The Ballad of the Brown King: A Christmas Cantata (1954) by Margaret Bonds and Messiah (our vest-pocket version) in Mozart’s orchestration
Conductor’s Note

As you and we embark together on this evening's musical journey, cozy and somehow reverent in this beautiful, historic hall, we're mindful that the last time we performed for a live audience was 643 days ago. Much has happened since we presented our Belshazzar Project – an exploration in music and poetry of the agelessly incisive Belshazzar story, through four centuries and five languages – anchored by the great Kathleen Chalfant, on March 7, 2020.

One of my touchstone phrases is from James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake: "for ancients link with presents as the human chain extends." It reminds us that even the most calamitous upheavals are but waves on a stormy sea. Change, inevitably, happens. Time, which is music's medium, continues imperturbably. The sea endures.

Established in 1906, The Cecilia Chorus of New York has witnessed not only two World Wars, but also the social upheavals of the 1960's and, so resonantly today, the flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed the life of one of our founders, Alice Mandelick Flagler. It's fair to affirm that, by now, having learned much from experience, and lived to tell the tale, we might be thought to know a few things worth knowing.

This evening's program epitomizes the humaneness and (we believe and hope) wisdom of our lived perspective. While our art-making can and must integrate the full spectrum of human (and animal!) emotion – in one common formulation: joy, sorrow, fear, anger and disgust – everything we do and offer is grounded, ultimately, in love. Kindness.  

Tonight, we showcase the music of Margaret Bonds, a Black American woman who was born as World War I loomed, and died just before the Watergate break-in that led to the fall of President Richard Nixon.  Celebrating the work of composers outside the mainstream, including women and non-European composers (such as the Syrian Zaid Jabri), isn't new to us. In the past decade, we've given the New York premieres of two major choral-orchestral works by Dame Ethel Smyth, as well as milestone Carnegie Hall performances of music by the Renaissance composer Isabella Leonarda and, earlier in our history, the Romantic-era composer Fanny Hensel (sister of Felix Mendelssohn). How moving to contemplate that Bonds and Smyth were, in part, contemporaries, walking this fragile earth – Bonds in New York, Smyth in London – for three overlapping decades. Smyth died in 1944, just ten years before the 1954 premiere of tonight's featured work, The Ballad of The Brown King by Margaret Bonds. Both women showed determination and resourcefulness, unswervingly following the star of their creative genius against the headwinds of savage prejudice. We honor them.

Our juxtaposition of Bonds and Handel is not happenstance. Messiah and the Ballad treat the same event, the Nativity (though Messiah extends the narrative further, through the Crucifixion and Resurrection).  Like all gifted composers, both Bonds and Handel are alert to the music of their moment, Bonds to pentatonicism, spirituals, jazz, and blues, Handel to the rhythms of eighteenth-century Germany and England as well as the vocal exuberance of Italy. Both are using fundamentally similar harmonic vocabularies, nor can it be coincidence, for example, that Bonds's rhythmic treatment of the word "alleluia" is an echo through the centuries of Handel 's. Mozart's reorchestration of Handel is another demonstration of a composer looking back and then updating a heritage for the sensibilities of their own era. And our "vest-pocket" version of Messiah is similarly a creative response to prevailing exigencies. When we conceived this program, Carnegie Hall was stipulating that concerts had to be 90 minutes from soup to nuts, without intermission. (Lucky for you, that restriction has relaxed, and we've added an intermission.)

In a time of much, and much-needed, societal questioning and self-interrogation, we've been taking a fresh look at our institutional mission: "to cultivate a rich and diverse community of musicians, composers, and concert-goers to create distinctive choral experiences and performances that inform, challenge, and uplift the human spirit."

This continues to encapsulate what we want to be about, doing more of it, and better. Welcome (back) to our pleasant grove.

©Mark Shapiro 2021