Concert Review: Soprano Mary Wilson Shines at IRIS performance
11/02/08
By Jon W. Sparks
Special to The Commercial Appeal
Sunday, November 2, 2008
It was a celebration mixing the old and the new at Saturday night's concert by the IRIS Orchestra at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre.
There were luminous performances throughout, but the brightest was Ned Rorem's "Songs Old and New," a song cycle commissioned by IRIS and presented in its world premiere just days after the composer turned 85.
The old songs were previously published with piano accompaniment. What was new was an orchestral arrangement for six poems, plus three new songs using material by Edgar Allen Poe. The poetry, including works by Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, Robert Hillyer, Christina Georgina Rossetti and Paul Goodman, are exquisite in depictions of love, wit, life and heartbreak.
Rorem's treatments are stunning, evocatively American, rich with intelligence and passion. The orchestrations shimmered and played with the texts, sometimes reflecting them, sometimes going the other way; passages of foreboding, for example, were set against seemingly innocuous verse.
The star of the evening was soprano Mary Wilson whose virtuoso performance infused the songs with crystalline beauty. Her expressive voice is perfectly suited to the Rorem works, bringing along warmth, whimsy and color.
As ideally suited as her voice is to contemporary works, it is no less adept with the classics. She performed Mozart's "Exsultate, Jubilate," a gorgeous motet created by the composer when he was a teenager. But it is a fully mature work, and Wilson's soaring performance nailed it with breathtaking precision.
This was Wilson's first appearance in the region and we hope there will be many more. She recently moved to Bartlett.
Maestro Michael Stern also led IRIS in two symphony performances Saturday night. Haydn's No. 49 (La Passione) was a gem that opened the evening and a showcase for the orchestra's expressiveness and balance.
The evening ended with Schubert's Symphony No. 3. Like the Mozart, this work was done when Schubert was a teenager. It's not a masterpiece - it's more like a youngster's really impressive exposition of tra-la-las for orchestra - but it is a fascinating moment in the composer's musical journey.
