Thomas Wilkins
(John Blanding/Globe Staff)
By David Weininger
Globe Correspondent
There was a joke that, earlier in his career, Thomas Wilkins and his
fellow black conductors would share knowingly. “The joke was: We were
always really busy in February,” he said by phone during a recent
interview. February, of course, is Black History Month, during which
“orchestras wanted repertoire by African-American composers,” usually
conducted by African-Americans.
This offended some of
Wilkins’s colleagues, who felt that “there was a sense of tokenism” to
these engagements, but he always took a different approach. Practically
speaking, it was a gig. And, he added, “I can’t control what’s in
someone else’s heart as to why they make the decisions that they make.
So if you hire me because I’m black, that’s on you, not on me. But the
next time you hire me, it’s because I’m good.”
This topic came up as Wilkins was discussing the music of Adolphus
Hailstork, a contemporary African-American composer whose vibrant “An
American Port of Call” is on a March 23 Boston Symphony Orchestra
program with which Wilkins, who has been the BSO’s youth and family
concerts conductor since 2011, will make his BSO subscription-series
debut. During the time when he was looking for repertoire to conduct at
those February concerts, he discovered Hailstork’s music, and has now
conducted virtually all of it.
“What I loved about his music is that it’s always extremely well
crafted,” Wilkins said. “He can write in a European tradition, but he
never loses his heritage when he writes.” That quality — what Wilkins
calls “being comfortable in one’s own skin” — links the music of the
four composers on the BSO program: Hailstork, Duke Ellington, Florence
Price (all African-Americans), and Roberto Sierra, who is Puerto Rican.
“A lot of composers understood that if their music was going to have
wide appeal, probably some of it was going to have to come from music of
the ‘common person,’ ” Wilkins explained. “That’s what this program is,
except that we have less often focused on Americanism’s original voice
in classical music. If you think about someone like Samuel Barber — he
was an American composer who wrote in a Western European voice. And
that’s not the case with Florence Price or Duke Ellington. I think
that’s the major difference.”
Both Ellington’s “A Tone Parallel to Harlem (Harlem Suite)” and
Sierra’s Concerto for Saxophones and Orchestra create distinctive
interfaces between jazz and orchestral music. But it is Price’s
appearance on the program that is of particular interest, given the
surge of attention her music has gotten over the past year or so, which
includes recordings of her symphonies and violin concertos. She was the
first black woman to have a piece performed by a major American
orchestra (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in 1933). When Wilkins leads
“Symphonic Reflections” — a suite knitted together from parts of her
Third Symphony — it will be the first time the BSO has played her music.
(The same is true of Hailstork.)
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