Published Tuesday, February 20, 2001
Gwendolyn Freed / Star Tribune
It's been a dream deferred that someday, somehow, American classical-music institutions might step out of their 19th-century European cobwebs and become icons of more-modern social relevance. Dead white males continue to dominate concert programs, and when they don't, we've come to expect heaps of clumsy window dressing in their place.
Of course, hope is not entirely lost. "Expect the unexpected" is the rallying cry of PlymouthMusicSeries founder and director Philip Brunelle. At Sunday afternoon's 11th annual Witness concert at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, he and his cast of hundreds delivered on that motto with music of great significance to the here and now.
Plymouth rolls out Witness each February to observe Black History Month. The program brings leading black performers into public schools and before concertgoers with works that speak specifically to the African-American experience. This year's concert featured Plymouth's Ensemble Singers, Chorus and Orchestra, as well the University of Minnesota Gospel Choir under the direction of Sanford Moore. It also included a brief appearance by six students from St. Paul's Open School.
Stephen Salters -- recent Naumburg Award winner and a baritone to watch -- was Sunday's special guest. In three works, including two premieres, he demonstrated interpretive acuity, consummate musicianship and a heaven-sent set of pipes. His is a voice that's overflows, and it always sounds like there's more to come.
Another major talent was composer Elena Ruehr. Her "Gospel Cha Cha," based on a lesser-known Langston Hughes poem, was a tightly linked chain of musical episodes, each more riveting than the last. She stirred whimsy with rhythmic complexity for an intoxicating opening cocktail of hurtling meter changes. And she cranked the poem's climactic finish up to great emotional extremes.
Duke Ellington's dipping, swirling, Hollywoodesque "King of the Magi" balanced the program, as did pieces by Jester Hairston and John W. Work III, both of whom would have been 100 this year. Hairston's spiritual-based works "In Dat Great Gittin' Up Mornin'" and "Give Me Jesus," and his famous original song "Amen," ranged from rousing to transcendent. Work's angelic "Canzonet" for humming chorus drew "mmms" and "ahs" from the audience.
Composer and Sweet Honey in the Rock singer Ysaye M. Barnwell contributed "Suite Death," a premiere based on four poems by Hughes. Digging for the nuance of sentiment beneath and beyond the spare lines, her treatment of "The Suicide Note" was unbearably tender. Her music for "Tell all my mourners/ to mourn in red --/ Cause there ain't no sense/ in my being dead" was a great romp for the ears.
Esteemed composer Alvin Singleton was on hand for a performance of his Rodney King-inspired piece, "56 Blows." The gripping conclusion of this atonal meditation on violence was wrecked, however, when something in the audience went off that could have been a cell phone -- that icon that we need to leave behind when we enter the concert hall.
Gwendolyn Freed can be contacted at
Copyright 2001 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
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