Tania Miller.
“When programming for an orchestra, I believe in curating experiences that will have a profound impact. Programming in a way that brings people in,” said Tania Miller, candidate for music director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. “So we don’t start with music that is unreachable.”
Miller will conduct the orchestra for Friday’s performance at Southern Connecticut State University’s Lyman Center for the Performing Arts. She is the second of four music director candidates that audiences and orchestra alike will have the chance to experience this season, and brings a varied program that features soloist Chelsea Guo, who will perform as both pianist and soprano. The pieces in the program range from a Beethoven piano concerto to a Schumann symphony, to pieces by Franz Lehar and Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.
“The Lehar” — that is, “Vilja’s Song” — “doesn’t necessarily thread the rest of the program, but it is such a nice showcase for someone in [Guo’s] unique position of being so capable as both an instrumentalist and vocalist,” said Miller. “There’s a feeling of the orchestra singing along with the soloist that I love.”
Usually when programming for an orchestra, Miller said you’re beholden to a certain realm of orchestration, and what has been programmed before. In this case, Miller had a selection to make from Guo’s repertoire sheet, and then looked at other works that could potentially connect — or contrast — with this work. That initial selection was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Bb Major, an early work in the composer’s oeuvre, one that shows the composer’s later sense of drama as well as some potentially unexpected playfulness for those only familiar with some of Beethoven’s more famous melodies.
From that selection, Miller found Schumann’s Symphony No. 2, a work indebted in several ways to Beethoven. “Schumann found Beethoven’s sense of joy, and hope, and of transcending of obstacles to be a source of comfort during a dark period in his life,” Miller said. The composer wrote the work during a period of poor health and depression, but Miller still sees a clear sense of joy in the music, and of gratitude toward his wife, composer and pianist Clara Schumann. “The music and the creative process inspired him back to health, in a way,” Miller said. The final movement of the work also features themes paying homage to Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” and the famous “Ode to Joy” melody.
The program also features Silvestrov’s “Hymne,” a 2001 work for strings. The Ukrainian composer and, until recently, Kyiv resident “said he was too old to move,” Miller reported, when the war started, and had every intention of staying it out. Eventually he was evacuated to Berlin, where he now lives.
“It’s a chance to get to know a Ukrainian composer and the culture of Ukraine — but I also think it’s a very heartfelt piece,” Miller said. “Silvestrov approaches music from a place where silence starts,” and his works “bring us back into silence.” In this piece that comes across with the use of specific instructions that allow the harmonies of the strings to suggest the acoustic of a cathedral, “which may or may not be there in the space,” Miller said.
Miller spoke a lot about the ability of classical music to bring a community together. “I’m a high believer of the orchestra being a source of vitality and vibrancy in a community, and I think by giving audiences a communal experience of art, without anyone telling us what to think or what to do in response,” she said. As music director, Miller says she would like to connect specifically to New Haven audiences, to know who this community is, and to tailor her programming based on that. In service of that goal, Miller is meeting with the orchestra at Hamden High School this week.
With Friday’s concert, Miller is concerned with winning the audience with works that she sees as presenting a sense of beauty. But she describes her bottom line as “works that change or entice us in some way, even intellectually,” and indicates that she sees her potential relationship with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra as something that could develop and change over time. “Over the long term, I can curate an experience that grows with the audience — and the audience grows with us,” she said.
This is an important point: orchestras around the country, the NHSO among them, are examining their programming practices, through participation in efforts like the 2022 Orchestra Repertoire Report by the League of American Orchestras. The inclusion of historically underrepresented and living composers among the canon can be a factor in how classical music reaches out to new generations of audiences.
But Miller does not see the repertoire of the past as being isolated away from the present. “Every piece of music has a context that is of this moment. Even though we’re playing Schumann and Beethoven alongside a Ukrainian composer of our time, I still think they speak to us now. And I believe classical music can be so empowering — when we transcend our normal life and experience that beauty together.”
Tania Miller leads the New Haven Symphony Orchestra on Friday, March 10 at 7:30 p.m., at Lyman Center for the Performing Arts on the SCSU campus. See the symphony’s website for tickets and more information.
