NEW YORK — So many symphonic programs begin with a new, 10-minute piece, often about climate change by a (rightly) fashionable composer who would eventually expand the music into something larger. Not quite so at Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center’s Aug. 8 “New Beginnings” concert at Geffen Hall in a new-music dominated program that reached out in multiple directions in pieces neither tidy nor provisional.
Framed by the spring-season echoes of Delius and Schumann, Hannah Ishizaki’s three-movement, anything-but-pastoral Change Thy Course had a world premiere, and Billy Childs’ anti-concerto for flute and clarinet A More Perfect Union received its New York premiere, showing both composers hopscotching through Western music history (though Ishizaki’s manner was more like a rampage). With strategic sequencing, music and artistic director Jonathon Heyward came off as solidly traditional and utterly cool.
The Childs piece requires the most explanation. The 69-year-old composer, well known in the jazz world and a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist for In the Arms of the Beloved, gave the three movements of A More Perfect Union subtitles — “I, Too, Sing America,” “Family,” and “Call To Action” — that were worth noting but could be distracting. In purely musical terms, the first movement has four distinct sections, forming a miniature symphony within the concerto, with astringent harmonies, propulsive rhythms, and angular themes reminiscent of William Walton.
The second movement is impressionistic, with a jungle of colors and gestures, humidity and all, suggesting that the “family” subtitle includes ancient ancestors. The third movement recalls Samuel Barber in perpetual-motion mode (as in the third movement of his Violin Concerto). Such references are starting points onto which Childs stacks any number of other musical layers, all with minds of their own. Even what seems like bass-line anchors suddenly become unstable and start going their own ways — along with everything else. Fun!
Sibling soloists Demarre McGill (flute) and Anthony McGill (clarinet) seemed added on, but not with the competitiveness typical in concertos. They maintained distance, perhaps representing the polarization of our society, almost like a formal debate, with separate, well-delineated cadenzas. Their occasional duets meshed with distinctive timbres, becoming part of the piece’s reckless charms, projecting what could be in a more perfect union.
Ishizaki (born in 2000 and still earning her Ph.D. at Princeton) drew her title Change Thy Course from the Adolf Böttger poem that partly inspired Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (Spring), in a piece that takes off like a shot, announcing itself with a grand quote from the opening of the Schumann symphony. From there, the first movement builds tension like an ever-widening wedge that stops in mid-climax but with a masterful sense of finality. It’s music that feels both spontaneous and inevitable. The next two movements have high-energy quotations from Hindemith and Stravinsky, hard-stomping rhythms included, ending with the brief gesture that concludes The Rite of Spring. You both hear it coming but don’t expect it. Lower brass sonorities — trombone glissandos, especially — create brazen downward slides suggesting a world-ending apocalypse.
And the traditional part of the concert? The program opened with Delius’ On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (an okay performance) and ended with Schumann’s Spring Symphony in ship shape. Fast tempos recalled John Eliot Gardiner’s period-performance endeavors a few years back, placing Schumann more toward the Classical period than in the Romantic era.
Under Heyward, such tempos didn’t seem hard-driven. Climaxes were built more from harmonic tension than from rhythmic thrust. The final movement pulled back a tad and felt almost relaxed. Allegro animato e grazioso is the marking; the last word means “gracious.” No speeding, in other words. Vitality was maintained, but the movement has rarely felt more genial — with an orchestra that was definitely first-class.
