![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI've heard a lot from the Catalyst Quartet at SF Performances in recent years. A while ago they did a whole series of concerts of the work of Black composers, for instance.
Tuesday's was kind of different. The main item on the program was the song cycle Sea Pictures by the canonical Englishman, Edward Elgar, with the original orchestral accompaniment arranged for piano quintet. Terrence Wilson at the keyboard joined the Quartet. The singer was Nikola Printz, whose dark mezzo unleashed a lot of power when Elgar called for it, but pompous grandeur and drama are not the highlights of this cycle. Elgar was at his best being coy and charming in the two best settings in the bunch, "In Haven" and "Where Corals Lie," where Printz's voice could be surprisingly intimate.
Now watch the chain of connections (not the order in which the pieces were played in the concert). A suite for quartet, Fantasiestücke by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, something of a protégé of Elgar's. Coleridge-Taylor was Black, and when he visited the U.S. he met with Henry Burleigh, the Black pupil of Antonín Dvořák who introduced Dvořák to Afro-American spirituals, which inspired the Largo of Dvořák's New World Symphony. So we got Printz singing a setting of "Going Home," the spiritual that was later made out of the theme of that Largo, and (for quartet) the Sorrow Song and Jubilee by the contemporary Libby Larsen, a tribute to Burleigh and Dvořák incorporating fragments from another spiritual, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." From her program notes, Larsen evidently thinks Dvořák incorporated "Going Home" into his symphony rather than the other way around.
It was a bit of a challenge in my current state going up to the City for a concert (and I have five more in the next week, so I'd better gird myself), but this one for all its oddity turned out to be worthwhile.
Tuesday's was kind of different. The main item on the program was the song cycle Sea Pictures by the canonical Englishman, Edward Elgar, with the original orchestral accompaniment arranged for piano quintet. Terrence Wilson at the keyboard joined the Quartet. The singer was Nikola Printz, whose dark mezzo unleashed a lot of power when Elgar called for it, but pompous grandeur and drama are not the highlights of this cycle. Elgar was at his best being coy and charming in the two best settings in the bunch, "In Haven" and "Where Corals Lie," where Printz's voice could be surprisingly intimate.
Now watch the chain of connections (not the order in which the pieces were played in the concert). A suite for quartet, Fantasiestücke by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, something of a protégé of Elgar's. Coleridge-Taylor was Black, and when he visited the U.S. he met with Henry Burleigh, the Black pupil of Antonín Dvořák who introduced Dvořák to Afro-American spirituals, which inspired the Largo of Dvořák's New World Symphony. So we got Printz singing a setting of "Going Home," the spiritual that was later made out of the theme of that Largo, and (for quartet) the Sorrow Song and Jubilee by the contemporary Libby Larsen, a tribute to Burleigh and Dvořák incorporating fragments from another spiritual, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." From her program notes, Larsen evidently thinks Dvořák incorporated "Going Home" into his symphony rather than the other way around.
It was a bit of a challenge in my current state going up to the City for a concert (and I have five more in the next week, so I'd better gird myself), but this one for all its oddity turned out to be worthwhile.
