STILL IN THE GRADUATE PROGRAM AT JUILLIARD: voluptuous mezzo Isabel Leonard was the Falla soloist. |
James Bolle’s final concert of Monadnock Music’s summer season began with a work that had had its premiere in Keene, New Hampshire, 70 years and three days earlier. No surprise there, but the work, Pocahontas, is by Elliott Carter! This was a ballet score he’d composed for Ballet Caravan, a touring company devoted to American themes and American composers that was sponsored by the WPA and formed by the wealthy ballet aficionado Lincoln Kirstein, Carter’s classmate at Harvard and a George Balanchine fan who would soon be the prime mover for New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. Carter was Ballet Caravan’s first music director, and Kirstein himself worked out the Pocahontas scenario; Lew Christensen was the choreographer. At Keene’s Colonial Theatre, August 17, 1936, there was only a piano accompaniment. The New York premiere, three years later, was a much revised version for full orchestra. It’s from that version that Carter drew the suite Bolle conducted.It’s a very grand piece: expansive, colorful, atmospheric, mysterious. We hear John Smith and John Rolfe getting lost in the Virginia forest; we hear the rituals of “Princess Pocahontas and Her Ladies,” in a slow unfolding of bird calls and forest noises that hints at Carter’s later slow movements. The music sounds mostly like 1930s Americana, but Pocahontas goes to England, so there’s also a stately neo-classical Pavane and some pungent Stravinsky-like harmonies. Both the opening and closing are startlingly grim. Bolle led the Monadnock Music Festival Orchestra in a performance both more powerful and more alluring than the one on the 1982 American Composers Orchestra recording.
This long program, “The Birth of ‘All American’ Ballet and of an Authentic Voice for American Composers,” originally included three other rare Ballet Caravan works, but Bolle decided to cut the most familiar one, Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid. Filling Station (1938), “a ballet document in one act” about late-night goings on at a gas station (drunken revelers, a hold-up), with a score by Virgil Thomson, sets and costumes by homoerotic artist Paul Cadmus, and choreography again by Christensen, was a direct assault on Eurocentric ballet — “America’s answer to Swan Lake,” as the Monadnock program note had it. It begins with a drum roll, virtually a dead march. But Bolle decided not to play every fragment in the suite, and the chosen excerpts sounded shapeless and didn’t call to my mind the comical incidents I was expecting. (I thought I heard a hornpipe.) It was hard to estimate the true quality of Thomson’s score.
The final Ballet Caravan item was Paul Bowles’s extended suite from his 1937 Yankee Clipper (choreography by Eugene Loring), which depicts a sailor’s nostalgic reminiscences of putting in at a variety of exotic ports. Bolle announced that the score hadn’t been performed since 1939 and that we might see why. It’s a long, charming work that deserves occasional resurrection. Bolle and the orchestra were back in form.
There was also a major American piece that was not a ballet score: Roger Sessions’s 1935 Violin Concerto. The soloist was former Monadnock concertmaster Ole Bohn, now concertmaster of the Royal Norwegian Opera. Bohn and Bolle entered with a friendly high five, but not all that followed went smoothly. A magnificent musician who plays a sumptuous 1766 Guadagnini, Bohn excels in ferociously demanding music — he’s the dedicatee of Carter’s Violin Concerto, which he premiered with the San Francisco Symphony. Sessions’s concerto opens with a trombone solo (the orchestra includes strings but no violins) and a high-lying passage of great lyricism for the violinist. Throughout, the soloist has numerous piquant duets with various woodwinds. A playful staccato Scherzo gets interrupted by a brooding slow section, then there’s a slow Romanza before the perpetual-motion finale (Molto vivace e sempre con fuoco), with hints of jazz and a polka. It’s one of Sessions’s most moving and appealing works, and Bohn was an ideal soloist.
But a few minutes into the fiery finale, Bohn stopped the performance, mimed a tempo, and the movement started over again. A bit later, he interrupted again. “Either it was polyrhythms or they just weren’t together at all,” someone commented on the way out. The concerto was being recorded, so these interruptions were probably necessary. I was told afterward that the finale had gone well at the dress rehearsal, and that may be what we’ll hear on the eventual recording. It was certainly not a satisfying conclusion for the Monadnock audience, though it was good to get a fresh glimpse of this seldom-played masterpiece.
NO SOLO BOWS: And Gustavo Dudamel never upstaged Imogen Cooper. |
Just two days before the end of the Tanglewood season, there was a smashing BSO debut. Gustavo Dudamel is the dynamic, curly-topped 25-year-old Venezuelan conductor who grew up in that country’s state-supported music-education program, which is not only saving lives but producing superb musicians. (The youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic is a 19-year-old bass player from the same system.) Six years ago, he became the director of Venezuela’s top student ensemble, the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra. Now, he has an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and his first recording — Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies — is about to be released.Dudamel led off with the Overture to Bernstein’s Candide, a whirlwind of breathtaking sweep, speed, and intricately pointed musical detail, full of quicksilver shifts in pace and tone. In the part of the overture that quotes Candide’s ironic love duet with Cunegonde, “Oh Happy We,” you could actually hear two overlapping voices.
