The institution of the city orchestra, once so crucial to musical life, was born in the 18th century. Its players were assembled from university students and assiduous amateurs, aristocrats with time and money on their hands, and journeymen musicians released from court obligations as these establishments, their coffers depleted by their incessant wars, dissolved in the face of market pressures and cultural shifts.
The Grand Concerts, for example, began in Leipzig in the early 1740s when J. S. Bach was still the city’s Director of Music, though he seems not to have been actively involved in these events. The gatherings took place at first in a spacious tavern. Such was their popularity that after forty years of successful concerts, the city decided to renovate the textile merchants’ guild hall and convert it to the ensemble’s venue for public performances. The Gewandhaus Orchestra was born—the oldest continuously functioning civic orchestra in Germany, and perhaps the world.
In 2043, the Gewandhaus will celebrate its 250th birthday, its founding predating by a dozen years the European “settlement” of Ithaca in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. This university town is home to the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, which kicked off its 50th season last weekend with a program that oscillated between music of the past and present, of rural courts and of the modern metropolis, and concluded with a canonic fragment.
A liberal enclave in a sea of Trumpian red, Ithaca has just over 30,000 inhabitants—almost exactly the size of Leipzig in the age of its Grand Concerts. Though its membership is not as geographically cohesive as Leipzig’s 18th-century orchestra, the CCO is proudly local, made up of players from Ithaca and its surroundings—many of them professors at Ithaca College with its large and vibrant School of Music, as well as music teachers and professional musicians from the area. The current Music Director, Guillaume Pirard, who began his already inspiring tenure on the CCO podium last year, travels from Brussels to lead five orchestral concerts each year, offerings complemented by a chamber music series and other special events. A world-class talent who takes the time during his sojourn to work intensely and fruitfully with the ensemble and connect to the community, Pirard doesn’t rack up the airmiles like those superstar conductors with seven-figure salaries jetting between far-flung gigs across three or four continents, but the CCO maestro is a long way from carbon neutral.
Is there room for Moral Rubato in the Age of Environmental Collapse? Let Art grant Guillaume a CO2 offset and the occasional upgrade to business class!
The 50th season’s inaugural concert took place at Ithaca College in a large, low-slung auditorium of mid-60s architectural vintage. The bleak interior does not raise the spirits. The music must do that without help from the hall. The historically minded among the audience yearned for the Three Swans Tavern of Leipzig circa 1743, or at least a pint of good German beer to brighten the sight lines.
The evening began with Ithaca’s Bürgermeister, Robert Cantelmo, reading a proclamation. He ambled onto the stage without a medieval mayoral chain hung from his shoulders to adorn his yellow polo shirt. He wore baggy jeans and white tennis shoes, not leather shoes with silver buckles. The look was casual, the sentiments sincere, the diction lofty and delivered with a resonant baritone voice and capacious cadence. “Whereas” followed “whereas” in uplifting succession, each florid clause rightfully praising the orchestra’s vital contributions to the musical life of this city and region.
Then came a short film in which community members, musicians, the articulate and erudite Belgian maestro, and a student extolled the accomplishments of the first fifty years and looked forward to the next fifty.
At last, Pirard made his way to the podium, his hands poised and free of the totemistic encumbrance of a baton for Maurice Ravel’s dance-filled suite, Le Tombeau de Couperin. Tombeau means gravestone in French and was used as the name for Baroque musical tributes to the dead, whether fellow musicians or monarchs. Originally conceived for solo piano across the first years of World War I, with the dead piling up, Ravel orchestrated the work after the Armistice with a palette of oboes, bassoons and clarinets—bawling, gruff, suave; flutes impish and sly; a trumpet that bolsters and smiles, instead of commanding the charge; strings, now rowdy, now refined; a shimmering, time-transporting harp—the ghost of the consummate harpsichordist Couperin divested of his keyboard but wanting to be heard nonetheless.
The mood of this memorial is not grave but paradoxically upbeat, Ravel averring that the fallen were sad enough already. The rhythms, colors, and sparking melodies flirt with a campy exuberance, far to be preferred to solemn kitsch. The gravestone glinted as it was etched and polished by Pirard and his sharply attentive and expressive musicians. But beneath the fizz there are tragic undercurrents—the almost crazed dissonance of the dancy Forlane, the mournful trio to the crystalline Minuet. Pirard and his musicians let these tensions simmer, if only to stoke the prevailing ebullience. The plot of headstones remained upright, catching the dappled sun and streaks of shade.
The typical slot before the intermission in a classical concert is allotted to a warhorse concerto in which a soloist wows the audience with heroic technical feats interspersed with moments of well-practiced pathos. But this default setting was delightfully toggled by the evening’s guest—the violinist, fiddler, composer, poet, singer, Christina Courtin. Backed by the orchestra, she sang and played her rhapsody on being giant-proof. She composed both the text and the music for this wide-eyed, wondrous hymn to life in the big city of New York, where Courtin has for some years now lived and worked, making her name there and beyond with her boundary-crossing musicianship and openness to experiment and collaboration. Pirard also spent many years in New York City, co-founding the now celebrated Brooklyn musical collective, The Knights, of which Courtin is a vital member.
Courtin sang her own music in tones that ranged from the hushed and confessional to the ecstatically operatic, while fiddling improvised flourishes and unfurling heartfelt countermelodies on her violin. Hers was an interior dialogue made public. The seven poems of the piece are set in an Americana style as accessible as it is imaginative, the surreal encounters and observations of the poetry putting up quirky resistance to surveillance (“it’s sus to ride the bus in exchange for my DNA”); claiming class consciousness (“I aint’ no billonaire”—“despite the biggest baddest people I’m, the gladdest”); throwing a glance at the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, and mixing off-beat mysticism with unexpected eruptions of nature in the stone canyons of the metropolis: “little birdies chirpin’ / I can almost see the light / deep inside my pocket / is the lint from another life.” But the music won’t efface moments of melancholy: “don’t confuse my weary eyes with the sadness that I carry.”
Downstate had come Upstate, and the Upstaters loved it, the audience jumping to its feet, oxygenated by Courtin’s winning sincerity.
After the intermission, Pirard took up his violin and joined in the symmetrical formations of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto—three violins, three violas, and three cellos—supported by double bass and harpsichord (Ravel’s harp now reunited with Couperin’s chord). Between the raucous outer moments, Bach wedged in a quizzical Adagio that couldn’t be shorter—just two bare-bones chords, an off-the-shelf item known as a Phrygian cadence. It’s a hilarious feat of compression by the habitual overachiever Bach.
This cadential cliché is a question mark that can also point off-piste. After Pirard’s short, extemporaneous soliloquy from the first of those cadential chords to the second, the music segued to another style and century as Courtin left her violin on a chair and sneaked from her position in the ensemble to the microphone at the front of the stage. There she sang Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” a song that cites the Mayflower and the Statue of Liberty and intones that “we come in the age’s most uncertain hour.” The hour of the song’s composition was in 1973—Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War. The fate of the nation was held to be uncertain, as it always must be. Bach’s archly epigrammatic “middle movement” had been freighted with portent. But at the end the singer reminded herself and her Saturday night audience that life’s demands leave little time or energy for historical ruminations: “tomorrow’s going to be another working day” and she’s “just trying to get some rest.” Sunday is no day of rest for the Amazon driver, though here’s betting none of them were at the concert. Out of the fatigue rocketed Bach’s Red Bull finale.
From “Cow” Cöthen, where Bach composed the Brandenburg, the program then vaulted to Vienna for Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, its brooding beauty attuned to Pirard’s sensibilities, his talent for shaping a phrase, for finding the resonance and resistance between them. He is not an overly animated conductor, though he can unleash metaphorical thunderbolts when the storm calls for big drama. For the most part, however, his exactitude is made up of subtle, contained motions—messages conveyed by the shape and direction of the hand, the turn of the wrist, the raising of a forefinger and curve of the thumb, the angle of his head, the lifting of the elbow. On the podium Pirard exudes thought and connection, and palpable energy hums silently with feeling and a deep engagement.
The basses and cellos recited Schubert’s opening motto, low and oracular: a curse or a promise or both? Troubled pizzicato basses emerge from the fretful, circling strings, and Pirard conjures the plaintive, ardent clarinet and oboe melody. A Beethovenian climax comes too soon, but out of the wreckage emerges the famous theme in the cellos. The second movement departs B-minor for the solace of pastoral idyll in E-Major—a fitting close to a musical evening in the Finger Lakes. This compelling music-making as meaning-making could match the conviction and quality produced by an orchestra of a mega-city, but was better for being far from one. Like Schubert’s symphony, the CCO’s work is always unfinished. There is much more to do.
