The Nashville Symphony Orchestra immersed itself in
the music of Richard Danielpour over the weekend. Its program, led by music director Giancarlo Guerrero at the Schermerhorn, featured the world premiere of Danielpour’s War Songs, which marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s end this year. Also on the bill was Danielpour’s Songs of Solitude, written a decade ago to honor the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Baritone soloist Thomas Hampson performed both of these orchestral song cycles with deep feeling and a welcome degree of high drama.
Appropriately enough, War Songs sets to music some of Walt Whitman’s most heartrending wartime poetry. In “Reconciliation,” Whitman writes of a dead enemy soldier, “a man as divine as myself,” who lies white-faced in his coffin. In “Come Up From the Fields Father,” the poet writes of a family that anguishes over the letter from their son, which, alarmingly, was not written by his hand.
Danielpour’s setting of War Songs has the feel of a concert opera, with the various Whitman poems set as emotionally wrenching arias. Hampson sang all of these songs with deep expression and urgency. Guerrero and the NSO, for their parts, provided colorful and powerful accompaniment.
Danielpour’s Songs of Solitude was more of a mixed bag. The poetry that W.B. Yeats wrote in grief and disillusionment about the First World War seemed just as relevant when applied to the terror of the early 21st century — the best of people still lack conviction, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Danielpour’s music, however, is so derivative that it rarely matches the power of the poetry. Too often the composer wears his musical influences on his sleeve, so we’re constantly hearing passages that remind us of Bartók, Britten and Mahler. The low-point of the cycle, for me, came in “Drinking Song,” which sounded too much like a discarded rough draft from Bernstein’s West Side Story.
That said, one couldn’t have hoped for a better performance. Much of the vocal writing was scored for the baritone’s highest register, and Hampson sang this music with a vaporous, transparent falsetto. Guerrero and the NSO provided the singer with sensitive, nuanced accompaniment.
Guerrero opened and closed the program with staples of the repertory. Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture moved forward with an irresistible sense of energy. Beethoven’s often overlooked Symphony No. 8 was performed with warmth, craft and finesse.
