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Pittsburgh Symphony makes 'A Woman's Song' moving experience
Oct 17, 2009 (The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
The Pittsburgh Symphony concert Friday night felt like a new start to the season, so refreshing was it to encounter two rewarding American scores -- one of them a notable world premiere.
Principal guest conductor Leonard Slatkin's return to Heinz Hall brought both smart programming and assured performances.
The new piece was "A Woman's Song" by the symphony's composer of the year Richard Danielpour. It was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra.
Danielpour's performances with the symphony later this season will include "Rocking the Cradle," conducted by music director Manfred Honeck in April.
"A Woman's Song" is a 25-minute song cycle about experiences over a lifetime using wonderful poems by Maya Angelou. It is a beautiful and moving piece that is firmly in the mainstream of American classical composition.
It treats Angelou's texts with the devotion they deserve, and Danielpour's devotion comes from the heart and not only the mind.
However, it was a big mistake of the symphony to withhold Angelou's texts from the audience. In the sixth of the seven songs, there's a lightly swinging vibraphone solo, and the audience should have been able to correlate it with the words "My life has turned to blue." At least the program booklet printed the titles of the poems.
Soprano Angela Brown sang beautifully. She was a vibrant, dramatic presence -- gentle, ironic and fervent as fit the song. But only some of the words were clear from downstairs. A friend reported at intermission that he couldn't make out any words sitting upstairs.
Danielpour's Coplandesque evocation of morning was a perfectly apt metaphor in the first song "Little Girl Speakings." The Afro-Cuban style of the second song, an older girl's "Life Don't Frighten Me," brought a burst of assertive energy.
Reflection has replaced tears by the time the woman sings of romantic frustration, in which Angelou takes the normally reassuring word "home" and makes it the woman's lamenting refrain: "But . . . They Went Home."
The concert opened with a brilliant performance of Peter Mennin's 1952 Concertato for Orchestra, "Moby Dick." Although the composer said it was a reflection of his general impression of reading Herman Melville's famous novel, there are many passages which can be taken almost pictorially. Both powerful and atmospheric, the music is shrewdly constructed.
The concert concluded with a good performance of the Symphony No. 2 by Jan Sibelius.
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go to http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/. Copyright (c) 2009, The
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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