Review: The sound of canyons, farms and rivers fill first Hartford Symphony Masterworks concert of season

With simulated thunderstorms and bird calls and actual hoots and hollers from the musicians’ mouths, Hartford Symphony is bringing the sound of the country to its first Masterworks concert of the 2022-23 season. “American Adventures” is the latest of the symphony’s concerts to feature all American composers — a feature not just of the Masterworks series but the Talcott Mountain summer season in Simsbury. The summer concerts are more overtly patriotic, held on Independence Day weekend and featuring stirring anthems. This one, though it starts with a lush rendition of the national anthem, is more travelogue than flag-waving rally. There’s Ferde Grofé's “Grand Canyon Suite,” Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring Suite” plus a more touristy “American Adventure” in another land, George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.”

The concert, which has its final performance Sunday at 2 p.m., begins not with wide open spaces but with the image of people isolated in their homes. Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout” was composed in 2020 as a tribute to frontline workers and was originally performed virtually by musicians in their homes. The symphony found a way to dramatize that sense of separation in a live concert setting by having a trumpeter perform his solo standing in the auditorium. The piece is well-titled, since there’s a moment where the orchestra members actually start shouting, an exhalation of relief as the busy workday conjured by Coleman comes to an end.

“Seven O’Clock Shout” is only five minutes long, but covers a lot of stylistic ground. It sounds like Henry Manchini one minute and modernistically discordantthe next.

The same might almost be said for Ferde Grofé's majestic, magnificent “Grand Canyon Suite,” composed in 1931. It may not be as well known today as “Appalachian Spring” or “An American in Paris,” but it once was. Ferde Grofé worked regularly with the same jazz bandleader, Paul Whiteman, who premiered Gershwin’s groundbreaking “Rhapsody in Blue,” then premiered “Grand Canyon Suite” seven years later in a similar setting. Grofé, who did the orchestral arrangement for that “Rhapsody in Blue” premiere, is as deft as Gershwin at infusing traditional European classical music styles with upstart American jazz grooves.

What’s necessary to put these style-melds across is an orchestra that understands and respects all the elements. There are a lot of too slick, too clean, too studied symphony recordings of “Grand Canyon Suite,” not to mention “An American in Paris” that completely drain these vibrant works of all their jazzy oomph and warmth. Hartford Symphony knows what these works need: human interaction, an acceptance of differences and an embrace of all the diverse things it means to be American. This concept of a musical community which allows for such a harmonious variety of sounds fits beautifully with Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout”: making music as one can, then bringing it back with a big heart to the concert halls.

“Grand Canyon Suite” opens like a gentle breeze of warm air, a tricky and almost silent opening gambit that the HSO nails with calm confidence. Then the violins kick in, cleanly and coolly. The suite isn’t meant to sound like a canyon but like the air that fills it and the wide open spaces that are contained within it. Friday’s audience broke the cardinal concertgoing rule of not applauding between movements, unable to hold back their excitement at the first section, “Sunrise.” They were clearly also having trouble containing themselves during the middle movement, “On the Trail,” which paints a picture of burros clopping up the canyon trails. There’s a grandiosity to “Grand Canyon Suite,” but it’s not elegant. It’s about nature and sunrises and sunsets. It ends with an utterly convincing thunderstorm. It uses jazz as a leveler.

“An American in Paris,” by contrast, uses jazz to insert an American sensibility into a different culture. The composition was famously turned into a 1951 Gene Kelly movie with an undercurrent of U.S./French relations post-World War II. More recently, it became a Broadway musical that deepened that theme with more visceral wartime memories and a grittier feel overall (though the dances were still gorgeous and dreamlike.) It’s nice to hear “An American in Paris” as the rather basic juxtaposition of cultures it was originally meant to be, unencumbered by plot or romance or fleet-footed dancing.

As for Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” it’s as fresh and modern-sounding as when it was written in the early 1940s. It has ideas in it that nobody has yet improved upon. Instead of jazz, Copland works with Shaker folk melodies, and just as with Grofé and Gershwin, Hartford Symphony knows how to keep it real, respecting the integrity of these religious hymns (which the constantly creative Shakers never meant to be become set-down standards) and letting them coexist with the other musical methods on display rather than sucking them into a formal classical framework.

The only drawback to hearing an orchestra play “Appalachian Spring,” of course, is that it was composed as a ballet score, for Martha Graham’s dance company no less. It’s a reversal of the “An American in Paris” reaction; “Appalachian Spring” has dance built into it, not added later. The way the Hartford Symphony plays it — with the Shaker melodies earthy and organic, other aspects sections rigorously formal and the ending slow and mournful — the drama is all there, and you can just imagine what it would it would be like with a stage full of Graham’s dancers.

This concert shows the Hartford Symphony in its most locally rooted full-strength arrangement — with no invited guest performers and with its inspired music director of the last decade, Carolyn Kuan, conducting — showing us vistas of Eastern, Southern and Western states as well as traveling abroad. There are many sumptuous symphonic moments, but what really stands out are the brazen modern flourishes: the squeaks and squawks and rumbles and raucous outbursts meant to evoke birds or bustling streets or cloudbursts or burros. The HSO is unafraid to cut loose, and it makes all the difference.

“American Adventures” is not just a great trip to the symphony because these are popular, accessible, familiar works that still have to power to move and delight. It’s because you will probably hear these grand pieces, these great adventures, as you’ve never heard them before.

Hartford Symphony Orchestra’s “American Adventures” concert runs through Oct. 9 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. $38-$73. hartfordsymphony.org.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.