BERKELEY’S NEW VOICES
BERKELEY, CA—Minorities and timeless tales stepped up in the Berkeley Symphony’s program of June 4 concurrent with Black Music Month. The timely program featured no less than three salient women’s issues and two living composers, the latter in attendance to supplement the interpretations by Music Director Joseph Young.
This orchestra has always been about relevance, going back to Kent Nagano’s podium leadership. Curiously, the two novel works from the past six years took varied approaches, but with parallel paths: Both presented a stormy center of stress and conflict, bookended by music of tranquility. Both composers draw in part upon their association with their mother.
The world-premiere “Lotus Prayer” by Xi Wang from Dallas is inspired both by Buddhist serenity and by her upbringing in China. She is a supremely poetic, Impressionistic composer, writing music of delicate refinement via flute, strings and gentle mallet percussion—as if you’re listening the drops of water falling on an unruffled pond. She attended late rehearsals with score in her lap, consulting with the music director on the forthcoming debut performance.
The Adagio opening of the 12-minute piece gives way to a world of conflict which may or may not reflect recollections of the Cultural Revolution. Chattering angry brass and explosive outbreaks mark this unstable orchestral episode of a chaotic world. Whereupon all reverts to the Buddhist enlightenment of the curtain-raising segment, both gentle and genteel.
“Portrait of a Queen” (2017) by Carlos Simon pours out a Black African queen’s culture and survival, with biographical narration provided by Leontyne Mbele-Mbong——again reflecting a woman’s tale with the spoken refrain, “I am a queen.” The 18-minute opus goes from the peaceful setting and music of Ghana to enslavement and the “stench of blood” asserted by the narrator in a highly unsettled world of shouting, stress and discord, crying out against the “fists of hatred” and “Jim Crow” suppression in the USA.
Vehement musical cross currents underline references to the plight of children and the shout, “Their lives matter!” All echoed by prerecorded crowd voices. There is a still unsettled resolution, with heavy strokes, and then a more soothing epilogue.
Even in rehearsal, “Portrait of a Queen” had conductor Young mopping his brow, appropriate to the programmatic themes. Simon’s music is clearly assertive, macho, aggressive and political.
There followed the astute wife Scheherazade avoiding nightly execution by spinning masterful 1001-Nights tales to the Sultan in the Rimsky-Korsakov tone poem. And once again, women emerge triumphant.
POSTSCRIPT—Simon, a resident of Washington, D.C., has been mentored by fellow composer Gabriella Lena Frank. He returns here in February, almost, but actually next door to the Oakland Symphony, for his premiere opera “Here I Stand: Paul Robeson.”
BERKELEY SYMPHONY in concert under Joseph Young, Zellerbach Hall, UC campus, Berkeley, June 4. For BSO info: (510) 841-2800, or go online, www.berkeleysymphony.org.
