Milwaukee Musaik Performs With Acclaimed Opera Singer

Image from Milwaukee Musaik.

In a pairing that conductor Alexander Mandl calls “almost inevitable,” the Milwaukee Musaik chamber orchestra will perform works by Samuel Barber and Gustav Mahler on Monday, May 18, at 7 p.m. Both Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 were inspired by poetry that sees the world through the eyes of a young child. The program is titled “Innocence and Wonder.”

“Knoxville” is a musical setting of a poem by American writer James Agee that served as the introduction to Agee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death in the Family. It evokes a child’s memory of a languid, hot summer night in Agee’s Tennessee hometown.

Barber chose the text when he was commissioned by soprano Eleanor Steber to compose a work for solo vocalist and orchestra. The poem resonated profoundly with Barber, who, like Agee, was five years old in 1915. “You see,” Barber said, “it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.”

Barber’s setting, says Mandl, “superbly depicts the reverie of memory, combining musical painting to images that bring it to life: the descending night, the muted atmosphere of a summer sunset, the quiet conversations, a passing streetcar with its clatter, lights, movement and the crackling spark that powers it along.” The work was premiered by Steber and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1948. An operatic star who grew up in West Virginia, Steber commented, “That was exactly my childhood.”

Mahler, who composed during the summers when he had no opera conducting engagements, found texts for some 20 of his compositions for voice in a collection of German folk poems published in the early 19^th century. His Symphony No. 4, written in 1899, expands his 1892 vocal setting of the poem Das himmlische Leben (“The Heavenly Life”). The text represents a child’s vision of heaven; portions of it are sung in the symphony’s final movement.

The four-movement work, which creates an atmosphere of innocence, was not well received initially, and Mahler made multiple revisions to it. He also approved the composition of reductions that pared down the number of instruments required to perform the work. Musaik will play a reduction for chamber orchestra written by English composer Iain Farrington. The intimate adaptation “allows the listener to follow more of what Mahler created and focus more clearly,” Mandl said. Farrington’s orchestration is nearly identical to Barber’s orchestration for “Knoxville.”

Soprano Alisa Jordheim joins the orchestra for both compositions. A Milwaukee resident who was recently named an outstanding singer to watch in New York Public Radio station WQXR’s list of “40 under 40: A New Generation of Superb Opera Singers,” Jordheim regularly sings major opera roles and performs as a soloist internationally. “It’s artistically fulfilling to do both these pieces,” she said. “They grow with you, and my interpretation has deepened with more life experience.”

Milwaukee Musaik with Alisa Jordheim will perform “Innocence and Wonder” at 7 p.m. Monday, May 18, at Wauwatosa Presbyterian Church, 2366 N. 80th St. Tickets are available online and at the door.