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Arts & Letters

George Tsontakis’s music is often pensive, but I’ve never heard it be mournful before. Some recent composers (Gorecki, for instance) have turned mournfulness into an aesthetic, but Tsontakis’s music more frequently has the ambience of someone mulling over a complex and troublesome past in a moment of calm and objectivity. Now, however, we get Mirologhia, Tsontakis’s new percussion concerto for celebrity percussionist Evelyn Glennie, which uncharacteristically sweeps us up in its emotion. Glennie wails – not only metaphorically, but with her voice – while Byzantine chants in the strings pour out their lament, woodwind bird songs tumble down sadly, and even the orchestra sings. And while this is fitting in a work premiered so soon after the deadliest attack ever made on American soil, the work had to have been completed before the disasters in New York and Washington. Mirologhia was not commemorative, but prescient.

Tsontakis, who turned 50 a few days after Mirologhia’s October 13 New York premiere at Carnegie Hall, is a composer of subtle harmonies, who plays with musical reminiscences. His music is at times tonal, at times atonal, but mostly it explores gradations in between. Unusually, for someone whose music explores semi-tonal pitch cells, his is often quite memorable. I find myself humming his Fourth String Quartet, for example (available on a New World recording), and wanting to rehear magic moments like the one in which three of the strings play in F major while another wanders away into another key. So far, we’ve had mostly chamber music from Tsontakis, but he’s had a sudden spurt of orchestral commissions in the last couple of years, of which Mirologhia was one.

This work was part of an unusual project: the commission of four percussion concerti by Glennie, who has won the hearts and imaginations of audiences partly for her powerfully dramatic stage presence, partly because she solos on percussion despite having been deaf since age 11. (She performs barefoot to feel the vibrations of the music transmitted through the floor to her feet.) To hear any percussion concerto is an odd experience. The genre is tiny, with the most famous concerto perhaps being that of Darius Milhaud from 1949. Suddenly, however, we have four such works dated 2001, by Tsontakis, Joan Tower, Chen Yi, and Stewart Wallace. It was truly brave of conductor Leonard Slatkin to conduct all four with the National Symphony Orchestra, in two evenings, first in Washington and then in New York. And yet as so often happens, audience enthusiasm seemed to justify the venture, and make one wonder why orchestra managements are habitually so timid.

All four composers asked for a wide range of mallet instruments, drums, and more exotic percussion batteries, but otherwise there was little similarity among the four strategies. Tower’s Strike Zone was the most conventional work in terms of the drama of concerto form; Glennie occupied center stage most of the time, her virtuoso passages framed by the orchestra. Chen Yi, between two complex virtuoso movements, used the slow movement as a kind of Chinese opera, having Glennie, while playing, intone a Chinese poem in an exaggerated stylistic manner. Wallace, least inspired, wrote a fast orchestral piece to which Glennie was allowed to add little more than a coloristic accompaniment.

Tsontakis’s solution was perhaps the most highly nuanced. Unlike Tower, he didn’t keep the soloist center stage, but rather made her the chief among many characters in the music. The title, Mirologhia, he explained in the program notes, derives from the word mirologhi, meaning to sing mournfully or wail. Mirologhia are songs of mourning composed spontaneously by women who have lost loved ones. And so in Tsontakis’s dramatic scenario, Glennie was the mourner, the woman giving voice to her bereavement, while the orchestra was the crowd of sympathizers and onlookers.

The opening was a powerfully romantic gesture whose climaxing unresolved suspension made me think that Tsontakis was leading us into Mahler or Sibelius territory. A blast of drumming from the soloist dispelled such an impression, although its violence seemed to be an emotional outburst, not a virtuosic show. Fragments of Byzantine chant appeared in the strings, and ran intermittently throughout the six-movement work. Tsontakis has explored these waters before; his Fourth String Quartet, mentioned above and subtitled “Beneath Thy Tenderness of Heart,” is beautifully based on a Russian Orthodox hymn. In that case, however, the hymn’s intervals are abstracted into motives that pervade the texture. Here, the chants seemed to return intact, as incursions into the work from a religious world just outside it.

They returned, most impressively, in the singing of the orchestra. A few composers have experimented with having the orchestra sing, and it rarely works very well. Sometimes the effect is gimmicky, other times the orchestra just doesn’t vocalize with enough enthusiasm. Here, Tsontakis had the lower string players sing mournful chants while the remainder of the orchestra continued playing; it was a primal, ancient-sounding gesture, and could have been stunningly effective if the National Symphony Orchestra players had put a little more soulfulness and unanimity into their singing. Even so, they were fluent enough that the flow of the melody from strings to voices to mallet percussion unified the work and made the use of singing natural and atmospheric.

Mirologhia’s fell movement titles suggested liturgical connotations: “Introit,” “Crotales Angelorum,” “Soson Kyrie” (“Lord, Save Your People”), “Labyrinth,” “Eonia I Mnimi” (“Eternal Remembrance”), and “Mirologhia.” The second and fourth sections featured birdlike woodwind melodies that reminded one of Olivier Messiaen’s music. In the “Soson Kyrie,” the orchestra played slow trills while Glennie limned the orchestral melody by playing “crowbar carillon,” a set of suspended crowbars that Tsontakis had power-ground to specific pitches, and that gave an unexpectedly clear chimelike effect. The fourth movement gave Glennie a cathartic drum cadenza, and had her doubling the orchestra on steel drum. Most haunting – a word that comes up frequently in describing Tsontakis’s music – was the “Eternal Remembrance,” in which Glennie sang of her sorrows over a drone of spare chords in the winds and strings.

In all of this, Glennie commanded the stage with a passionate and well-choreographed presence. One wonders whether other percussionists will have enough theatricality to duplicate her achievements, so that this explosion in the percussion concerto repertoire will radiate beyond her immediate sphere of influence. I hope so, since Mirologhia is a powerful addition to Tsontakis’s work and a new side to his musical personality.