Knox County Symphony to close season with powerful choral works

For its final concert of the season, the Knox County Symphony will join forces with the hundred-voice Kenyon Choral Union to present two works of exceptional lyrical power and emotional depth. The spring concert, capping the symphony’s 60th-anniversary year, will also feature two purely orchestral works, including the rousing third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony.

The concert takes place on Sunday, April 26, starting at 7:30 p.m. in Rosse Hall on the Kenyon College campus. Tickets, which can be purchased at the door, cost $10 for adults and $7 for seniors; students with a valid ID will be admitted free.

Before the performance, a special presentation will honor symphony board member Magic McBride, who retired last year after serving for 21 years, fifteen as president.

“Magic worked tirelessly for the symphony,” said current board president Rebecca Abbott. “Our continuing success owes a lot to her commitment, her attention to detail, and her dedication to the mission of presenting great classical music to the community. Our audience knew Magic as the voice of the symphony. She introduced every concert and spoke at social events and fundraisers.”

The choral works anchoring the program will immerse listeners in the spiritual reflections of two masterful artists: The 19th-century Romantic composer Johannes Brahms and the widely admired contemporary composer Morten Lauridsen. Knox County Symphony conductor Benjamin Locke noted that both pieces — Brahms’s 1871 Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny) and Lauridsen’s 1997 Lux Aeterna — were written while the composers were facing the loss of their mothers; they might well have been seeking comfort in a time of turmoil.

The Brahms work is considered, along with his Requiem, to be one of his two greatest choral compositions. It is set to a poem by Friedrich Hölderin that contrasts the serenity of “heavenly breezes” with the mortal suffering of humans “moving blindly from one hour to the next, like water tossed from crag to crag.” The Schicksalslied opens slowly and tenderly but then, said Locke, “throws us into the pit of despair” with a suddenly tumultuous section which, in turn, yields to a peaceful ending that has inspired debate among scholars. Is Brahms expressing hope, hopelessness, or resignation?

Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, set to sacred texts alluding to light, is beautifully tranquil, using “flowing melodic lines and changing meters” to create “a fluidity that’s very appealing to audiences,” said Locke. The work, in five movements played without pause, “has an emotional impact in a comforting, dramatic way.”

Lauridsen himself wrote that he composed the piece “in response to my mother’s final illness and [I] found great personal comfort and solace in setting to music these timeless and wondrous words about Light, a universal symbol of illumination at all levels — spiritual, artistic, and intellectual.”

The Kenyon Choral Union consists of two ensembles that perform regularly with the symphony. One is the 48-voice Kenyon Chamber Singers, the premier choir at Kenyon College. The other is the Kenyon Community Choir, which includes community members as well as students.

The symphony comprises more than 60 musicians, including many local community members along with students from Kenyon, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and area high schools. Locke, a Kenyon music professor, has conducted the symphony since 1984.

Like the choral pieces in the spring concert, the instrumental works also emerged from periods of grief or crisis in the composers’ lives, Locke noted. The concert will open with Edward Elgar’s lilting, deeply affecting, and much-loved “Nimrod,” from his Enigma Variations. “Nimrod” is considered a tribute to Elgar’s friend and publisher, August Jaeger, “in appreciation for Jaeger’s support at a time of deep depression,” Locke wrote for the concert’s program notes.

The Tchaikovsky movement is march-like rather than pensive, but the Pathétique Symphony may also have a brooding subtext, Locke said. Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere performance of the symphony in October of 1893, just nine days before he died under mysterious circumstances, and some speculate that the work was a musical “suicide note.”

“We should remember that composers don’t write just for intellectual reasons,” said Locke. “These pieces are deeply personal. The composers are struggling with their identity, their past, their future, their faith, and where things fit in the universe. The music serves them personally, and it serves the audience, in our shared humanity. The composers are motivated by this humanity, and by the need for connection.”

The concert will be followed by a reception, where audience members can meet the musicians and get refreshments.

For more information about the symphony, see the ensemble’s website at knoxcountysymphony.org.