By Lawrence Toppman
Resident conductor Christopher James Lees stepped to the Belk Theater podium Saturday night to tell us the linking theme between four pieces on the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra program would be “home.” Those four yielded a joy, a challenge worth taking, a discovery and a novelty that eventually became an embarrassment.
The joy came in Bedřich Smetana’s symphonic poem “Vltava,” colloquially called “The Moldau” and depicting the flow of that river through his native Czech woods and meadows. Lees paced this polished rendition well, if without much indication that whitewater was churning in the middle of it, and the orchestra gave smooth, buoyant pleasure.
You might dub Syrian-American composer Malek Jandali a hometown guy, though he has been a citizen of the world: He graduated from Queens University of Charlotte in 1997 and has returned there as composer-in-residence. His Clarinet Concerto, dedicated to victims of injustice everywhere, anchored the program this weekend.
CSO principal clarinetist Taylor Marino seemed a bit hesitant in the solo part at first but warmed to it. Jandali’s website quotes reviews that address his skillful interweaving of Arabic elements – often folk-inspired – with Western classical construction, and you could hear that in this elusive but attractive piece.
The mood, aptly more melancholy than anything else, relied on swirling clarinet solos, syncopated percussion and subdued, contemplative passages interrupted by bursts from the soloist that might have been cries of despair or outrage. (Cedille Records has made a fine recording with Anthony McGill as the soloist; he played the Copland Clarinet Concerto last May with the CSO.)
The piece I’d never heard was Clarice Assad’s “Sin Fronteras,” which imagined a world without frontiers – an American world, at least, as all the music traced its roots from the United States down to her native Brazil. People often use the term “derivative” dismissively, but it needn’t be: When you combine attractive elements from your influences, you can give a unique pleasure.
So it was here, as lush strings that might’ve graced a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack gave way to a tipsy homage to Aaron Copland’s “El Salon Mexico,” then rhythms that suggested either Leonard Bernstein’s mambo in the gym from “West Side Story” or carnival time in Brazil. Congas, xylophone, marimba and a drum kit added to the jaunty blend.
The concert concluded with the “Boléro” of Maurice Ravel, who’d have celebrated his 151st birthday Saturday. I like “Boléro” to be woozy, sexy, louche. But you could make a case that playing it with exactitude and some restraint, as Lees and the CSO did, elevates it above a level of vulgarity it often reaches. (Ravel himself preferred a steady tempo without acceleration for effect.) I was reminded that, when it became a ballet, Ravel unsuccessfully suggested a setting with a factory in the background, symbol of the music’s mechanical and repetitive aspects.
CSO management spruced up the familiar piece by setting it to a self-produced film. Unsmiling musicians performed solos in front of the Firebird, on the Truist Field grass, at the entrance to Latta Arcade (where people eating lunch improbably paid no attention to a trumpeter a few feet away.) It became apparent that “home” meant life within a square mile around Trade and Tryon streets, along with brief shots of Plaza-Midwood and a triumphant conclusion at SouthPark.
Did the symphony film at one of the Title 1 elementary schools where its own Project Harmony exposes underprivileged kids – mostly Black and Latino – to classical music? Did it shoot outside a Black or Asian church, near a Hindu temple, an Islamic mosque? Did it film anywhere that wasn’t sparkly clean and used mostly by prosperous white citizens? Nope.
As a friend said, “Look around you. This film was made for the people sitting at this concert.” The CSO blew its chance to refute the old claim that classical music is elitist. What could have been a clever idea became a cliché, and it didn’t look much like “home” to me.