Star-Ledger: NJSO Brahms concerts in week’s ‘Top 5’

The Star-Ledger names the NJSO’s performances of Brahms’ First Symphony in Englewood, Princeton and Newark among the “Top 5 NJ shows this week”:

Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, joins the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra to perform the premiere of Richard Danielpour’s Clarinet Concerto, “From the Mountaintop,” inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Concerts Saturday and Sunday at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Thursday at bergenPAC and Friday at the Richardson Auditorium also include Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 and Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3, njsymphony.org

Asbury Park Press delves into Danielpour’s Clarinet Concerto, inspired by the life of Martin Luther King Jr.:

His concerto, “From the Mountaintop,” [was] born from an idea for an opera on the life of King, planned in parternership with the poet Maya Angelou, a previous collaborator in Danielpour’s work. While the opera itself never panned out, the music for it made it to this instrumental work.

The music in three connected movements has touches of the dramatic, including timpani representing the thunderstorm that occurred during King’s last speech in Memphis, just hours before his assassination. In that speech, King spoke of threats against his life but said he was unconcerned about what might befall him because he had “been to the mountaintop” and had been allowed a glimpse of a better future.

“And I've seen the Promised Land,” King said. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

Danielpour doesn’t shy from the political and social struggle represented in the headlines of the civil rights era, but he also strives in his music to put the drama into a broader context, more worthy perhaps of a Bach cantata than an opera or a concerto. In remarks cited on the NJSO website, Danielpour says his interviews with King colleague Andrew Young convinced him that “the point of the civil rights movement wasn’t political; it was spiritual.”

“The goal of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was forgiveness,” Danielpour is quoted as saying. “This is a piece about memory and respect. When you recall an event that occurred 45 years earlier, your memory is tinged with a different quality of energy. The concluding movement is about pain, but pain tinged with hope. I hope it is art that means something.”

Read the full preview at app.com.