Erie Philharmonic Reunites with Joyce Yang for Gershwin Swings
With Carlos Simon bridging culture and social justice with orchestration
SATURDAY, NOV. 14
Before the sleigh bells ring for Come Home for the Holidays, the Erie Philharmonic continues its Symphonic Series with Gershwin Swings, bringing back acclaimed pianist Joyce Yang for George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F. Curated alongside Carlos Simon's Four Black American Dances and Claude Debussy's Nocturnes, the concert fuses the classical and jazz traditions for a "brilliant blend of symphonic power and jazz-age flair." The Erie Philharmonic Chorus also returns this month for its annual performance of Handel's Messiah, under the direction of Thomas Brooks, featuring soloists Jana McIntyre, Sophie Michaux, Logan Wager, and Joseph Parrish.
"To my mind, I'm always looking for connections between works on a program, and essentially, while I'm looking for a strong connection between them, I'm also looking for contrast," Erie Philharmonic Music Director Daniel Meyer explained. "And so I knew that we were going to program the Gershwin Piano Concerto in F with Joyce Yang performing. With the very famous premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, [Gershwin] enraptured the entire community, both on the jazz end and on the concert end. So he brilliantly succeeded in fusing those two worlds."
Yang has performed with the Erie Philharmonic and worked alongside Meyer a decade ago, when he served as guest maestro for the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra's Summermusik Festival. "When it comes to Joyce, she's an artist that I would engage to play just about anything. In fact, I can't think of a repertoire that she hasn't mastered, that she wouldn't feel comfortable playing or wouldn't play brilliantly," Meyer described. "The Gershwin [concerto] is one of those beautiful works that you have to have a good sense of swing, a good sense of style, and be able to play syncopation. She's one of those artists who beautifully straddles both of those worlds."
Gershwin, known for his songwriting alongside his brother Ira, served as the bridge between the classical and jazz worlds. Those connections led Meyer to program Carlos Simon alongside Gershwin and Debussy, creating a parallel between the past and present in contemporary classical composition. "Here's a young American composer capitalizing on not only his own heritage as a Black American composer, but also his love for and his serious commitment to writing for a modern classical orchestra."
Simon, an associate professor of music at Georgetown University and the inaugural Deborah and Philip Edmundson Composer Chair at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, incorporates themes of social justice into his work. The composition abrea(d)th, co-written with Marc Bamuthi Joseph, was dedicated to the memory of George Floyd and performed by the Minnesota Orchestra with musicians from South Africa and Minneapolis. Requiem for the Enslaved, nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition at the 2023 Grammy Awards, drew influence from African American spirituals and Catholic liturgical melodies to "commemorate the stories of 272 enslaved men, women, and children sold in 1838 by Georgetown University." Simon was the 2021 recipient of the Sphinx Organization's Medal of Excellence, dedicated to the development of young Black and Latino classical musicians.
Four Black American Dances, recently performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Manfred Honeck, celebrates the tradition of dance in Black American communities, with each movement focusing on a specific dance style with cultural significance. The ring shout originated from enslaved communities in the South and has been passed down within families for generations. In the percussion, Simon specifies using a large stick banging on the stage floor to evoke celebration and match the dance's rhythmic techniques. This is similarly done with the snare drum to represent tap dancing in the third movement. The waltz pays tribute to the debutante balls within Black social groups of the 1930s, while Holy Dance echoes the high-energy movement of worship within Protestant Christian denominations.
"Carlos Simon is in some ways a modern-day George Gershwin, where he's able to think about popular styles, church styles, and Indigenous styles, and find a way through the classical orchestra to bring it into a brilliant and very colorful piece for orchestra," Meyer said. – Thomas Taylor
7:30 p.m. // Warner Theatre, 811 State St. // $19-$69 // For tickets and info: eriephil.org
Handel's Messiah, Sunday, Nov. 29 at 3 p.m. // Warner Theatre, 811 State St. // $19-$25 // For tickets and info: eriephil.org
