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A Cosmic Garden from the ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
In the 1930s and ’40s, the Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky played an essential role in shaping classical music. With excellent taste (and generous funding), the conductor performed and promoted the best of contemporary music, and his tastes have proved enduring.
It seems Koussevitzky’s mantle has moved south, adopted by conductor Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In recent years they’ve given a massive boost to composers whose reputations, in the music community, outpaced their national prominence. Jennifer Higdon, Chris Theofanidis and Osvaldo Golijov are among the new American power composers who have benefitted from Spano and the ASO.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, we heard the latest voice in the ASO family: Michael Gandolfi, who teaches at Boston’s New England Conservatory. Spano conducted the premiere of Gandolfi’s “Impressions from ‘The Garden of Cosmic Speculation,’” two summers ago at the Tanglewood Music Festival.
In four movements, “Impressions” depicts a private garden in Scotland created by architect Charles Jencks. It’s an art-meets-science landscape where Dada sculpture, new-age spirituality and Stephen Hawking-style abstract physics inform the design of the 30-acre preserve.
The composer has yet to visit the garden; when composing, he found inspiration in Jencks’ lavishly illustrated coffee-table book. In a video interview broadcast before the performance, Gandolfi said he was enthused by the “crazy science stuff the garden alludes to.” Clearly, there’s a lot to think about even before the music starts.
The opening movement, called “The Zeroroom,” awakens like a pale pink sunrise, misty and atmospheric. Repetitive minimalist patterns — echoes of Adams or Andriessen — hint at far-away geese, honking and flying in a V formation. You can almost see them. It’s a lovely image.
The second movement, “Soliton Waves,” refers to the garden’s long, undulating iron fence. But the music scurries along, assertive yet sweet, with a contrasting lyrical section. It seems rabbits have infiltrated this garden. Not much happens in “The Snail and the Poetics of Going Slow,” a proper slow movement in this quasi symphony. The mood is shimmering and mysterious.
“The Nonsense,” the finale, refers to a M.C. Escher-like pavilion, with odd angles and a staircase to nowhere. The music lurches forward in an irregular alignment and with terrific momentum. The whole score is unstoppable, fun to hear and is suggestive of more than it actually contains. The music tapers to a soft ending, which didn’t encourage a wild audience response.
We’ll be hearing much more from Gandolfi. Over the next year, he plans to visit the garden and expand the current 20-minute work into a 50-minute triptych, which the ASO will perform (and record for Telarc) in May, 2007.
The all-American evening opened with Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture,” the composer’s impressions of visiting the island in the 1930s, complete with Caribbean-tinged rhythms and the distinctive sounds of bongos and maracas. Like Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story,” which closed the concert, the Gershwin overture celebrates the vernacular and the ordinary — the hum and energy of the street. Spano swiveled his hips and cha-cha’d through the Bernstein. The players were electrified, the audience deliriously happy.
In the middle of all this Americana sat John Corigliano’s Piano Concerto, from 1968. It was the New York composer’s first major work, a stylish (if sometimes laborious) blend of warm romanticism and the complex modernism then in fashion. It’s big, rigorous and thoughtful, with a soft side. Pianist Terrence Wilson nailed the solo part, in technique and emotional equilibrium — a winning performance.
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