Joseph Schwantner (born 1943, Chicago)
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Neidorff-Karpati Hall, Manhattan School of Music, New York City
Leonard Slatkin’s penchant for thoughtful programming was at its vibrant best here – his latest of many visits to the MSM as “Distinguished Visiting Artist in Conducting and Orchestral Studies” – the Schwantner embraces Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech (August 28, 1963, Washington, D.C.), “freedom and justice for all”, while Shostakovich Eleven relates to the first of the Russian Revolutions in 1905, its composition coinciding with the Hungarian Uprising that occurred towards the end of 1956.
The twenty-five-minute New Morning for the World: “Daybreak of Freedom” (1983), like Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, calls for a narrator, Sidney Outlaw on this occasion. Musically, it’s a powerful and painterly score, also soulfully expressive, with King’s words, specifically about Black people in America – slavery, racial discrimination, and the like – probably even more relevant today, and with a much wider geographical import, than when King delivered them. Outlaw was an excellent orator, impassioned and stirring with King’s optimistic if dangerous desires (he of course was assassinated). In music and in speech this was impressive, the MSM Symphony Orchestra fully committed.
Similarly cinematic, the Shostakovich. Natan Rakhlin conducted the premiere in 1957, followed by Sargent (UK) and Stokowski (US), the latter recording it. In four continuous movements – ‘The Palace Square’-‘The 9th of January’-‘Memory Eternal’-‘Tocsin’ – lasting on average about an hour, save for Kondrashin (fifty-four minutes) and Rostropovich (seventy-two, his LSO version); see below. From Slatkin and the talented MSM students the first movement was tense, eerie and ominous, the second finds protests mounting, only to be mercilessly put asunder by the Tsar’s troops, Shostakovich at his most graphic and goriest (timpani salvos, trombone glissandos, bass drum gunshots). Then a memorial for those lost (eloquent violas), rising from the depths, before revolutionary fervour (and the songs Shostakovich quotes) takes hold once more, with zeal and rhythmic bite, mediated here by a wonderfully lyrical cor anglais solo, before crowd activity returns and bells ring out (here left to resonate at the end) – not in triumph but alarm, although 1917 wasn’t far away. This terrific fifty-seven-minute account was testimony to the students’ abilities and Leonard Slatkin’s inspirational guidance.
https://www.josephschwantner.com
Rostropovich’s second recording of No.11 (the first was with the National Symphony Orchestra for Teldec)