Culture & Community | Music | Arts & Culture | New Haven Symphony Orchestra | Arts & Anti-racism
Perry So photographed in New Haven's Wooster Square Park last year, during his "audition" for NHSO music director. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
A clarion call to choose joy, in a world completely turned on its head. A reimagining of Beethoven’s first and only ballet, complete with New Haven’s first poet laureate on the mic and some of its best dancers on the stage. A nod to 20th-century composer Robert Nathaniel Dett, forgotten largely because he was Black.
And a question around how the symphony itself can move forward, in a country where its performance model is no longer sustainable.
All of those are on tap this year, as Maestro Perry So begins his first season as music director at the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO) this month. As he kicks off rehearsals for the season opener this week, he is thinking about the role music plays in building community—and how the organization can better serve New Haven in its 130th year.
He is also celebrating a sort of homecoming: So lived in New Haven during his time as an undergraduate at Yale, and then stayed for almost a decade when his wife, the historian Anna Graber, pursued a graduate degree in the history of science and medicine at the same university. This summer, the two moved to Madison with their two young children.
"All of the elements are in place for us to start to build the kind of orchestra that I feel like New Haven deserves,” he said during an interview Monday afternoon.”We're programming more thematically, we're programming with a particular eye towards what questions might be in the public imagination, what questions we might want to address.”
“So Tchaikovsky and Brahms and those guys are still there, but they are in a context of really a civic conversation about the cultural direction of our society. It's taking music back from the absolute music people and claiming for it a space at the center of public dialogue.”
So replaces Maestro Alasdair Neale, who served as music director from 2019 to 2024. During his tenure, Neale grew the symphony’s repertoire while helping steer musicians through a global pandemic and a reckoning with white supremacy that is still very much ongoing. He and his husband, Dr. Lowell Tong, have since relocated to Paris.
In his absence, he leaves room for a new vision that is as curious and expansive as it is generous, with musicians and community often at the center. That begins on stage this month, as the symphony opens with Ludwig van Beethoven’ Symphony No. 9, known for its sweeping fourth movement and use of Friedrich Schiller’s eighteenth-century poem “An die Freude” or “Ode To Joy.”
Presented alongside Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson’s 2023 “Gathering Song,” it is a nod to that which is possible in a world totally beset by catastrophe and grief.
“The protagonist talks to himself, and says, ‘I’m gonna choose something else,’” So said of the fourth movement, which may be the most instantly recognizable part of the work. When he started programming the season, that stayed with him. “We are in this kind of intractable moment where there’s no physical way to remove ourselves from a lot of these questions. The choice of joy seems to me the element of the Beethoven that is not culturally limited.”
Beethoven’s work is not uncomplicated, So acknowledged: “Ode To Joy” has been used by Fascist and colonial regimes including the Nazis, the British Crown and the government of East Germany, as well as left-leaning politicians like François Mitterand. Schiller’s poem, if one does a close reading, isn’t a particularly moving or extraordinary piece of art. And the first three movements are fairly “airless,” dark and despairing, he said.
And yet, the fourth movement breaks through, giving listeners a totally unexpected burst of agency. It is, in other words, it summons joy in a world where it does not always feel conceivable. It is choosing to raise children despite climate change, that they might make better choices than their parents. It is choosing mutual aid instead of capitalism, because one finally understands the harmful limits of economic growth. It is choosing arts education in school districts that have made it a rarity. It is believing that another world is possible.
“Joy is what so many of us are looking for in a conversation that seems joyless,” he said. “I find that reading the text itself has given me a clue as to why it endures.”
The program, meanwhile, also allows two works to talk to each other across time and space, imagining what Beethoven might teach his listeners in the present. With “Gathering Song,” Bryan and Thompson tap into the genius and breadth of Black music, celebrating musicians from Scott Joplin to Stevie Wonder. For the young composer, whose body of work also addresses police brutality, it is a powerful call to come together that resonates with So.
“It says so much of what I hope for the symphony,” he said. “That it’s a gathering place, that it’s a forum, it’s where roads cross … In this culturally very diverse and complex community, the idea that what was once an incredibly white institution is really confronting its history and trying to find a way to be a gathering place.”
It is part of a larger rethinking of Beethoven that So is excited to bring to New Haven. In late November, the NHSO returns to the Lyman Center for the Performing Arts with Beethoven’s “The Creatures of Prometheus,” written and performed in 1801 as the composer’s first and only ballet. While people may be familiar with the five-minute overture that introduces the work, very few have listened to the whole ballet; fewer still have seen a staging.
The ballet explores the myth of Prometheus, the Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity. When the gods discovered what Prometheus had done, Zeus punished him by having an eagle peck out his liver, only for it to grow back again and again in perpetuity.
As it comes to New Haven, So is shaking off two centuries of historical baggage, folding in work from New Haven Poet Laureate Sharmont “Influence” Little and Tia Russell Dance Studio to create a wholly unique New Haven premiere. While the music will remain the same, Little plans to weave in five new, original poems, interventions on the work presented alongside choreography from Tia Russell Brockington and studio dancers.
It’s a little bit like throwing musical spaghetti at the wall: So doesn’t know what it will be like or whether it will work, because it’s completely new. But he’s excited to give it a try.
“The entire experience will feel, hopefully, like you’re listening to music that sounds kind of familiar, because we all think we know Beethoven, but it’s been contextualized entirely differently,” he said. “And the myth itself will be presented by Sharmont only through the lens of how it might be a mirror for contemporary life.”
“The idea,” he added, “Is that we have to resurrect him [Beethoven] to make him actively answer to what our concerns are right now.”
It also means shifting the narrative around who gets to own a genre of music, particularly when it belongs to the classical canon. In February 2025, the symphony will present Robert Nathaniel Dett’s “The Ordering of Moses,” an oratorio that was pulled from the radio mid-broadcast in 1937 after listener complaints flooded the airwaves. The complaints had nothing to do with the music itself: listeners didn’t like hearing the work of a Black composer on the radio.
In the years and then decades that followed, Dett’s name was largely left out of a mainstream conversation around twentieth-century classical music (his legacy continued in historically Black colleges like Hampton, where he taught prior to his death in 1943). For years, his name was forgotten—a fate that fellow composers like Fela Sowande, Florence Price and Carl Haywood also suffered during and after their lifetimes.
In that sense, the concert is a reclamation: all those names appear on the same concert program. So also plans to present the work as “sort of a sermon,” liberated from the buttoned-up (and relatively recent) conventions of classical music. That’s not necessarily a first for the symphony—an April 2024 celebration of the Harlem Renaissance felt more like a hot jazz joint than a stifled concert hall—but it’s still relatively rare at a performance.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is make the concert format less European—well, less white, I think I should say that,” So said.
That work to grow the canon continues in May, with So’s final concert of the season. Titled “Danzas Sinfónicas,” the performance will feature work from composers Arturo Márquez, Daniel Freiberg, Gabriela Lena Frank, Silvestre Revueltas, and Alberto Ginastera, including two concertos that have not yet been heard on the East Coast. Pacho Flores, a Venezuelan trumpet virtuoso, will feature as the day’s soloist.
“I’m excited to bring music that I don’t think the New Haven Symphony plays very much of, and in a concert format that doesn’t really center any particular composer or any particular style,” So said. “It really is an invitation to think about the America of classical music differently.”
As he begins the season, So also sees this year as a chance for the organization to rethink and expand its work, from educational partnerships to performances themselves. For years, he said, the symphony’s rehearsal and performance model (and that of regional symphony orchestras across the country and the globe) hasn’t been sustainable. Often, musicians rehearse for four days, then deliver a single concert performance—sometimes two—before moving on to the next concert.
Where does that leave So as he begins his tenure? "We have to reinvent ourselves as both a performing and a service organization,” he said. For him, that means leaning into the partnerships that already exist—Black Lives Matter New Haven, the New Haven Free Public Library and the LAB at ConnCORP, as well as several schools and opportunities for young people—and building new ones that fill the needs of a community.
It also means pushing musicians—including young musicians and “the geniuses in our midst,” whose stars have been long overlooked—to play with more technical and emotional skill than audiences have heard in some time. As the NHSO finds itself in the midst of a strategic planning process this year, that question feels right on time. It’s also an invitation to the audience—to come along for the musical ride, but also to inform it.
“Are we performing with the technical but also the spiritual and emotional intensity and at the level where our audience and our community feels that we are transmitting something essential?” So said. “In many ways, art is a luxury—you need bread before you can have it. But that we can create at which we all sit, and we’re nourished by the same ideas and the same experiences of art.”
The first concert of the NHSO’s 2024-25 season takes place at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 22 at Woolsey Hall in downtown New Haven. Tickets and more information are available here.