Hartford Symphony, Hartford, CT
June 8-10, 2018
by Michael J. Moran
For the concluding “Masterworks
series” program of the HSO’s 74th season, Music Director Carolyn
Kuan presented three diverse works, each of which, in contrasting
ways, celebrates life.
The brief concert opener was Anna
Clyne’s festive “Masquerade,” commissioned by the BBC and
premiered at London’s Promenade concerts in 2013. In the absence of
program notes, Kuan called on concertmaster Leonid Sigal and the
orchestra in a spoken introduction to introduce the 5-minute piece’s
several dance-like themes. Their performance of this colorful score
by the rising young British-born composer was appropriately
exuberant.
Lisa Williamson |
The first half of the program continued
with Samuel Barber’s haunting memory piece for soprano and
orchestra, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Setting excerpts from
American writer James Agee’s memoir A Death in the Family about his
Tennessee childhood, Barber wrote it in 1947 for soprano Eleanor
Steber. A reduced HSO and Kuan offered lush backing to soprano Lisa
Williamson’s crystalline-voiced account of the nostalgic text.
But the main attraction of this concert
came after intermission: a jubilant rendition of Carl Orff’s
massive “Carmina Burana,” a cycle of 24 songs for soprano, tenor,
and baritone soloists and two choruses. The Latin title means “Songs
of Beuren,” the site of an abbey near Orff’s native Munich, where
about 200 thirteenth-century poems were discovered over a century
before he set a selection of them in 1936 to original music,
according to the program book, of “a sinewy, electric muscularity
that is driven by an almost primeval rhythmic energy.”
The hour-long cantata begins and ends
with the fatalistic “O Fortune,” surrounding three sections which
revel in the pleasures of spring, drinking, and love. Highlights
included: tenor David Guzman’s hilarious impersonation of a swan
being cooked for a meal; baritone Tyler Duncan’s vividly drunken
abbot; and Williamson’s radiant “Dulcissime,” where she nailed
the highest note in the score as she embraced her lover. The Hartford
Chorale and the Connecticut Children’s Chorus sang with vigor and
precision, fervently supported by orchestra and conductor.
Full printed texts and translations for
the Barber and Orff pieces capped as grand a season finale as
Hartford has seen in some time.