It was a cabinet full of wonders and a few curiosities, too. Thursday, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra offered an uncommonly intriguing program — five works from wildly different perspectives on music and society — all bundled together by Colombian-born, United States-educated conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados, making her ASO debut.
Gonzalez-Granados, winner of several conducting competitions and now resident at the Los Angeles Opera, has a clear, unfussy beat and kept the ASO balanced and together. She’s building a reputation for championing new or obscure music from Latin America. With the ASO, she opened and closed the evening with short works from Mexican composers.
At the top, Gabriela Ortiz’s Kauyumari, from 2021, depicts an Indigenous Mexican spiritual journey that connects, via hallucinogenic peyote, the people and their ancestors and the invisible world. The music starts mysteriously, with a low-strings drone, jangly maracas and offstage trumpets calling out a tune, echoed by trumpets on stage. As the sound grows, there are trippy doppler effects — the peyote has started to kick in — but soon a blocky, repeated rhythm tells us we’re immersed in an ancient ritual beyond our control.
Ortiz has an ear for gorgeous layering and color combinations, such as a plunking harp below a desert-evoking piccolo — a timeless sound. At climatic moments, it all builds to an overpowering noise. Kauyumari taps some of the same raw energy as Silvestre Revueltas’ famous Sensemayá (which itself was modeled after Stravinsky’s savagely neoprimitive The Rite of Spring). As modernist composers have long known, nothing beats a full orchestra in pounding, obsessive, apocalyptic music.
At the evening’s other end, Gonzalez-Granados and the ASO closed with Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2, from 1994. Based on an Afro-Cuban dance made popular in Mexico, the music’s cha-cha-cha rhythms and sepia-tinted orchestrations give it a life-affirming and nostalgic feel, like looking at an old, yellowed photograph of your great-grandparents dancing in their youth. It made for an endearing finale.
The three big works in the middle of the program covered a lot of terrain.
The local premiere of a major new work by Joel Thompson was easily the most anticipated. Born in 1988 and raised in Gwinnett County, he’s an Emory University grad pursuing a doctorate at Yale. Among other high-profile gigs, he’s composer-in-residence at the Houston Grand Opera. With piles of commissions stacked up, we know he’s busy. Atlanta audiences can hear his chamber music at least twice next season — and that’s just at Spivey Hall. There will surely be other performances of his music around town: He’s Atlanta’s hot composer of the moment. (Perhaps overbooked, he has also missed a few deadlines).
After the ASO performed his powerfully original To Awaken the Sleeper in 2022, the orchestra jumped on a commissioning consortium for a new piece, To See the Sky. The New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere last month.
Much of Thompson’s music concerns issues of race and social justice, often with potent ideas and words delivered by singers or a narrator. The 20-minute To See the Sky, in three parts, is for the orchestra alone but takes inspiration from a lyric by jazz singer and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant: “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky.” Introducing the piece to the audience, Thompson spoke of documenting “my realities as a Black man in America.”
As with his older To Awaken the Sleeper, this new work moves in distinct episodes of kaleidoscopic cacophony or lush, sweeping blocks. The most compelling section of To See the Sky is the central nocturne. The section opens with a whoosh and the sense of far-away nature, with wind and maybe birds and a gentle stillness in the air. Soon a muted trumpet seems to speak words that are just beyond comprehension, Cassandra-like. Rhythmically heavy dance gyrations break the tranquil mood as maracas add something of a spiced, Afro-Caribbean vibe.
When the first section’s aggression returns briefly, it’s like a dark memory you turn over and over in your head before sleep. Putting such emotional and evocative imagery into music is among Thomson’s great talents as a composer, but much of To See the Sky rambles and feels vague. It’s a strong first draft that will be improved immeasurably with a little tightening and revision.
On Thursday, the ASO, gaining familiarity with Thompson’s gestures and musical vocabulary, played To See the Sky with verve, although you got the sense that the musicians on stage weren’t always certain how their phrases fit into the whole.
After intermission came Gabriela Lena Frank’s 30-minute Walkabout, the biggest work of the program. The subtitle is “concerto for orchestra,” although in performance its symphonic proportions and structure were apparent: It’s in four movements, with powerful opening and closing movements, and with a kind of playful scherzo and a slow prayer in the middle.
Like a lot of Frank’s music, Walkabout is a cool, colorful piece, in both temperature and vibe. She touches on sounds and cultures that make up her multicultural family tree — subtly or overtly — including Peruvian, Chinese, Baltic and Jewish heritages. Individual players and sections of the orchestra get the starring role. The music and imagery are complex, but Frank’s orchestrations are always clear and effective, with no wasted motion. She expertly slips in a fun Latin American rhythm or a sultry dreamscape, taking the listener on the journey of the work’s title. The piece builds to a whistle-driven climax and then drops down to quietly tapering low strings, and we realize we are where we started. We’re home.
In the middle of this enriching program sat a popular favorite, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with the great French pianist Cédric Tiberghien making his much-belated ASO debut. Yet in many ways, the Gershwin was the least compelling piece on such an alive program.
The orchestra was in great form. In the iconic opening clarinet lick, Jesse McCandless embodied a New Orleans jazz musician, wailing and louche — completely over-the-top and just right. Trumpet and trombone traded their wah-wah patter as if it were speech, and you could almost catch their muted words.
But at the Steinway, Tiberghien was mercurial and self-indulgent. He often brought his solo sections to a complete halt as he moodily contemplated his next move, as if he were part improvising cocktail pianist and part commanding supervirtuoso. It drained the life out of this exuberant American classic. Still, the orchestra was having fun with it. The audience, as always, responded to Rhapsody in Blue with absolute delight. What’s not to love?
The program repeats tonight, Friday, April 26, at 8 p.m.
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Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.