ALBUM REVIEW: Kevin Puts Symphony No.2 – Flute Concerto – River’s Rush

by Maggie Molloy

In that singular moment when the hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, everything changed. It was as if, overnight, the entire world became louder, more turbulent, more terrifying—and far more fearful.

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Kevin Puts. Photo Credit: David White

This sudden paradigmatic shift was the sole inspiration for Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts’ Symphony No.2, a 21-minute masterwork exploring the way in which the events of 9/11 shook our nation to its very core. Though the symphony first premiered in 2002, just shortly after the terrorist attacks, it still rings with the same tempestuous passion and urgency today—nearly a decade and a half later.

The Peabody Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Marin Alsop, breathes new life into that harrowing moment with a brand new album featuring three world-premiere recordings of works by Puts, his cataclysmic Second Symphony among them.

The programmatic symphony opens with a slow and steady orchestral build across the first eight minutes of the work, with a familiar timbral palette of piano and strings laying a soft foundation for delicate woodwind flourishes: the tonal soundscape of a gentle, proud, and perhaps naive nation.

But the blissful innocence and patriotic rhapsody is short-lived. A wandering violin solo stumbles into a violent orchestral upheaval: the aural equivalent of the planes crashing into the twin towers. A visceral darkness stains the orchestra’s entire harmonic palette, the thunderous melodies intertwining and colliding amidst the terrifying chaos. Yet at the height of this catastrophe, the solo unaccompanied violin returns for another musical reflection, calming the orchestra and leading it into an intimate epilogue. A clock-like pulse creates a sense of expectancy, uncertainty, and fear—yet as time passes the orchestra becomes unified once again, finding light, color, and enduring hope even amidst the lingering uncertainty.

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Marin Alsop. Photo Credit: Grant Leighton

The work is followed by a performance of Puts’ “River’s Rush,” inspired in part by the extraordinary grandeur of the Mississippi River. Rapid successions of short melodic motives capture the coursing waves of the river, at one moment stormy and intimidating, the next gentle, soft, and reflective. Freely combining major and minor chords from different keys, Puts illustrates the utter majesty of the river: the delicate reflection of light against its waves, the constant, natural flow of its coursing veins, and the organic life both within and around it.

The album concludes with Puts’ Flute Concerto featuring soloist Adam Walker. Spritely, agile, and endlessly virtuosic flute melodies soar across all three movements, from the poignant and lyrical introduction of the first through the nocturnal andante of the second (featuring an unmistakable quote from Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, K. 467), and clear through the tremendously energetic toccata finale of the third. The piece closes with an spirited flute solo playing off the rhythmic hand-clapping of the orchestra.

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It’s a perfectly upbeat ending to an album which traverses the full range of human emotion, reminding us of the distinct power of music to help us reflect on our past, embrace and exist wholly in our present, and look forward with hopeful hearts toward our future.

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ALBUM REVIEW: David Lang’s the national anthems

by Maggie Molloy

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As we near another anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, we’re reminded of just how terrifyingly destructive and divisive those events were, both within our country and beyond it. Nearly 3,000 innocent civilians died that day—along with another 6,000 who were injured—and that was only the beginning of what was to come.

The attacks led our nation’s troops into what has become the longest-running war in U.S. history. Since 9/11, nearly 2 million U.S. soldiers have been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. Over 6,000 American troops have been killed, another 44,000 wounded, and the rest of our nation’s lives forever changed in the legislation that has followed.

Nineteen hijackers changed our nation, our world, and the entire course of history.

It begs the question: Why?

Why are the nations of the world so divided? Why do we keep terrorizing one another? Why do we keep fighting these wars? Are we really all that different?

These are some of the questions composer David Lang asks with his composition “the national anthems,” a choral work released earlier this summer on Cantaloupe Music. Performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale (under the baton of Grant Gershon) with the Calder String Quartet, the album takes a critical look at the way we as individual nations define ourselves.

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Los Angeles Master Chorale under the baton of Grant Gershon. Photo credit: David Johnston

“I had the idea that if I looked carefully at every national anthem I might be able to identify something that everyone in the world could agree on,” Lang said. “If I could take just one hopeful sentence from the national anthem of every nation in the world I might be able to make a kind of meta-anthem of the things that we all share. “

He combed through the anthems of all 193 countries in the United Nations, pulling one line from each to use in his libretto.

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David Lang. Photo Credit: Peter Serling

“What I found, to my shock and surprise,” Lang said, “Was that within almost every anthem is a bloody, war-like, tragic core, in which we cover up our deep fears of losing our freedoms with waves of aggression and bravado.”

That underlying sense of fear haunts the entire work, with the choir’s prayerful voices rising above a stained glass string accompaniment. The piece is organized into five movements exploring themes of peace, courage, glory, freedom, and community, ever so slowly sprawling outward from the first movement’s unified, tight-knit harmonies toward contrapuntal chaos.

The piece builds in quiet urgency through the war-stained patriotic glory of the middle movements, the once-unified voices separating as the wounded strings weep softly in the distance. And yet, the final movement returns to a churchlike hymn, the voices once again finding unity in their hopes, their prayers, and their music.

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Calder Quartet. Photo Credit: Autumn de Wilde

The anthem is paired with another largescale choral work: Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “the little match girl passion,” based on the children’s story of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. It’s a classic parable given new depth through Lang’s masterful part-writing: a poor young girl, beaten by her father, fails to sell matches on the street and freezes from the bitter cold of the cruel world around her. Yet in wake of “the national anthems,” her story serves a dual purpose, reminding us of the personal wars and private tragedies we all face—and how truly delicate and cherished is our freedom.

“Hiding in every national anthem is the recognition that we are insecure about our freedoms, that freedom is fragile, and delicate, and easy to lose,” Lang said. “Maybe an anthem is a memory informing a kind of prayer, a heartfelt plea: There was a time when we were forced to live in chains. Please don’t make us live in chains again.