The Music City Review

On Thursday May 2, Chamber Music City, a new chamber music organization helmed by Percussionist Ji Hye Jung, gave its premier production at the chic Ruby Nashville venue in the West End. Upon reading her stated mission to produce “innovative programming, unforgettable performances, and community” by “bringing a new type of musical experience to Nashville,” I wondered that, in her ten years up in Blair’s ivory tower, Prof. Jung has still not heard of Intersection, Chatterbird, Alias or the Nashville Chamber Society. That said, even if Chamber Music City isn’t the only shining light on the Music City’s skyline, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place and space for an ensemble “centered around diverse programming of music old and new performed by globally renowned artists.” And their first concert introduced the ensemble’s ideals quite nicely to the scene with a program of quite diverse music spanning the long 20^th and 21^st centuries and featuring works by Antonin Dvořák, Caroline Shaw, Toru Takemitsu, and Gemma Peacocke.

After a preconcert discussion with the evening’s musicians, led by Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad, the evening opened with Gemma Peacocke’s Fear of Flying (2020), for alto flute and electronics. Peacocke’s work was composed from the inspiration of a poem of the same name by Teresia Teaiwa which was written in “broken Gilbertese,” an Oceanic language of the inhabitants of island regions in the South Pacific. Sooyun Kim’s performance was excellent, with a warm tone that blended well and a facility of technique that kept a comfortable pace with what might otherwise have been an unforgivingly ferocious electronic track. Personally, I wasn’t a fan of this piece only because the timbres of the flute and electronics just didn’t seem to go together, perhaps it was for programmatic reasons relating to the piece’s inspiration, but CMC was just getting started, and with the second piece the magic really started to happen.

Tōru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea was written in 1981, commissioned by Greenpeace for the Save the Whales campaign and is written in free time (without measure lines). Its tonality isn’t defined as much as it is suggested, and its inspiration is drawn from Melville’s Moby Dick. However, Takemitsu can only achieve the shores of Cape Cod by sailing through the impressionism of Debussy’s La Mer. The musicianship here, not just interpretation of the score but musical intuition and nuanced communication among Jung on the Marimba and Kim on the Alto Flute, was simply remarkable. The roof of Ruby added an aleatoric dimension as the heavens gave way to a downpour—an addition that enhanced the poetic nature of the moment—it really was beautiful.

Takemitsu’s ‘Toward the Sea’: it really was beautiful

Caroline Shaw composed Entr’acte, for string quartet, in 2011, “after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77, No.2 – with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet.” Shaw’s reference to the key shift (from one flat to five, which is quite distant aurally) is somewhat misleading, for her work seems to build from Haydn’s timbre and dynamics rather than his tonality. Shifting between a barely perceptible pianississimo (super-quiet) to forte (loud), and exploring the aural timbres of pizzicato, glissando and bowed sounds across the range, the CMC ensemble engaged with this delicate work admirably. The highlight for me was listening to the careful aural balance that the two violins (Kristin Lee and Siwoo Kim) maintained throughout, seeming to share the spotlight equally—no small achievement for “globally renowned artists.” As we broke for intermission, I lamented to myself that Shaw had not written three additional movements to make a complete quartet.

Antonin Dvořák wrote his twelfth string quartet, the “American Quartet,” in a little more than two weeks, while he was on vacation with a Czech immigrant community in Spillville, Iowa. However, it was written after he had completed his 9^th Symphony “From the New World” but before it had been premiered and was thus probably inspired more by the country than the state—indeed, the quartet is in a very similar “American” language to the Symphony and the four vast movements are primarily unified through the use of a pentatonic tonal language.

The first movement opens wonderfully with the primary, pentatonic theme emerging from the middle of the texture (Violist Paul Neubauer performed this exquisitely) as the cello part (gently measured by Mihai Marica) provides long, slow notes underneath and the violins sparkle on the surface. The music contains all of the utopian ideals of manifest destiny at a time when our gilded industrialism still sparkled with a naïve optimism for the future. Indeed, Dvořák accomplished much in bringing native American musics and African American musics into the creation of the “American Sound,” yet he seemed blind to the toxicity that European colonialism was bringing to the country. Indeed, the recent catastrophe at the Battle at Wounded Knee in 1890 (the deadliest mass shooting in American history) had just happened three years prior to his composing this work.

Similarly, the second movement’s primary theme is often cited as a stylized African American spiritual. It is a beautifully accompanied melody, longing in a romanticism that completely disarms the reality of the period just as the third movement’s quirky, syncopated opening texture seems to reach for the frontier. The ensemble performed well together to this point, but in the fourth movement, with Dvořák’s locomotive rhythm, they really hit their stride as a unit. It provided a thrilling close to a wonderful evening of music. After the final cadence, as I participated in the (deserved) standing ovation, I realized that very few of the people in the room were hearing the American Quartet as naïve (as I had)—they had all enjoyed the music in their own way, some perhaps as a statement of patriotism, some as a statement on behalf of the marginal in the face of colonialism and perhaps others as purely absolute music performed admirably by excellent musicians. In the end, this might be what will set the CMC apart.

The evening’s concert was presented without an underlying political dimension or moral lesson, making me think of that old premise of ars gratia artis (art for its own sake—an emphasis of a work’s content over its context) which was so important in the late 19^th century and is so rarely heard anymore. Despite occasional pushback, the aesthetic reversed slowly across the 20^th century, with an emphasis of context over content slowly replacing the 19^th century’s idealistic (and patently false) aesthetic. This reversal began to reach extremes in 1967 when Roland Barthes, in his “The Death of the Author,” surmised that the audience’s interpretation trumps the actual intention of the author (or composer) in understanding a piece’s expression and purpose. The extremes became ridiculous in the ‘90’s with the rather doltish mainstream acceptance of the idea of the “Mozart effect,” when pregnant mothers began to play music to their bellies in order to make their unborn children smarter. This strange assumption (that exposure to Mozart makes one smarter) became the primary justification for classical music (as if any music needs justification). Importantly, these contextual aesthetic determinants and perspectives are quite important to contemporary concert life; for some they (the contexts) have remained the primary determinant of the music’s value.

For a nonprofit performing organization, for example, in order to obtain a grant for a project, the granting committee will typically expect a proposal to carry an expression of some underlying, non-musical (and often politically-charged) purpose above and beyond a simple performance of great music. Without pushing all the way back, (they did have a program and a pre-concert talk) CMC is emphasizing the beauty of the experience in the intention, content and context in performance, and in doing so, leaving space for individual interpretation by each member of the audience. I’m not sure how they obtained this privilege, but I hope that it continues! By simply presenting these pieces as masterpieces it was liberating for me, at least, to be able to attend a chamber concert where the music spoke for itself and the composer, without being inundated with external (to the music) lessons or ideologies. When we all can take what we need from the music and leave an enriched person in our own way, it is no longer ars gratia artis but instead ars pro nobis (art for our sake), which I think is just as it should be. I can’t wait to hear what the wonderful Attacca Quartet will perform next October in Ruby as part of the next concert of the CMC.

GOAL!

Alan D. Valentine, President and CEO of the Nashville Symphony, welcomed patrons to the performance from the stage on Friday, May 3, wearing a hockey jersey. This jersey was gifted by the Symphony’s neighbors at the Nashville Predators, complete with a Schermerhorn nameplate and the number 46 – signifying the named concert venue and the year in which the ensemble gave its first performance respectively. The Predators were also ‘performing’ this evening at Bridgestone Arena in a must-win game to advance in the National Hockey League playoffs, while Morgan Wallen rounded out the schedule of entertainment with a country concert in Nissan Stadium. Downtown Nashville was electric, as would soon become a rather full Laura Turner Concert Hall.

We first heard soloist Gil Shaham tuning his violin off stage while audience and orchestra both waited in anticipation to experience his interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61. Engaged throughout an expansive orchestral preamble, Shaham followed Beethoven’s scoring, looking at specific sections as they spun melodies and established the sonic landscape in which the soloist would eventually participate. Before his first entrance, and subsequently just before extended breaks from playing would cease, Shaham could be seen fingering along with various excerpts being executed by factions of the orchestra. Shaham often took residence seemingly right under maestro Giancarlo Guerrero, connecting the soloist to the podium and ensemble; the conductor had no choice but to receive that which was being communicated.

Premiered in Vienna during Beethoven’s ‘heroic’ period, the Violin Concerto was composed around the time of his Fourth Symphony, while working through sketches of his Fifth Symphony, just after the opera Fidelio premiered, and likely simultaneously with Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata.” One may have then become more excited knowing that the Nashville Symphony, only a mere month earlier, presented Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major, Op. 60, with Guerrero conducting. While historic performance is neither expected nor desired, an awareness of style and approach is a reasonable expectation. Guerrero’s gestures regularly appeared rather heroic, but seemingly in a manner that conflicted with expectations of early-Nineteenth Century sensibilities. Big, heavy gestures undermined, at times, the transparent sensitivity Shaham invited. A more intimate perspective with respect to tone color and dynamic was desired from the orchestra, but in a bit of irony, a reality not achieved until the stage was filled with more musicians during the second portion of the program.

Shaham managed to bring the audience to the music that he was creating. An especially powerful moment was host to only the solo violin nourishing a long, held note alone in the higher register at a hushed dynamic. Time paused while our collective focus and energy waited with a patience not common to modern society. Gil Shaham’s musicality has a healing quality; a prescription for one’s soul that was awarded three energetic bows from the audience. Fortunately for Nashville Symphony patrons, Shaham is scheduled to return next season to partake in a live recording project featuring Mason Bates’ Nomad Concerto in October 2024.

The second half of the concert featured An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64, of Richard Strauss. Affected greatly by the death of his contemporary, Gustav Mahler, one way in which Strauss processed the loss of his beloved friend was through composing this work – a composition that would prove to be his final tone poem. The scale of the project is massive: nearly fifty minutes in length and expanded orchestral forces are used, including heckelphone, Wagner tubas, off-stage brass musicians, thunder and wind machines, and organ. While the presentation of Beethoven may have left one wanting more of the Nashville Symphony, the performance of An Alpine Symphony proved why this ensemble has been awarded fourteen GRAMMY® Awards out of twenty-seven nominations. Firmly planted in genres and styles that innovate, the Nashville Symphony’s commitment to and execution of such compositions is inspiring.

The energy generated by dotted rhythms throughout the orchestra were impassioned, specifically those moments featuring the trombone-tuba contingency. In juxtaposition, quiet passages from the violin sections comforted the listener, transporting one not so dissimilarly from the way in which Shaham’s artistry has been afore described. Special acknowledgment should be given to the viola section, who, aside from minor distractions generated from frantic page turns, performed with an agility and presence that can unfortunately be overlooked in orchestral performance. William Leathers continues to be a welcomed addition to the ensemble, charging valiantly from the principal trumpet seat. It is unfortunate that the final release was somewhat splintered and abrupt, given the way in which the Nashville Symphony otherwise successfully navigated the seamless twenty-two sections of this work.

One is encouraged to experience the Nashville Symphony and Giancarlo Guerrero present Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, May 16-18, for an even more heightened journey of emotion. Preparing Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony for performances this past week will likely ensure that the ‘team’ is ready to successfully advance next week with Mahler; unfortunately, unlike the Symphony’s neighbors at the Nashville Predators, who’s season has ended.