By JAMES D. WATTS JR. Scene Writer on Jun 16, 2011, at 5:43 PM Updated on 6/16 at 5:43 PM
As OK Mozart executive director Shane Jewell said Wednesday night, the Bartlesville festival is famous for bringing some of the country’s greatest musicians to Oklahoma.
But equally important, he said, is the festival’s efforts to showcase Oklahoma’s own excellent musicians, to prove that the home-grown talent is more than worthy of sharing the same stage with the likes of Itzhak Perlman, Jean-Pierre Rampal and Leontyne Price, just to name a few of the luminaries of OK Mozarts past.
Wednesday night at the Bartlesville Community Center, OK Mozart hosted the world premiere of “Wiley Post: Tone Poem for Violin and Orchestra,” composed by Edmond native Callen Clarke and featuring as soloist Kyle Dillingham of Enid.
Even the Amici New York, the OK Mozart orchestra in residence, had an Oklahoma accent, as it was augmented by about half a dozen Tulsa musicians.
Dillingham, who was named Oklahoma’s Musical Ambassador by Gov. Brad Henry, and Clarke have collaborated on two other symphony pieces, “The Argosy Overture” and “The Mary Rose.”
I have only heard portions of “The Mary Rose,” and thought it an accomplished work, evoking the history of a Tudor-era English warship from its joyous launch to its violent demise.
“Wiley Post” is a marked improvement. For one thing, it is not strictly a programmatic piece. If you know the basic biography of Post, the Oklahoma-raised aviation pioneer whose achievement and innovations had a profound effect on the history of manned flight, you can imagine how the four sections of the work fit that story.
But you can know nothing about Wiley Post and still be captivated by this soaring, expansive and very Oklahoman composition.
It begins with a stately tune played on piano (at Wednesday’s performance, the pianist was Tulsa pianist and composer Roger Price) that called to mind the hymn-like melody in the middle of the “Jupiter” section of Holst’s “The Planets.” This led into a flowing, almost dreamy first section – music that evoked the sense of a young boy’s daydreams, that seem to rise into the prairie sky, only occasionally being brought back down to earth by a sharp, discordant note or phrases.
The second section, which Dillingham said was informally called “the roughneck section,” was where Dillingham was able to cut loose with some truly fiery fiddling. The music wasn’t conventional fiddle tunes inserted into orchestral settings, but fast, complex, extended passages of abstract music played in the fiddle idiom – imagine what it would sound like if Paganini had grown up in Appalachia, and you begin to get the idea. This explosion of fiddling then resolved itself into a cadenza based on yet another well-known tune, “Wayfaring Stranger.”
The bulk of the piece is the third section, with the music growing more expansive and grandiose, the solo lines becoming piercing, everything swirling inexorably upward – and then the music literally falls apart into silence, a remarkably effective way of handling the idea of Post’s death along with Will Rogers in a 1935 plane crash in Alaska.
Then Amici New York concertmaster Erika Kiesewetter stood up and began playing the work’s opening melody, with Dillingham and then orchestra joining in and the piece rose one again to its triumphant conclusion.
It was an impressive performance on all counts. Conductor James Bagwell, known to Tulsa audiences for his work with Light Opera Oklahoma and the Tulsa Symphony, led the orchestra with a firm, yet expressive hand, and the orchestra responded with its best playing of the evening.
Fortunately, “Wiley Post” is not going to go the way of many new works of music. It will be performed again in the fall with Dillingham performing with the University of Central Oklahoma orchestra, and that performance is scheduled to be recorded.
The evening also featured Bartlesville native Joe Sears as narrator for Aaron Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait.” Sears caused a bit of a titter in the crowd when he strode onto the stage decked out in the top hat, overcoat and shiny maroon vest of a 19th century gentleman, but he delivered of the text, drawn from Lincoln’s writings and speeches, in strong, no-nonsense tones, with just the right amount of passion.
Opening the concert was Mozart’s Overture to “Don Giovanni,” with Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 closing out the evening. The Schumann began with some horribly strangled tones from the brass, but the orchestra recovered itself quickly. Personally, we prefer Schumann in smaller forms, which seemed better suited to his abilities. And if one thought of this performance not as a symphonic whole, but merely four individual studies for orchestra, it worked well. It also made the applause that greeted the end of each of the four movements sound not out of place.
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