William Boughton nodded to members of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, raised his baton, and began to expand his wingspan. He sat up a little straighter in his chair. Cued the reeds with a gentle swish of his left hand. Brought the strings in, their sound immediately swelling around the stage.
And like clockwork, steady strains of Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90 drifted over the first empty rows of Woolsey Hall, and began to fill every corner of the space.
Members of the symphony were rehearsing for Thursday night, which marks the start of the 2016 – 17 season and school night at the symphony, a chance for K‑12 students to attend the concert for free. After highlights including a new composition, a near sing-along and hoppy celebration of Beethoven last year, Boughton and members knew they had one option: to start the season off with a bang.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Boughton.
Or rather, a very full musical plate. Invested in both keeping students (and concertgoers more generally) coming out for the arts — instead of experiencing them on their computer or smartphone screens — Boughton has assembled a program that he calls “a five-course meal,” easing the audience back in to the classical regime before sucker punching it with two Shostakovich piano concerti, the musical equivalent of the best main course one may have ever digested. It’s something he spent a long time thinking about.
“How do you lead up to those main courses and what do you offer for dessert?” he mused in an interview earlier this week, as he watched a general disengagement with the past, and its music, unfold around him.
“The important thing is to make the experience powerful,” he said. “It is an expression of who we are, of what we are. The great challenge with classical music is that people see very little relevance in the past … we’re very good at tearing things down and building new things up.” Yet “we’re the products of the past,” he continued. “The products of our ancestors. That’s what I have to get across. It’s inspiring people to think about what poetry and literature and fine arts and music is about and having people lose themselves in that world.”
So he wrote a menu with that partly in mind. Beethoven’s “Egmont Overture” seemed like the right amuse-bouche. Boughton found the Mendelssohn light and frothy enough to keep easing folks in, like a chilled cucumber soup. Hannah Lash’s “Biological,” the newest movement of the composer-in-residence’s Lash/Voynich Project, was a scherzo that would usher people into the present while reminding them of the musical past. All of those together were enough to lead up to the concerti, performed back-to-back by pianist Ilya Yakushev in a musical marathon that would leave even the most seasoned attendees dazed.
“We started thinking about how we could do something very special that’s not been done before,” Boughton said of the concerti. “It’s a massive feat, to be able to perform two in one night.”
But the other pieces, much like the courses one lays out with gradual care, are not just embellishments, flavorful side dishes to the massive entree Shostakovich has given the world with Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor, Op. 35 and Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major, Op. 102. The Beethoven is like an intro to classical music, with gradated steps that manage drama and power. The Mendelssohn is super0masculine in its format of rising action, climax, falling action, denouement — but still leaves first-time listeners with a knot in their chests as strings swell and swell with no seeming end. Lash’s “Biological” is thrilling, at once dewy and new and fully formed as notes climb on top of each other with a dizzying complexity.
Embracing the educational sprit and looking toward how the past informs the present, the symphony and city have worked together to declare Sept. 29 “Women Making Music Day” in honor of both Lash (the first to shake the label of “feminine” or “feminist” from her compositions) and Helen Hagan, organist for the Dixwell Congregational Church, the only female African-American musician sent to perform for the troops in WWI France, and the first African-American woman to graduate from the Yale School of Music.
When Hagan was interred, her burial site in New Haven’s Evergreen Cemetery was left unmarked. Before their concert Thursday night, members of the NHSO and the City of New Haven are going to fix that. At 2 p.m., Lash and others will gather to speak at a dedication ceremony for her new grave marker, where the Mayor’s office will be presenting the day’s official proclamation.
