Rating: 5.0/5.0
Last Sunday, led by guest conductor Ming Luke and Grammy Award-winning composer Juan Pablo Contreras, the Berkeley Symphony performed at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley to soaring heights and riveting technical achievement. The show featured four compositions, including Contreras’ revelation “Alma Monarca,” which was commissioned in-part by the Berkeley Symphony alongside the Chicago Sinfonietta and Fresno Philharmonic.
The four compositions were led by “Alma Monarca,” which was preceded by a foreword from Contreras where he described the work as a remembrance of his family’s history in Mexico and their celebration of Día de los Muertos.
Contreras spoke accurately to the journey of “Alma,” as the composition makes tremendous effort to incorporate traditional Mexican music into the standard symphonic components with strings and woodwinds. The piece enculturates its listener, moving efficiently and succinctly through the fantastical feel of celebrating Día de los Muertos.
The composition is a narrative piece which not only seeks to explore the Día de los Muertos holiday, but moves through the two-day period of the celebration. Contreras makes superbly inventive choices in exploring emotional and temporal trajectories in “Alma” by highlighting different sections of the symphony as the central force of the work at different times. Whenever a new section takes sonic center stage, the listener understands that the celebration has moved to a new ceremony or moment.
Contreras’ innovation extends to the style of instruments used, with one section featuring a gleeful xylophone solo, played only in that moment, by three walk-on xylophonists. It’s a moment that encapsulates the expertise Contreras exercises and his ability to command a packed house into a fit of laughter — in that moment, the church was pandemonium.
Contreras harkens back to baroque-era experimentation by using the instruments to evoke the natural world; the piano emulated bells, woodwinds emulated water and violins emulated birds. These Vivaldi-esque choices snapped the listeners right into his home state of Jalisco and culminated in a well-deserved standing ovation from the house.
“Alma” was followed by Lang’s arrangement of Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,” a heavier successor to Contreras’ whimsy. “Four Last Songs” was accompanied by Grammy Award-nominated opera singer Laquita Mitchell, whose expressive capabilities extend far beyond her vocal talent.
Mitchell treated these compositions as theater, filling the auditorium with her stage presence; her physicality and facial movements underscored the pathos of her voice. As the title suggests, the piece is split into four movements, or songs, with Mitchell anchoring each segment as the lead soprano.
Each of these songs are lyricized in German, and though I do not speak it, it was an easy effort to engage with the heartache and tumult Mitchell performed. The instrumental sections were more in the periphery of the vocals here, yet they merged in a way that allowed the audience to feel what Strauss likely intended to express: longing, regret and desire.
The third composition was Missy Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres),” another contemporary experimental work like Contreras’. Per the programme which every audience member received upon arrival, Mazzoli’s piece is “music in the shape of a solar system,” an abstract idea that was actualized through unusual instrumentation, such as a harmonica choir, and alternative use to standard instrumentation, like the unconventionally sporadic drums section that appeared at random throughout the work. The piece was dense for good reason — a sonic interpretation of an intergalactic experience where sound cannot travel.
The evening culminated in Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 9 in E-flat minor, Op. 70,” another modern European work which satisfied the movement between 1900s and 2020s compositions. This 26-minute epic was Shostakovich’s defiance against the Nazi regime in 1945, textured by a smaller orchestra that still packed a poignant political message. The piece had a recurring convention of drums that emulated a militaristic march, at first followed by a doomful, bass-filled section from the drums and strings, and then dwindled to diminishing returns every time the militaristic march reoccurred.
The last march was followed by a bright, wimpy section from the woodwinds; it’s easy to imagine how this could parallel the petty fall of the Nazi regime and the relevance of performing this piece in the United States today.
For better or for worse, Shostakovich’s satirical tone is as biting and relevant now as it was in the ’40s — a testament to Luke’s prowess as a conductor and programmer alike.