The Kingdom LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor
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Thursday Evening, October 31, 2019, at 8:00 Isaac Stern Auditorium / Ronald O. Perelman Stage Conductor’s Notes Q&A with Leon Botstein at 7:00 presents The Kingdom LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor EDWARD ELGAR The Kingdom, Op. 51 I. In The Upper Room II. At the Beautiful Gate III. Pentecost Intermission IV. The Sign Of Healing V. The Upper Room The Blessed Virgin Mary: JANAI BRUGGER, Soprano Mary Magdalene: EVE GIGLIOTTI, Mezzo-soprano St. John: COOPER NOLAN, Tenor St. Peter: ALEXANDER BIRCH ELLIOTT, Baritone BARD FESTIVAL CHORALE JAMES BAGWELL, Director This evening’s concert will run approximately 2 hours including one 20-minute intermission. This program has been made possible due in part to The Elgar Society. American Symphony Orchestra welcomes the many organizations who participate in our Community Access Program, which provides free and low-cost tickets to underserved groups in New York’s five boroughs. For information on how you can support this program, please call (212) 868-9276. PLEASE SWITCH OFF YOUR CELL PHONES AND OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES. from the Music Director Elgar’s The Kingdom a pervasive sense among those who by Leon Botstein could support concert life that the cost of putting on one live large-scale pro- During the Bard Music Festival in fessional performance, which remains 2007, which had Edward Elgar as its only in one’s memory, seems utterly focus, the American Symphony Orches- wasteful and capricious. Nonetheless, tra planned to present in the New 75 percent of the costs of an evening York area the composer’s three great at the symphony are wages that make oratorios. The festival, at the Richard it possible for musicians to earn a B. Fisher Center for the Performing respectable but modest middle-class Arts at Bard College, closed with a per- living. In a society that is unwilling formance of The Dream of Gerontius. to provide tax-based economic sup- The title role was brilliantly sung by port for the performing arts, we are Vinson Cole. The performance took on dependent on private charity and a special significance when the audience therefore we can only put on large- realized that Jessye Norman had come scale programs intermittently. Fur- to hear Cole in this daunting but mag- thermore, the number of high-caliber nificent role. The chorus was prepared amateur choruses in New York has by James Bagwell, who also prepared fallen, making it essential to work with the chorus for today’s performance of professional singers in the chorus. The Kingdom. The superb Princeton University volume that accompanies Yet, the 2017 Apostles performance each year’s festival was entitled Elgar was successful. A century had passed and His World, and was edited by between it and the previous performance the author of the program notes that in New York. The Apostles created a accompany today’s concert, the distin- groundswell of support for completing guished Elgar scholar, Byron Adams. the ASO plan to perform all three Elgar oratorios. Emails and letters came in In 2017 the ASO performed Elgar’s urging us to schedule The Kingdom— The Apostles on the stage here at Car- the least well known and least appre- negie Hall. The reason for the gap of ciated of Elgar’s oratorios. The ASO is a decade between Gerontius and The pleased that only a two-year hiatus was Apostles was a combination of financial needed, not a decade. and cultural factors. Choral-orchestral works are expensive and, from a com- The cultural factor behind all this is a parative standpoint regarding the value lingering prejudice against unfamiliar of money, extravagant affairs, especially music within the public. It seems that in our society where hoarding money only a few choral-orchestral works and acquiring permanent assets have are guaranteed to fill a large concert gained an improbable prestige. The per- hall—Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, forming arts that require large forces— the Messiah, the Verdi Requiem. many performers with no potential When was the last time one heard, of a CGI-like digital equivalent— in a major venue in New York, a suffer, despite the fact that we live performance of Dvor˘ák’s Requiem, in an era of extreme wealth. There is Schumann’s Scenes from Faust, or Mendelssohn’s St. Paul, all undisputed dering of a well-known work from the great works, much less the many less past than encountering some glorious well-known gems from the choral- but unfamiliar work once considered as orchestral repertoire? great by past generations of musicians and listeners. It is hard not to notice a generous ero- sion in the public’s interest in history. Neither literature or painting operate There is now a welcome enthusiasm with such an obsession with a small for new music, but there is a palpable canon deemed to represent unmatched loss of curiosity in the music of the greatness. The recent re-opening of the past, again with the exception of famil- Museum of Modern Art easily reveals iar and acknowledged masterpieces. It the contrast. A treasure trove of his- therefore bears repeating that the way toric works, not all icons and not all we tell the story of the past influences hyper-familiar, are displayed alongside what we choose to do in the present more recent art. The ASO has sought and future. We neglect the rich history to reclaim the rapidly forgotten past of music at our own peril. for many years through performances. It has hung, on the stage, so to speak, We justify our neglect on account of an the kind of works proudly displayed by appeal to history as the ultimate arbi- MOMA and visible permanently at the ter of judgment. The world of music Metropolitan Museum of Art. suffers from the illusion that the only music worth hearing are works that Within this somewhat dispiriting con- have survived the test of time. They text of the absence of enthusiasm for are said to have persisted as part of great but unfamiliar music from the the repertory and therefore deserve past with a slim performance history, to be classified as masterpieces. The English music, written in the 19th and truth is, however, more complicated. 20th centuries, has struggled. Elgar was Not all works that one might deem the first composer since Henry Purcell masterpieces survive the test of time. to achieve worldwide fame and broad The reasons for that are not issues of acknowledgement as a major figure. His quality, but matters of accident, pol- breakthrough to fame as a composer itics, or mere bad luck. As the taste came rather late in life and it marked and education of our audiences have the beginning of an English renaissance shifted from active amateur participa- in music that has continued to this day. tion in making music, at home and in But in New York, Elgar’s reputation the community, to an audience accus- has failed to lift the works of Parry and tomed to listening on electronic devices, Stanford, or Bridge, Bliss, and Walton more and more pieces of music find into view. A concert of English music themselves passed over, even though from the past is not one that seems some sound document of them can naturally to draw a crowd, with the be found on the Internet. Even recent possible exception of music by Britten. works vanish after a few performances. The music that remains and is played Even though among English compos- practically every season gets validated ers, Elgar remains the best known, The by an obsession peculiar to classical Kingdom has remained virtually hidden music; the obsession with some saintly from American audiences. Gerontius status of an aesthetic of perfection that (I still remember from my childhood is granted to a few works. The audience a mesmerizing account with the New seems more interested in the next ren- York Philharmonic at Carnegie under Sir John Barbirolli) has gained some performances before a listening audience currency. But The Apostles and The made up of many amateurs would in Kingdom continue to experience resis- turn inspire the audience to participate tance. Part of that resistance is once in and organize future performances, again financial since given the expense much like today’s many amateur, sum- of choral works, most organizations mer stock, provincial, and high school retreat to the most popular, works such performances of works from the musical as the Verdi Requiem and the Messiah. theater that began their life with success- The irony is that the travesty of neglect ful premieres and runs on Broadway. that persists for orchestral music may be even more severe when it comes to It also should be remembered that the sacred and secular choral music with generations of musicians and listeners instrumental accompaniment from the who immediately preceded us were far 19th and 20th centuries. Therefore, more allergic to the on-the-sleeve piety the ASO is justly proud to present of Elgar’s lush writing. There is some- The Kingdom. thing self-consciously emotional and beautiful about the music in this work. This performance is a rare opportunity. Despite its monumental Edwardian and The critical evaluation of the work, as British Imperial grandiosity and rheto- Byron Adams has suggested, has been ric, The Kingdom has the unmistakable compromised by a sense that Elgar’s character of using music to turn theol- own enthusiasm for the subject and ogy and faith into an accessible dem- the form may have waned. I think that ocratic experience. It is Elgar’s music view is unfair, even though there are that permits the generous dissemination good reasons to consider Gerontius a of the highest aspirations of a universal “greater” work.