Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, completed in 1946, is not only one of the great American works of the last 60 years but also probably the finest musical expression of the public-square nationalism that gripped this nation during, and just after, World War II. It is Copland at his populist best, big in scoring, striding in rhythm, expansive in structure, open-hearted in outlook. Its confident gestures show the composer reaching out to communicate to a mass audience in terms a mass audience would understand.
This kind of artistic identification with the common man may have long since gone out of fashion among serious composers, but Copland’s music continues to speak with a vitality that reminds us of the irreparable loss we suffered at his death a decade ago.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which is all but ignoring Copland in this centennial of his birth, tried to make amends by offering the Symphony No. 3 as centerpiece of the season’s final subscription program, heard Thursday night at Symphony Center. Resident conductor William Eddins was on the podium. He coaxed a suitably vigorous, muscular reading from the CSO. The downside was that the performance was so ear-splittingly loud and brassy at times that it must have given the Chicago Blues Festival across the way at Grant Park some formidable competition.
As a matter of fact, the mighty CSO brasses sounded as if they were having a field day throughout Eddins’ all-American program. Certainly one of their number was doing so–Gene Pokorny, the orchestra’s ace tuba player. He got to lug his contrabass tuba from the back to the front of the orchestra as soloist in the world premiere of a work written for him, “Journey,” Concerto for Contrabass Tuba (1998). The composer was John Stevens, tuba professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music and also a professional tubist.
The largest and lowest member of the brass family, the contrabass tuba would seem to be the unlikeliest solo instrument imaginable. Orchestrally it usually serves as underpinning for the other low brass and is most often used for comic or menacing effect. Stevens, writing on a CSO commission from the Edward F. Schmidt family, clearly hoped to prove that this glowering Fafner among brasses can do more than that in a solo setting. He also wished to work in programmatic images of a railway journey, by way of honoring Pokorny’s interest in America’s classic steam locomotives.
“Journey” is couched in a tonal, conservative idiom familiar from other American brass concertos of the Schuman-Mennin school. Some of the musical ideas are as commonplace and obvious as the chugging rhythms. The concerto finally impressed as a user-friendly, well-crafted piece of no particular musical depth. The principal problem is that the contrabass tuba is a monochrome instrument, even in the hands of so accomplished a soloist. Stevens has not solved the inherent problem of how to make it soar over an orchestra. I’m not sure any composer could.
Pokorny can do anything he wants on his instrument, and he did. His virtuosity, incredible breath control and musicality must have been the despair of every brass player in the house. He was generously rewarded by the audience afterward, as was the composer, who joined the performers on stage to share in the applause.
Eddins remembered Copland’s great protege, Leonard Bernstein, with a sometimes brash, not terribly tidy but undeniably rousing rendition of the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein’s “West Side Story.”
Speaking of untidiness, it was a shame management failed to acknowledge the passing earlier this week of Willard Elliot, the orchestra’s beloved principal bassoon from 1964 to 1997, a splendid chamber musician and a versatile composer. He will be missed.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday.
