Kim Kiely Photography
Orchestras Photos, clockwise from top left: At Virginia’s Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra, Music Director Janna Hymes speaks to the audience at the orchestra’s first concerts following the Paris terrorist attacks last November. On September 23, 2008, the Philadelphia Orchestra was to perform a free Neighborhood Concert at City Hall. That afternoon a Philadelphia police officer was killed in the line of duty, the fourth officer slain on the job in eleven months. After discussions between the orchestra and the mayor’s office, the concert went ahead, but as a memorial for city police officers who had been recently slain. After violent protests erupted in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore Symphony gave a free “Peace Concert” for the community in front of Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall on April 28, 2015. David Robertson, music director of the St. Louis Symphony, and Kevin McBeth, director of the IN UNISON Chorus, during a concert at Greater Grace Church in Ferguson, Missouri last spring. The location of the St. Louis Symphony’s annual IN UNISON Chorus concert changes each year, but Ferguson’s Greater Grace Church was selected for 2015 as a gesture of support from the orchestra.
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Responding to Crises: It’s All About the
Music
F
riday, November 13, 2015. The City of Paris is attacked by terrorists; 150 people dead, 300 injured. The world is overwhelmed with shock, fear, and a gnawing sense of imbalance, of life in freefall. The news explodes with gruesome images, screaming headlines; social media fans the flames. St. Louis Symphony Music Director David Robertson is in his car on the way to Powell Hall to conduct the evening’s concert. He hears the news on the radio. But his agenda that night is prescribed: Anton Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), and Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. How to respond, what to say—to the musicians, to the audience.
“You try when you’re making programs to always be thinking about what is relevant,” he says when prompted to remember that night. “Then all of a sudden you get these moments when something becomes relevant without you realizing beforehand that it would be.” If Beethoven was describing his joy at wandering through the Vienna Woods in the Sixth—“No one can love the country as I do … every tree seems to speak to me saying ‘Holy! Holy’ ”—Webern was mourning the tragedy of his mother’s sudden death in his spare, short pieces. Strauss, meanwhile, was, at age 84, contemplating his own death; the final couplet of the fourth and last song is translated, “How tired we are of wandering. Might this perhaps be death?” symphony
SUMMER 2016