Pro Musica Colorado, the professional chamber orchestra directed by Cynthia Katsarelis, has told us “Stories” and taken us on “Journeys” in their past seasons. But there is no theme for 2014–15.
“Sometimes in classical music, when you’re putting together beautiful programs, the pieces are perfect together, but you can’t come up with a great theme,” Katsarelis explains.
That particularly seems true of the first concert of Pro Musica’s season, which will be performed Friday in Denver and Saturday in Boulder (7:30 p.m. both nights; www. promusicacolorado. org/season). The program comprises three pieces with no evident connection among them: Sibelius’ tone poem Rakastava for strings and percussion, Samuel Barber’s deeply moving setting of James Agee’s prose poem Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for soprano and chamber orchestra, and Mozart’s Symphony No. 39.
“I started with the Mozart,” Katsarelis says of how the program came together. “Then I thought about works that I thought would be complementary.
“The Mozart symphony’s absolutely sublime, and in the second movement very stormy, and there is just something in the sound world and the emotional world that I think goes extremely well with the Barber.”
And Sibelius, which is based on a story about doomed lovers from Finnish legend? Katsarelis admits it has nothing to do with the other pieces, except that it seems to fit.
“I just love Sibelius, but there’s only so much that you can play with a chamber orchestra,” she says, noting that the symphonies require much larger forces. “So we have this beautiful piece that doesn’t go with the Barber story, it doesn’t go with the Mozart story, and yet the music is ideally suited [to the program].”
Symphony No. 39 is the first of the three symphonies Mozart wrote in 1788, and it is the only one of the three that Pro Musica hasn’t played before. The symphonies of 1788 are particularly celebrated because they were the last three Mozart composed and there is no certainty that they were ever performed in his lifetime.
All three symphonies — No. 39, No. 40 in G minor, and No. 41 in C major (“Jupiter”) — are considered among Mozart’s greatest works. They have been described as a large symphonic cycle, opening with the ceremonial slow introduction of No. 39, with the stormy G minor Symphony in the middle, and the radiant “Jupiter” Symphony ending the cycle with a triumphant fugue.
The emotional heart of the program will be the Barber Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Agee’s text describes an idyllic summer evening when the author was, as he wrote, “so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” Both the text and Barber’s music evoke a deep nostalgia for the life of a child, secure within his family, with “my mother who is good to me” and “my father who is good to me.”
But beneath the nostalgia is the knowledge of the adult author that the idyll would soon be destroyed.
“The poem speaks really beautifully to the innocence, but there are sort of dark references,” Katsarelis says. “The prayer, ‘God bless my people,’ it’s such a poignant prayer because we know what happened to them, and the rendering of the street noises takes on a different turn when you know that the next year his father was killed in a car accident.”
Amanda Balestrieri has sung Knoxville: 1915, but she says that recent experiences have deepened her understanding of those darker shades in the music.
“It has been probably eight years since I’ve sung it,” she says. “I’ve had things happen in my life that made me relate much more closely to the piece.
“The middle section became much more meaningful after I had suffered the loss of family members. To me now the climax of the piece is not so much the nostalgic and atmospheric part, which is how most people think of this piece. I think of it as where it suddenly gets much slower and says, ‘God bless my people.’” Katsarelis relates the yearning for a lost innocence not only to Agee’s family tragedy but also to the fact that in 1915 the country stood on the precipice of World War I.
“I had both in mind,” she says. “Even though it’s written for a specific set of circumstances, it speaks to the world situation of the time as well. The Greeks have a fantastic word for it: xenitia (zeneh-tee-AH), a feeling of catastrophic loss and yearning for home.”
Conductors are always most excited about their next program. But it is clear that this concert is very dear to Katsarelis’ heart.
“Balestrieri is just a magnificent singer, [with] her range of expression and vocal capability,” she says. “I think that the chemistry of her, and the Barber, and us, and the Mozart is just exquisite and fantastic.”
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