Culture & Community | Music | Arts & Culture | New Haven Symphony Orchestra
So conducting prior to his 2024 tenure. Photo Courtesy NHSO.
Baritone Eric Greene could hear the interplay of light and dark before he ever left his seat. Around him, brass mounted and swirled with furious speed. Percussion rumbled beneath it. Woodwinds pushed cautiously back, strings following their lead. The sound billowed around Greene’s head, a tug-of-war that had the audience on the edge of its collective seats.
Then he stood, and banished the darkness.
Did he choose joy? Can we?
That question—and its full-throated answer—sat at the heart of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s sold-out season opener last Sunday, as Maestro Perry So took the podium at Woolsey Hall for the first time. Performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony alongside Composer Courtney Bryan’s “Gathering Song,” he suggested that joy is a choice, and humans have the agency to summon or quash it each day.
In so doing, he put forth a model for reimagining the canon that hints at an exciting season to come (read more about that here). In addition to NHSO musicians and vocalists Lisa Williamson, Annie Rosen, Chad Kranak and Greene, the performance included singers from the Heritage Chorale of New Haven, New Haven Chorale, and Yale Glee Club. Roughly 2100 people attended.
“Joy is not something that is easy,” So said at the beginning of the concert, as attendees fanned themselves to fight the still, warm air that hung around the stage. “Joy is not something that is there for the taking. Joy is something that we choose.”
The composer Courtney Bryan. Lucy Gellman Photo.
That began not with his close reading of Beethoven’s Ninth, but Bryan’s “Gathering Song,” which premiered at the New York Philharmonic in March 2023. A work that is as powerful as it is comparatively short—roughly 14 minutes to Beethoven’s sweeping hour-plus—the piece is a sort of journey through Black music history, with quotations of big band jazz, ragtime, gospel and syncopated brass that are thrilling as Bryan sews the work together.
There’s a conversation with Beethoven there: the work pushes its listeners to reassess who and what they understand as “canon" and perhaps ask themselves how those views got so narrow and pigeonholed in the first place. And at the same time, the piece itself is a broad call to come together in a world where people seem to have increasing trouble doing so.
Sunday, that began as strings crested over the stage, Greene’s rich baritone weaving through them. He sang out, and the music seemed to bend to his voice. Horns entered, hot, triumphal. Woodwinds shrieked and trilled, and then the sound shrank beneath him just as quickly. Percussion flounced in with an ebb and flow of harp that felt divine, seraphic.
The music was a current running through Greene: his voice swelled over percussion, fitting itself around the woodwinds before it fell quiet just as quickly. Bryan’s composition jumped decades, with influences that ranged from Wayne Shorter to Stevie Wonder to her own background in sacred and secular spaces. Strings dipped, and for just a moment it felt like a quotation of Beethoven’s Ninth.
Lucy Gellman Photo.
Bryan, who spoke about the piece in a pre-concert talk with So, looked on and beamed as the symphony played. In Woolsey especially—a historically, sometimes stiflingly white space with acoustics that are still more 1902 than 2024—compositional voices like hers that are vital. They recognize what has been deemed classical, but they also show audiences how much has been left out, to everyone’s detriment. So later singled her out from the stage, holding out an arm to congratulate her as she stood, and received waves of applause.
That sense of music as a gathering force rippled through the hall. “I needed this today,” a woman murmured to her friend in section E of the balcony seating, and the friend mmmhmed a low, certain response. Across the balcony, a set of parents held their kids close, running their fingers through their hair. Elaine Carroll, chief executive officer at the NHSO, took a moment to honor Chris Getman, who made history as the symphony’s longest-serving board member and passed away last year at the age of 81.
Then musicians were back at attention. With the suggestion already in the air, So jumped into the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, a live wire as he summoned 200 years of music history. There was that familiar build, the momentary trick that the orchestra might be tuning before a fiery, fierce declaration from brass and percussion. As So’s hands fluttered upward, brass and strings began a kind of businesslike waltz, a give and take that had the sections talking to each other across the stage.
Or rather, it seemed at times, debating. As he conducted the first movement—sometimes on the balls of his feet and sometimes bent at the waist—So pushed the orchestra forward with moxie and gusto, drawing out the sheer drama with which the symphony begins. When timpani rolled in, principal Michael Singer might as well have been summoning storm clouds inside. They swelled and gathered, horns and strings bringing in the sheets of rain.
At the end of the first movement, applause filled the hall, traveling up to Woolsey’s high, adorned ceilings and pressing out toward College Street and the Beinecke Plaza. If it was a surprise that bucked buttoned-up convention, nobody fought it. Onstage, So pushed the symphony forward at a clip, in a second movement that seemed at times to gallop. By the time it flowed into the third, pinpricks of light had begun to shine through, some listeners lost in the slow, stretched lyricism of the movement.
And then, the movement shifted, and musicians broke through. Strings made a hopeful entrance, only for a cascade of horns to push them back. They tried again, woodwinds not far behind them, to find a sort of melancholy greeting in their way. Absorbed in the music at the podium, So gestured to sections one by one, pulling his arm back gently, as though raising and lowering the volume of a great, undulating live being.
And then there it was: the first suggestion of the “Ode To Joy” as people know it, played well before voices ever entered the mix. So let it hang there, gentle and hesitant, the sound like the fast beating of wings.
What followed was, in the audience and onstage, the very choice So had referred to earlier in the concert. When Greene took the floor, he pushed away the doom of the earlier movements for a utopic, sometimes euphoric sort of joy. O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! he announced, and the words filled every crack and crevice in the hall.
Sondern laβt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere! In Woolsey, the translation was palpable. Oh friends, no more of these sounds! Let us sing more cheerful songs, More full of joy!
Around him, it was not just fellow soloists who carried that hope, but the choirs themselves, performing in a heart-swelling declaration that felt triumphant, absolute in a world where things often are not. When the work ended, attendees got to their feet—and applauded for what felt like another 15 minutes.
If it was (and is) So’s way of embracing the audience, the audience embraced him back. After the Scherzo, applause was so fervent—just as it was in Vienna, two centuries ago—that musicians rolled with it, and appeared to take an extra beat before starting on the third movement. At the end of the piece, cries of bravo! and Yes! Intermingled for nearly as long as the first movement. People spilled back on to College Street, still thinking about the work.
“Since we are equally human in joy and sadness, together let’s choose the joy that reminds us how much we all share,” So had written in the program notes before the concert, and the words echoed well into Sunday afternoon and evening. It’s a gutsy reading: it points to a belief in both the power of agency, and the potential of people—all people—to be fundamentally good.
It also points to a question: What does it mean to choose joy in a world so completely wracked by violence, grief, and devastation? Surely, when So was programming the season opener, he could not have known that September would include continued war in Sudan, escalating violence in the Middle East and at home, a police-involved shooting in New Haven and floods that washed away entire Appalachian homes and livelihoods.
But he did know the music, a piece that clearly lives in him at this point. Is joy recognizing that the music is not a distraction, but a thing that coexists among these things, in spite of it all? Is it practicing mutual aid over individualism? Is it asking for peace in a season that feels overwhelmed by violence? Is it listening to Courtney Bryan and realizing how much unlearning one must do for classical music to be right?
Is it choosing to work toward the world that could be, rather than the one that is?