Concert in the Seiji Ozawa Hall, Sunday, July 23, 2023
Program:
Richard Strauss, Don Juan, conducted by Agata Zajac; Gabriela Lena Frank, “La centinela y la Paloma” (“The Keeper and the Dove”), conducted by Armand Singh Birk, with Bridget Esler and Yvonne Trobe, sopranos; Sergei Prokofiev, Symphony no. 6 in E-flat minor, op. 111, conducted by Xian Zhang
Although not officially part of this summer’s Festival of Contemporary Music (FCM), the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra concert on Sunday, July 23 served as a kind of prelude inasmuch as it featured a significant work by one of the four FCM curators, Gabriela Lena Frank. Frank has recently gained widespread attention thanks to an extensive profile in The New York Times. But she has been a significant figure in American contemporary music since before the start of this century, and she is now a mentor to a younger generation of composers, many of whom have been inspired by her project: to interrogate her complex ethnicity as an American of Peruvian descent with Chinese and Lithuanian forebears, and to incorporate these cultural elements into her music organically, in a manner far removed from the “exoticized” cultural references of the late Romantics and Impressionists.
The work performed Sunday night consists of four excerpts from a long-gestating opera entitled “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Final Dream of Frida and Diego”), with libretto by poet Nilo Cruz, that was started 15 years ago, and which just received its premiere performance at the San Diego Opera. (It will be performed at the Met this coming season.) The four excerpts, collectively entitled “La Centinela y la Paloma” (“The Sentinel and the Dove”) form a cycle of four solos (more dramatic scenes than arias) for the two characters referenced in the title: The sentinal, Catrina, is the guardian of the gates to the land of the dead, and the dove is Frida Kahlo. Originally intended for a single performer (it was premiered by Dawn Upshaw in 2011), the solo duties were shared by two sopranos: Bridget Esler and Yvonne Trobe. Strangely, they split the cycle in half, even though the first and last songs are in the voice of Catrina, and the second and third in that of Frida. Scored for a chamber orchestra with extra percussion, the performance was effectively conducted by Armand Singh Birk.
The action, announced in the first section by Catrina, takes place on November 2, the Day of the Dead, when the gates between the living and dead are opened and departed souls are allowed to visit earth, but only for one day. She makes it clear that her favorite soul is Frida, her “little dove,” who is “the most ungrateful of the dead” (i.e., the one who still yearns for life). In the second solo, Frida revels in her return to the land of the living, seeming to forget the fact that she is only a phantom as she seeks out her “little frog,” her husband Diego Rivera, and makes the unintentionally ironic comment, “I am dying to see you once again, darling.” But in the third solo, performed by voice alone, she recalls that she is going to be called back to death, and she expresses her bitter refusal to accept this fact. Finally, Catrina announces the closing of the gates, notices that Frida has not returned, and declares, “No one escapes Catrina,” after which she welcomes Frida back and closes “the divide between life and darkness.”
Frank commands a wide stylistic range, from heavily folk-tinged to more abstract. Her scoring here is colored by a range of percussion, including marimba, tubular bells, snare and bass drums, triangles, various cymbals, wood blocks, a tam-tam (large gong), and a thunder sheet, the last providing the sound of the opening and closing of the gates. There is also harp, piano, and celesta. These are blended with more conventional instruments to produce dramatically striking and unique sonorities. The vocal writing employs a wide range of modes, from pure singing to pure speech, along with the in-between technique dubbed by Schoenberg as “Sprechstimme” (speech-song). This is all deployed to continuously gripping dramatic purpose. While the opening and closing sections offered an arrestingly colorful soundscape, the second alluded to the sounds of Mexican music without quoting it, including trumpets singing in thirds, mariachi-style, and fragments of dance rhythms, suggesting Frida’s unsuccessful attempts to re-embody herself. This was all presented at the high level of intensity implied by the word “operatic.” Hearing it whets the appetite for the complete opera. Frank’s music will be heard again on Thursday night, when she has three chamber works programmed, with Bartok’s “Contrasts” in the official opening concert of the Festival, and also at the closing concert on Monday night, again featuring the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, which has shown its capacity for digging enthusiastically into such challenging scores.
The rest of Sunday night’s concert included another challenging score: Symphony no. 6 by Serge Prokofiev. While this is one of the composer’s major works, and sometimes cited by critics as their favorite among his symphonies, it is rarely heard here in concert. The previous Tanglewood performance was in 1965 by Erich Leinsdorf, who recorded the complete canon of seven symphonies. It has been far out-shone in popularity by Symphony no. 5, which preceded it by only a few years, but those years were significant ones. The earlier work was composed in 1944 while Russia was still at war, while this one came just afterwards, in 1946. While the first work expressed the gritty determination of the Russian people to throw off the Nazi invaders and optimistically anticipated success, the second explicitly contemplated the devastation incurred: It can be genuinely dubbed a tragic symphony, even though the last movement seems to throw off the pall of mourning, only to have it return at the very end. Prokofiev was quite explicit about the meaning of this structure: “I did not want the finale to be regarded merely as a gay appendage to the preceding movements.” In addition to expressing the collective tragedy of the aftermath of war, these devastating final moments seem to share with Mahler’s 6th Symphony (also called “the Tragic”) a premonition of the composer’s death: Prokofiev had suffered a fall before composing it, and the ensuing concussion compromised his health for the rest of his life. Although initially very successful with the public, which only too vividly got its message, Prokofiev was included in the denunciations of Soviet Composers by Andrei Zhdanov at the Composers’ Congress of 1948, and the symphony disappeared from orchestra programs in the Soviet Union for over a decade, adding another dimension to the composer’s late career woes.
The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra continues to serve the indispensable function of widening audience exposure to less familiar repertory. The Prokofiev was directed by Xian Zhang, music director of the New Jersey Symphony, who elicited an alert and high-energy performance of this strenuous score. It may have lacked the final polish of phrasing and continuity that can be heard in the best Russian recordings, but the playing was heartfelt, especially in the second movement, which features a flowing melody that the composer returns to and rescores again and again, a companion piece to the “Fields of the Dead” song from his score to the film “Alexander Nevsky.” The parallel is a good indication of the expressive intention of this powerfully affecting music.
