{"id":2489,"date":"2023-03-21T23:45:49","date_gmt":"2023-03-22T03:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=2489"},"modified":"2023-03-21T23:45:52","modified_gmt":"2023-03-22T03:45:52","slug":"re-thinking-the-concert-experience-in-south-dakota-and-minnesota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2023\/03\/re-thinking-the-concert-experience-in-south-dakota-and-minnesota.html","title":{"rendered":"Re-Thinking the Concert Experience in South Dakota and Minnesota"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Leningrad under Nazi siege, 1941-42<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

There was a time \u2013 the 1990s, when I was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM \u2013 when the practice of speaking from the stage at symphonic concerts was controversial, both among audiences and orchestra leaders. And people debated whether or not thematic programing was a good thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those days are finally over. But the next step \u2013 fundamentally re-thinking the concert experience \u2013 lies largely dormant ahead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not referring to screens and new technologies, but to something more fundamental: programming. Every concert I\u2019ve produced, beginning with those heady Brooklyn Philharmonic seasons, has been thematic. It works. The musical impact is strengthened. There is more to think about. Education and collaboration are facilitated. Museums curate thematic exhibits for these reasons.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One step beyond that is the narrative concert that tells a story<\/strong> \u2013 as with programs in which I recently participated in South Dakota and Minnesota. The South Dakota Symphony presented Shostakovich\u2019s\u00a0Leningrad<\/em>\u00a0Symphony linked to activities at two universities. \u201cDvorak\u2019s Prophecy\u201d at St. Olaf College linked to a second public event on cultural appropriation, a classroom visit, and meetings with individual students.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also encountered a counter-example \u2013 a standard-format concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra that went nowhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have often written about the\u00a0South Dakota Symphony<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in this space. So far as I am aware, it\u2019s our most genuinely innovative, most inspirationally forward-looking professional orchestra. It is also the happiest professional orchestra I know, and the most engaged. Its mission is defined and driven by its Music Director of twenty years: Delta David Gier, who in 2004 moved to Sioux Falls and proceeded to raise a family there. Gier\u2019s signature initiative is the\u00a0Lakota Music<\/strong>\u00a0Project<\/strong><\/a>, which links SDSO to Indian reservations across the state. He also regularly showcases new American music. And he regularly tackles big repertoire: a Mahler cycle, the\u00a0St.<\/em>\u00a0Matthew Passion<\/em>\u00a0(unabridged),\u00a0Redes<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/a>with Revueltas\u2019s great score performed live — and now Shostakovich 7. More than a century ago, Theodore Thomas \u2013 whose touring Thomas Orchestra made the concert orchestra an American specialty \u2013 preached: \u201cA symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Gier\u2019s South Dakota Symphony does that and more. It should become a national model.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gier\u2019s galvanizing reading of the\u00a0Leningrad<\/em>\u00a0Symphony, three weeks ago, was preceded by a forty-minute \u201cdramatic interlude\u201d commencing with the lascivious trombone slides, from the opera\u00a0Lady<\/em>\u00a0Macbeth<\/em>,\u00a0that got Shostakovich in big trouble with Stalin in 1936. The infamous\u00a0Pravda<\/em>\u00a0editorial was recited. We moved on from there to the Fifth Symphony and its ostensible Socialist Realist contrition, thence to the horrific 872-day Nazi siege of Leningrad and Shostakovich\u2019s legendary musical response. All this, with interpolated music, was co-scripted by Gier and myself. The Seventh Symphony followed after intermission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The performance was attended by dozens of Music, History, and Political Science students bussed to Sioux Falls from South Dakota State University an hour away; they also took part in an hour-long post-concert discussion. In the days before and after that, I visited four SDSU classrooms. And the Dakota String Quartet (comprising principal players of the SDSO) visited with Shostakovich\u2019s autobiographical Eighth String Quartet \u2013 which they contextualized, and also brought to the University of South Dakota an hour from Sioux Falls in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Mark Bertrand, the pastor of Sioux Falls\u2019 Grace Presbyterian Church since 2017, the testimony of a German soldier, cited by Gier, underlined his experience of the long, inexorable crescendo climaxing the Leningrad<\/em> Symphony. Using loudspeakers, the Soviets had broadcast Shostakovich’s symphony to the Nazi troops enveloping the city. A German soldier wrote afterward: “\u201cIt had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather \u2013 the will to remain human.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bertrand also told me: \u201cI think that by the end of the evening \u2013 the forty-minute preamble about Shostakovich, Stalin, and the siege of Leningrad, the eighty-minute symphony itself \u2013 all of us felt a combination of elation and exhaustion. We had gone through something important together. Of course, the symphony crescendos to a point of elation. But you also feel the sheer duration of it all. I sensed a kind of joyful weariness. You know, I\u2019m a cynical person by nature \u2013 and David and the South Dakota Symphony are constantly challenging that cynicism. They renew my confidence in the meaning of art<\/strong>.\u201d Like many others, Bertrand found himself reflecting, as well, on Ukrainian resistance to Russian troops today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spoke with David Reynolds, Director of Performing Arts and Professor of Music at South Dakota State University, about the ongoing collaboration with the South Dakota Symphony. He said: \u201cFinding a way to use the performing arts to bring these important stories to life \u2013 in this case, stories about World War II, about the siege of Leningrad — is a wonderful way to touch students who are growing up with social medica and other non-traditional means of communication<\/strong>. I\u2019ve always been passionate about arts in general education. I know that the students in our Music Appreciation course are the folks that one of these days are going to be bank presidents, school board members \u2013 jobs that will decide the role of the arts in public and private schools, and funding for the arts, twenty years from now. It\u2019s vital to open their eyes to experiences just like these contextualized Shostakovich concerts. To leave them thinking, \u2018my life would be incomplete without the arts being a part of it.’ \u2019\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magda\u00a0Modzelewska, the SDSO principal second violist since 1998, is also a member of the Dakota String Quartet. She told me: \u201cThis is a very special orchestra and I have felt that from the beginning. I remember there was once a survey of job satisfaction in different professions. And [orchestral] musicians \u2013 their job satisfaction was the lowest. I have been very lucky \u2013 we don\u2019t appear to have this attitude problem. There\u2019s a sense of gratitude for what we do, of friendship and common purpose.\u201c She called Delta David Gier \u201ca rare conductor with a big heart and a set of really solid values.\u201d She called her work as a core participant in the Lakota Music Project \u201chumbling . . . in Indian culture we\u2019ve found such peace and good will<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(My next NPR \u201cMore than Music\u201d documentary<\/a><\/strong>, for the newsmagazine 1A, will be \u201cShostakovich in South Dakota” on April 24.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 * * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not long after my two weeks in South Dakota, I took part in a series of events at St. Olaf College based on Dvorak\u2019s Prophecy <\/a>and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music<\/em><\/strong>. <\/em>St. Olaf is famous for its choral program. It also boasts an exceptional student orchestra (that tours). The superb conductor, Chung Park, is new this school year; his predecessor for forty-one years, Steven Amundson, is a local legend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was invited to narrate a St. Olaf orchestral concert telling a story. The second half comprised Dvorak\u2019s New World<\/em> Symphony. The first half freshly contextualized that familiar work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We began with Dvorak\u2019s Slavonic Dance Op. 46, No. 3, composed in Prague, in direct juxtaposition with an excerpt from  his American<\/em> Suite, composed in New York City. Whereas the New World<\/em> Symphony is a European symphony with an American accent, the American<\/em> Suite, a year later, doesn\u2019t \u201csound like Dvorak\u201d; rather incredibly, it is bona fide American music. I introduced the suite\u2019s third movement by correlating its three themes with minstrel dances, plantation song, and Dvorak\u2019s desolate \u201cIndian\u201d mode \u2013 not an attempt to adapt Native American song, but a personal and compassionate evocation of the tragedy of Native America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After that came William Arms Fisher\u2019s \u201cGoin\u2019 Home\u201d \u2013 his famous 1922 adaptation of Dvorak\u2019s Largo, sung with orchestra by Emery Stephens of the St. Olaf faculty. Without a pause, Chung Park then launched \u201cHope in the Night\u201d \u2013 the middle movement of William Levi Dawson\u2019s Negro Folk Symphony<\/em><\/strong> (<\/a>1932). This work is a huge find, in which Dvorak\u2019s 1893 prophecy \u2013 that \u201cNegro melodies\u201d would foster a \u201cgreat and noble school of music\u201d \u2013 discovers searing fruition. And I introduced the New World<\/em> Symphony, on the second half, by citing four passages in which Dvorak found inspiration in Longfellow\u2019s The Song of Hiawatha. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many in the audience, many in the orchestra, afterward said that their listening experience was transformed by this exercise in informed engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I was at St. Olaf\u2019s, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra turned up with a mixed program including Mendelssohn\u2019s\u00a0Scottish<\/em>\u00a0Symphony alongside shorter works by Fanny Mendelssohn and Hummel. Comparisons were inescapable. Mendelssohn\u2019s symphony was inspired by a visit to Scotland. The canopy of sorrow that magically distinguishes this work are captured in a letter home reading in part: “In the deep twilight we went today to the palace where\u00a0Queen Mary lived and loved. . . . The chapel below is now roofless. Grass and ivy thrive there and at the broken altar where Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything is ruined, decayed, and the clear heavens pour in. I think I have found there the beginning of my ‘Scottish’ Symphony.” Much can be done with this information — especially for an audience of college students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The online program note (there was no printed program) comprised two sentences. Nothing was said from the stage. The performance itself (sans conductor) was featureless. Both the South Dakota Symphony\u2019s Shostakovich, and the St. Olaf Orchestra\u2019s Dvorak, if less polished, were more energized, more distinctive. Chung Park\u2019s smashing reading<\/a><\/strong> of the Slavonic Dance sang with trumpet vibratos and string portamentos. In the Leningrad<\/em> Symphony, Gier masterfully shaped the long slow movement, challenging his players (in rehearsal) to give everything they could to the culminating reprise of the opening chorale theme. I have rarely heard such massed sonic intensity from a string choir. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both the SDSO concert and the St. Olaf concert were livestreamed. My 26-year-old daughter watched the SDSO\u2019s Shostakovich concert from New York City. She phoned me afterward. Were her friends to encounter \u201cconcerts like that,\u201d she said, they would be converted to classical music.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stakes are that high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I take part in \u201cMahler and New York\u201d via the Argento New Music Project<\/a><\/strong> April 4 in New York City. Then I\u2019m with George Shirley and Chamber Music Cincinnati, April 10-11. Then April 12 at Princeton University: \u201cDvorak\u2019s Prophecy,\u201d with John McWhorter, Sidney Outlaw, and Allen Guelzo via the university\u2019s James Madison Program.  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read Alex Ross in The New Yorker on the South Dakota Symphony, click <\/em>here<\/em><\/strong>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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