NEW YORK — Whoever had the idea to place Nathalie Joachim’s Le présent éternel in conversation with Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra was onto something. Harrison’s concerto was first heard in 1959, while this new version of Le présent éternel — for four vocalists, live instruments, and electronics — received its world premiere on the New York Philharmonic’s “Sound On” new music series May 22, but the two works have much to say to each other.
To start with, each piece, conducted by Christopher Rountree of L.A.’s Wild Up ensemble, is itself a kind of dialogue between contrasting cultures and musical materials: The music of the Indonesian gamelan was a lifelong obsession for Harrison (1917-2003), and much of his work fuses sounds inspired by that traditional percussion ensemble with materials and techniques from Western classical music, whereas Brooklyn-born flutist and composer Joachim has — in her most celebrated works — drawn on the same Western tradition to explore her own cultural heritage as the Black American daughter of Haitian immigrants.
In terms of material, each work also presents a dialogue between competing lyrical and rhythmic elements. As his title implies, Harrison does away with the orchestral brass, winds, and strings one might expect to find accompanying a violin concerto, replacing them with a curious battery of flower pots, coffee cans, washtubs, and even a contrabass, all of which — in addition to a number of more or less conventional percussion instruments — are struck with mallets, sticks, and more by the quintet accompanying the soloist. The complex timbres and steady pulsing of the percussion instruments suggests a junkyard version of the gamelan’s gongs and metallophones, while the role of the violinist, the lyricism of its sustained monophony contrasting with the ensemble’s chiming rhythms, evokes the role of the traditional suling flute or stringed rebab.
And assistant concertmaster Michelle Kim-Solman let loose a torrent of lyricism. So often, orchestral violinists seem to play their solos with an emphasis on clarity and accuracy rather than on expression — and if one had been watching a silent film of Kim-Solman’s poised yet reserved physicality, one might expect it to sound precise and cerebral to a fault. But if she looked every bit like an assistant concertmaster, she sounded like a rock star, wrenching rough-edged sonorities and swoops of pitch out of the instrument, delivering pure passion in sonic form.
Not that she sacrificed clarity and accuracy: Her octave double-stops chimed with perfect intonation, and she built long, patient phrases out of the endless chains of slow, implacable eighth notes in the second movement, moments of such transparency that any imperfections in the execution of Harrison’s score would have screamed themselves out to the audience.
In Le présent éternel, the rhythmic element is once again supplied by a line of percussionists. Just as the steady cycles of gamelan music interlock to generate hocket-like melodies, Haitian music builds layers upon layers of percussion to create a dizzyingly complex aggregate rhythm, so that even short, seemingly simple percussion phrases have immense depth and texture. Two additional rhythmic layers — a chorale of brass instruments and a quartet of chug-chugging contrabasses — add yet more complexity, the connections between their pulses and those of the drums so oblique as to be nearly indiscernible at times.
The lyrical element in Joachim’s score takes the form of a quartet of amplified voices. Thanks to the singers’ wireless mics, the audience heard them before seeing them, offering harmonies in an Afro-diasporic style reminiscent of breathy American soul vocals. They took the stage with glamor to spare, not only singing but moving and posing to the music, striking tableaux and dancing in formations that gestured toward the piece’s roots in Haitian spiritual practices.
The text, assembled by Joachim from a variety of sources, is a mix of sacred and secular, from Vodun invocations to the U.S. Constitution — the common thread being the liberation of enslaved Africans by revolution in Haiti and by law in the United States. But just as the score’s stylish electronic elements lent the music a sense of timelessness, looking forward as well as back, the texts offered an insistent reminder of the ongoing struggle for racial justice. When the electronic accompaniment remixed the vocalists’ recitation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, instituted to guarantee full legal status to formerly enslaved Americans, it was impossible not to recall the attacks on birthright citizenship in our own historical moment, and the vilification of Haitian and other non-white immigrants to the U.S.
The composer’s own presence onstage, singing with the quartet, lent the piece a special intimacy and directness, and it is no insult to say she was the least assured of the four soloists: She was simply outshone by the finely wrought melismas of her collaborators. She might have needed a little extra oomph from sound designer Mark Grey, but Joachim in particular was often hard to hear. By contrast, Nathalie Cerin’s voice was admirably cool and agile, Laurin Talese’s bright and satisfying, and Jade Hicks’ the most spectacular of all, a brilliant and passionate belt with a pure tone at its center.
One might have wished for more physical commitment from the performers. In a room as big as Geffen Hall, the gentleness of their gestures and the casualness of their blocking felt as if the singers were “marking” their movements. But they did move with distinctive, individual grace, and the decision to make this a semi-staged piece proved powerful, especially as the singers recessed in the very last movement. Once again, their disembodied voices could be heard broadcast from the wings, lingering like ghosts of the past, like the legacy of oppression, or perhaps like a cultural memory — a once-enslaved people’s enduring pride in the resilience of their ancestors.
