Recently WXXI Music Director Julia Figueras asked me to point to a single favorite musical moment of 2016.
That’s impossible.
My head swims with memories of many fantastic performances. For example, in February, flutist Marina Piccinini and the RPO dazzled in a flute concerto by Pulitzer winner Aaron Jay Kernis. That was super exciting!
I also keep thinking about a much smaller-scale event last February in which I heard soprano (and WXXI host) Kearstin Brown perform four arias from Nkeiru Okoye's Harriet Tubman, a song cycle which traces the life of the heroic abolitionist from childhood to old age. Kearstin not only sang exquisitely from memory, but she modified her voice to underscore the stages of Tubman’s life, sounding like a child in the beginning and warming to a full-throated, womanly sound. She became Harriet Tubman. It was stunning.
In April, I was thrilled to perform in the Rochester premiere of a new chamber version of Cary Ratcliff’s Ode to Common Things with Madrigalia and the Buffalo chamber choir Vocalis. That’s a work that was commissioned and premiered by the Rochester Oratorio Society twenty years ago. Now it’s being sung all over the country.
But I think the single most significant musical event of 2016 was the November world premiere in Kodak Hall of Kevin Puts’ song cycle for soprano and orchestra Letters from Georgia, based on letters by Georgia O’Keefe. Like Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Kevin’s new piece, written for Renée Fleming and the Eastman Philharmonia, touches on themes of identity, love, loss, and friendship. I have high hopes that other singers and conductors will recognize its power and beauty in the years ahead.
To be fair, I miss a lot. That’s the price of getting up at 4:00 a.m. So I missed Don’t Blame Anyone, the new multi-media opera performed by the Eastman School of Music’s BroadBand Ensemble with El Arte de los Titeres, Secretaria de Cultura, Universidad de Guadalajara, and PUSH Physical Theatre. My colleagues raved about the original music by Eastman faculty members Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon and Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez. I also missed Joyce DiDonato’s concert In War & Peace: Harmony through Music with Il Pomo d’Oro. The concert was, by many accounts, spectacular and edgy. From what I gleaned from watercooler reviews, Ms. DiDonato’s theatrical and imaginative presentation points a way to the future.
My favorite moment OUTSIDE the concert hall took place on an empty lot in the center of the city in June. A huge crowd gathered for a jazz festival concert on “Parcel 5,” the former site of Midtown Mall. Rochester’s city government has collected proposals for developing the East Main Street lot. At least two include plans for some kind of performing arts venue. I know I’m not alone in hoping that urban planners take a minimalist approach and create a vibrant green space -- a kind of mini-Tanglewood -- in the very heart of Rochester.
