The Jacksonville Symphony celebrated the close of its historic 75th season on June 6 and 7 with an all-American program under Music Director Courtney Lewis’s baton. Presenting programmatic works by George Gershwin and Carlos Simon along with Aaron Copland’s third symphony, the Symphony’s celebration reassured as it provoked. The grace with which the season’s closing performance captured the American experience in sound, coupled with the composers’ historically marginalized identities, demonstrated an urgently needed authenticity in its embrace of our nation’s shared values.
The evening began with impressive recognitions of Symphony musicians: the 25th season of principal hornist Kevin Reid and the retirements of Assistant Concertmaster Melissa Barrett and flutist Rhonda Cassano. Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan then took the stage for well-deserved congratulations to the Symphony on its successful efforts and promising future. With additional reflections by President and CEO Steven Libman, and a framing of the evening’s music by Lewis, the scene was set for a memorable evening.
Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” opened the performance portion of the evening with a pleasant energy. Gleeful, percussive rhythms and grand swells ebbed into sensitive string harmonies, which flowed back into powerful brass phrases and slides.
The soulful execution of Gershwin’s more jaunty passages infused the performance with the evening smoke of a Manhattan jazz club. Then, the sparkle of the celesta brought us back to the classical roots of this tone poem.
With the evocation of taxi horns and march-like phrases in the percussion, the Jacksonville Symphony relished the richness of Gershwin’s tapestry of mid-20th-Century American life, even while abroad. The warmth and steady vibrato of principal tubist James Jenkins’ solo displayed the charm of Gershwin’s jazz-influenced classical sound, propelling the orchestra into the cinema-like finale of the work. The orchestra overcame difficulties in the coda to finish with a smile, answered by the audience’s enthusiastic standing ovation.
Composer Carlos Simon then joined the stage for a charismatic description of his work, “Zodiac,” and its inspiration in star signs and horoscopes. The Jacksonville Symphony’s world premiere of Simon’s “Zodiac” evocatively connected listeners with the personalities depicted in the score.
The bold and temperamental heat of the fiery (like the composer himself), the mysterious and at-times confounding flow of watery dispositions, the lofty headspace of air signs (like the conductor and this critic) and grounded earthiness all found a place in the work’s first outing. The score’s strengths lay in the outer movements. The opening movement’s rhythmic and harmonic unpredictability convincingly portrayed its subject matter, and the closing movement’s string writing was a highlight of creativity in the work.
However, Simon’s own star sign may have presented difficulties for the middle two movements. The density of the second movement’s development halted the clear expression of its ideas. While the third movement provided a welcome return to Simon’s more communicative voice, its intricacies may have proved too airy to be captured.
Nonetheless, Simon’s ambitious aim to capture all varieties of personalities paid off in a balanced presentation. The work captured a hint of the humanness among those we’re likely to encounter on a daily basis — even if we don’t fully understand them.
The highlight of the evening came after intermission. In perhaps one of the best performances of the year, the Jacksonville Symphony gave a moving account of Copland’s all-American Symphony No. 3.
As Lewis explained before the performance, Copland’s uncanny ability to depict — somehow at the same time — the experience of being on the prairie and in the steel mill gives this score a heightened relevance. Just exactly what one means when asking about “the American experience” requires more than a single response, and Copland’s extended meditation on this topic took the Jacksonville Symphony to new heights.
The performance of Copland’s symphony greatly benefitted from expanded forces, with guests joining the Jacksonville Symphony’s standard roster on stage to cover additional wind parts and add robustness to the string sections (although the identities of the guests were unfortunately not made known to the audience). The fuller sound became immediately noticeable in the opening phrases and added to the experience through the entirety of the symphony.
The Symphony communicated Copland’s ideas with clarity and reverence. Athleticism and energy throughout the “Allegro molto” elicited applause from the audience, while the sensitivity and control of the “Andantino quasi Allegretto” gave the impression of encountering serious, American art.
Listeners sat up in their seats at the entrance of the famous “Fanfare for the Common Man” in the final movement. Beyond simple familiarity in the tune, the Jacksonville Symphony’s performance conveyed a depth that captured our attention. The professional and the uninitiated alike could sense that the Symphony’s voice aligned with the score’s ethos to enrapturing effect.
While debates over divisiveness and unity continue to dominate, Lewis and the Jacksonville Symphony discovered a compelling case for shared values that celebrated differences without overlooking history. The concert’s success demonstrated that there was no need to downplay that Gershwin was the son of an immigrant, that Simon’s compositional voice uniquely illuminates the injustice people of African ancestry face today, or that Copland lived an openly gay life even before Stonewall. The Jacksonville Symphony’s 75th season concluding concert celebrated these voices as part of the authentic American experience — a refreshingly wholesome perspective.
Matt Bickett is a musician and scholar based in Jacksonville. He is director of music at St. Paul’s by the Sea Episcopal Church in Jacksonville Beach and is a Corps Member with Teach for America.
