For new symphony season, a change in tune
This article was published in The Charlotte Ledger e-newsletter on March 25, 2023. Find out more and sign up for free here.
Charlotte Symphony's '23-'24 lineup showcases substantial works by an array of living, diverse, contemporary composers; new musical director expected by year's end
Big names in music including opera great Renée Fleming, TikTok sensation Cody Fry and jazz violinist Regina Carter will perform during the new Charlotte Symphony season. (Photo courtesy of Charlotte Symphony/Michael Harding)
by Lawrence Toppman
I’ll let a great composer of the mid-20th century sum up the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra’s 2023-24 season: “Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
Chuck Berry may not be featured in these concerts, though you can never tell what crossover violinist Regina Carter might play, and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky are still on the roster.
But for the first time in memory, members of the Great Classical Canon will be less important than the startling array of Black, female and living composers who’ll populate the programs, not only in the Classical Series but the Pops Series and even the Family Series aimed at kids.
The CSO has yet to name a permanent music director. Officially, that will happen by the end of the year; according to informed rumor, we’ll get a decision by September. She or he will inherit an attitude that has suddenly invigorated Charlotte’s oldest professional arts organization.
Consider these numbers:
The upcoming Classical Series contains eight works by composers who are still with us, nine by women, four by African-Americans, two by living Asian-born composers.
Two of the four Pops concerts offer tributes by Black artists to Black singers: Carter will play David Schiff's “Four Sisters,” a concerto honoring Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, and vocalist Dee Daniels will pay homage to them and others in an evening titled “Great Ladies of Swing.”
Even the Family Series goes farther afield. Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals” pairs off with “Thurber’s Dogs,” a suite inspired by James Thurber’s drawings and composed by Peter Schickele. (Schickele is the musical satirist famous for creating the fictional composer “P.D.Q. Bach.”) Instead of a typical “Mozart/Beethoven/Brahms Lives Upstairs” morning, “Saint-Georges’ Sword and Bow” will introduce us to the Afro-European contemporary of Mozart who was a gifted fencer, violinist and composer.
Jazz violinist Regina Carter will join the Charlotte Symphony Feb. 9 and 10, 2024, for a program featuring David Schiff's Four Sisters, a concerto that pays homage to Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. (Photo courtesy of Charlotte Symphony)
The CSO increased its commitment to contemporary and lesser-known music during Christopher Warren-Green’s 12-year tenure as music director, which ended last May. (He’ll return to lead an all-English program: Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from the opera “Peter Grimes,” Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 1 to texts by Walt Whitman, and Grace Williams’ “Sea Sketches.”)
Yet his freewheeling KnightSounds program stopped in 2016 after six years, and the replacement altsounds series died even faster. The CSO has put a toe or two into contemporary hot water, occasionally with a big work such as John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 but more frequently with a short curtain-raiser unlikely to drive off timid listeners.
Now we’ll hear many substantial pieces new to our ears. John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic Symphony,“ adapted from his Manhattan Project opera “Doctor Atomic,” will get an airing before Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.
Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement will go well with “Rhapsody in Blue” by her contemporary, George Gershwin. Most daringly, William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1 — known as the “Afro-American Symphony,” the first symphony by a Black composer played by a major orchestra — anchors a program after Dvořák’s tone poem “The Noonday Witch,” Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto and a “Faust” overture by long-dead German composer Emilie Mayer.
Programmers dared to curate evenings without a single cornerstone of the repertoire. The English sea pieces above comprise one of those. A January concert matches Aaron Copland’s suite from the ballet “Billy the Kid” with Samuel Barber’s Second Essay for Orchestra, Jennifer Higdon’s “Cold Mountain Suite” — co-commissioned by the CSO — and the season’s biggest surprise: Mizzy Mazzoli’s violin concerto, “Procession,” with in-demand soloist Jennifer Koh.
You may wonder who assembled this lineup, with Warren-Green back in Britain. Credit goes to president and CEO David Fisk, director of artistic planning Carrie Graham, resident conductor Christopher James Lees (who conducts the Family Series), principal flutist Victor Wang (chair of the musicians’ Artistic Advisory Committee), cellist Sarah Markle, clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld, timpanist Jacob Lipham and principal trumpet Alex Wilborn.
They’re importing some starry names: Carter, Koh, Metropolitan Opera soprano Renée Fleming for a September gala, TikTok sensation Cody Fry for a Nashville-tinged concert in October.
Yet locals will get more of a boost than usual. Concertmaster Calin Ovidiu Lupanu will play his annual concerto — Henryk Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 2, last heard here four decades ago — but Wilborn will get a concerto, too, an obscure one by Oskar Böhme. CSO cellist Jeremy Lamb will make his Classical Series debut as composer of “A Ride on ‘Oumuamua,” inspired by the first known interstellar object to travel our solar system.
Maybe the final concert of the season best indicates where the CSO is going. Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” will draw people who like orchestral spectaculars. Before that, though, we’ll hear compositions by two youngish North Carolinians, “ ‘Oumuamua” by Raleigh native Lamb and “The Observatory” by Greenville’s Pulitzer-winning Caroline Shaw. If this thinking represents the symphony’s future, classical music fans should applaud.
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