PRSO’s ‘Paulus’ (who?) promises enriching fare with Barber, Strauss

Soprano Laura Miah Ramos (Facebook via lauramiah)

“Parents on porches: rock and rock.

From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.”

– “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” by James Agee

By PEGGY ANN BLISS

Special to The STAR

This Saturday’s Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra (PRSO) concert may feel a bit like deja vu. After all, the long-planned classical concert with the cryptic title of “Paulus” just might have a few music lovers scratching their heads.

Who is Paulus to have a whole concert named for him?

After all, didn’t we just learn about concerti for orchestra, introduced by the genre’s inventor Bela Bartok in 1943?

But wait, the prolific but little known composer Stephen Paulus (1949-2014) wrote another five-movement concerto for orchestra in 1982-83, a full four decades after his Hungarian standard bearer wrote the concerto featuring the large ensemble.

Be that as it may, as soon as Associate Music Director Rafael Enrique Irizarry raises his baton at Saturday’s opening offering it will be clear that Paulus owes more to the bombastic and iconoclastic works of Russian Igor Stravinsky than to the output of the folk-inspired and meditative Bartok, who engaged more with the non-European folk music of the Roma and Magyar tribes of Hungary and Rumania.

Yet Paulus, who spent most of his life in the cold extremes of Minnesota, including the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, is “American in the truest sense of the word,” Irizarry said in a text talk with The STAR.

In a week filled with polished run-throughs at the orchestral home venue, the maestro recalled “the cosmopolitan rhetorical devices used early in the 20th century by composers like [Aaron] Copland, [William] Schumann, [Roy] Harris, [Charles] Ives and others.”

Paulus, a double Grammy winner (posthumously), penned more than 600 works of almost every genre. 

Second on the program, Irizarry -- himself educated in Puerto Rico, Indiana, California and Venezuela, the latter known for its innovative musical educational programs -- has continued the North American theme on an entirely different note, with “The Summer of 1915” by Samuel Barber (1910-1983), inspired by contemporary poet James Agee about the last days of innocence before warfare broke out all over Europe, eventually dragging the U.S. into the fray of World War I.

Agee and Barber take the audience back over a century to the idyllic pre-war days of the laid-back southern rhythms of Knoxville, Kentucky in an innocence achieved less than half a century after the abolition of slavery in the New World’s southern agricultural belt.

Those idyllic days, spent chatting with neighbors on porch steps, reach out slowly but luxuriously.

This nostalgia, in the original English, will be delivered in the limpid, pure soprano tones of Puerto Rico’s Laura Miah Ramos, called “the perfect voice” by British composer John Ritter when she sang his “Magnificat” here with the PRSO. Conservatory-trained in San Juan, she is now completing her master’s degree in opera at Yale University.

Barber’s work was commissioned by American soprano Eleanor Steber and later performed/recorded by such an imposing interpreter as Leontyne Price.

However, in later years, following the lead of lyric soprano Dawn Upshaw, who won a Grammy for her child-eye’s view of the same back porch, the interpretation changed. After Upshaw came several lighter-voiced sopranos, including Kathleen Battle, Sylvia McNair, praised for her “intimate and dreamy version,” and Renee Fleming, who has performed it in the nostalgic sylvan atmosphere of The Shed at Tanglewood Music Festival in western Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains, an evocative setting.

But perhaps no one related to the local classical music scene can forget the intricate prose text and crystalline vocal line that the late Susan Pabón (née Young) performed here in 1982, coinciding with the World’s Fair in Knoxville. That local premiere was a perfect vehicle for her “crystalline voice, supreme vocal color and perfect diction,” and “emotive clarity,” in the words of music critics.

And while following in Pabón’s footsteps is no walk in the park, veteran Irizarry, who recalls the late soprano with fond admiration, promises her successor will take those steps in stride, setting another bar for Agee and Barber.

“Miss Ramos will beautifully soar above the orchestra showing off her glorious vocal instrument in the rewarding acoustics of the Casals Symphony Hall,” he confidently predicted after rehearsal. “She’s the real deal.”

The concert culminates with a “Symphonic Fantasy” by German composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949), a concert version of his sumptuous, but overlong, opera “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” (The Woman Without a Shadow).

Strauss wrote this version in 1947, when he was broke and nearly broken by World War II. Barely surviving as an exile in Switzerland, he lived on credit provided by an admiring and principled innkeeper, who carefully preserved Strauss’ previous manuscripts as collateral.

The opera, written during World War I some 30 years earlier, is a sweeping, mythological fantasy about love, sacrifice and redemption (spiced with Freudian psychology) that leaves an uplifting message through its most enduring themes.

Irizarry, who has wielded the PRSO baton for almost two decades, told this reporter he hopes his modern selections will enlighten and entertain, as every well balanced program is obligated to do.

A toast to Paulus. May he join his better known 20th century colleagues in a perfect concert.

Concert No. 10 “Paulus” of the current PRSO classical season will be presented Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Pablo Casals Symphony Hall at Luis A. Ferre Performing Arts Center in Santurce.

Composer Stephen Paulus (allmusic.com)