KEY WEST, Fla. — Can the cello play bebop? Maybe not typically, but in the hands of cello soloist Zuill Bailey giving the world premiere of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s jazzy Cello Concerto, the answer is a resounding yes.
Zwilich, who was the first woman composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1983 for her Symphony No. 1, has more than a dozen published concertos. But there had not been one for cello until Bailey’s debut performances with the South Florida Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned the work, music director Sebrina María Alfonso conducting. After it had been played in Fort Lauderdale and Miami, I took in the third performance on March 8 at the Tennessee Williams Theatre on the campus of the College of the Florida Keys.
Bailey, a 2017 Grammy Award winner for his performance of Michael Daugherty’s cello concerto Tales of Hemingway with the Nashville Symphony on the Naxos label, was an ideal champion of Zwilich’s new concerto. His warmth and richness of tone, lyrical phrasing, and rhythmic flair brought a splendid sense of freedom to the 15-minute work that was infectious. In an interview, the composer told me that “the cello wants to sing — it’s a mezzo-soprano,” and the concerto’s solo part showcased the instrument’s wide range, often likened to the human voice, from soulful crooning in the lower register to bright, keening coloratura at the top.
Zwilich gives the solo cello plenty of nimble, virtuosic passagework, but her writing is always concise and to the point. Never did Bailey lapse into empty brilliance for the sake of mere display. There was nary a wasted note. The three movements, played without pause, had a narrative drive and coherence stemming from an inner pulse that propelled the music. If anything, this expressive, impeccably detailed, technically sophisticated work felt a bit too brief, leaving me wanting to hear more.
Certainly, the concerto contains a strong jazz quality, with sparkling, toe-tapping orchestration that recalls Gershwin and Bernstein, and there’s a clarinet lick or two right out of the Benny Goodman playbook. Zwilich’s harmonies are elegant and unpredictable, even including what sounded like a suggestion of Minimalism popping up here and there. At times, Bailey seemed to be channeling his inner Sonny Rollins, the cello honking and shouting like a tenor sax. A highlight was the back and forth between cello soloist and individual players in the orchestra, such as Bailey’s deft exchanges with flute and bluesy, muted trumpet. An eight-measure dialogue between cello and English horn in the third movement was sublime.
The Cello Concerto represents a fortuitous convergence of composer, soloist, and conductor. Alfonso and Bailey go back decades together, from their student days at the Peabody Institute of Music. The cellist has been a frequent soloist with the SFSO, playing in an early benefit concert when the orchestra was being organized as the Key West Symphony, and he performed the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 during its initial season in 1998. Zwilich, a Floridian and regular attendee of the orchestra’s concerts, has long admired Bailey’s playing, and she dedicated the concerto to him and Alfonso, who has programmed other works by her through the years.
“When she was composing this, Ellen said that she had Zuill and me in mind and how we are on stage together, how we move and communicate,” said Alfonso, a Key West native who founded the orchestra. Along with the dedication to Alfonso and Bailey, Zwilich wrote the score in memory of a pair of legendary cellists, Leonard Rose and Mstislav Rostropovich.
Zwilich, who turned 80 last year, is a prolific, versatile composer whose catalogue includes close to 100 works, with a steady stream of performances listed on her website. Looking ahead, her 2019 Abgang and Kaddish, modeled on Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, will be performed by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio with clarinetist David Shifrin at the Kennedy Center on March 3, 2021, and for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on March 14, 2021.
“You know,” Zwilich said, “Verdi did some of his best work in his 80s. As long as you have it, do it. I’m still writing. The day I wake up and don’t feel happy about what I’m doing, then I quit. That day hasn’t come yet.”
The South Florida Symphony, which had 65 players for the Zwilich concerto, is a non-union, paid-per-service ensemble. With a budget of about $2.5 million, the 2019-20 season encompasses four masterworks programs plus a variety of outreach, educational, and other concerts played in Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe counties. Since 2009, the orchestra’s base of operations has been in mainland Fort Lauderdale, but it continues to perform in its original venue, the 480-seat theater named for Williams, the great playwright who lived in Key West for more than 30 years (and whose Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? had its premiere at the theater’s 1980 opening). It is indeed an evocative place in which to enjoy a concert, and the community’s raffish, kitschy charm and the natural beauty of the island are wonderfully alluring and part of the orchestra’s identity. Under Alfonso, the orchestra has played quite a lot of contemporary music, as well as some fascinating rarities, such as the Delius Piano Concerto, with Mark Bebbington as soloist, scheduled for April 16-18.
On the downside, the SFSO has struggled with financial problems, as reflected in a complaint last season by the South Florida Musicians Association, part of the American Federation of Musicians, about the orchestra’s non-payment of musicians. Alfonso said that musician payments are up to date.
Preceding the Zwilich Cello Concerto in the first half of the program was another world premiere, Sunset, a symphonic poem by John D. Gottsch, who divides his time between Key West and Baltimore. In seven short, connected movements inspired by gatherings at Mallory Square to watch the sun go down, frigates soaring over Higgs Beach, the impact of climate change on the fragile Florida ecosystem, and other local themes, the piece had a robust fanfare and a few other emphatic moments in the brass, but the musical vocabulary was one-dimensional and lacked nuance, deficiencies compounded by some insecure intonation in the violins.
After intermission, Alfonso and company gave a good account of Beethoven’s The Consecration of the House, followed by Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5, Reformation. This was an interesting work to hear, since it is not performed nearly as much as Mendelssohn’s popular Scottish and Italian symphonies, and the glorious tune of the Lutheran hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” is woven through the finale. Unfortunately, the orchestra was loudly amplified for the symphony in an effort to overcome the dry acoustics of the theater, and that became a tiresome distraction.
John Fleming is president of the Music Critics Association of North America. He writes for Classical Voice North America, Musical America, Opera, and other publications. For 22 years, he covered the Florida music scene as performing arts critic with the Tampa Bay Times.
