"Forward Into Light": Songs of Freedom & Suffrage at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 15 June 2022 14:31

Written by Jack Angstreich

Hilary Hahn with the New York Philharmonic

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Friday, June 10th, I had the great pleasure to attend a terrific concert featuring the New York Philharmonic—playing at their near finest—under the unusually effective direction of Jaap van Zweden.

The program began promisingly with the remarkable, marvelously performed world premiere of a new commission by the ensemble, the beautifully orchestratedForward Into Lightby the American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. To describe the work, I can do no better than to quote her note on it:

Forward Into Light is a meditation on perseverance, bravery, and alliance. The piece was inspired by the American women suffragists—Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, Zitkála-Šá, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, to name but a few—who devoted their lives to the belief that women were human beings and therefore entitled to equal rights and protections under the law of the United States of America.

I wrote the music thinking about what it means to believe in something so deeply that one is willing to endure harassment, deprivation, assault, incarceration, hunger, force-feedings, death threats, and life endangerment in order to fight for it.

Formally, the piece was inspired by the idea of synergistic interpersonal partnerships, which lay at the heart of the American women’s suffrage movement. The best-documented example of this was the alchemical relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them,” Stanton said of Anthony. “We did better work together than either could alone … and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of 30 long years; arguments that no man has answered.”

Forward Into Light opens with three motivic ideas: a pair of ascending sixth intervals in the violins, an undulating quintuplet figure in the harp, and a lyrical line in close canon led by the violas. The trio of ideas coax each other forward, tentatively at first, and then more urgently, as tremors of adversity intensify the stakes. New voices join the conversation, challenging and subverting the original ideas to explore new collaborative solutions, united in the search for a strength that only a defined, mutual purpose can yield.

Forward Into Light features a musical quote fromMarch of the Women, composed in 1910 by British composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth, with words by Cicely Hamilton. The anthem of the women’s suffrage movement,March of the Womenwas sung in homes and halls, on streets and farms, and on the steps of the United States Capitol. It’s briefly alluded to by the oboes in close canon following each of the narrative’s first two arcs, and then precedes the ending as a recorded sample, performed here by Werca’s Folk, a women’s choir based in Northumberland, England, under the direction of Sandra Kerr (used here with permission).

The title of the piece derives from a suffrage slogan made famous by the banner that suffragist Inez Milholland carried while riding a white horse to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade on March 3, 1913, in Washington, DC:

“Forward, out of error
Leave behind the night
Forward through the darkness
Forward into light!”

The very attractive Snider, who wore a striking black and emerald green dress, joined the musicians onstage to graciously receive the audience’s acclaim.

The splendid virtuoso Hilary Hahn then emerged as soloist for an impressive account of the fabulous Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber, one of the most exquisite examples of the genre. The composer said the following about the piece:

The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was completed in July 1940, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania, and is Mr. Barber’s most recent work for orchestra. It is lyric and rather intimate in character, and a moderate-sized orchestra is used: eight woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano, and strings.

The first movement—Allegro molto moderato—begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement—Andante sostenuto—is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetual motion, exploits the more brilliant and virtuoso characteristics of the violin.

The program note adds:

Barber contributed this comment to The Philadelphia Orchestra’s program for the premiere of his Violin Concerto. Written in the third person, it refers to tempo markings that Barber would later simplify.

The opening Allegro is gorgeously expressive, but at times dramatic, while the ensuing Andante is more inward, but also lovely, infused with a passionate Romanticism that pervades many of the composer’s works. The finale is lighter in tone—indeed often comic—and commensurately dazzling in its way. A standing ovation elicited an extraordinary encore: Johann Sebastian Bach’s sublime Sarabande from his Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004.

Even more rewarding was the second half of the concert: an utterly persuasive realization of Gustav Mahler’s magisterial Symphony No. 1. A mysterious, anticipatory introduction precedes the the truly enchanted main body of the first movement, which has a pastoral quality but acquires a more suspenseful and triumphant character, building to a joyous conclusion. The second movement, with the rhythms of a Ländler, is celebratory as well. The third movement—which opens uncannily with the primary melody played in a high register by the first double-bassist—is a brilliantly sardonic funeral march—based on Frère Jacques—not without genuine melancholy, periodically interrupted by a pastiche of popular Viennese band music—this epitomizes what may be described as the “dialectical” nature of the composer’s aesthetic sensibility. (A lyrical middle section is especially haunting.) The finale begins tumultuously, but rapidly moves to a thrilling, propulsive tempo arrested by slower, more introspective—indeed celestial—passages; the music increases in intensity, closing exuberantly. The artists received rousing applause, ending an unexpectedly memorable evening.