Comment on this story Who: Knoxville Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Lucas Richman What: Pieces by Adams, Copland, Ives, and Barber, including "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," featuring Katherine Erlandson Soroka, soprano When: Saturday, May 1, 8 p.m.; Sunday, May 2, 3 p.m. Where: Bijou Theatre Cost: $16-25, with discounts for students and seniors

Chamber series finale includes Barber's “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”

by Jack Neely

American music gets no respect. Most American orchestras, including Knoxville's, typically perform much more European than American music. KSO conductor Lucas Richman thinks the Western Hemisphere gets less than its due. "America is a cultural melting pot, in terms of music," he says, "and has developed with a self-esteem problem: that what was done could never be as good as the source, the source being the Old World. It's a misguided conception that still holds true not only for audiences but for artists and conductors. In fact, the quality of music making and writing is certainly as good, if not better than what comes from Europe."

If this weekend's two performances at the Bijou won't set things aright, it will at least be a rare opportunity to hear a night of American music in a chamber setting.

The Knoxville Chamber Orchestra's season finale is a program of music by Yankees Charles Ives, John Adams, Aaron Copland, and Samuel Barber, with a loose theme. "The program reflects a certain time period, the early 20th century," Richman says. Though they weren't all composed in the early 1900s, he says, they evoke the period in one way or another. (Probably the farthest astray of them is Adams' "Shaker Loops," a modern piece inspired by a 19th-century spiritual movement.)

The 1909 Bijou may be the ideal place for this program. "It matches the decor," Richman remarks.

Besides its subversive Americanism, the program will be unusual in its relative modernness, as well. The often-conservative chamber series tends toward Bach and Mozart. Richman says, "We're certainly shaking it up a bit." All of the music on the program is 20th century, and a little of it may be perplexingly so to traditionalists. "The Ives and Adams pieces are not as audience friendly," Richman admits, as the other two, which are more familiar. "But they're fascinating pieces."

He's especially interested in "Three Places In New England," Ives' circa. 1914 evocation of historic spots in his home region. Richman says the piece makes references to contemporary popular music: "cakewalk songs, ragtime, jazz integrated into a forward-thinking way of writing music." Ives' music, he says, "creates an atmosphere. His music is about creating musical pictures." (Coincidentally, Leonard Slatkin conducted "Three Places" for last Saturday's performance by the National Symphony at the Civic Auditorium.)

Richman seems especially curious, not to say anxious, about how the minimalist Adams’ piece will go over. "I don't know how much minimalist music has been played in Knoxville," he admits. Adams, who is one of the best-known minimalists, wrote "Shaker Loops" in the ’70s, early in his career. "It gives us insight into the composer he was going to become."

Richman shares some of the audience's inexperience with it. "I have conducted the Copland and the Barber," he says. "As a violinist, I have played Ives' 'Three Places In New England.' The Adams piece is the piece I have never experienced."

He's less tentative about the other two, Copland's "Quiet City" and Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915."

"I really love the Copland and the Barber," he says. "They are gems." In "Quiet City," featured performers will be Cathy Leach on trumpet and Elizabeth Telling on English horn.

For some, the climax of the show will be a piece that you'd think would be more familiar here than it is: Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." Based on a 1936 text by Knoxville native James Agee, the piece is well known around the world. However, as a documentary crew from the BBC discovered when they visited in 1995, it's not necessarily very well known here.

Richman was surprised that, except for a somewhat impromptu performance by soprano Jami Rogers with a symphonic group at the Bijou about three years ago, the Knoxville Symphony has not performed it in years.

"Samuel Barber's reputation as a leading American composer has given the piece great exposure," Richman says. "It's one of the pieces he's best known for."

Barber, who was from Pennsylvania, had no personal connection to Knoxville himself; he wrote the piece in response to Agee's text. "While it has the word Knoxville in the title, the music is so beloved in other nations because it speaks to audiences in other cities that are very similar to Knoxville," says Richman. "It's very representative of a lifestyle, a time of nostalgia."

"Knoxville: Summer 1915" is commonly assumed to be an excerpt from Agee's posthumous 1957 novel, A Death In the Family. That is indeed the handiest place to find it. However, Agee published "Knoxville: Summer 1915" as a short prose piece in the influential Partisan Review about 20 years before the Knoxville-based autobiographical novel was published, and probably never intended to include it in the book. It was added by editors. When he wrote this mature piece about love and loss, Agee was a 26-year-old reporter for Fortune magazine.

Barber's interpretation of the piece was actually well known during Agee's life. At the time of Agee's sudden death in 1955, Agee's two greatest books were respectively forgotten and unknown, and among his greatest claims to fame listed in his obituary was his connection to Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." (Note to erstwhile copy editors: Barber inserted the preposition of into Agee's original title.)

Doing the honors will be soprano Katherine Erlandson Soroka, a soprano Richman knew in Pittsburgh. (Her husband is principal percussionist for Richman's old Pittsburgh Symphony.) She has an unusual resume for a soprano, mixing work in musicals with administration and acting stints on a couple of soap operas: you may remember her from One Life to Live—though that seems to be a principle she doesn't observe herself.

April 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 18 © 2004 Metro Pulse