Highlights of praise for the World Premiere of Valerie Coleman's Concerto for Orchestra with the Philadelphia Orchestra
Photo Credit: Chris Lee
Philadelphia Orchestra premieres new Valerie Coleman Concerto for Orchestra to rave reviews
By David Patrick Stearns
The Philadelphia Inquirer
June 1, 2024
Though heard at Carnegie Hall as long ago as 2004, composer-flutist Valerie Coleman was received like a major new discovery on Friday when the Philadelphia Orchestra unveiled her new Concerto for Orchestra (Renaissance) in a Debussy/Ravel program (featuring much-honored pianist Mitsuko Uchida) that received a rock star audience welcome.
The piece was premiered Thursday in Philadelphia (to be repeated Saturday and Sunday at the Kimmel Center). Coleman is part of the city’s Imani Winds chamber-music group and the author of three previous works written for the Philadelphia Orchestra, including Seven O’Clock Shout — a COVID-era, trauma-transcending piece establishing her as a composer using the congenial Aaron Copland/Samuel Barber tradition as a launching point for her own distinctive voice.
Oddly, on Friday, Coleman chose not to face her newfound admirers with a bow from the Carnegie stage, but waved from her aisle seat on the main floor. She later said that it would just take too much time to go up and back. Besides, listeners went out of their way afterward to address her directly and emphatically at her seat. Commonly heard: “You are a great composer!”
The title, Concerto for Orchestra (Renaissance), carries double meaning, referring to Bartok’s landmark Concerto for Orchestra, as well as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ‘30s that previously prompted Coleman to write smaller-scale musical portraits of poet Langston Hughes and cabaret star Josephine Baker. The new piece is her largest (“so far,” she said after the premiere), and one showing how she has made quantum leaps with an often-spectacular orchestration that she attributes to the guidance of music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Her pieces are full of extra-musical references — this one’s three movements are subtitled American Odyssey, Portraits, and Cotton Club Juba — but aren’t dependent on reading program notes to create a vivid listening experience. That said, Coleman cites specific passages in the new work that refer to paintings of African American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) that document the northward migration amid Jim Crow laws with vivid colors and folk-art directness, as well as depicting World War II more abstractly with diagonal perspectives, bodies mashed together, and an overall sense of danger.
As with the Lawrence paintings, each section of Coleman’s music had its own distinctly crafted color palette, but within that, eloquent, disparate layers of meaning that also give most sections of the orchestra antic animation solo moments with the kind of unfiltered truth that one doesn’t expect in the symphonic medium. The first movement was full of bustling, contrasting personalities, but what developed in the amassed string section was broad, tectonic motion suggesting important shifts in the society being depicted.
The second two movements ran together in what wasn’t anything so tidy as an orchestral tone poem, but a landscape full of ever-evolving discoveries. If the brass were playing fanfares, they weren’t typical, twisting around with anything-but-predictable jazz-influenced motion — and with the subtle defiance of an alternate sensibility.
The final Cotton Club section could’ve inspired conventionally showy symphonic jazz but was dense and eventful, dipping into dark back rooms, full of hectic and at times heedless activity. Arresting, slashing orchestral gestures could be heard any number of ways, whether liberating or debilitating.
Yet these large Coleman canvases maintained a chamber music feeling in sound, drawing their overall power from details within details. The consistent vitality made the music endlessly engaging — attracting the ear not by being imposing or commanding, but by being inviting. This piece may take listeners years to fully digest, but never do you feel that the music is leaving you behind.
Read the full article here.
Photo Credit: Chris Lee
Supreme Coleman, Ravel and Debussy make a memorable Philly Orchestra season finale
By George Grella
New York Classical Review
June 1, 2024
The Philadelphia Orchestra finished their season of visits to Carnegie Hall Friday with one of the most scintillating orchestral performances one has heard there since last year.
The program was well-chosen and strong; Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, with Mitsuko Uchida, and after intermission the New York premiere of Valerie Coleman’s Concerto for Orchestra and Debussy’s La Mer. Even one-quarter into the 21st century, concerts of music that lies solely within the era of common historical and cultural memory are both too infrequent and immensely welcome. This one was also full of marvelous thinking and playing.
Coleman’s Concerto for Orchestra is subtitled Renaissance, and is her fifth score for Philadelphia. One hopes this partnership will continue because her music is terrific and exemplary of an important style of American music-making. One hears so much contemporary mainstream American orchestral composing that is involved with the possibilities of instrumental sonorities and expresses an amiable eclecticism and a desire to shine a light on the composer’s place in society. Such music is always skillfully crafted and invariably bland, it accepts everything and says nothing.
Coleman’s style, on the other hand, is full of vigor and conviction, the urban, sociable modernism that grew after World War II. She has passionate and sincere things to say—in her own words the concerto “is centered on honoring and reflecting upon the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance”—but she doesn’t get lost in arguing specificity. The concerto, in three-movements based on the baroque origins of the tradition, is full of drama and trusts the listener to feel a sense of meaning without telling them what to feel.
The opening is moody, ringing percussion underneath a muted trumpet that has fragmented lines that seem to struggle with articulation in a way that is eloquent. It’s echoed by off-stage brass, and has a rich, noir feel. As colorful as everything else on this program, the music was deeply atmospheric because of the sense of expression, not just instrumental techniques.
With a combination of tonal harmonies, forward-moving rhythms, and a great sense of pace and form, the music leapt from the orchestra. The playing felt inspired, Bernstein-esque moments of physical pleasure kept pressing forward. This was the sound of music that comes from lived experience, and of musicians finding the driving power and inspiration from that. This is a piece that every American orchestra should play. Even with a first hearing, one felt that the performance was skillful and true to the music, as with the Ravel.
Read the full article here.