Reena Esmail, Seattle Symphony’s composer in residence (Rachel Garcia)
ALSO NOTE: Tonight Friday night at 8pm, Reena Esmail curates a program at Seattle Symphony”s Octave 9 space with Kala Ramnath and SSO musicians, titled “Ragamala: A Journey into Hindustani Music.”
I had the pleasure of writing about the marvelous Reena Esmail and her new violin concerto for Hindustani violinist Kala Ramnath, which Seattle Symphony will premiere at the Celebrate Asia concert on Sunday, 20 March.
For its opening night concert last September, when the Seattle Symphony returned for its first full season since the pandemic struck, it was music by Reena Esmail that launched the program. She continues in her role as composer-in-residence with the world premiere of a newly commissioned violin concerto …
Cultural historian Joseph Horowitz considers the case of the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1939) in his latest piece for NPR. According to Horowitz, Revueltas was not only “Mexico’s greatest composer but the supreme political composer of concert music produced in our Western hemisphere.”
A related project of Horowitz’s PostClassical Ensemble endeavor is the world premiere recording of the complete soundtrack Revueltas wrote for the 1935 film Redes, conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez.
Sunny Xia conducting the Arizona State University Studio Orchestra in the Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony 5
This morning Seattle Symphony announced that Sunny Xuecong Xia has been named the Douglas F. King Assistant Conductor. She will begin her appointment in September 2022. Meanwhile, the search for a new music director since the sudden departure early this year of Thomas Dausgaard is underway. Lee Mills will continue to serve as Associate Conductor through the current 2021-2022 season, until Xia succeeds him at the start of the 2022-23 season.
Currently, Xia is Assistant Conductor of the Phoenix Youth Symphony Orchestra and Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra. The selection process for the SSO position involved a working rehearsal session with SSO musicians as well as an interview with a panel comprising musicians, board, and staff. Xia is also pursuing a doctorate in Orchestral and Opera Conducting at Arizona State University.
Here’s the full bio from Xia’s website:
Recognized for her innate musicality, compelling presence, and technical precision, conductor Sunny Xuecong Xia’s ability to forge an immediate and captivating connection with orchestras and audiences alike has led to engagements around the country. Sunny currently serves as Assistant Conductor of the Phoenix Youth Symphony Orchestra and Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra while pursuing a doctorate in Orchestral Conducting under Dr. Jeffery Meyer. In the 2021-22 season, she was invited to lead a production of La bohème with the Chandler Opera Company and serve as cover conductor for Arizona Musicfest. She recently appeared with double bassist Xavier Foley and violinist Eunice Kim in a performance of Foley’s poignant For Justice and Peace at Arizona’s Mesa Arts Center. In the 2020-21 season, she appeared as guest conductor with the MusicaNova Orchestra and was invited to serve as Assistant Conductor at the National Music Festival and Pierre Monteux Music Festival. In January 2020, she made her successful debut with the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra.
Highlights of the 2019-20 season include being selected by Marin Alsop as a Conducting Fellow in the Peabody Conducting Workshop. She was also appointed Apprentice Conductor at the North American New Opera Workshop (NANOWorks) and served as Cover Conductor for the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra and Firelands Symphony Orchestra. Chosen from a pool of 75 first-round competitors, she was one of ten semifinalists in the NRTA Conducting Competition in Tirana, Albania. Additionally, she led the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra in the 2019 Benefit Concert “A Legacy in Bloom: Celebrating Clara T. Rankin” with violinist Caroline Goulding.
As Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Institute of Music Opera Theater from 2017 to 2020, Sunny assisted Maestro Harry Davidson in productions of Die Zauberflöte, The Juniper Tree, Le Rossignol, and L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. A dynamic advocate for contemporary music, she has led the CIM New Music Ensemble in music series such as the Cleveland NEOSonicFest and CIM New Music Series. She also served as a Conducting Fellow in the 2020 Cortona Sessions for New Music Conductor and Advocate Virtual Summit. Dedicated to bringing music to unconventional and diverse locations, while in Cleveland, Sunny organized and led concerts in retirement communities and elementary schools, including an interactive presentation of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in East Cleveland for an audience of 4th and 5th graders.
Sunny holds a dual master’s degree in Orchestral Conducting and Violin Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music where she studied under the tutelage of Carl Topilow and Jan Mark Sloman. She has had the privilege to be mentored by a number of prominent conductors, including Marin Alsop, JoAnn Falleta, Giancarlo Guerrero, Tito Muñoz, Ludovic Morlot, Larry Rachleff, Robert Spano, Carl St.Clair, and Thomas Wilkins. For two summers, she attended the Monteux School and Music Festival as a Kurt & Torj Wray Conducting Scholar. An accomplished violinist, prior to becoming a conductor, Sunny performed as a soloist with orchestras in China and Australia, including the symphony orchestras of Harbin, Zheijiang, Hunan and Guangxi, and the Concertante Ensemble. While attending Cleveland Institute of music, she served as concertmaster of the CIM Orchestra.
Originally from Guangzhou, China, Sunny relocated to Sydney, Australia at the age of 14 on a sponsorship from the Australian String Academy that allowed her to further her violin studies with Peter Shi-xiang Zhang and Charmian Gadd. A talented basketball athlete, she competed in the semi-professional New South Wales Metro Junior League before focusing primarily on her musical pursuits. When not performing or enjoying a pick-up game, Sunny can be found reading, kayaking, or learning languages. She speaks Cantonese, English, German, Mandarin and Teochew, and is improving her French and Italian.
For this month’s column, I had the privilege of writing about this very talented young conductor:
When he was still in college, Lee Mills had a dream job of becoming a roller coaster designer. But the unexpected career path he ended up following has given the young conductor another way of providing some very memorable thrills—especially during the current season of turbulent twists and turns….
The sudden cold blast, climate change, a pandemic that seems never-ending, World War III angst — I’d rather take a night off and focus instead on the transportive music of John Luther Adams. Erin Jorgensen has curated a program of small-ensemble works that is being presented at 8pm on Thursday, 24 February, at the Chapel Performance Space in Seattle.
JLA of course has an important relationship with this city: Seattle Symphony commissioned his Pulitzer Prize-winning (and Taylor Swift-approved) Become Ocean as well as its companion work Become Desert.
Thursday’s program, which includes lighting designed by Charles Smith, will consist of:
The Farthest Place | violin, vibes, piano, marimba, double bass
The Wind in High Places | string quartet
Among Red Mountains | piano
The Light That Fills the World | violin, vibes, keyboard, marimba, double bass
Seattle Symphony members Mikhail Shmidt (violin), Andy Liang (violin), and Joseph Kaufman (double bass) are among the musicians, who also include Rose Bellini (cello), Storm Benjamin (vibraphone), Rebekah Ko (marimba), Jesse Myers (piano), and Erin Wight (viola). Mask and vaccination required for entry; tickets $15-$30.
PS In case you missed it, JLA’s memoir Silences So Deep came out in the height of the pandemic.
My latest CD review for Gramophone is of the recording by the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra of Lowell Liebermann’s lengthy ballet score Frankenstein:
Within just five years of its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel inspired a stage play that became a hit – the first of a seemingly endless stream of adaptations for other media that has flowed ever since. While the most popular of these are associated with the screen (going back to a 1910 short silent film from Edison Studios), Frankenstein has additionally spawned operas, musicals and this full-length ballet, premiered by the Royal Ballet in 2016….
A spirited toast to the matchless John Coolidge Adams, who celebrates his 75th birthday today. This is an especially busy year for the composer: San Francisco Opera will launch its centenary season in September with the world premiere of Adams’s latest opera, Antony and Cleopatra.
Ruth Reinhardt conducting Seattle Symphony in Bernstein’s Candide Overture during her tenure as an SOO Conducting Fellow (2017)
Last week’s subscription concerts launched Seattle Symphony’s Sibelius Symphony cycle, which had been anticipated as a highlight of Thomas Dausgaard’s return since the pandemic. In the wake of the now-ex-music director’s sudden departure announced last month, a handful of replacement conductors has been enlisted to take over Dausgaard’s commitments for the rest of the season.
First up this month was Ruth Reinhardt, a remarkable conductor of the young generation. She had the formidable task of taking on the first program of the Sibelius cycle, in which the Finnish composer’s symphonies are being combined with newly commissioned compositions. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Ellen Reid responded to Sibelius’s First Symphony with a work titled TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY AND TODAY. Lasting about a quarter-hour, it showed Reid as a composer who not only creates intriguing soundscapes but is able to illuminate them with psychologically resonant significance.
The Macbethian title (even more despairing than “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”) refers to the patterns of repetition and monotony endured during the pandemic. But her music stages various escapes — lyrical fantasias, utopian dreaming, even a down-to-earth party — from the stasis and repetition that threaten to drain each day of the joie de vivre. Reid uses the resources of the orchestra with great imagination and variety.
Moreover, as became clear in Reinhardt’s sweeping, panoramic vision of the Sibelius, Reid seems to have found a pandemic-era equivalent for the vision conveyed by Sibelius’s extraordinary debut symphony, which builds to a seeming lyrical breakthrough or even oasis, only to find it illusive. That connection certainly seemed apparent in Reinhardt’s overview of both works. Between them, we were treated to an exquisitely phrased, completely beguiling interpretation by Garrick Ohlsson of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, followed by thunderous, bell-like chords in his encore, the C-sharp minor Prelude.
What a gift to have Asher Fisch back in town after a long absence. The program he conducted on Thursday evening paired George Walker and Gustav Mahler, and the pairing works beautifully. Fisch infused Lyric for Strings with genuine warmth and underscored the fascinating entanglement of folk and modernist elements in the much later Folksongs for Orchestra, which dates from 1990. It continues to defy belief that this great American composer remains such a rarity in our concert life. How long is it going to take to change that?
Fisch was in his element with Das Lied von der Erde, and the Mahler-starved audience — the pandemic has been especially unkind to the composers who require enlarged orchestras — drank it up with rapt attention. I especially admired his flexible rhythms and feeling for Mahler’s Jugendstil ornamentation, but he also kept the emotional destination of the cycle clearly in view, illuminating the way to, and the journey within, the vast final song. Problems of balance left tenor Russell Thomas largely drowned out for stretches of the opening “Trinklied,” but his passionate delivery conveyed the flashes of bitter epiphany Mahler expresses.
Mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor brought a rich, dark timbre to her three songs, carefully building the sense of inevitable leave-taking in “Der Abschied.” The expanded woodwind section was a special highlight, with eloquent contributions from flutist Demarre McGill and oboist Mary Lynch in particular. Fisch’s unpretentious, unfussy clarity allowed each detail to fall into place with memorable impact.
The program will be repeated on Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 4pm. It would be a shame to miss it.
MEMETERIA 