Charleston orchestras dance the night away at Carnegie Hall
The port city of Charleston, South Carolina has so many resonances in American history and culture, it’s hard to know where to start. So how about starting with the resonance of a famous concert hall?
Three stagefuls of musicians from that city occupied Carnegie Hall Wednesday night, in what was billed as “A Celebration of Charleston.” Familiar masterworks alternated with a selection of orchestral Charlestoniana that provided the evening’s most arresting moments.
The ensemble seemed to grow up before one’s eyes, as the Charleston Symphony Youth Orchestra of 13-to-18-year-olds yielded the stage to the College of Charleston Orchestra and ultimately the very grownup Charleston Symphony.
And what better way to start a celebration than with a world premiere? Ryo Hasegawa led his young players in Charleston Mix, composed for the occasion by Charleston-born, New York-based Thomas Cabaniss. The piece began and ended with the musicians clapping in the 3-3-2 rhythm that drove the “Charleston” dance craze of the 1920s. In between, a dance tune started in the tuba and clarinet, then roamed through the orchestra, players standing as they took their solos. A dash of fugue here, a soft interlude there, and a richly scored tutti wrapped it all up before the vision vanished and only the rhythm was left. The composer stood at his seat in the hall to acknowledge the warm applause.
That piece was in part a tribute to the Jenkins Orphanage Band, a touring group that spread the Charleston beat far and wide in the Twenties. Edmund Thornton Jenkins, son of the founder, left his home town behind to study music and promote African-American causes in London, but paid tribute to it in a colorful tone poem, Charlestonia.
The youth orchestra opened its richly characterized performance in a mist of string tremolo, from which a subtle Charleston beat and intertwining dance tunes emerged. A snappy ragtime melted into a lush cello theme, a moment of Mahlerian folksy woodwinds, and a pounding urban scene complete with police whistle. Cacophony and cross-rhythms grew to almost Ivesian proportions before a colossal bass drum stroke announced the brief, swirling coda.
To close their segment of the program, Hasegawa and his players poured on the youthful fervor in Sibelius’s Finlandia, groping for a pitch here and there but relishing the militant rat-a-tat of brass, the mellow string theme, and the powerful closing hymn.
Then it was the collegians’ turn, playing colorfully in the New York premiere of Corsaro, a swashbuckling piece by one of their own faculty members, Yiorgos Vassilandonakis. Drawing on his Greek childhood near the sea and lifelong fascination with pirates, the composer produced an orchestral seascape gleaming with brass and burbling with bassoons, as flutes whistled overhead. Strings sighed softly in a nocturnal episode with glimmers of horn and trumpet before a polyharmonic crescendo brought the piece to an exuberant close. Conductor Yuriy Bekker expertly mixed the colors and swept the piece along.
The sea has unfortunately been known to enter the New York subway, but otherwise there is no connection between Corsaro and the next work by New Jersey-based Trevor Weston, Subwaves. His tribute to the sounds of public transit, and the Hip Hop pioneers who hung out there, began of course with a near-incessant rumble of timpani and bass drum, from which stuttering horns and syncopated strings emerged. Two plaintive interludes, Bernsteinian and a little blue, separated the piece’s plunging, agitated sections, vividly drawn by Bekker and his players. Composer Weston trotted onstage to join the bows afterward.
Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” was born in New York and premiered in this very hall 130 years ago. Bekker and the college musicians had a good go at the symphony’s final movement, but it never quite rose to the level of technical polish, balance, and characterization they achieved earlier.
Conductor Bekker brought on his professionals next, as the Charleston Symphony performed the New York premiere of Edward Hart’s A Charleston Concerto, featuring the Harlem Quartet as soloists. The composer, a native of Charleston and faculty member at the College of Charleston, took a sweeping view of his city’s history in three substantial movements.
The first, titled “Discovery,” imagined what the first humans experienced on the site of Charleston: sea air and forest scents, sparkling waters and teeming wildlife. The Harlem players—Ilmar Gavilán and Melissa White, violins; Jaime Amador, viola; and Felix Umansky, cello—entered modestly with long chords and unisons, but soon were taking up themes from the orchestra and elaborating them. Each player shone in solos as well, especially cellist Umansky in a long lyrical interlude. Hart also knew how to weave the quartet into the orchestra to create a luscious, layered texture. And when things went up-tempo, that Charleston beat put in yet another appearance.
The second movement, “Tragedy and Reconciliation,” evoked the storms that have battered Charleston over the centuries, and the metaphorical storm of slavery and racial discrimination. Soft solos were harshly punctuated by the snap of a whip and orchestra players stamping their feet in unison. The quartet answered angry dissonances in the orchestra with a fervent Gullah spiritual. A booming march for tuba and bass drum and a Charleston dance led to a dreamy conclusion for flute, bells and strings. Reconciliation at last? A final foot stamp suggested otherwise.
But optimism, wrote the Charlestonian composer in a program note, “seems to be in our collective DNA.” The closing movement, “Tomorrow,” opened with sweet solos by the quartet players and a xylophone-driven, Gershwinesque tutti. Then all fell silent while the four-person percussion section went a little crazy with a Charleston cadenza. That became the underlying beat for much dancing and conversation, especially within the solo quartet, interrupted briefly by soloist Gavilán with a tender melody before the short, infectious coda. Composer Hart joined soloists and conductor on the crowded stage to share in the applause.
Charleston prides itself on its association with George Gershwin by way of Porgy and Bess. That composer’s sentimental, jazzy An American in Paris was coming home on Wednesday too, having premiered at Carnegie in December 1928. Conductor Bekker led a well-coordinated performance that had difficulty lightening up and featuring individual players and sections when called for.
The concert let out about 10:45, having given the audience its money’s worth while just avoiding paying the Carnegie stagehands overtime.
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