Sinfonia No. 5, “Visions,” the last score completed by George Walker, comes at the end of a long and remarkable career. A prolific composer (who studied under Nadia Boulanger) and a virtuoso pianist, Walker wrote more than 90 pieces, including works for piano, orchestra, and chorus. By the time he died at age 96, he had broken numerous barriers. The son of a government employee and an immigrant from the West Indies, he attended the Oberlin Conservatory at the age of 14 and was the first Black composer to graduate from Curtis Institute of Music; he was also the first African American soloist to perform at New York’s Town Hall (as soloist in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto), and the first to receive a Pulitzer Prize, which was bestowed upon him in 1996.
The Sinfonia No. 5, “Visions,” is a brief but powerful piece that evokes Walker’s reaction to the horrific shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Walker began composing the work in 2015 but reworked it in the aftermath of the massacre. According to Thomas May, “When he learned what had happened, he became determined to introduce a layer that pays tribute to the victims.” Complex and densely textured, as Walker’s works often are, it nonetheless has a special sense of urgency that is explained by Walker’s eldest son, Gregory: “He looked back and saw the other work he had done and thought this could be the last one. And he felt an urgency about getting it out there.” Tonight’s performance is for orchestra alone; there is an alternate version which contains video and a short, surreal narration that concludes with a vision of enslaved people being “beaten, chained, auctioned, and boxed.” Walker did not live to see the Sinfonia performed: It was premiered posthumously in 2019 by the Seattle Symphony with Thomas Dausgaard conducting.
The work features somber chords, interconnected motifs (a Walker signature), swirling strings, and cascading piano clusters, all seeming to strive for something beyond reach. A quiet middle section offers moments of haunting lyricism from the winds and strings. The piece is enlivened by fierce fanfares, some consonant, others darkly dissonant. Walker includes snatches of vernacular melodies (including “Rock of Ages” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”) in the orchestral textures, but these are subtly disguised. At the end, a stalking bass pizzicato leads to a chilling, percussive cut-off. The work has a fierce individuality typical of Walker’s work, summarized by conductor and pianist Ian Hobson, who shortly before his death called Walker “a composer of great integrity, uncompromising in the best sense of the word, who doesn’t pander to anything.”
For years it has been fashionable to argue that Leonard Bernstein’s best music is for the theater, where he eschews all that square symphonic stuff and becomes fully himself—authentically “American” and authentically “Lenny.” Yet there is no hard separation between Bernstein the symphonist and musical theater composer. West Side Story, for example, is symphonic Broadway, meticulously constructed around a series of recurring motifs and classical structures, just as many of the concert pieces, such as the Serenade for violin and orchestra, have jazzy syncopations and harmonies.
Following his dramatic last-minute replacement for Bruno Walter to conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1943, Bernstein rapidly rose to fame as maestro, composer, writer, pianist, political activist, and ever-present musical personality. As a musical educator he had no peer. His televised Young People’s Concerts introduced thousands to classical music from Beethoven to Stravinsky, his image, voice, and charisma effortlessly turning something ostensibly abstract and remote into something vital and hip through the sheer force of personality.
Juggling his many careers meant that he often slowed down from composing. He worried toward the end that he had not been prolific enough, but practically everything he wrote is in the repertory, in the concert hall and opera house and on the Broadway stage. Many of his “problem” pieces have received new, celebrated performances, including Mass and the three symphonies, the latter championed in acclaimed interpretations by tonight’s conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano. We should remember that all of Ravel can be contained on three or four CDs, and all of T. S. Eliot can be read in a single evening.
Years after the premiere of the Serenade, Bernstein stated that it was “originally called Symposium [but] I was dissuaded from that title because people said it sounded so academic. I now regret that. I wish I had retained the title so people would know what it is based on … It’s one of Plato’s shortest dialogues and it’s on the subject of love. It’s seven speeches, at a banquet, after-dinner speeches so to speak. By Aristophanes, by Agathon, by Socrates and himself … it’s really a love piece.”
Serenade is a violin concerto with an unusual programmatic structure, offering soaring lyricism, jazzy swagger, jolting dissonance, and exquisite delicacy, with violin writing that juxtaposes breathtaking virtuosity with songlike simplicity. The orchestration, for strings and percussion, has a shimmering transparency, though dense chords appear in the finale. In his own program note, Bernstein wrote that “each movement evolves out of elements in the preceding one, a form I initiated in my Second Symphony.”
Bernstein provides precise, colorful commentary on each “speech” from Plato’s dialogue:
I. Phaedrus; Pausanias (Lento—Allegro marcato). Phaedrus opens the symposium with a lyrical oration in praise of Eros, the god of Love. (Fugato, begun by the solo violin.) Pausanias continues by describing the duality of the lover as compared with the beloved. This is expressed in a classical sonata-allegro, based on the material of the opening fugato.
II. Aristophanes (Allegretto). Aristophanes does not play the role of clown in this dialogue, but instead that of the bedtime storyteller, invoking the fairy-tale mythology of love. The atmosphere is one of quiet charm.
III. Erixymathus (Presto). The physician speaks of bodily harmony as a scientific model for the workings of love patterns. This is an extremely short fugato scherzo, born of a blend of mystery and humor.
IV. Agathon (Adagio). Perhaps the most moving (and famous) speech of the dialogue, Agathon’s panegyric embraces all aspects of love’s powers, charms, and functions. This movement is simply a three-part song.
V. Socrates; Alcibiades (Molto tenuto—Allegro molto vivace). Socrates describes his visit to the seer Diotima, quoting her speech on the demonology of love. Love as a demon is Socrates’ image for the profundity of love, and his seniority adds to the feeling of didactic soberness in an otherwise pleasant and convivial after-dinner discussion. This is a slow introduction of greater weight than any of the preceding movements, and serves as a highly developed reprise of the middle section of the Agathon movement, thus suggesting a hidden sonata form. The famous interruption by Alcibiades and his band of drunken revelers ushers in the Allegro, which is an extended Rondo ranging in spirit from agitation through jig-like dance music to joyful celebration. If there is a hint of jazz in the celebration (there is more than a hint), I hope it will not be taken as anachronistic Greek party music, but rather the natural expression of a contemporary American composer imbued with the spirit of that timeless dinner party.
Mahler is now a central part of musical culture; his simultaneous embrace of ecstasy and despair, swooning lyricism and brutal dissonance, epic structures and microscopic details, and ethereal melodies and coarse vernacular tunes, constitutes a largeness of vision that today’s listeners find riveting. Unlike Mahler’s contemporaries, we view him as embodying multiplicity rather than contradiction, grandeur rather than sprawl, emotional honesty rather than crassness.
Early works often yield fascinating glimpses of the mature artist to come. Mahler’s First, however, is the rare example of a long premiere symphony that bears the artist’s distinct signature in almost every measure. As Schoenberg, one of Mahler’s earliest champions, observed, “Everything that will characterize him is already present … Here already his life-melody begins, and he merely develops it. Here are his devotions to nature and his thoughts of death.”
Here also are the manic emotional shifts, the gigantic orchestra (including seven horns and four trumpets), the injection of popular sentimental tunes into epic symphonic structures, the elaborate extra-musical “program,” the long stretches of primeval stillness, the juxtaposition of caustic irony with fervent Romanticism, and the gargantuan finale that recapitulates the symphony’s disparate parts and winds things up with a big bang. Mahler was fond of saying that a symphony should contain the entire universe, and he meant it from the beginning.
When compared to his subsequent works, Mahler’s First Symphony does have some marks of youth. The gloom and dementia that shatter some of the later symphonies are only brief convulsions here. The gut-wrenching fortissimo in the middle of the first movement, the “gloomy and uncanny colors” (as Maher called them) in the third, and the “sudden outburst of a deeply wounded heart” opening the finale are real but momentary shadows banished by the symphony’s basic brashness and brightness.
Still, the First was radical enough to alienate the 1889 audience at its Hungarian Opera House premiere. Mahler provided a detailed program for this version of the piece. In addition to the “Titan” subtitle (after a Jean Paul novel) for the entire symphony, the first movement was called “Spring Without End” (the long pedal introduction evoking “the awakening of nature at early dawn”), the second “Under Full Sail,” the third “Funeral March in the Manner of Callot,” and the finale “From Inferno to Paradise.” Mahler also included another movement called “Blumine,” but later suppressed it. In addition, the symphony was divided into two parts, “From the Days of Youth” and “The Human Comedy.” Although he later scrapped all this, at least two sections—the awakening scene at the beginning and the visionary funeral march—actually constitute some of the most vivid and exacting tone painting he ever wrote.
—Jack Sullivan
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