As was announced a week ago, last night at Davies Symphony Hall Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) shared the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) with Ludovic Morlot. MTT limited his performance to the final work on the program, Aaron Copland’s score for “Appalachian Spring,” a dance choreographed by Martha Graham, first performed at the Library of Congress on October 30, 1944.That premiere performance involved only thirteen players, due, probably, to limitations in both space and capital.
This music is probably best known through a concert suite for full orchestra that Copland himself prepared, which was given its premiere performance by the New York Philharmonic almost exactly a year later. It is unclear when Copland decided to provide the full-orchestra account of the original score, but that was one of MTT’s SFS offerings relatively early in his tenure. SFS performed that version for the first time under MTT’s baton in June of 1996. That is the version he revisited last night.
I have always had a preference for the original chamber version of the music; but, by the same count, I also harbor a great love for the film of Graham’s choreography performed by the original cast. I discovered that film on YouTube during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when, in the absence of concert performances, I broadened the scope of my writing by reaching out into cyberspace. When I wrote about that film, I drew upon a synopsis I had found on the dance’s Wikipedia page:
A young farm couple ruminate on their lives before getting married and setting up house in the wilderness. An itinerant preacher delivers a sermon. An older pioneer woman oversees the events with sympathy and wisdom. The newlyweds muse on their future as night falls. In the course of the dance, Graham reveals the inner lives of the four principal characters – Wife, Husbandman, Pioneer Woman and Preacher. She shows that the couple will face a future that will not be all sweetness and light, but she also draws out the private and shared emotional resources they will be able to bring to the challenges. Such is the power of Graham's images, however, that this very particular story broadens out to become a parable about Americans conquering a new land.
Graham herself danced the Wife, partnered by Erick Hawkins as the Husbandman. The Pioneer Woman was taken by May O’Donnell; but the real surprise was the opportunity to watch Merce Cunningham in the role of the Preacher. Cunningham’s agility served him excellently in his account of the hell-and-brimstone sermon that the Preacher delivers to music that Copland cut for the suite version. It is because of that historical context that I have always had a significant place in my heart for the original score, even when instrumentation was expanded to full orchestra.
The fact is that Copland could engage a keen sense of narrative when his work required him to do so. While the “Appalachian Spring” suite addresses the primary elements of character and plot, the cuts in the score disrupt the overall narrative flow. During that flow the Preacher’s sermon is abruptly interrupted by the common-sense Pioneer Woman; and the narrative shifts its attention to the Wife giving birth to her first child. As a result, when the music returns to a “final chorus” of “Simple Gifts” (the one theme that Copland appropriated from traditional sources), there is a sunny optimism that a new generation is emerging to make sure that the life initiated by the pioneers would continue and flourish. Thus, what was most important to my own listening last night was MTT’s clear understanding of those many narrative details and his skill in weaving them into the overall flow of the music more familiar from the suite.
SFS Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins reflecting on composing and performing (from the SFS event page for the concert being discussed)
In that context it was a little bit disappointing that this “historical” offering should overshadow a premiere performance. The major work on the first half of the program was the world premiere of a trombone concerto composed by SFS Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins and written with the support of an SFS commission. Like the Copland offering, this was very much a full-ensemble composition; and what may have been most impressive was the balance between the solo part, played by Higgins himself, and all the other instrumental resources (including a generous share of activity by the percussionists).
The music itself was in three movements entitled “Daybreak,” “Night Time,” and “Finale,” respectively. The entire score amounts to a meditation on the impact on the composer’s life that resulted from the birth of his first child. In other words the music was a highly personal reflection, which was then fleshed out through the act of performance and the subjective rhetoric of Higgins’ solo work. Reflecting back on the concert as a whole, I realized that there was an implicit bond between Higgins’ concerto and Copland’s score for Graham. One might say that, taken as a whole, the program provided life-goes-on perspectives in which a narrative based in the nineteenth century complemented one set in the present day.
Where the overall program was concerned, the opening selection, the orchestrated version of Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose) suite, was a bit of an outlier. Those familiar with the music know that it is based on fairy tales, rather than nursery rhymes. Fortunately, Peter Grunberg’s pre-concert talk clarified this matter, which was particularly useful, since the movements were not enumerated on the program sheet. For those familiar with the music, Morlot managed the orchestral resources in such a way as to bring life to the narrative behind each of the movements, all of which are surprisingly minimal in thematic content. Having established his rapport with the ensemble through Ravel, Morlot then went on to provide Higgins with all the support he needed to bring his new concerto to the SFS audience.
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