| . | 02/22/2002
Eos Night Celebration of American Music
By: Bruce-Michael Gelbert
photo credit - Josef Astor
A haunting new song cycle by Jake Heggie, whose opera "Dead Men Walking" reaches the New York City Opera in the fall, was a highlight of "America Singing Songs," the opening of the Eos Orchestra's seventh season, on February 21 at the Ethical Culture Society Concert Hall. With Artistic Director Jonathan Sheffer presiding, Gordon Hawkins lent a sonorous baritone to the world premiere of Heggie's "A Great Hope Fell: Songs from Civil War," made up of musical responses to pertinent 19th and 20th Century texts, punctuated by dark, forceful arrangements of traditional Civil War-era melodies.
Following a spoken passage from Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God," a sorrowful, insistent, and dynamically diverse "Ships That Pass in the Night," to poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose parents were slaves, serves as a musical prologue. Heggie's dramatic versions of a pair of poems by Maya Angelou frame the work proper. "Africa" envisions the continent as a sensual woman, raped and recovering, but well remembering the ravishing. The double-edged "America" explores our nation's tragically unrealized potential, its misery and its hope. An exceptionally moving "Letter to Abraham Lincoln from Annie Davis, August 25, 1864" employs a missive from a slave, unaware that emancipation occurred more than a year and a half earlier. Giving the cycle its title is verse by Emily Dickinson, depicting defeat and death, which becomes a song wrenching in its beauty and simplicity.
Interspersed among these are Heggie's takes on "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and Stephen Foster's "Was My Brother in the Battle?" I would be curious to hear "A Great Hope Fell" sans preexisting melodies. It might make an even stronger impact.
Ruth Crawford Seeger's plaintive "Andante for Strings" made a fitting opening for Eos' first post-September 11 outing. Paul Creston's ever-darkening and crescendoing "A Rumor" stood as a sort of orchestral response to Basilio's hissing and thundering "La calunnia" aria from Rossini's "Barbiere di Siviglia." Hawkins and soprano Pamela Armstrong collaborated on Virgil Thomson whimsical rarity "Collected Poems," using Kenneth Koch's anything but linear poetry, its varied images tumbling over one another in a gently rollicking piece that reminded of the composer's settings of words by Gertrude Stein.
Two works by Samuel Barber concluded the concert. Sheffer led his ensemble in a breathtaking account of the exquisitely yearning "Adagio for Strings." With seeming effortlessness, Armstrong caressed the hazily nostalgic lines of "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," after the opening of James Agee's "A Death in the Family." Hawkins and Armstrong's ardent encore was Gershwin's "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," from "Porgy and Bess."
Preceding the concert, Eos presented a talk with composer Ned Rorem. In conversation with conductor Sheffer, Rorem lamented what he sees as the declining current state of American classical song composition and performance and spoke of his long history of turning American texts to works for piano and voice. Rorem, at the keyboard, and singer Scott Murphree, whom he styled a "tenor deluxe," proffered graceful performances of three Rorem songs: "Root Cellar," a spare setting of a Theodore Roethke poem describing smells and textures in a dank cellar; the lyrical "Early in the Morning," a gentle remembrance of youth, to a text by Robert Hillyer; and "The Lordly Hudson," with words by Paul Goodman, limning the majesty of New York and New Jersey's river.
Ethical Culture Society, 2 West 64th Street at Central Park West 212/691-6415. March 31 Puppets and Spain, featuring Falla's "El Retablo de Maese Pedro"; April 25 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Music of Tan Dun; May 23 & 25 Wagner's "The Rhinegold." $25, 35, 50, except "The Rhinegold" $25, 50, 65.
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