nothin New Haven Symphony Does Jazz | New Haven Independent

New Haven Symphony Does Jazz

Joe Crawford

Chris Brubeck, Joseph Boughton, Christophe Vanacore, Chris Worden and Michaeljohn Alio.

The small-city symphony orchestra occupies an often lamentable role in the grand scheme of American arts culture. Unlike large city orchestras or university ensembles, smaller orchestras can find their programming connected too directly to their funding, where securing the continued support of private donors necessitates continued performances of classical and romantic era workhorses.

Happily, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra defies that expectation — not only with their composer-in-residence programs, which have resulted in several world premieres of orchestral works, but with programs such as the one the orchestra offered last Thursday at the Shubert.

All of the works performed were American, written after 1950, and all reflected a healthy awareness of jazz, from the choice of composers — like Duke Ellington and artist-in-residence Chris Brubeck — to the presence of a young jazz combo playing alongside the orchestra in a new piece commissioned from Brubeck.

The history of jazz and orchestras is contentious. It is hard not to see European composers’ early attempts to fuse the traditional orchestra with jazz harmony and syncopation as quaint and only occasionally successful. American attempts at the same, by composers like Gershwin and Bernstein, are generally more artistically successful, but continue to raise questions of authenticity years later.

Meanwhile, jazz and its musical offspring has had many of its own flavors of orchestral music, from Duke Ellington’s big bands to Charles Mingus’s expansive combos, not to mention more fully hybridized music by Anthony Braxton, Jason Kao Hwang, and Bill Dixon. But racial and cultural politics interfered with many of the early interactions between jazz composers and soloists and traditional symphonic orchestras.

in Thursday’s program, the NHSO explored a few possibilities for how to bridge that divide. The program started with Leonard Bernstein’s overture from Candide, a concise musical statement that references jazz in its harmonies and syncopation. Under conductor William Boughton’s baton, the orchestra made tidy work of the piece, carrying a sense of whimsy throughout Bernstein’s jittery instrumentation. Solo violin and oboe passages stood out among the piece’s many organic changes of meter and tempo, and the orchestra handled the syncopation gracefully.

But getting at the question about the authenticity of symphony orchestras performing jazz or jazz-derived works, the notes for Thursday’s concert, in providing background to the excerpts from Ellington’s The River Suite, mention that the composer’s music, and by extension a great deal of jazz, has no definitive score, due to the interpretive and structural freedom that Ellington took great advantage of when working with his ensemble of adept improvisers.

The NHSO performed an orchestrated, fixed” version by Ellington collaborator Ron Collier, and while the excerpts presented bore the stamp of Ellington’s harmonic vision, complete with touches of late Romantic composers filtered through the bandleader’s pianistic sensibilities, something was missing. It wasn’t the orchestra’s performance. The strings handled the heavily syncopated lines remarkably well, and there were some jaw-dropping uses of orchestral color, especially some outstanding pairings of woodwinds and strings in the second and fourth movements, and a tremendous performance from the brass (especially trombones) throughout. But there are elements of the piece, like the gentle push and pull of tempi throughout, that simply couldn’t work as well with a 60-person orchestra as they could with a working jazz band of any size. Some elements needed to be felt rather than conducted.

Two Brubeck compositions explored other possibilities for the fusion of jazz and orchestral music, to more effective ends. Brubeck’s Concerto No. 1 for Bass Trombone took three movements to explore the possibilities for jazz in an orchestral context, absorbing the sounds and methods of its traditional forbears as it referenced American composers, funk rhythms, and the aggressive studio orchestra sound of early 60s TV and film. Brubeck’s tone and intonation on the bass trombone were impressive, and in moments where he was sparsely accompanied or flying solo, you could see members of the orchestra nodding along with his lines. The orchestra’s percussionists in particular handled the piece’s shifting metric accents easily, grounding the jittery and often beautiful orchestral accompaniment.

For the world premiere Time Changes for Jazz Combo and Orchestra, young musicians Michaeljohn Alio, Joseph Boughton, Liam Doolan, Christopher Vanacore, and Chris Worden crowded on stage with Brubeck as the titular combo. Brubeck’s introduction of the piece indicated the last-minute conditions more common to jazz groups than symphony orchestras. But this wasn’t evident from the spirited reading, in which the players navigated difficult melodic lines with the orchestra as their foil. Brubeck made some wise choices in pairing sections and soloists against the jazz horns’ melodic work — although there were relatively few tutti moments and the roles of the orchestral basses and percussion seemed to be reduced due to the constant presence of the amplified pizzicato bass and trap kit. Some balance issues drowned out a few significant lines from guitar and pitched percussion, perhaps indicating the lack of a sound check, but the piece was an intriguing entry into the hybrid field.

The program’s final piece, Ansel Adams: America, was a collaborative composition between Chris Brubeck and his father, the late pianist Dave Brubeck. The piece was inspired by the black-and-white photography of Ansel Adams, projected on a screen above the orchestra. Individual moments shined in their use of jazzy syncopation and orchestration, though the orchestra managed the many changes in meter and tempo less smoothly than they did elsewhere on the program, and the composition seemed somewhat impatient with itself. In its most impressive moment, a piano-led fugue slowly drew in the rest of the orchestra, but it, like many other themes during the piece, came and went without much fanfare. The composition’s overall slow tempo and fragmented nature made it the wrong choice for the end of the program.

All that said, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra is to be applauded for a bill like this. The questions of authenticity raised in the program notes are still unanswered. But if more orchestras were committed to bills like this one, and to adventurous programming in general, the questions would be less and less necessary.

The NHSO’s adventurous season continues with Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (‘Choral’), on March 28 in Norwalk, CT and on April 2 at Woolsey Hall in New Haven.

Sign up for our morning newsletter

Don't want to miss a single Independent article? Sign up for our daily email newsletter! Click here for more info.


Post a Comment

Commenting has closed for this entry

Comments

There were no comments