In the Before Times, before the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, symphony orchestras across America performed, on average, just a few women composers each season — under 2% of the repertoire. Most of it was contemporary music (and much of it by one popular composer, Jennifer Higdon, an Atlanta favorite).
But music by Black women composers? The percentage was infinitesimal.
So one of the pleasures of recent Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts has been hearing music new and old by women of color. These haven’t been one-off token gestures but rather pieces across a range of styles and forms, from short concert openers and substantive concertos to grand symphonies. The range is broad; the quality is high.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, the ASO opened with a world premiere, Chanda Dancy’s Cacophony of Spirits: A Cinematic Tone Poem and closed with Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3, from 1938. In fact, the whole concert held interconnected links, of teachers and students and colleagues — a sophisticated network of talent and ambition. Without having to bill itself as such, this subscription concert was a powerful acknowledgement of Black artists in classical music.
The ASO commissioned the Los Angeles-based Dancy, born in 1978 and a fast-rising film composer, at the suggestion of guest conductor Anthony Parnther, who’s performed in and conducted countless movies, from major Hollywood studios to Netflix.
For Cacophony of Spirits, Dancy wrote in a program note: “The past few years have been all at once a time of incalculable loss, suffering and a general sense of doom” amidst a pandemic, police violence, wars and, not least, the death of her spouse. In interviews, Dancy has spoken on what it’s like to be a talented Black American in the predominantly White spaces of movie scoring and the classical concert hall.
Her 11-minute Cacophony of Spirits tugs at all these emotions. Its four sections are vividly portrayed in the music, such that a listener didn’t need to know the subtitles. “Joy/Wonder” opens with a gallop and flickers of sound from the brass, rhythmically hesitant and inquisitive. It builds toward bold brass statements and tangy harmonies, then dissipates into a mist of sound. “Fear/Suffering” gets martial and scary — are we being hunted? — as the music segues into the third section, “Rage/Destruction,” where rhythms drive propulsively, punctuated by the boom! of the bass drum. A wild frenzy ensues, then it cuts off clean.
In the final section, “Sorrow/Acceptance,” the strings and harp stretch out an anguished theme, almost slow-walking music that wants to go faster, but the orchestra can’t, or won’t, let it flow. Gradually, light infuses the scene as they modulate upward toward resolution, and the piece fades into an unsettling silence.
Cacophony of Spirits is Dancy’s largest concert work to date, at least in instrumentation (triple winds, big brass section, lots of percussion), and that was, at times, the work’s only shortcoming: a little too much sonic clutter; too many people on stage often without clear need; not lean enough even when a specific passage seemed to call for leanness.
Still, Dancy’s voice is assertive (while never approaching cinematic cliche), and her every turn of phrase felt sincere, with an undercurrent of melancholy. It all sounded very personal and very real. Learning to balance sections and economize will be a key part of her craft and her creative growth. As a concert hall composer, she’s on her way up.
After intermission, conductor Parnther explained how it was once impossible to get orchestras interested in the unappreciated Symphony No. 3 by Florence Price (1887-1953). As Price herself wrote in a pleading letter to a Boston Symphony conductor, “I have two handicaps — those of sex and race,” adding, “I should like to be judged on merit alone — the great trouble having been to get conductors, who know nothing of my work . . . to even consent to examine a score.”
But in just the past couple of seasons, Price’s music has belatedly gained a foothold in the repertoire, including with the ASO for her Piano Concerto and in a Grammy-winning recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra, including her Symphony No. 3. Thursday’s concert was the first time it was performed by the ASO.
From the very opening measures, Parnther’s interpretation was a revelation. In recordings I’ve heard — including Philly’s polished version conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin — Price’s music is played as if she were a student of Dvorak and maybe Ives, embedded in a folksy, if rather generic, Americana.
Parnther instead put the African American idioms in the foreground, and the music exploded with vitality and groove. There was a lot of physicality in his approach, so dance rhythms felt danceable and made listeners want to move in their seats. Price was a virtuoso organist, and the opening movement’s scaffolding is constructed like a pipe organ piece, moving in blocks of sound. The ASO took to Parnther’s approach — minimal stick movements, maximum attitude and joy — and played with buoyancy throughout. The little kick at movement’s end was cute and almost comical. This was something special.
They crafted the tender second movement, slow and meandering, as a lovely tableau centered on a yearning tune, sounding like a spiritual that had long existed but heard only for the first time.
The third movement is propelled by the Juba dance, a vernacular musical form that gave birth to ragtime and early jazz. Parnther took it very fast, making it raucous, fun and a little dangerous. There was so much flair in his rhythms, and the ASO delivered the music with so much personality — Price’s personality — that when the movement came to an end, the audience laughed with happiness and almost broke into applause.
No surprise, they pushed the stormy, exuberant finale to its extreme, and wound it all up for a spectacular big finish. We might hope that the ASO records Parnther’s reading of Price’s Symphony No. 3. For conductors learning the piece, it should be the benchmark for how this wonderful music goes.
In the middle of the concert sat John Williams’ The Five Sacred Trees, from 1995, a deluxe bassoon concerto in five movements — each inspired by a tree from Celtic mythology, and each with its own sound-world. Three of the movements are named after real trees: oak, yew and ash. Two others are magical trees, although all five have ancient spiritual and poetic properties. The music is earthy and often lovely and charming and all without a storm trooper or quidditgch broom in sight. Conductor Parnther, himself a bassoonist, has played in many of Williams’ soundtracks, most recently for an Indiana Jones sequel — another of the evening’s network links.
To mention the return of bassoon soloist Andrew Brady at the end of a concert review is seriously burying the lede, a journalistic sin. For seven years, Brady sat in the ASO’s principal bassoon chair and, even surrounded by all-star woodwind players, stood apart for playing that was consistently clear, insightful and often deeply moving. (Brady jumped ship for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra just as Nathalie Stutzmann’s ASO tenure as music director began; the ASO plan to become a “destination” orchestra remains elusive.)
Although it’s a concerto, The Five Sacred Trees doesn’t pit the soloist against the orchestra, and nothing feels directional or especially goal-oriented. The music just is. And as the evening’s soloist, that suited Brady’s playing. Seated at the front of the stage, Brady’s tone, at once peat-mossy and plangent, was intensely focused and full of serenity and humanity. This sounds like an overloaded mix of aural sensations, to be sure, but it’s what makes him a compelling musician — a versatile and persuasive communicator.
As a two-bassoon encore, Brady was joined by Parnther, who was Brady’s bassoon teacher when he was a school kid in Tennessee! (The behind-the-scenes network operating in this concert just kept getting deeper.) Together they played the slow movement from Mozart’s Sonata for Bassoon and Cello (K.292), with Parnther taking the cello part. It was beautifully delivered — two old friends making music they love.
In all, a great night at the ASO.
This winning program, highly recommended, repeats Saturday 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.
