Charlotte Symphony’s All-New York (sort of) Program Takes Off at Knight Theater
May 19, 2025
By Lawrence Toppman
At the exact moment a Mexican Navy training ship was crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday, the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra was paying unofficial homage to America’s biggest city in its final Classical Series program of the season.
Leonard Bernstein wrote his only film score, the Oscar-nominated music for the 1954 drama “On the Waterfront,” in New York. Aaron Copland premiered his Clarinet Concerto there four years earlier with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Sergei Rachmaninov wrote most of his Symphonic Dances, his last major piece and the only one written completely in the United States, a commuter train ride away on Long Island in 1940.
Anthony McGill, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, was a superb soloist in the concerto. Knight Theater proved the right venue for his intimate wizardry: He sustained achingly slow lines with a firm tone and delicate beauty, then swept jauntily through the jazzy interlude that reminded me the concerto was commissioned by Benny Goodman. Copland’s puckish humor, audible in the challenging finale, came out in McGill’s jabbing high notes.
McGill communicates not only through his licorice stick but with his eyes and swaying body, even when he isn’t playing. He seemed aptly appreciative of the big string section – Copland scored ensemble passages only for strings, harp and piano – and, cheered by the audience response, capped his performance with a short encore: A solo arrangement of “Amazing Grace” created for him by Jasmine Barnes, whose version is spiritual yet gently swinging.
Conductor laureate Christopher Warren-Green, who has always had a penchant for American music, opened with Bernstein’s suite from the Best Picture winner of 1954. He lost to Dmitri Tiomkin for “The High and the Mighty,” and I hear why: Jazz scores hadn’t yet become the norm, and the wild mood swings and dissonant moments seemed odd to Hollywood.
The CSO got everything out of the suite: violent and explosive moments related to mob killings, the lonely midnight sound of saxophone-driven solitude, lyrical sections tinged with danger (a precursor to “West Side Story” three years later). The ‘50s were a time of great experimentation for Bernstein; he wrote music for four Broadway shows and one immortal film, then put “non-serious” music away when the New York Philharmonic made him music director in 1957 – a great loss, as he never equaled these works in his classical compositions.
Rachmaninov was still experimenting three years before his death when he wrote the three dances in his sprawling suite. Some people think it’s padded; I’m not one, though I see their point. I enjoy the full 35 minutes, from the mournful saxophone in the opening to the battle between Death (the Dies Irae theme, omnipresent in Rachmaninov) and Resurrection (a quote from the ninth movement of his “All-Night Vigil,” where mourners discover Jesus’ empty tomb).
Warren-Green, who was uncharacteristically silent the entire night – I don’t remember that ever happening — took a broader approach then some conductors, which can make the piece seem long if you don’t care for it. Yet he never lost sight of the title: This is a suite of dances, meant to be choreographed by Michel Fokine until Fokine’s early death. Other dancemakers later took it up, including Salvatore Aiello for our own N.C. Dance Theatre (now Charlotte Ballet) in 1991.
Warren-Green’s weighty but well-sprung rhythms brought out the peasant-like stomping in the first part, the broken waltz in the second and the swirling dance of Death in the third. He and the orchestra both seemed justly exhausted after the final thunderous measure.
Pictured: Knight Theater at Levine Center for the Arts. Courtesy Charlotte Symphony.
