Santa Rosa Symphony, Press Room

San Francisco Classical Voice
Problem Child Of Our Time

April 15, 2002
By George Thomson

By George Thomson
Much has been written about the future of the Symphony Orchestra in modern culture, and many hands have wrung over its perceived irrelevance and lack of connection to today's world. Pundits have bemoaned the graying of audiences and suggested that orchestras need to make their programming more accessible to a broader public. Organizations long on advisors and short on leadership continue to drive the lowest common denominator ever lower and more common. Such folks should have taken their well-wrung mitts last week to witness the remarkable, exhilarating and occasionally irritating experience that was Monday evening�s Santa Rosa Symphony Concert at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.

This concert was the latest in a series of multi-disciplinary collaborations between the Symphony and the ArtQuest magnet program at Santa Rosa High School. It featured conductor Jeffrey Kahane with the orchestra, a chorus (the Santa Rosa High School Concert Choir with the Sonoma County Bach Choir) and soloists in Michael Tippett�s fascinating but flawed oratorio "A Child of Our Time." In addition, the concert was literally surrounded � in time and space � by hundreds of earnest and accomplished works of art by students from the ArtQuest program: paintings, drawings, mixed media, photography, writing, dance and drama in astonishing profusion.

Emotion, boldness, muddled critical thinking

The Tippett oratorio was composed in 1939-41 as a response to the horror of Nazism but also as a broader protest against oppression. Its idealist universality has that amalgam of searing emotion, boldness, and muddled critical thinking that makes it an unexpectedly perfect vehicle for a high-school collaboration. On entering the lobby for the evening�s performance, wading through the maze of art displays, my eye was quickly drawn to a long series of panels, with lines of text accompanied by a wide variety of illustrations � an enormous "illuminated manuscript," as the caption explained. I scanned the text, musing on the mock seriousness and posturing of high school poetry, until it hit me with a shudder: This was Tippett's text for his oratorio. It is pretty awful stuff, and not only for those who find its pacifist and Jungian response to unfathomable evil empty and inert; the rhetoric is also at times intensely embarrassing.

The fact that Tippett bases his formal scheme on baroque oratorio, complete with recitatives, arias, ensembles and choruses, keeps the musical norms at least within the ambitus of the post-Victorian English Choral Society (albeit a rather lefty one). The musical language is likewise lyrical and expressive; the spirituals that function as chorale-like interludes also imbue the surrounding music with their harmonic directness. Even at its most artily modern the work rounds off all of its edges. (Sharp points might hurt someone, after all.) I would stop somewhere short of Kahane�s attribution of a "sublime stroke of genius" to Tippett's inclusion of spirituals, those totems of universalized oppression and suffering, but there is no denying the boldness of the gesture and power of their effect.

A stirring, unified, radiant performance

The musicians young and old responded to Tippett's music with a committed and passionate performance. The orchestra was in excellent form, with the string sound particularly warm and unified. The combined choruses were very well blended, though the timbre of the young voices predominated, and diction was very clear throughout the evening. The soloists � soprano Janice Chandler, mezzo Milagro Vargas, tenor Richard Clement and baritone Derrick Parker � lent musical substance to even the most excruciating lines of text. Chandler in particular contributed a most radiant warmth of sound.

Conductor Kahane presided with urgency and utter commitment, without which the work could easily have floundered in its own righteousness. Had he but restrained his heartfelt opening remarks, managing to evoke the themes of oppression and reconciliation so vividly from his own experience that there was scarcely anything left for the audience to interpret, unmediated, in the music. Likewise the emotional responses engendered � nay, demanded � by the visual art that surrounded the theater and framed the musical performance (in brief introductory and concluding slideshows) almost dwarfed the concert in their breadth and boldness.

As the supply of emotionally charged, epic choral works by British pacifists available to the Symphony for future such events is rapidly dwindling (they've tackled Britten's "War Requiem" already), one wonders how this intrepid project might respond to the challenge of music less indebted to words. The important fact is that such a project is taking place. It brings many genres, ages, and perspectives together. It fills the concert hall with a palpable excitement (verging on the self-congratulatory, true, but a buzz nonetheless). It may not be the solution to the modern Symphony Orchestra�s identity crisis � I noted with some despair a survey in the program asking me to rate every aspect of the experience, doubtless for the benefit of some committee somewhere � but it�s a wonderful try.

(George Thomson is a conductor, violinist and violist, Director of the Music Conservatory, San Domenico School, living in San Rafael.)

�2002 George Thomson, all rights reserved