Boston Classical Review

Christopher Wilkins conducted the Boston Landmarks Orchestra Wednesday night. File photo: BLO

The rain cleared Wednesday night just in time for the Boston Landmarks Orchestra to open its free summer season with a “Best of Boston” concert at the Hatch Shell. Music director Christopher Wilkins led a wide-ranging program that   spotlighted Boston connections, celebrating both America 250 as well as the ensemble’s 25th anniversary.

The concert began with Dudley Buck’s Festival Overture on the American National Air, a work with a deep Boston pedigree. (Buck taught at the New England Conservatory and served as organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral.) Buck threads the “Star-Spangled Banner” theme through the overture in constantly shifting orchestral shades: tender in dark, low-lying scoring, brisk and joyful when the winds and upper strings take it. Wilkins turned to face the audience and led them, standing, into the anthem’s final iteration as the sun began to set behind the shell in a graceful piece of stagecraft and a fitting opening gesture for a 250th birthday party.

The mood shifted dramatically for Omar Thomas’s Of Our New Day Begun, written in memory of the nine victims killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015. Thomas completed his master’s at NEC and joined the Berklee faculty at 23. Similar to the Buck work, Thomas weaves in “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (otherwise known as the black National Anthem). Wilkins let the orchestra sit fully inside the piece’s darkness, its harmonies blues-inflected and its rhythmic gestures rooted in stomping and clapping textures.

The Reverence Gospel Ensemble of Berklee, led by Keeme Tajudeen, joined in for a finale of real flair. The chorus sang with conviction and confidence, though more singers would have bolstered their strength. Combined with the orchestra, it was the most emotionally direct performance of the evening, extending into a gospel encore of “Come What May It’s Still Yes!”

Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story closed the first half. Scored in 1960 by the show’s original orchestrators, Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, the suite condenses the musical’s stylistic sprawl of mambo, cha-cha, ballad, and bebop fugue into an effective dramatic arc. The orchestra found real tenderness in “Somewhere” and turned loose, biting brass through the “Cool” Fugue and Rumble. When the final section returned to the “Somewhere” theme, the sky had darkened enough that the music’s resolution and the day’s felt like the same event.

The evening’s centerpiece was William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 4, “Autochthonous,” a work heard far less often than his First Symphony and long overdue for attention. Still’s own Boston story is one of the program’s most striking: while performing oboe in the touring production of Shuffle Along in 1922, he sought out George Chadwick, then director of NEC, who took him on as a private composition student without charging tuition. The Fourth is dedicated to Still’s Oberlin teacher Maurice Kessler, a Boston Symphony violinist.

Conceived as a stylistically pluralistic portrait of America, the symphony opens on a five-note motive drawn from black musical traditions before the strings take up a buoyant, open-hearted principal theme. The second movement is a slow blues that turns more forceful in its middle section; the third, a bright dance that carries clear echoes of Still’s Broadway work. The finale, marked “slowly and reverently,” moves from an anguished climax through a densely woven middle section that stacks earlier themes atop one another, before returning to its opening material and rising to a resounding close. Wilkins shaped the arc with deliberate authority, and this performance made a strong case for Still as a composer of greater depth and originality than his more-familiar works might indicate.

Lighter music made up the rest of the program.

Brazilian percussionist Marcus Santos and Grooversity, his Boston-based Afro-Brazilian drumming ensemble joined the orchestra for two Chiquinha Gonzaga numbers, with Atraente, a choro-inflected polka, flowing into Ó Abre Alas. Gonzaga was Brazil’s first professional female conductor, and the arrangements (by David Kempers), gave the orchestra room to breathe alongside Grooversity’s driving hand percussion. Here the ensemble was unsurprisingly loose in patches, as it had to be, with several hundred audience members, recruited during intermission, playing along on the lawn. 

The night wound down with several Leroy Anderson works (Serenata, The Syncopated Clock, the Jazz Pizzicato-Jazz Legato pair, The Waltzing Cat, and “The Rakes of Mallow” from his Irish Suite). Born in Cambridge and educated at NEC and Harvard, Anderson is nearly as much a Boston institution as the orchestra playing his music. Most of these pieces began life as Boston Pops premieres under Arthur Fiedler, who first encouraged Anderson after hearing a Harvard University Band arrangement.

The Landmarks players turned these light classics out with the sass and polish Anderson’s music rewards, capped by a well-timed bark-and-hiss cat fight from one game staff member during The Waltzing Cat. An unannounced encore of Anderson’s Fiddle Faddle drew a standing ovation and sent a satisfied Esplanade crowd home.

Christopher Wilkins leads the Boston Landmarks Orchestra in Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, and works by Florence Price, William Grant Still, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Julia Perry, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 29 at the DCR Hatch Memorial Shell. The program will be repeated 7 p.m. July 31 at Bethel AME Church, Jamaica Plain, and 3 p.m. August 1 at Twelfth Baptist Church, Roxbury. landmarksorchestra.org

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