CHICAGO — The future will decide if Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared, a world-premiere concerto for soprano and orchestra, is among the most important Chicago Symphony Orchestra commissions in recent decades. It certainly seemed so from my vantage point at Symphony Center, where I heard three of the four Dec. 4-7 performances led by Czech conductor Petr Popelka and featuring American soprano Julia Bullock.
Aucoin’s 22-minute opus borrows text from the epic, elegiac, violent 2003 Spanish-language poem “INRI” by Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, who was temporarily imprisoned during Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year reign of terror in Chile between 1973 and 1990. Zurita answered his own brutal experience with unflinching poetry depicting devastation and torture on a vast scale. Bullock’s first sung words, “Soprendentes carnadas llueven del cielo” (“Strange baits rain from the sky”), established the hellish vision of doomed victims hurled from cliffs to be devoured as bait by the creatures of carnivorous waters, a fate reminiscent of violent Old Testament warnings to those who failed to heed God’s laws. INRI, the four letters one sees often on crucifixes, stands for “Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum,” or “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” It is the mocking title that Pontius Pilate placed on Jesus’ cross, but it earned a double meaning as Jesus’ followers came to embrace the acronym as their own.
The poem’s calamitous hellscape of a consuming and burning sea is the substance of Aucoin’s first movement, “El Mar” (“The Sea”), followed by a middle movement of haunting stillness, “Una ruta en las soledades” (“A Path in the Solitudes”), which gives voice to the dead victims who speak “as the stones speak, as the earth speaks … and all that love rises.” Still strong in memory is the profoundly sad exchange between soprano Bullock and CSO English hornist Scott Hostetler, dialogue of such aching isolation that it howls with yearning for a time when, in Zurita’s poetic visioin, “the dead pupils of our eyes the skies will open, the flesh we were will cover us again like the mountains with living lava…And I will love you again.”
The spectacular finale, “Rompientes” (“Breakers’), which Aucoin has called “an ascension,” offers images of wild frenzy, the extravagant regenerative power of volcanic eruptions, and of waves — the “breakers of resurrection” — crashing into the shore. The grotesque extent of Pinochet’s brutality, which became known in full only after the regime ended in 1990, is the sort of information one instinctively shies from, but the balm of Aucoin’s finale, a vision of harrowing beauty, is such that one cannot turn away.
That Pinochet killed thousands, and tortured tens of thousands, might not be so widely known without Zurita’s influential poetry. Zurita was detained almost immediately upon Pinochet’s takeover and held captive in the cargo hold of a ship with 800 others, packed into a space that historians describe as designed for dozens.
Aucoin, 35, and Bullock, 39, have collaborated frequently since their student days at Juilliard. Conductor Popelka is 39 as well. The staggering achievement of this relatively young team put me instantly in mind of the new work’s octogenarian bookend from 2023: the Chicago Symphony’s world premiere of The Triumph of the Octagon, composed by Philip Glass, then 86, and conducted by the orchestra’s music director at the time, Riccardo Muti, then 83. The two works stand out among the 13 CSO premieres so far since 2020.
One thing is clear. The still-young Aucoin is already an authentic master at orchestration. The opera experience shows. He sets off the voice easily, and he is particularly adept at exploiting the full orchestra at the edge of silence to accomplish a suspenseful atmosphere — that high alert one feels when the air is all but still, yet instinct says that something’s amiss: The first bars of “El Mar” offer sustained ripples maintained by flute, vibraphone, and strings in a vast quiet, briefly reinforcing the idea of a windless ocean breathing. This diaphanous texture is punctured by dive-bombing motifs that spark and whistle as the singer wonders about those “strange baits” raining from the sky. Aucoin leaps at the ferocious potential of such a phrase.
Popelka provided ideal support for Aucoin’s new work, efficiently managing its technical challenges while repeatedly indicating changes of direction for the benefit of the listeners — an essential talent. As for the rest of the program, one might have expected an easy line-up, considering the challenge of the premiere. Instead came virtuosity of other kinds: Brahms’ Third Symphony, beloved by musicians, often does not succeed as well as it should in concert halls. It doesn’t shout. Popelka and the orchestra made a precious gem of it, the lyrical woodwind moments and velvety low brass lines among the standouts. Then, for fireworks and fun, came Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, a saucy, virtuosic free-for-all. And why? Because they could.
