Yesterday afternoon I was at Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley for the third & final performance by the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra of their latest program, Voices of War, a topic sadly as relevant as ever; in fact, as Music Director Ming Luke told us, though this concert might be seen as a response to the world's current conflagrations, these pieces had actually been scheduled years ago, only to be disrupted by the pandemic.
The first piece, Elgar's Sospiri, was a pleasant surprise, as it was not listed on the website description of the concert. It is a meditation for harp & orchestra, provoked by the First World War, & I'm surprised it isn't better known, as it is reminiscent of Barber's celebrated Adagio for Strings, with a similar dignified sense of mounting sorrow. Perhaps it's the piece's relative brevity, & its comparative emotional complexity (it doesn't build on a single subject as the Barber does, but moves meditatively around) that render it less suitable for public commemorations. It did seem a very personal statement, despite the large forces involved. I was glad to "discover" it.
The Elgar was followed by the wind blows full of sand, a setting by Sam Wu for chorus & orchestra of Li Po's Lament of the Frontier Guard, as rendered into English by Ezra Pound. Wu did not set the entire poem, but made effective use of large sections & fragments of it, which helped emphasize the dislocated & desolate effect of the work. The setting is bleak but beautiful as a desert is beautiful; waves of sound sweep forward, intersected with fragile, almost scratchy effects from solo strings. The chorus is sometimes united, sometimes halved, singing over & under each other in a sort of call-&-response way. as they contemplate the yellowing grasses & the chilly expanse of bones "white with a thousand frosts". As the words describe the imperial anger & brutal battles that left so many bodies to waste in this distant field, the music grows stridently martial, with the sort of harsh indifferent sarcasm of the marches in Shostakovich's symphonies. The battle recedes but the bones remain; the chorus's final word is forgotten. This powerfully effective piece was commissioned by the BCCO & given its world premiere in these performances. Wu was present & came on stage to an enthusiastic ovation. This piece wsa conducted by the group's Assistant Conductor, Samantha Burgess; Music Director Ming Luke directed the Elgar & the final piece, Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time.
Tippett wrote the piece to express his profound anguish over the events surrounding Kristallnacht, but his aim was to write a piece about the universal underlying situation (the violence provoked by oppressing one group of people, including the violent force used to suppress their resistance) rather than the facts behind this particular situation: thus instead of Herschel Grynszpan, whose killing of a German diplomat in Paris was used as an excuse by the Nazis for a night of terror against German Jews, we have The Boy, & his Mother, & an unnamed power oppressing an unidentified people. They could be Jews, but they could also be Black Americans; the libretto mentions "pograms in the east, lynchings in the west", &, just as Bach used Lutheran hymns in his chorales, Tippett widens his musical & emotional net by using Black American spirituals for several of the choruses.
Tippett wrote his own libretto, at T S Eliot's suggestion. His lines may not have the rhythmic power of Eliot's work, but they make up for any lack of elegance with sincerity & directness, though that's not the same thing as simplicity; given his lifelong interest in Jungian psychology, Tippett references our shadow selves & other underlying psychological structures as he looks forward to some sort of future human reconciliation. Tippett's attempt in his libretto to create a universal situation certainly struck me as superior to Amin Maalouf's similar attempt for Adriana Mater, which has extraordinarily powerful music by Saariaho in the service of a clumsy & reductive libretto. Tippett was wise to write an oratorio, in which the action is interspersed with meditations / interpretations & suggestive emblems, rather than a more overtly dramatic opera.
The BCCO had certainly lined up a powerhouse quartet of soloists: soprano Brandie Sutton, alto Sara Couden, tenor Jonathan Elmore, & bass Kirk Eichelberger. Sutton sang her lines, which included The Mother's, with a soaring & anguished purity; Elmore was the plangent & earnest Son. Couden gave conviction & power to her meditations, & Eichelberger stentorian authority to his. The whole concert was pretty remarkable; I'll admit that I only recently found out about this group, though it's been around for nearly 60 years, &, as this program showed, it does excellent work.
The concert was free & open to the public, which is also a pretty remarkable thing, but though I understand the need to ask for money, I wish that particular speech had been placed somewhere other than right after Wu's piece, as it jolted us right out of the powerful effect he had created. We get bumped back into reality soon enough.
The program book mentioned that Tippett's use of spirituals in A Child of Our Time has "drawn charges of cultural appropriation". I find his use of them respectful & empathetic, & a way of incorporating the history of American racism as part of the universal struggle he is trying to depict. What's his alternative? Ignoring the oppression of Black Americans? Should he, a gentile from England, also not have been moved to compose by the plight of Jews in Germany? Cultural appropriation is a real thing, but also a complicated thing, & it's a term that gets tossed around more easily than it should, without much thought or distinction. The history of culture is the history of "appropriation": borrowing, outright theft, misunderstandings, re-interpretations, revisions, an empathetic realization that a culture that is not your own is saying something to you . . . The alternative seems to be a reductive insistence on a mostly imaginary cultural purity, & of course "cultural purity", unpolluted by foreign influences/appropriations, is a central tenet of fascism. & as the program also mentions, Pound, whose influential version of Li Po's poem was the basis for Wu's powerful work, was a fascist & an anti-Semite. Yet his version (or appropriation) of the Chinese poet speaks with harrowing truth about the effects of authoritarian violence, & Wu, an Australian of Chinese descent now active in the United States, made it the source for an excellent new work. It's a reminder that all we can do is try to make the best we can of a troubled & unsatisfying world.
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