MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Celebrating Unity around the World is the title of  inaugural program of the All-Star Orchestra’s 10th-anniversary season; the program aired on September 28, 2023. Founded by the conductor Gerard Schwarz in 2012, soon after he concluded his 26th season as music director of Seattle Symphony, the All-Star Orchestra comprises prominent musicians from leading orchestras across the United States, including members of the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, National Symphony, and San Francisco Symphony, among several other ensembles. 

The name evokes the kind of showcase team of outstanding athletes familiar from the sports world, or perhaps a supergroup of highly successful rock stars — but with the All-Star Orchestra, the focus is first and foremost on the music itself. Schwarz, who also serves as music director, devised the orchestra as a project through which top-level musicians could join together to cultivate symphonic music and share their love of this living tradition through public broadcasts. Each concert/program lasts about an hour and includes the maestro’s commentary — a latter-day response to Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus concerts that spread the word about classical music a half century ago. 

One unusual aspect of this multiple Emmy Award-winning project is that the All-Stars do not play for live audiences but record their performances in a ballroom at the Manhattan Center with an array of 18 high-definition television cameras and a team of top audio engineers. The results are not only broadcast on member PBS stations but released as DVDs on the Naxos label, and ensuring the highest quality for both the visual and the audio dimensions has been essential to the project’s success. 

Along with the musicians he handpicked to be members of the All-Star Orchestra, Schwarz thus invited the eminent producer Dmitriy Lipay, winner of five Grammy Awards, to serve as audio director and producer for the project. The audio engineering team for the present program provided excellent sound — an especially notable feat in view of the vast spectrum of orchestral sonorities Schwarz selected to showcase, ranging from Richard Wagner to the 20th-century master Alberto Ginastera to the contemporary American composer Valerie Coleman. 

Schwarz chose a thrilling opening work with music from Wagner’s early opera Tannhäuser. Rather than simply present the Overture from the original 1845 version, however, he leads the musicians in an engrossing account of the expanded version Wagner created for the Paris production of 1861 — an event of unique music historical importance despite the provocations of the composer’s opponents, which forced the production to close after just three performances. Schwarz thus segues from the Venusberg music at the center of the original Overture to the extended ballet Wagner devised for the opening scene in Paris. 

The ballet depicts both the orgiastic transports sponsored by Venus in her forbidden realm, where Tannhäuser has been sojourning, and a feeling of languor from the bacchantes’ overstimulation. Schwarz seamlessly move from the vocabulary of Wagner’s earlier style to the chromatically saturated harmonies he had explored in Tristan und Isolde and imported into his revision of Tannhäuser. The overlap of languages from different eras of Wagner’s creative life intensifies the fundamental conflict between sacred and profane love that gives Tannhäuser its universal appeal.

A very different ballet music emerges in Alberto Ginastera’s dance suite from Estancia. The Argentine composer wrote this ballet score commissioned in 1941 by the forerunner of New York City Ballet. Schwarz coaxes the players to revel in Ginastera’s vibrant use of rhythms, majestically clashing harmonies, and boldly colorful orchestration as he pairs percussion and horns to evoke a sense of raw, elemental power. But the quasi-Impressionist evocation of the cattle ranch’s shimmering horizons is also well-calibrated. For the climatic dancing tournament that ends the suite, Schwarz coordinates a kaleidoscopic battery of percussion and trumpets.

The final selection is Umoja: An Anthem for Unity by the American composer and flutist Valerie Coleman, also known as the founder of the pioneering Imani Winds ensemble. Coleman initially composed Umoja for women’s choir; in 2019 the Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned her to write an expanded instrumental version. The title comes from the Swahili word for “unity” and refers to “the first principle of the African Diaspora holiday Kwanzaa.” 

In her interview segment on the program, Coleman discusses how Umoja is the kind of music that “not only sends a message but is also part of a vast tradition of passing stories down, passing heritage, just through the element of intuition and feel.” She situates the sonority of African drums within a classical framework, evoking a sense of the vast Serengeti: “You feel the wildlife — you feel all of these things that are truly what I think is Mother Earth … the core of unity,” according to Coleman. “And we’re truly celebrating the moment and the message of unity.”

Ultimately, Schwarz has said that his vision for the All-Star Orchestra project is to make great music as accessible as possible. This first program of the latest season is proof that with the right elements in place, he can offer an appealing alternative to the many distractions competing for our attention span. 

Review (c) 2023 Thomas May. All rights reserved.  

Filed under: All-Star Orchestra, audio engineering, Gerard Schwarz, review