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| SOARING THROUGH AIR by Clara Longstreth The vivid imagination of poets, artists, and composers is the subject of NAS's upcoming program. We will sing tales of dreaming, sailing and flying when NAS returns to Merkin Hall on May 27, 2004, for the final concert of the season, "The Poet Dreams." We will also be returning to several composers whose works we have sung and loved, indeed to some whose earlier works belong on a NAS Greatest Hits list! These include Adolphus Hailstork's The Glory of God Thunders (NAS 2002), Charles Fussell's Specimen Days (NAS 1997), and Eric Whitacre's Lux aurumque (NAS 2003). And we remember Alla Borzova's Ballad of Barnaby (NAS 2002) with great affection. Now it is the turn of her husband, Alexander Dmitriev, whose thirty-minute concerto for mixed chorus on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will have its world premiere in our Merkin Hall performance. The Russian-American composer Dmitriev has set the voyage and trials of the ancient mariner that are familiar to many of us through Samuel Coleridge's eighteenth-century magical poetry to music that is equally enchanting.  The extraordinary imagination of Leonardo da Vinci is the subject of poetry and music written in collaboration between Charles Silvestri and Eric Whitacre. The result is Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, a spectacular piece of choral music including fragments from Leonardo's notebooks. It has been widely performed throughout the United States since its commission by the American Choral Directors Association in 2002.
Some of the highlights of this piece are moments when Whitacre creates music that sounds like flying through minimalist repetition (perhaps representing the racing of a motor-or a heart!), spoken sound effects like "whhh" and "shhh," and the use of Latin American dance rhythms to represent the exhilaration of flight. For Triumph in My Song, composer Adolphus Hailstork has chosen stirring lines from Phillis Wheatley's poem "On Imagination" for a triumphant a cappella work. While Wheatley's poetry is couched in the eighteenth-century language of her day, her life has contemporary relevance. Wheatley was enslaved in the Senegambia region of West Africa and brought to America as a child, where she was bought by a Boston merchant who educated and championed her. She holds the distinction of being the first African American to publish a book, but the founding fathers in Boston had to be convinced that her poetry was indeed her own by subjecting the teenage girl to an oral examination. Black writers were at first inspired by her but generations later labeled her a traitor to her race because she appeared to condone slavery and "wrote white." Documents found in recent decades have since proved her disdain for the institution of slavery. In Triumph in My Song, Hailstork has gloriously set her words to music. Come soar with us May 27, as we celebrate the imagination of these visionary artists! Composer Profile by Marianne Wait For Alexander Dmitriev, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a powerful object lesson. "One of the reasons I wrote this piece was to remind some people of one of the most important Commandments: Do not kill." Coleridge's mariner, after slaying a great sea-bird, is plagued by a spirit "who thicks man's blood with cold." By way of penance the sailor is compelled to roam from land to land telling his ghastly tale.  Dmitriev, forty-three, a native of Ukraine and husband of composer Alla Borzova, scoured the public domain for the right poem before choosing Mariner. "I read it again and again, thinking, 'it won't work,' then, 'it might work,' then finally I said 'okay I'll do it.'" In the end, he says, "I used it because I liked it. It's one of the best pieces of English literature."
It's not the first poem he set to music. His choral concerto Svetlana was based on a nineteenth-century Russian ballad. He has also written instrumental works. Dmitriev wrote The Ancient Mariner from within the walls of the theological seminary in Pennsylvania where he was teaching music. There he drew inspiration from the religious icons, the bell towers, and the Pocono Mountains. It was 1996, his third year in America. Later he would spend two summers at Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he held residencies. Technically, he notes, Mariner is not hard, but it is "long and emotionally difficult." The challenge for the chorus is "to inhale in the beginning and exhale twenty-eight minutes later." Dmitriev faced his own challenges. "It is very difficult to write a long piece and not get worse at the end," he says. But the last verses are key. The poem is filled with "the darkness of a man who killed God's creature, who destroyed something beautiful, but then it becomes lighter with God's help." The music too lifts, with a soprano solo that floats into some of the only high notes in the work. "I don't like high notes," says Dmitriev. "They are too loud, too nervous, too bright. You have to use them only on very special occasions." Many composers lack such reserve, he laments. "My ears are suffering over this yelling and screaming." He is not nervous about Mariner's premiere. "My task as a composer was to write the music," says Dmitriev. "Now it's your child." |
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