By JAMES D. WATTS JR. Scene Writer on Jun 17, 2012, at 2:05 PM Updated on 6/17 at 2:05 PM
The 2012 OK Mozart International Festival in Bartlesville came to a close Saturday with an evening both intimate and epic.
The intimacy was courtesy guest artist Esperanza Spalding, blending her acrobatic jazz vocals and supple bass playing into classical pieces accompanied by the Amici New York orchestra. And “epic” is the only term suitable for the world premiere of Oklahoma composer Callen Clarke’s “Life Symphony.”
Last year, OK Mozart premiered another Clarke work, “Wiley Post: Tone Poem for Violin and Orchestra,” that was a brilliantly evocative and effective piece of music.
“Life Symphony” is a supremely ambitious follow-up. It is Mahler-like in scale — the seven movements, performed almost without pause, took just over an hour to perform — and in vision, as those seven movements trace the evolution of a human life from conception to the afterlife.
Violinist Kyle Dillingham, Clarke’s musical partner in many of his symphonic endeavors, was the soloist for this work, although his role was less that of a traditional concert soloist — someone set apart from the orchestra, carrying on a musical conversation whether genial or antagonistic — as that of an integral voice within the whole, a strongly emphasized orchestral section of one.
It is, also, an undeniably spiritual work, a statement of faith that is forthright without becoming didactic. It is there for those “who have ears to hear.”
Clarke employs everything from 12-tone and atonal music to melodies as simple as lullabies in this work. The first and third movements, titled “Genesis” and “Experience” respectively, get particularly thorny. Random sounds from the percussion evolve slowly up through the various sections of the orchestra into a concentrated abstract roar in the first movement.
In the third movement, the symphony’s longest section and the only one not to feature the soloist, determined passages — at times martial, at times industrial — begin subtly to disintegrate into unresolved dissonances, so that every phrase sounds incomplete.
These harsh, unsettling movements are juxtaposed with sections that are so simple, direct and melodic that they sound almost naive. The second movement, “Innocence,” and the fourth, “Elegy,” are built upon similar three-note motifs — the barest necessities of melody — yet the openness of the music in these sections make them strikingly effective: essentially, these are songs without words.
Singing comes into play in the final movement, “Passage,” which concludes with another simple melody. Clarke and Dillingham demonstrated the tune before the performance, so that the audience could join in, as Dillingham improvised over the melody as he walked off stage, until the voice of the violin could no longer be heard.
“Life Symphony” has its longueurs, passages that make their musical point and then continue to make it a time or two more for good measure. But for the most, all the ambition that went into the work was realized — in large part because of the passionate performance by the Amici New York, conducted by Constantine Kitsopoulous, and by Dillingham’s energetically lyrical giving voice to, to quote the program notes, “the soul of an individual.”
The piece made marvelous use of the orchestra, giving such players as principal bassoon Charles McCracken, flutists Kathleen Nester and John McMurtery, timpanist Samuel Solomon and guest harpists Gaye LeBlanc and Elizabeth Wenzel.
It also was greeted with an immediate and sustained standing ovation from the OK Mozart audience.
Spalding, in her second OK Mozart appearance this year, started out in a purely classical mode, performing a special orchestration of Vivaldi’s Sonata No. 5 in E Minor. And one could tell that she was quite a bit outside her comfort zone, almost tentative in her approach to this piece.
But once she put down the bow and went at the bass with both hands, her energy, expressiveness and happiness all came out, first in the song “Little Fly” from her album “Chamber Music Society,” then in jazz-fueled vocalese renditions of tunes by the Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal, along with the well-known Adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.
For this piece, Spalding sang what is traditionally played by solo guitar, in a clear and highly flexible soprano, as she and pianist Leo Genovese established a smooth but undeniably swinging groove for this piece.
Spalding returned for one encore, scatting to Genovese’s own composition “Chacarera.”
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