ISO says goodbye to resident conductor, welcomes back a star soprano

 In the spring after  the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Esquire magazine published a long

Unforgettable, iconoclastic cover

reassessment of the slain president by Tom Wicker, titled as a gentle warning: "Kennedy Without Tears."

This weekend's program as the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra resumes its Classical Series could well be called "20th-century Music Without Tears." The allusion in this case refers to the remaining wariness of the ordinary classical patron about musical modernism: Will I weep with regret that I attended this concert? The resistance is tempered somewhat if there's a commissioned new work on the program, since everyone gets at least a bit excited by novelty.

But what Jacob Joyce chose for his podium swan song to the ISO is unlikely to spur any anguish or gnashing of teeth. Instead, the tears are buried within the music, and that's part of the appeal of Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes, Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," and Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. 4 ("Inextinguishable"). The program will be repeated in Hilbert Circle Theatre at 5:30 p.m. today.

Britten and Barber are two of the most eminent 20th-century conservatives. Nielsen, a distinguished Danish composer with 19th-century roots, never embraced the modernist revolution that had taken root by the time he wrote his fourth symphony in 1915. Their strong artistic personalities never succumbed to fatuous ideas of inevitable musical progress.

Jacob Joyce, former resident conductor here

The three works have different ways of acknowledging "the tears in things" (lacrimae rerum) that Virgil cited so long ago in the "Aeneid." In "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," Barber gave permanent concert status to his contemporary James Agee's nostalgia for his boyhood in Tennessee. Nielsen proclaimed that the positive force of life is "inextinguishable" despite the carnage of World War I, in which America had not become embroiled at the time of Agee's idyll. Britten, looking backward from his temporary exile in the United States during World War II, drew upon an 18th-century narrative poem by Thomas Crabbe to fashion "Peter Grimes," the only enduring repertoire opera introduced since that cataclysm. 

It was a thrill to have soprano Julia Bullock back with the ISO after several years. She had made Britten's "Les Illuminations" more intelligible to me than it had been in the signature recording by tenor Peter Pears, the composer's durable life-and-artistic partner. I anticipated similar revelations in her performance of the Barber classic, and indeed she insightfully embodied the American composer's magical way with Agee's lyrical prose memoir. This is a case where another classic recording (Leontyne Price's) can occupy all of a listener's head space available for "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." Bullock made the work her own, blending intimacy and intensity.

Dressed somberly in dark elegance, she entered the stage with a contrasting broad smile, answering the audience's applause with some of her own. She seemed genuinely happy to be here. But every gesture and facial expression during her performance matched the tender depiction of Agee's childhood bliss among family, gazing skyward from the lawn on a star-spangled Southern evening. Where Barber/Agee regard the stars that so few of us see any longer, comparing their brightness to the voices of sleeping birds, the soloist raised her eyes in awe. 

Near the end, Barber follows Agee's twang of  "Who am I?" anxiety indelibly.  On Friday, Bullock

Julia Bullock's return as guest artist is most welcome.

suggested the questioning mood with her hands spread slightly out from her sides, then closing toward her breast as she mirrored Agee's reflection that the deepest issues of personal identity are up to each of us to solve. Her tone and phrasing matched each nuance of the text, and Joyce shaped the orchestral setting with genuine picturesqueness.

The tormented fisherman Peter Grimes of Britten's opera is the source as well as the victim of his own troubles. The tears in its Four Sea Interludes are implied through music that captures both the variability of the ocean on which he and his fellow villagers depend for their livelihood and wrenched harbingers of Grimes' dismal fate. Joyce and the ISO opened the concert with a brilliantly evocative performance; the "Dawn" interlude, with its portentous brass lines welling up in answer to the strings, sounded massive as well as hushed.

 Only some imprecision in the way the violins answered the horns' church-bell imitation marred "Sunday Morning," the second interlude, which faded away marvelously well. "Moonlight" was superb as an eerie prelude to "The Storm," which filled the hall with Britten's authentic representation of meteorological terror and false hopes of calm.

Joyce prefaced the post-intermission performance of the Nielsen symphony with expressions of gratitude to the orchestra and audience for support during his time here. Over the past four years, he has had to deal with upholding the artistic viability of the ISO during the challenges of the pandemic. He did so imaginatively, even when little more than the orchestra's online presence could be sustained.

This concert was an impressive display of his direct and eloquent podium technique and his thorough attention to music of immense variety, much of it in the Nielsen symphony alone. His management of pace and texture (the latter ranging from first-chair string soloing to the immense two-timpanist duel and the general furor of the last movement) was steady and sensitive. The haunting mood of reminiscence the composer permitted himself blossomed in the second movement.  And finally, Joyce and the orchestra remained alert to the work's difficult resolution of conflict in favor of life's inextinguishable triumph.

 Like those teardrops on Esquire's JFK cover, this ISO program uses music both to call up sorrow as an assertion of values and to hold open the promise that it can be wiped away for a time.