Mt. Airy composer's premiere hurt by acoustics

by MICHAEL CARUSO

David Hayes, the Philadelphia Singers and the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia gave the world premiere of Babylon, a work for chorus and orchestra composed by Mt. Airy resident Thomas Whitman on Sunday night in the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium.

Whitman, associate professor and chairman of the department of music and dance at Swarthmore College, explained his choice of Psalm 137 (“By the waters of Babylon”) as a text by saying, “Like many musicians, I find this psalm’s central image poignant and uplifting: it is a portrait of a group of people who, vilified by the larger community, yearn for spiritual strength through music. Their invocation of Jerusalem — i.e., a place of peace that seems forever beyond reach — might resonate with anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.”

He pointed out that this text has been set to music many times over the centuries by Christian composers, but that they usually omit the final stanza, which is a call for vengeance. “I am Jewish,” he said, “and felt somehow compelled to set the entire psalm.”

Whitman originally started to compose a setting for bass voice accompanied by a consort of viola da gambas about 10 years ago. Working with a modern translation, he tried to work out a strategy for setting the angry and violent last verse. He recalled that at that time, there was a violent incident during which a Jewish gunman burst into a mosque and murdered many Arabs, forcing him to lay aside his work on the text.

“A few years later,” he continued, “I revived the idea of doing a setting, this time for chorus. I still felt immobilized by the words, however, so I gave a stack of several English translations of the psalm to Nathalie Anderson (a professor of English literature at Swarthmore College), the poet with whom I have written two operas. She used them as the basis for a magnificent poem. Her version of the conclusion seemed to me to strike just the right tone: sorrowful and questioning. The title — Babylon — is hers.”

In performance Sunday evening, Irvine Auditorium’s slightly murky acoustics didn’t serve the score particularly well. Striking me on first hearing as more episodic and less continuously and motivically developmental, Babylon depends upon the audience’s being able to easily discern each and every syllable sung for an effective rendition. Although one could occasionally clearly hear the text, that occurred only when the scoring for the accompanying orchestra was light and the choral texture straightforward rather than contrapuntal or even just fully harmonized. Throughout most of the work, the choral sound was mostly sonic rather than verbal. There were some intriguing timbres but little sense of dramatic narrative.

YOUNG MAESTRO

Although Rosen Milanov has been the Philadelphia Orchestra’s associate conductor for the past four seasons, it’s only on the rarest occasions that local audiences have had the opportunity to hear him conduct the full ensemble. That’s why it was such a pleasure on a recent Saturday evening to catch him on the podium in Verizon Hall leading the Philadelphians in a substantial program of music composed by Frederick Delius, Nicholas Maw and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The work that drew the focus of interest in Milanov’s program was the world premiere of a commissioned English Horn Concerto composed by the Englishman Nicholas Maw for the orchestra’s English hornist, former Chestnut Hiller Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia. Cast in one movement, it got off to a marvelous start that sadly soon lost its momentum of inspiration.

The English horn, placed in a range a fifth below its brother, the oboe, lacks its double reed sibling’s bright tartness of tone and, consequently, broader palette of expressivity. Whereas the oboe can be both mellow and pungent, the English horn tends toward a consistently mellow timbre that requires a greater sensitivity to delicate orchestration than that which Maw displayed on only the rarest occasions. During large portions of the score, the soloist’s voice was lost amid the heavier tones of the strings and the more forward tones of all the other wind instruments.

The concerto also revealed an inability on the composer’s part to sustain the ongoing line of motivic and rhythmic development that is absolutely necessary for the efficacy of a one-movement score.

MONTEVERDI VESPERS

Matthew Glandorf will conduct the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, along with Piffaro and King’s Noyse, in a performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s acclaimed but rarely heard Vespers in Honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Friday, May 13, at 8 p.m. in the Episcopal Cathedral Church of the Saviour in West Philadelphia.

Commenting on the small number of performances the Vespers has ever received since it was composed in 1610, Glandorf said, “It’s extremely virtuosic in its writing for the vocal soloists, the choir and the instrumentalists. It requires professional vocal soloists, professional instrumentalists and a chorus that can sing the very demanding choral parts.

“It’s the first sacred choral piece to combine the dazzling styles of madrigals, opera and instrumental concerti,” Glandorf added. “It occupies a place alongside the great Bach settings of the Passion and Handel oratorios.”

For ticket information, call 215-545-8634.