Contemporary American Composers Philip Glass: Symphony No. 11; Jessie Montgomery: Hymn for Everyone; Max Raimi: Three Lisel Mueller Settings *Elizabeth DeShong (mezzo-soprano); Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Riccardo Muti CSO Resound CSOR9012301 66:54 mins
Jessie Montgomery’s Hymn for Everyone (2021) is the first piece written as part of the composer’s ongoing residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO). Tolling bells punctuate slow-moving melodies that are passed, chorale-like, from strings to woodwind to brass, where the music explodes in epic tragedy. The date of composition reveals the pandemic reference point; Montgomery also draws on the loss of her mother, whose Poem for Everyone provided the initial inspiration. It is a significant gear-change from the likes of Banner (2014) and Starburst (2012), Montgomery’s sprightly, better-known works for strings; the CSO confidently steps into the darkness.
The visceral juxtapositions experienced in Lisel Mueller’s poetry feed into three songs by Max Raimi, a long-standing CSO viola player. Evocative imagery (‘starry heads of dandelions turned sages’) is conjured by gently meandering solo lines, with the occasional spoken word (mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong) and colourful – often dramatic – orchestral writing, sensitively played by the CSO.
Philip Glass has said that he considers Chicago an ‘artistic home’, having attended many CSO performances while he was a student in that city. Riccardo Muti leads the orchestra through Glass’s 2017 Symphony No. 11, in which the driving melodies of the first movement snowball – percussion collects woodwind, ultimately to be smothered by brass. After a more restrained, if disjointed, middle movement, the third opens with an extended percussion solo before returning to the thickly textured format. Everything has been thrown at the wall, instrumentally speaking, and not much sticks. Claire Jackson