Plus it was a knuckleball of a program, with Hailstork’s austerely dovetailed twin homage to John F. Kennedy and poet Robert Frost located between Duke Ellington’s luxurious 1950 scene piece “Harlem” and John Adams’s 1985 masterwork “Harmonielehre.”
However in particular person — at the very least on the primary run of a program that repeats Saturday — the night was missing important crackle. Thursday nights are Thursday nights, certain. And orchestras beneath the steerage of visitor conductors can usually register the audible discomfort of a primary date. However together with this system’s trio of unlikely repertoire, the orchestra was additionally grappling with a uncharacteristic hesitancy.
Within the Ellington, we heard an instance of the orchestra admirably if perilously venturing exterior its consolation zone. Currently a mannequin of cautious management and exactly realized element, this NSO seldom has cause (or alternative) to swing, and the brilliant lights, bustling tempo and easy cosmopolitan class of “Harlem” suffered barely from a stiffness within the joints.
Regardless of some thrilling honey-in-the-horn ornamentals throughout the brass part — notably the limber trumpets of Josh Kauffman (a participant with the U.S. Military Blues) and Brian MacDonald (of the U.S. Air Pressure’s Airmen of Observe) — the “band” appeared to trudge. This regardless of percussionist Erin Dowrey’s reliably strong place within the pocket on the lure equipment.
Ellington’s gleaming portrait of a dwelling, respiration metropolis too usually felt mottled into watercolors, and though Edusei labored onerous to emulsify a constant vibe, his outcomes had been distractingly combined — right here too slick, there too slack. A full of life percussion solo by James Ritchie delivered a closing thrill, and brought collectively, “Harlem” was nonetheless stunning: wealthy, beneficiant, unabashed in its tenderness. However Edusei’s hand didn’t at all times successfully showcase Ellington’s.
On the core of the night was this system’s centerpiece, Hailstork’s “JFK: The Final Speech,” an NSO co-commission premiered on the Colorado Music Pageant in July. And on the core of “The Final Speech” is Kennedy’s closing tackle, delivered at Amherst School in October 1963, lower than a month earlier than his assassination.
The story across the speech is spicy sufficient that it may need warranted some rationalization from the stage, but it surely was confined to the digital program. So right here’s the brief model.
Two years after Frost famously learn “The Reward Outright” at Kennedy’s 1960 inauguration, the budding friendship between the 2 males would fracture.
Frost, as a guide for the Library of Congress, accepted the invitation of Arizona congressman Stewart Udall to hitch a visit to the Soviet Union to steer discussions with writers and artists towards “constructive types of rivalry between our two nations.” However the poet had better ambitions.
The journey resulted in a bedside go to to Frost from none apart from Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev (Frost had a fever) and a protracted dialog. To Frost, this unlikely alternate signaled the advance of beliefs about peace and prosperity between rival world powers. To Udall, who recalled the incident for the Los Angeles Occasions in 1988, it allowed Khrushchev to make use of “a Russian model of poetry-and-power to push his program of political reform.”
Upon return, an exhausted Frost inexplicably tossed reporters a devastating “quote” (which was really only a flip of phrase he preferred): Khrushchev, he mentioned, “thought that we’re too liberal to battle — he thinks we’ll sit on one hand after which the opposite.”
“I used to be appalled,” Udall wrote. “Frost had misrepresented Khrushchev’s place … and embarrassed his good friend, the President.”
The subsequent morning, The Washington Submit’s headline sealed the poet’s blunder into historical past (“Frost Says Khrushchev Sees U.S. as Too Liberal to Defend Itself”) and sunk the lads’s friendship. Kennedy stopped replying to Frost’s wires, despatched no flowers to a hospitalized Frost in December 1962, and wouldn’t point out him till the next October, in a speech at Amherst to dedicate a brand new library within the poet’s identify.
That backstory lends greater than a little bit of emotional heft and conceptual reverb to the divergent roads within the yellow wooden of Frost’s poetry, which too usually will get flattened into mere panorama. The speech — parts of which had been narrated with stentorian distance by Rashad — is a treatise on the significance of artists within the shaping of American society, but it surely’s additionally a eulogy tinted with a deeply human hue of damage and remorse.
Maybe it was this dimension of heartbreak and human connection that was lacking from the efficiency of this fastidiously composed, artfully balanced piece of music, which on Thursday felt low on blood. The music’s light alternation between the voices of Rashad and Burton — whose brilliant and lithe-voiced soprano was a delight all through — appeared neither in service of the gritty grace of Kennedy or Frost. It had, as a substitute, the under-glass feeling of a museum vitrine.
A few of Hailstork’s strongest work takes the type of tribute. His operatic and choral works have examined the lives of historic Black figures, together with Crispus Attucks, abolitionist John P. Parker and the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. He has additionally tailored presidential texts previously, to bracing impact: A latest efficiency by the Cathedral Choral Society and Heritage Signature Chorale of his 1985 piece “Executed Made My Vow” included strains from President Barack Obama’s speeches.
And whereas there have been beautiful moments all through its 28-or-so minutes — the opening meeting of harp and flute atop a scrim of ascendant strings was a chic begin — lacking was the darkness and depth of Frost’s forest, and the poetry and energy of Kennedy’s imaginative and prescient. Burton’s voice generally felt unsupported by music that grew diffuse and unsure. The sound felt starved of its story.
Issues got here speeding again to life with the opening E-minor browbeating of John Adams’s “Harmonielehre.”
Titled after Arnold Schoenberg’s 1911 textual content on music idea, the piece was supposed by Adams to each break a cussed stretch of author’s block and concoct a unified idea of his compositional sense of self. And whereas its three actions are strewn with stray fragments of Sibelius, Debussy, Mahler, Schoenberg and Wagner, the alloy of Adams’s music will get its explicit shine from his masterful negotiation of minimalist impulse and maximalist indulgence.
Bending his physique right into a tense crescent, Edusei crafted fabulous textures from the strings, expertly managing the piece’s swirling subcurrents — there’s at all times one thing coursing beneath Adams’s shiny surfaces. Towering shocks of brass made for giant thrills within the second motion, and pristine shimmers illuminated the dreamlike third, which builds to what Adams has referred to as “a buffalo herd in E flat main.”
Right here, too, the NSO appeared to be paddling in unfamiliar waters. We don’t usually hear this orchestra work by means of the rhythmic spin cycles of minimalists like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. And within the rough-hewed churn of its earnest and energetic efficiency, one might nearly really feel the identical identification disaster Adams confronted in composing such a casual-seeming collision of mental rigor and pure sentimentality. Right here’s hoping the NSO follows the composer’s lead and extra fearlessly performs to its strengths.
JFK: The Final Speech repeats Oct. 28 at eight p.m. on the Kennedy Heart. kennedy-center.org.