Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Portland Symphony Music Director Eckart Preu leads the closing program of the orchestra’s 100^th Anniversary season. American violinist Tai Murray makes her PSO debut at this concert, though she has performed previously in Portland with other organizations. The music on this program highlights views of the USA from inside and out.

Duke Ellington’s Harlem Suite  began life as a work for the composer’s jazz band, which premiered it in New York City in 1951 at the (pre-Lincoln Center) Metropolitan Opera House on a concert to raise funds for the NAACP. The orchestral version heard tonight was first played in 1955 at Carnegie Hall, also in New York, by the Symphony of the Air led by Don Gillis. Ellington wrote about the people of Harlem as an insider: he had moved there as a young man, failed to catch on, moved back to his Washington, D. C. birthplace, and then returned, more determined and savvy, finally becoming a major force in American music. The suite is the finest of several extended works  from this era in which the composer stretched the world’s understanding of what jazz could encompass.

Child prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose brilliant opera Die Tote Stadt conquered the world when he was just 23 years old, fled Europe in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution of Jews. His immense skill, boundless imagination and ease in the lush musical language of Romanticism made him a natural choice to write music for the Hollywood films of early mid-Century America. The Violin Concerto was first heard in 1945. It is a work of great charm and superb craftsmanship. Its familiar, late-19^th Century musical language sounds familiar to 21^st Century ears, and reminds us how much later generations of film composers owed to Korngold.

AntonÍn Dvořák lived in the USA from 1892 to 1895, imported by Jeannette Thurber to lend cachet to her newly founded National Conservatory of Music, a predecessor of the modern-day Juilliard School. The school was unusual in its day for admitting women and black people, along with the usual white men. While in New York, Dvořák somewhat self-consciously sought to discover truly “American” music, settling on the idea that art music here should be based on the music of black and native Americans. His Symphony No. 9 is the greatest result of this conviction, remaining since its premiere one of the most popular symphonies of all time.

– Martin Webster