Jeffrey Mumford
(Photo: Al Fuchs, Courtesy of Oberlin Conservatory of Music)
Dominique-René de Lerma:
Great expectations
Those who know the music of teenage
Mendelssohn -- the Octet, the overture to A midsummer night's dream --
would agree there might never have been so creative and individual a
composer-prodigy in music (as a life-long missionary for Mozart that's very
painful to admit), and there still remain those 12 string symphonies from his
even earlier years. What followed in adulthood is not always of the same
quality. Despite the popularity of Elijah, it gets awfully close to
mere Satzkunst. (Mendelssohn is next week's topic. by the way.) Now
look at Coleridge-Taylor. Not everyone has agreed with me in the past, but I
think Hiawatha's Wedding Feast is masterful and touchingly inventive,
and the clarinet quintet, also a work from his youth, promises a wonderful
future. But that didn't happen, did it? I mean the Petite suite is
quite charming, but better suited for promenade concerts amid potted palms than
the season's series of serious essays. Yet that was the work that was
excerpted for the eighth program in Bill McLaughlin's two-week tribute to Black
music. There are works which are more historically important than pieces of
great art, which some historians might respect longer than aestheticians. If Hiawatha
is not in everyone's latter category (and it ranked in the top three choral
works, along with Elijah and the Messiah, for a long period), it
certainly belongs to the historical. Here was a specific work that
demonstrated Black talent to Americans shortly before the eruption of the
Harlem Renaissance, and helped bring that about. Listeners not already
familiar with Coleridge-Taylor might have looked on this initial exposure as
only "nice" music at best. There are better.
We did hear works by two very important
figures who have not appeared as often on programs as they really deserve.
Jeffrey Mumford (her easternllight), who has taught at Oberlin and, an
old friend of McGlaughlin, helped guide him through this enormous world of
Black music. Jeffrey is fairly well represented by recordings, but how well
has he been included on concerts, radio broadcasts, or in the literature? The
same is true for Alvin Singleton, long active in Europe, represented by a work
(In Our Own House) that requires a saxophonist with seemingly more than
ten fingers. The CD of Natalie Hinderas was welcomed back for Hale Smith's Evocation.
Time did not allow a richer exploration of this classic figures' output -- his Ritual
and incantations being even more evocative.
The central work was the Liszt E-flat
piano concerto, a flamboyant one-movement work, devoid of any subtlety) in the
historic performance by a teenage André Watts, whose vast recorded repertoire
got as close to his mother's heritage as Gershwin.
The mélange gave us a chance to hear
Robert Sims, surely one of the most exciting of today's voices, in Roland
Hayes' Little boy. Again, however, we missed a thread that unites the
repertoire but, as usual, Bill McLaughlin certainly continues to stimulate our
minds and asks for our reactions. The web site, www.wfmt.com/exploringmusic, indicates
titles, performers, and record labels for the repertoire under
"Playlists", as well as a means for expressing our reactions and
suggestions. Shows are developed weeks in advance, but Bill is very receptive
to his fans' sentiments.
In the middle of March, he
will take us to the southern Americas, but the visit will not include Nunes
García, any of the 18th-century figures from Brazil's Minas Gerais, or Antônio
Gomes. So there is a virginal future.
------------------------------------
Dominique-René
de Lerma
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