Carnegie Hall’s NYO2 makes its anticipated return to New World Center for an exclusive one-night-only event—the orchestra’s only public performance before its finale at Carnegie Hall on August 1. 

Under the baton of conductor Mei-Ann Chen, the ensemble will open its concert with a performance of Jessie Montgomery's Soul Force. Its title drawn from Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the work blends elements of popular African-American musical styles, including big-band jazz, funk, hip-hop and R+B. Jazz pianist Aaron Diehl performs a new edition of George Gershwin’s Concerto in F—a perfect fusion of classical, popular and jazz styles. Shortly after fleeing a war-ravaged Europe for America, Rachmaninoff composed his expansive Symphonic Dances. Sprinkling in influences from his new home, he included a nostalgic solo for saxophone and a lurching waltz before its ominous finale. This tour de force would be Rachmaninoff’s final composition, himself claiming “it must have been my last spark.”

NYO2’s 2018 season and six-day residency in Miami marked the start of a new partnership between New World Symphony and Carnegie Hall, which has current and former NWS Fellows mentoring and performing side-by-side with participating NYO2 students from across the country, including many from South Florida.   

Comprising a "remarkable array of talent" (The New York Times), NYO2 is an orchestral training program for talented young players ages 14–17 with a focus on recruiting musicians from communities underrepresented in classical music. 

Click here for more information on NYO2.

NYO2 is a program of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute.

Program

Jessie Montgomery

Soul Force for Orchestra (2015)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist and educator. She is the recipient of the ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).

Montgomery’s growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal and orchestral music. Recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019), commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta; and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—which was written for the Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation and presented in its U.K. premiere at the BBC Proms in August 2021.

Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players. She has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at Princeton University. She is professor of violin and composition at The New School. In 2021, she began her three-year appointment as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

                —Jack Sullivan, © 2022 Carnegie Hall

 

In the Composer’s Own Words

Soul Force is a one-movement symphonic work which attempts to portray a voice that struggles to be heard beyond the shackles of oppression. The music takes on the form of a march, which begins with a single voice and gains mass as it rises to a triumphant goal.

Drawing on elements of popular African American musical styles, such as big-band jazz, funk, hip hop and R&B, the piece pays homage to the cultural contributions—the many voices—which have risen against aggressive forces to create an indispensable cultural place.

I have drawn the work’s title from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he states, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

                     —Jessie Montgomery

George Gershwin

Concerto in F major for Piano and Orchestra (1925)
Approximate duration: 30 minutes

George Gershwin, just 25 and already at the top of the songwriting industry, made his first real splash in the world of “serious” music with Rhapsody in Blue. Among the spectators at Gershwin’s debut performance with Paul Whiteman’s dance band was Walter Damrosch, the conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, who was so impressed that he immediately invited Gershwin to compose a true concerto to perform with the orchestra. Gershwin himself understood that Rhapsody in Blue was insufficient to establish his classical credentials; he wrote, “Many persons had thought that the Rhapsody was only a happy accident. Well, I wanted to show that there was plenty more where that had come from. I made up my mind to do a piece of ‘absolute’ music. The Rhapsody, as its title implied, was a blues impression. The Concerto would be unrelated to any program.”

Gershwin worked on his Piano Concerto in F from July to November of 1925, and he debuted the score that December. The Concerto’s gestation was much more arduous than that of Rhapsody in Blue (which took less than a month to draft), not least because Gershwin endeavored to teach himself the art of orchestration, rather than hiring an arranger as he had for the previous score.

The Concerto in F successfully masks any discomfort its composer may have had with venturing so deep into territory staked out by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven. The opening tutti section, with its juxtaposition of bombastic timpani and syncopated dance rhythms reminiscent of “The Charleston,” establishes the duality that runs throughout the score. The piano arrives with a cadenza that teases out a slow and sultry response.

The middle movement calls out a trumpet to present the lazy melody, colored with characteristic “blue” notes and backed up by a chorus of clarinets. The piano makes its entrance on a sassy melody decorated with “crunched” notes, propelled forward by strummed chords from the strings that mimic a jazz guitar or banjo.

The brisk finale plays up the virtuosic gesture of repeated notes on the piano. Echoes of earlier music bring the work full circle, until a final barrage from the timpani sets up the swelling cadence.

For most of its performance history, orchestras have had to play the Concerto in F from scores and parts full of errors and fixes, but a new effort by the Gershwin estate and the University of Michigan is developing critical edition publications for this and all other works by George and Ira Gershwin. This performance features the new authoritative score edited by Timothy D. Freeze.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (1940)
Approximate duration: 35 minutes

The outbreak of World War II prevented Sergei Rachmaninoff from returning to his beloved villa on Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne, so he spent the summer of 1940 at an estate on Long Island. He had sworn off composing four years earlier after finishing the Third Symphony and his preparations for the upcoming concert season kept him plenty busy, but still he was compelled to compose what turned out to be his final score, the Symphonic Dances. He was inspired in part by the recent staging of a ballet set to his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, choreographed by the fellow Russian expatriate Michel Fokine (the creator of The Firebird and Petrouchka, among his signature works for the Ballets Russes). Rachmaninoff hoped Fokine would choreograph his new dance movements, and the collaboration seemed on track after a readthrough of the piano score, but nothing came of it before the choreographer’s death in 1942. Instead the work debuted on the concert stage in a performance in 1941 by Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra, to whom Rachmaninoff dedicated the score.

There is no overt program behind the Symphonic Dances, although there are hints of a backstory in Rachmaninoff’s working title of “Fantastic Dances” and an abandoned plan to label the movements Noon, Twilight and Midnight. Symphonic Dances is a fitting title in the end, with the three broad movements forming an arc of symphonic dimensions. The kinetic, dancing nature of the music conjures Tchaikovsky, one of Rachmaninoff’s formative influences from 50 years earlier. There are also nostalgic references to significant musical themes from earlier in the Rachmaninoff’s own life, including a quotation in the first movement from the ill-fated Symphony No. 1 (which was received so poorly in 1897 that it nearly ended his career) and a robust reference in the finale to the Dies irae plainchant that appears in so many Rachmaninoff scores.

The Symphonic Dances often spotlight solo voices within the orchestra, most distinctively an alto saxophone—making its only appearance in all of Rachmaninoff’s music—which delivers a haunting melody in the opening movement. The emphasis stays on woodwinds throughout the first movement, while a solo violin emerges for an extended melody in the waltzing second movement. Midway through the finale, a languid episode provides further opportunities for intimate solos. The outer sections of the finale, by contrast, employ full orchestral forces for sizzling rhythms and modal harmonies redolent of Spanish flamenco music.

– © Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes Handel's masterpiece as a collective call for justice.

Lead Donors: Hope and Robert F. Smith, Marina Kellen French and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, The Kovner Foundation, and Beatrice Santo Domingo.

Global Ambassadors: Michael ByungJu Kim and Kyung Ah Park, Hope and Robert F. Smith, and Maggie and Richard Tsai.

Leadership support for NYO2 is provided by Clarissa Alcock Bronfman and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Estate of Joan Eliasoph, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Major support for NYO2 is provided by the Mercedes T. Bass Charitable Corporation, Ronald E. Blaylock and Petra Pope, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony B. Evnin and the A.E. Charitable Foundation, Clive and Anya Gillinson, the Marc Haas Foundation, Beth and Joshua Nash, Melanie and Jean E. Salata, Sarah Billinghurst Solomon and Howard Solomon, and Joyce and George Wein Foundation, Inc.

Founder Patron: Beatrice Santo Domingo.

With additional funding provided by Alphadyne Foundation, Sarah Arison, Ernst & Young LLP, Stella and Robert Jones, Martha and Robert Lipp, Andrew J. Martin-Weber, Lauren and Ezra Merkin, the Morton H. Meyerson Family Foundation, Linda Wachner, David S. Winter, and Judy Francis Zankel.

Public support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Management for Ms. Chen and Mr. Diehl: Opus 3 Artists; 470 Park Avenue South, Ninth Floor North; New York, NY 10016