Author: Michael Witthaus

The Phil presents wide-ranging music

Folk Voices and Fantasies, an upcoming afternoon of classical music from the New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by The Phil’s Music Director Mark Latham, offers three works from three composers, each from a distinctly different corner of the world.

What binds together Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, and Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía India isn’t style or era but instinct, Latham explained in a recent Zoom interview.

“The main connecting thread is composers using folk music from their native traditions,” he said.

For Petrushka, Stravinsky borrowed Russian folk songs and even a few German waltzes; most of its melodies weren’t his to begin with. Bruch did the same with Scottish reels and airs, and Chávez went even further, working not from memory or nostalgia but from within a living indigenous Mexican tradition.

To honor that, an orchestra member hand-built a traditional güiro for the performance. The notched hollowed-out gourd is usually played with tines and produces a ratchet sound. “Because the percussion element in the Chavez is very strong and uses a lot of Mexican instruments,” Latham said. “It’s trying as much as we can to use those instruments.”

It reflects a late 19th- and early 20th-century trend of composers “very interested to explore what was going on musically in their native arena,” Latham offered. “Bartok, for instance, was going out into the countryside before the advent of recorded sounds, actually notating local folk songs and that kind of thing … very early musicology.”

The concert begins with Stravinsky’s tale of a carnival puppet who turns out to feel things too deeply for his own good. It’s an exhilarating choice for an opener, and it concludes not with a bang but with a ghost: Petrushka, apparently killed, reappears hovering over the theater in the final bars, leaving the question of his humanity forever unresolved.

A superimposed C major and F-sharp major, called the Petrushka Chord, recurs throughout the work. It denotes the main character’s many dualities: puppet and person, ridiculous and suffering, knowable and unknown. The motif became a go-to for composers like John Williams, who used it for his “Theme From Jaws.”

Fifteen-year-old violin prodigy William Yeh solos on Scottish Fantasy. Yeh is a student at the Juilliard School in New York and last year’s Sempre Musick Competition winner. The Phil has collaborated with Sempre Musick for the past few years, Latham said. “These days, the Grand Winner plays their piece with the New Hampshire Philharmonic the next season.”

The piece is a back-and-forth that Latham described as a conversation. With the young soloist still developing his voice, it has its own particular texture — the orchestra takes its tempo from listening to Yeh, and shapes its phrases around his. “The soloist provides the main musical impetus, and then we answer.”

The evening ends with Chávez’s percussion finale and its offbeat sparks that, Latham said, “aren’t quite agreeing with the rhythm,” and a frenetic ending that inspires both audience and orchestra. “It’s like a rock drummer … ‘Let’s just go for it at the very end,’ right? It’s percussion going crazy.”

Latham has made the case throughout The Phil’s current season that classical music belongs to everyone. Folk traditions aren’t less powerful when they’re arranged for an orchestra, and the barriers people feel entering a concert hall are mostly imaginary.

“If people at a classical music concert would be more like a rock concert,” Latham said, “that’d be fantastic.”

Beyond that, he believes music is a salve for challenging times, remembering Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache’s observation in an interview with a French journalist 30 or 40 years ago. “Beauty is a stepping stone to freedom,” he recalled him saying.

Latham added that the act of creation is, more often than not, a political one.

“Some people say, ‘art for art’s sake’ — I’m not one of them,” he said, citing Leonard Bernstein’s words in the aftermath of his close friend John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “This will be our reply to violence; to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

Folk Voices and Fantasies: Music Rooted in Culture and Imagination
When: Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31, at 2 p.m.
Where: Seifert Performing Arts Center, 44 Geremonty Drive, Salem
Tickets: $5-$35, nhphil.org

Featured photo: Clockwise from top left Sean Williams, Pauline Berger, Margot Lasalle, Anna Multone. Courtesy photos.

Nashua International Sculpture Symposium offers access to artists

In front of a revitalized Civil War-era cotton mill, four sculptors are doing something unique: creating their work in full view of the public. Through early June, Pauline Berger of Germany, Margaux LaSalle of France, Anna Moultoni of Italy and Sean Williams of Barre, Vermont, are shaping stone into permanent public sculpture.

For close to two decades it’s been a rite of spring, and the longevity of the Nashua International Sculpture Symposium has changed the scope of the event’s debt to the city. This year the organization behind it has a new name: the Nashua Sculpture Project. It’s a subtle but telling shift in identity.

“We had 56 sculptures as of last year,” Executive Director Gail Moriarty said in a recent phone interview. “When I looked at them, it became pretty clear to me that we need to change our focus from just being three weeks in May to the care and preservation of our collection.”

So much outdoor sculpture, spread across Nashua’s parks and public spaces, represents an enormous civic investment and an equally large maintenance responsibility. The new organizational framework puts stewardship of its legacy alongside the annual event itself.

The Symposium remains the same, Moriarty continued, but what’s different is a focus on care and restoration for the rest of the year. It means expanded programming, including fundraising events, family classes, stone-carving workshops and the like.

“Art is everything,” she said. “The Nashua Sculpture Project is about art in every form.”

Annual sculptor selection was a peer-driven process, led by Artistic Director Jim Larson. It began with last year’s artists recommending sculptors for the current year. From a compiled list, the board considered individual portfolios, along with what Larson called “less quantifiable considerations.”

Speaking by phone recently, Larson explained what that meant. “We try to consider what Nashua needs, how these artists might enmesh into our community, and how they’ll serve Nashua. We try to create a group that will work well together … have similar perspectives in some ways, but also varying perspectives.”

This year’s guiding theme for the four sculptors is “Gathering Momentum.” It was chosen as a principle, not a prescription. Artists are free to interpret the phrase wherever their instincts lead them. For Larson, though, they are impactful words that reflect his convictions about art’s role in the present age.

“I and many other sculptors share this idea that artists today should be working at a scale that matches the level of destruction we see in the world right now,” he said. “If we are going to keep up with that, we need as much momentum and as much power and forward movement as we can muster. That’s what it’s about.”

All four sculptors this year will work in stone. It’s a deliberate choice and, for Larson, also philosophical for a symposium that requires materials built to last. A hundred-year maintenance-free lifespan is their stated goal, but the reasoning goes deeper than durability, Larson believes.

“We’re not making luxury objects for Nashua, we’re not trying to boost property values,” he said. “We are trying to make livable, meaningful artwork for people. That means we have to work with humble materials that are accessible, and stone is the most humble material we have. It’s just a piece of the ground.”

Larson encourages the curious to come out to see it happen, to experience what he considers a rare opportunity.

“It’s so hard to just have a conversation with an artist, because they’re not out in public working, and this is the chance,” he said. “If you want to go talk to an artist, just show up and they’ll talk to you. If you really want a long conversation, bring a meal and sit down and have dinner with them.”

For details on buying a meal for a sculptor, visit the Project’s website, or contact the organization for information on other ways to support the effort. Larson offered a final thought on why watching enduring art come to life is a valuable and truly enlightening experience.

“In America, manual [and] demanding labor is really rare to see. The widespread view of hard physical labor right now is that it’s an unfortunate byproduct of having to afford an expensive American life. But for these artists, this version of work is one of the most joyous things that they get to do.”

19th Nashua International Sculpture Symposium
When: Mondays through Saturdays, through June 3, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Picker Artists Studios, 3 Pine St., Nashua
More: nashuasculpturesymposium.org
Closing ceremony – Saturday, June 6, at 1 p.m.

Featured photo: Clockwise from top left Sean Williams, Pauline Berger, Margot Lasalle, Anna Multone. Courtesy photos.