QUEEN CITY NERVE: Down at Spoleto Festival USA, the Vibe Is Shifting
June 5, 2024 - by Perry Tannenbaum, Queen City Nerve
“Looking down benignly at his Dock Street Theater audience, the newly anointed host of Spoleto Festival USA’s chamber music series, Paul Wiancko, gave us a slight ceremonial nod. “You have chosen wisely,” he said sagely…
Enough to mightily crown most concerts, the Beethoven was merely a satisfying appetizer. For Wiancko had cooked up a powerful combo, calling upon two living composers that I was barely familiar with, Jonathan Dove (b. 1959) and Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937).
Our contribution to the magic would be to withhold our applause between the two pieces. It was easy enough to maintain stunned silence after In Damascus, Dove’s heartfelt setting of Syrian poet Ali Safar’s grieving (and aggrieved) reaction to a senseless car-bombing in his nation’s war-torn capital.
The prose poems were achingly and angrily sung by tenor Karim Sulayman, perhaps most indelibly after an extended instrumental interlude, turbulently delivered by a string quartet that included Kenney, Beilman, Wiancko (on cello), and violist Masumi Per Rostad.
“We will be free,” Sulayman sang in Anne-Marie McManus’s ardent translation, “of our faces and our souls/ or our faces and our souls will be free of us/ and the happy world won’t have to listen to our clamor anymore/ we who have ruined the peace of this little patch of Earth and angered a sea of joy.”
Sulayman was visibly in tears as the lights went down on In Damascus and pianist Pedja Mužijević entered with his iPad and sat down at the Steinway. In the dimness, Mužijević played Silvestrov’s Lullaby, an appropriate coda to a song sequence that began with the children of the Zuhur neighborhood in Damascus who would never wake from their sleep — or survive a bogus “holiday truce” — and ended with the evocation of mothers and loved ones who would always await their return…”