Right now the pulse of classical music in Nashville feels pretty strong. One ambitious new building project has just been completed at the Blair School of Music on Blakemore Avenue, and another for a proposed new Symphony Hall is in the works, though neither site nor design has been finalized. Together, these two developments represent both the rewards of the year just past and the fertile promise of the year to come.
2001 offered a number of highlights, chief among them perhaps the Nashville Symphony’s collaboration with Tennessee Repertory Theatre in a production of West Side Story, Nashville Opera’s spectacular and seismic Turandot, and Nashville Chamber Orchestra’s world premiere of local composer Conni Ellisor’s concerto Sea Without a Shore. The schedule for the upcoming season suggests that programming at venues across town may be richer and more diverse than ever before. Local ensembles and organizations are offering safe, certified masterworks, of course, but they’re also presenting scarcely known treasures by famous composers, along with music by composers who are scarcely known themselves.
Perhaps the most exciting local classical company at the moment is Nashville Opera, whose growth over the last half dozen years has been meteoric. It could be argued that this company has an unfair advantage: The music of Verdi, Puccini, Strauss and Britten is wonderful in itself, but an opera also has drama and spectacle with which to grab a house. In any case, Nashville Opera in 2002 will follow last fall’s splendid Turandot with Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel and Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, before ending the season with Verdi’s tremendously moving Rigoletto.
Each year, as a teaching aid, the Blair School stages lots of concerts, and the Turner Recital Hall will continue to be the venue for most of them. But the school’s newly unveiled Martha Rivers Ingram Center for the Performing Arts offers twice as many seats—and enables state-of-the-art opera productions (which, one hopes, holds the promise of some future collaborations with Nashville Opera). The inaugural concert at Ingram Center will feature the Fisk Jubilee Singers in their first-ever performance at Vanderbilt—a significant meeting of two longtime local institutions that were for decades kept separate by racial barriers.
In this spirit, Blair’s other offerings are delightfully varied, including a showcase of Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and strings, a solo recital at the Ingram Center’s new Steinway concert grand, and the debut of a new piece by Blair professor Michael Kurek. Just down the road from Blair, Vanderbilt University expands the city’s already impressive classical offerings with its Great Performances series featuring touring national and international artists. One of these is the brilliant Miró String Quartet, who will deliver a performance originally scheduled for last fall at Langford Auditorium. About a month later, pianist Awadagin Pratt returns to town in a program with hot young cellist Zuill Bailey.
Belmont University offers lots of concerts too, the finest of them coming from the Camerata Musicale, which performs chamber works in the Belmont Mansion. Super percussionist Christopher Norton recently joined the faculty there, and in March, he and some guest artists will fill the Grand Salon with some fresh and unusual sounds. Indeed, Norton’s concert may well provide some of the most adventurous music to be found in a classical venue this year.
The Nashville Chamber Orchestra might be considered the city’s maverick classical ensemble, regularly taking creative risks, commissioning new works and winning new fans and national recognition in the process. Its offerings this year shouldn’t disappoint—in particular its “Guitar Festival” season finale at Blair’s new Ingram Hall.
Finally, the Nashville Symphony, recovering from darker days in the 1980s and ’90s, has been steadily rebuilding and redefining itself in recent years. Witness its 2002 calendar, which is so fetchingly varied that it hardly seems representative of this ensemble. Most of what the calendar promises is carefully safe—like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky—but some of it is bracingly adventurous—like Janacek and Ginastera. Most importantly, the orchestra is playing a wide range of selections, both “classical” and “pops,” and can be expected to play them quite well. Some of these bookings are calculated to appeal to the largest possible audience: The Lettermen are coming, as are Paul Anka and Kathleen Battle (albeit not on the same bill). But then there are the darker horses—the bolder, more exciting bookings, which include the classical/jazz/pop ensemble Pink Martini, the Irish American female sextet Cherish the Ladies, and the works of little-known composer Amy Beach.
It’s encouraging that all of Nashville’s classical groups, from the opera to the symphony, are performing very well right now. The chances look better now than ever before that local concertgoers will be so pleased by what they hear that they’ll come out again for something they’ve never heard before. For the city’s classical performers, who crave to push the boundaries of their craft and their repertoire, that’s a very nice thought indeed.
Comments (0)