U.S. and abroad. Saturday’s performance of the opera’s Overture, though marred by intonation problems in woodwinds and horns, opened a time capsule of rural African-American music in the 1880s with a medley of rags, juba dances, slow drags, and Spanish rhythms.
A generation later, Florence Price became the first African-American composer to have a work (her Symphony No. 1) performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She studied with the American symphonist George W. Chadwick at the New England Conservatory, and that composer’s preference for bright, open orchestral textures and dialogue between the sections was evident in Price’s Suite of Dances (1933 for piano, orchestrated 1951). In the ASO’s lively rendition, the three brief movements stepped away from the sophistication of Price’s larger concert works to cheerfully evoke the pentatonic tunes and smart-as-a-whip rhythms of an earlier time in black life.
Conductor Botstein asked the audience for a show of hands by all those who had seen Alfred Hitchcock’s movie thriller Psycho. Then he told the many hand-raisers to put the movie out of mind as they listened to excerpts from Bernard Herrmann’s iconic film score for string orchestra, and just listen to the performance as music.
Not an easy thing to do, especially as shrieking violins announced the notorious shower scene, but in Botstein’s lightened-up interpretation, the movie’s bleak adagios and kinetic agitatos could actually be imagined melting away into a kind of modernistic dance suite. Once-ominous violin lines soared benignly. Eerie trills and thumping pizzicatos had a kind of ectoplasmic charm. There was even Hitchcockian humor in the sudden, dissonant final chords.
It all reinforced the proposition in the conductor’s opening remarks to the concert: “Music doesn’t lie,” he said. “But it’s you, the listener, who give it its meaning.”
Kurt Weill’s Kleine Dreigroschenmusik (Little Threepenny Music), for a pit band of brass, winds and percussion, offered a proposition similar to the Herrmann, with an entirely different affect. Separated from The Threepenny Opera, the bitterly satirical theatre piece that Weill created with Bertolt Brecht, this music sported a jaunty air, tangy and dissonant and tuneful, with delicious solos for tenor and alto saxophones, clarinet, and even piccolo. Its endless variety of instrumental colors, and popular dance beats from foxtrot to habanera, enabled the performers to lift the music far from stage realities into the realm of imagination.
The musicians’ steady improvement in wind playing reached its peak in Bernstein’s Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, which received a thrilling, expertly layered performance from Botstein and the ASO. This lively suite from the 1944 musical, though not quite as varied and colorful as the later Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, got a boost recently from being featured in the film Maestro, and had a good deal of compositional fun with its familiar four-note “New York, New York” motive.
The zesty adventures of three sailors on shore leave in the big city, and dreams of romance in dusky clarinets and a muted trumpet solo, found a young hotshot composer channelling Gershwin and Copland into an all-American midcentury urban idiom, closing the American Symphony Orchestra’s season opener with a bang.
The American Symphony Orchestra and the Bard Festival Chorale perform the U.S. premieres of two choral works by Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach, Jan. 24, 2025 at St. Bartholomew’s Church. americansymphony.org
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