all rise - all right!

July 9, 2004 performance review by Dave Conlin Read

For the opening program of the 66th season in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra took the bold step of presenting "All Rise," a composition by a living African American, Wynton Marsalis, rather than one by a deceased European caucasian. And Marsalis' work makes a case for the addition to the pantheon of another B (alongside Beethoven, Brahms, Bach), this one to represent the Blues, which provides the organizational scheme for "All Rise," which comprises12 movements reflecting the 12 bars of the blues.

The work was commissioned in 1999 by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic and performed tonight by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Masur's direction, The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver conducting, and Laquita Mitchell, soprano, Cynthia Renee Hardy, mezzo-soprano, Brian Robinson, tenor, and Robert Honeysucker, bass-baritone. (It was first performed by the BSO last December at Symphony Hall.)

It's noteworthy that in July 1999, in celebration of the centennary of Duke Ellington, Marsalis and the LCJO joined Seiji Ozawa and the BSO at Tanglewood for a program that featured music of Edvard Grieg as arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Ellington is Marsalis' role model in many respects and a predecessor in basing jazz compositions on European classical music. (This can get circular, of course, because Jazz came to be as a kind of Afro-Americanization of European music in the first place.)

But "All Rise" is not a fusion of classical and jazz. As the multi-Grammy winning composer (in both Jazz and Classical categories) himself notes, "This piece has elements of everything from didgeridoo, ancient Greek music, fugue, the New Orleans funeral cadence...and plain old down-home ditties, but I don't strive to combine many different styles in a "world-music" type of melange, I only try to hear that they are the same."

So here was a two hour Blues, that maybe didn't quite blow the roof off the joint but it surely blew away most in the audience because of its great overriding joyousness. Although there were passages that felt long, they never languished, and one's attention wasn't allowed to wander before some big surprising sound came forth and you were glad to follow the music in a new direction.

When the ride ended, the audience rose out of their seats and off their blankets for a sustained and spirited ovation, which Mr. Marsalis acknowledged with two encores, one an emotional solo improvisation on his burnished trumpet and then with a number that gave each member of the outstanding LCJO a turn in the spotlight.