Feature: CSO—A Theatrical Vision: New Contexts for Familiar Works

Above: A video still from the 2020 CSO livestream of Julia Perry’s Homunculus C.F. led by Louis Langrée. Left: Thomas Søndergård (©Andy Buchanan)

we knew. Audiences will probably be surprised to hear the May Festival Chorus featured during In the Hall of the Mountain King, Langrée says. The production’s director Bill Barclay adds, “We usually think of Morning Mood as a classic Norwegian landscape, but actually Grieg was portraying a sunrise in the Sahara desert.” (See sidebar on Barclay’s production.) Tying the evening together will be Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, who, after playing (and whistling!) though Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason’s highly theatrical Violin Concerto, returns in costume as a roving Hardanger fiddle player in Peer Gynt.

Guest conductor Thomas Søndergård followed a comparable algorithm in matching composers for his CSO debut on January 6 and 7. Already knowing that Britten’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich was on the program, Søndergård decided to open with On the Cliffs of Cornwall, the Prelude to Act II of Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers. “I once paired Smyth and Britten on a Pride program in Copenhagen,” he says. “For that concert, it was Cornwall and Britten’s Young Apollo, but his Violin Concerto was written around the same time and the two pieces are quite similar.” From there, Søndergård moved on to Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2, which he compares to Britten in spirit. “Both Britten and Sibelius were brave in using simple melodies and dance-like rhythms,” he says. “They both remained connected to the child within themselves and were able to bring out the child in each of us.”

A rather different bit of recontextualized theatricality turns up in Langrée’s program on January 21 and 22, which ends with Prokoviev’s Symphony No. 3 and opens with Julia Perry’s Homunculus C.F., a piece for harp, keyboards and percussion that Langrée discovered during the pandemic and performed previously with CSO musicians only in an audience-less livestream concert. “A piece with so much atmosphere and drama needs an audience,” says Langrée, who has made championing the music of Akron-born Perry a personal mission.

The piece’s title, Latin for “little men,” reveals the music’s “Faustian dimension,” Langrée says, alluding to a scene in Goethe’s drama where Faust’s apprentice brings Homunculus to life through alchemy. “You don’t need to know any of this, just like you don’t need to analyze the piece’s structure, to see how the music directly impacts an audience,” he adds. “How is it possible that Varèse’s Ionisation is rightly acknowledged as a masterpiece while Julia Perry’s music disappeared completely?”

Between Perry’s percussive impulses and Prokoviev’s Third Symphony—largely reworking

music from the Russian master’s long-neglected opera The Fiery Angel—comes Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, a perennial favorite with concert audiences that will almost certainly be colored by the theatrical trappings of the rest of the program, Langrée says.

Violinist Randall Goosby, who picked up the Tchaikovsky concerto this season for the first time in nearly a decade, fully embraces that sense of rediscovery. “Being bookended by two such theatrically charged works will certainly urge me to support the spirit of the evening,” he says. “There’s already so much drama and excitement in the Tchaikovsky, that creating any more of a theatrical atmosphere will have audiences grabbing the edge of their seats.”

The season’s spirit of rediscovery continues right through the CSO’s Lunar New Year tribute on February 3 and 4, beginning with a reunion of sorts with Zhou Tian, whose Concerto for Orchestra (commissioned and recorded by the CSO) was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 2018. Balancing Zhou’s The Palace of Nine Perfections, the program also features The Five Elements, an early work by Langrée’s Beijing-born

fellow Parisian Chen Qigang. “They share, in very different languages, a similar orchestral color,” says Langrée, who conducted Chen’s Elements in Paris, Brussels and Detroit, but has not led the work since coming to Cincinnati in 2013. “Everywhere I performed this music, audiences were intrigued and mesmerized,” he says. “You can really feel the Chinese flavor, and yet Qigang was also the final student of Olivier Messiaen, one of the 20th century’s great composers and himself a great lover of Asian cultures.” Working from a similar orchestral palette, Langrée fills the rest of the evening with Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole (“a similar l’invitation au voyage,” he says, Violinist Randall Goosby. “despite different destinations”) Credit: Kaupo Kikkas and Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto, with soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, bringing a compatible range of musical colors. “Any successful program comes from bringing different people together, for different reasons, under different circumstances,” Langrée adds. “For some people, this program will mark an occasion to celebrate their culture and their New Year holiday. For many others, it will be a chance to discover musical works they don’t know.”

Zhou Tian after the world premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra by the CSO in May 2016, Louis Langrée conducting. Credit: AJ Waltz

Bill Barclay discusses how he reshaped Grieg’s Peer Gynt for the modern concert hall

by KEN SMITH Back in 1876, Peer Gynt marked an historic collaboration between two of Norway’s most illustrious artists, but in practical terms the marriage didn’t last. Edvard Grieg’s music went on to become a wordless favorite on the concert stage, while most revivals of Henrik Ibsen’s play do away with Grieg’s score altogether. Writer/composer Bill Barclay cites the cause of divorce as “irreconcilable differences.” “No one today would dare to do Ibsen and Grieg together the way the play first premiered,” says Barclay, whose staging mediates an artistic reconciliation. “Ibsen’s story is febrile, long, massively unedited. It would take nearly five hours and require forces that no theatre would support. Our version, on the other hand, fits on the second half of a concert program.” First commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Barclay’s staging starts with the music—not just Grieg’s two concert suites but also additional incidental music rediscovered in the 1980s—then judiciously adds bits of Ibsen’s text to relate the story, theatrically seasoned with staging, lights, costumes and a bit of puppetry. “I call this ‘concert-theatre,’ because we put music and theatre on equal footing,” he explains. “When music is subservient to theatre, there’s a class system with actors above the musicians. When drama is subservient to the music, as with opera, everything serves the score but you’re not locked into the story the way you are with a great movie or play. Here, the actors retreat when the music is front and center, and when the orchestra slips into incidental music the actors enter and color the story in real time.” Originally a popular dramatic poem, Peer Gynt has always suffered as a play script, Barclay says. “At its heart, this is an unstageable tale spanning some 60 years and encompassing the greatest hits of Norwegian folklore,” he says. “There are dramatic gems and fabulous comic impulses, but there’s no way to realistically portray hundreds of child trolls and an underground monster. But putting this in the concert hall, where the protagonist is definitely the orchestra and chorus, we have to use our imagination anyway.” Although Ibsen’s play has seen a resurgence in recent years, it rarely uses Grieg’s original score—usually because those productions find a modern archetype for Ibsen’s capitalistic, selfaggrandizing title character. “Most directors want to free themselves from the 19th-century formula that Ibsen and Grieg created,” he says. “If you have a contemporary setting, you’re probably going to use rock, or electronic dance music, or even country. You might use Grieg’s music ironically—throw in bits of In the Hall of the Mountain King—but if you reconceive Peer as, say, a rock and roll star, you’re probably not going to reach for Anitra’s Dance.” For Barclay, though, the original partnership is mostly the point. “By rewriting Ibsen’s work myself, I can condense the story points to establish the setting Grieg was trying to portray,” Barclay says. “I think it’s possible to recreate the incredible collaboration between these two titanic figures, using as much of the original material as possible, but distilled and reshaped to fit our needs in the concert hall today.”

From above: Barclay’s Peer Gynt from the premiere at Boston Symphony Orchestra (©Robert Torres). Henrik Ibsen, portrait by Henrik Olrik, 1879. Barclay’s Peer Gynt from the most recent performance at Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (©Jake Hill).