Cincinnati’s major Classical music organizations are having a moment. Both the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati May Festival — featuring its chorus with James Conlon conducting the CSO — released recordings last year that earned plaudits from national critics and continue to draw attention. The May Festival’s live from Carnegie Hall performance of The Ordering of Moses, a largely forgotten oratorio by African-American composer R. Nathaniel Dett, was chosen as one of 2016’s best Classical recordings by Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times.
And perhaps the most attention will come this spring, when Cincinnati Opera releases the eagerly anticipated recording from last year’s world premiere of Fellow Travelers, the opera about the persecution of gays in the government during the 1950s era of McCarthyism. With music by Gregory Spears and a libretto by Greg Pierce (from a novel by Thomas Mallon), it garnered accolades and was chosen as one of 2016’s best Classical performances by The New York Times.
The May Festival was first out of the gate last May with its performance of The Ordering of Moses, recorded in May 2014 at Carnegie Hall and released on Bridge Records.
The oratorio had its world premiere at the 1937 May Festival in Cincinnati and was broadcast nationally on NBC Radio, but was mysteriously cut off some three-quarters of the way through. No reason was officially given, but the fact that Dett was African-American suggested that racist callers and advertisers shut down the broadcast.
The Ordering of Moses again was performed at the 1956 May Festival and featured the young soprano Leontyne Price and baritone William Warfield. Starting in 2002, the festival committed to performing works by African-American composers. May Festival executive director Steve Sunderman was determined to track down a score of The Ordering of Moses, and his dogged research caught the interest of Conlon, who was in his penultimate season as the festival’s artistic director.
The Cincinnati performance was on May 7, 2014. Two days later, the orchestra and the May Festival Chorus appeared in Carnegie Hall as part of its Spring for Music Festival. Critics applauded the rediscovery of this neglected work, as well as the performances of soprano Latonia Moore, mezzo Ronnita Nicole Miller, tenor Rodrick Dixon and baritone Donnie Ray Albert.
The decision to release a commercial recording was not made until several months after the performances. “We recorded the concert for a broadcast on WQXR-FM in New York and they streamed it for almost a year,” Sunderman says. “Bridge Records had worked with James Conlon and they were interested in The Ordering of Moses.”
The latest release in the CSO’s long recording history, Concertos for Orchestra, documents live performances of three works commissioned for the orchestra by Louis Langrée, its music director and conductor since 2011. “These concertos can demonstrate not only the virtuosity of the orchestra and its players, but also they allow for a rich variety of orchestral colors,” he says. “I wanted three different composers from different schools, styles and even continents.”
Sebastian Currier’s FLEX premiered in October 2015 and Thierry Escaich’s Psalmos and Zhou Tian’s Concerto for Orchestra premiered in the final two weeks of the CSO’s 2015-16 season. Each piece is a fascinating journey into the orchestral color palette Langrée described, and each has its own unique appeal.
Released in November, Concertos for Orchestra is on the CSO’s own Fanfare Cincinnati label, which made its debut in 2011 after the orchestra’s longtime label Telarc ceased producing new recordings in 2009. Fanfare Cincinnati partners with Naxos of America, Inc., to distribute and market its recordings. Naxos is a leading independent digital and physical distributor of Classical music. Naxos handles the uploads to Spotify, iTunes and Amazon and oversees CD distribution.
Because Currier is American, Escaich is French and Zhou is a native of China now living in the U.S., the CSO’s marketing staff felt the need for extra international exposure for the record. (Langrée, of course, is French and has an international following.)
“We’re working with a publicist in Europe to make sure we’re getting as much global reach as we can,” says Chris Pinelo, the CSO’s vice president for communications. The first large-scale example of that reach was Langrée’s guest blog in the November issue of Gramophone, a British publication.
The Cincinnati Opera caps this impressive hat trick with the upcoming release of Fellow Travelers, recorded during its world-premiere run at the Aronoff Center for the Arts’ Jarson-Kaplan Theater last summer. Unlike the CSO and the May Festival, Cincinnati Opera’s team had the benefit of multiple performances for recording.
“Five performances and the dress rehearsal were recorded,” says Marcus Küchle, the Opera’s director of artistic operations. “The opera’s composer, Gregory Spears, is the executive producer overseeing the final product with an engineer in New York. I’m serving as the executive managing producer.”
Fellow Travelers, with its story of a gay love affair set in 1950s Washington, D.C. amid a homophobic Lavender Scare throughout the government, was a huge success. Inquiries about a recording started after the first performance. “I get requests for the recording every week,” Küchle says. Funding was provided by private donations and support from the Gale Family Foundation and the Newburgh Institute for the Arts and Ideas.
Fellow Travelers’ late-spring release will also be on the Fanfare Cincinnati label, which means that Naxos will handle the distribution logistics.
All three recordings reflect the dynamics and economics of an industry in flux, if not decline. Recordings were once reliable sources of income (especially for the Cincinnati Pops) but in this age of streaming and downloads are no longer.
So, in addition to documenting an important performance, CSO’s Pinelo says the recordings present opportunities to promote new music worldwide. “The reason we get invitations to tour is because people hear our recordings,” he says. ©
This article appears in Feb 15-22, 2017.
