Garden State Symphony Does Nature Advocacy
High-Definition Environmental Humanities or: Renée Fleming Makes Me Cry, But Not About Nature
Performers:
Ensemble: New Jersey Symphony (home team)
Conductor: Xian Zhang (resident)
Soloist: Renée Fleming (soprano)
Program:
Hazel Dickens/arr. Jeremy Kittel Pretty Bird, George Frideric Handel “Care Selve” from Atalanta, Nico Muhly Endless Space, Joseph Canteloube “Baïlèro” from Chants d’Auvergne (Series 1), Maria Schneider “Our Finch Feeder” from Winter Morning Walks, Björk/arr. Hans Ek All is Full of Love, Heitor Villa-Lobos/arr. Abel Rocha Finale from Floresta do Amazonas, Howard Shore “Twilight and Shadow” from Lord of the Rings, Kevin Puts Evening, Curtis Green Red Mountains Sometimes Cry, Burt Bacharach/arr. Hal David What the World Needs Now
* * * intermission * * *
Ruggero Leoncavallo “Musetta svaria sulla bocca viva” from La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi, Ennio Morricone Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso, John Kander A Letter from Sullivan Ballou, Richard Rodgers “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel
Frederick Loewe "I Could’ve Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady [Encore]
Position: Top tier, center back, NJPAC (Newark)
Purpose/Intent/Questions: This was a “pull” program for me, for reasons of exploring the environmental humanities more broadly. Despite consistent, committed, thorough engagements with both environmental humanities and with music, the point of overlap is an area in which I still feel quite inexperienced, or perhaps yet-satisfied.
How’d it go?
Sweet sanity, this was a very Jersey crowd.1 I have yet to find another audience where such a large percentage of people feel compelled to respond to the orchestra’s tuning A with an A (…natural, sharp, or flat) of their own. Beyond the fit for the overall character of the audience, it was also suitably intelligent given that the orchestra started with “The Star Spangled Banner,” for which a sizable portion of those present opted to sing along. Even if you’re by nature out of tune, a warmup is still salubrious.
This doesn’t happen at every concert in the country–it doesn’t even happen at every season opener. As I have been reading more about the interwoven histories of nationalism and classical music, it was affecting to have this start, though it would have been reasonable to expect it. There were times when it was a matter of political scandal for an orchestra to forgo the anthem.
One thing I do not adore about attending a performance of this sort, which is to say one designed to highlight a vocalist, even one as splendid as Renée Fleming, is that the much beloved orchestra feels, in some way, less necessary. It doesn’t seem that way to me in operas, or jazz performances, or even many oratorios with several soloists. But this was definitely a Renée Fleming event, though the orchestra did get a token amount of time for purely instrumental work.
But as I said, this was a “pull” for me because the bulk of the program was Fleming’s project, Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene, a multimedia presentation of live song interacting with environmental themes, backed by assorted footage from the National Geographic2 Society. As a longtime and lifetime member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, a hat-trick Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference Fiction Workshopper, a contributor to EcoTheo Review, and otherwise an actively engaged enviroliterary citizen, it feels strange that I have avoided, whether intentionally or out of ignorance, a real exploration of the musical branch of the environmental humanities. This felt like an accessible place to dip my toes in. NJS is big-time accessible. The fact that it was on the one-year anniversary of the start of my Outdoor Mindfulness Guide training gave it an even greater air of individual welcome.
And yet, the word is “underwhelmed.” Playing was professionally competent. Footage was beautiful and mostly relevant. Fleming is amazing even when she is working outside of her range. But by the time the intermission rolled around, I had developed a sense that the project was in the category of we ought to do something with only the level of consideration that one can put into urgent memos on emergent events, rather than the sort of Laudato si’ commentary it’s not unreasonable to anticipate about matters we have dealt with since before I was part of the “we.”
I don’t need a strong argument. I continue to believe that environmental hope is a valid part of environmental realism, however narrow, privileged, or unpalatable it might seem. There are a lot of emotions–as well as an unmanageable number of facts–at play in our relationship with all-the-rest-of-this, and it can come out seeming a bit like a jumbled purple-grey Play-Doh mess of alexithymia. Nature blends into nature, but we see where the forest meets the river. This was more like a series of flashes than even vignettes. Perhaps in a more “immersive” seat, front and center, I would have felt something different. But ultimately this felt like something that, for me and for most of the artists, academics, and other thinkers I know working across a variety of disciplines, would still carry the watermark of “draft.”
Dressed like a sort of anti-siren, jumping out of the sea in a rich blue mermaid-cut gown to sing us away from our collective demise, only for that outfit to be somewhat upstaged by the fiery sequined “Halloween” number she changed into for the second part, Fleming herself seemed less than perfectly invested in the environmental program.
Perhaps I was too well-primed from having taken a mindful stroll through Military Park before the performance, on top of my train-ride reading about the Siege of Leningrad, but Fleming’s rendition of “A Letter from Sullivan Ballou,” including her preface that she imagined her singing of the song as Sullivan’s wife reading this final letter out loud to herself, saw me crying and squeezing my fingers to prevent the tears from progressing into any sort of audible weeping. Maybe I am more personally driven by stories of interpersonal love, by brave men, by impossible decisions taken up with courage and dignity. Maybe I have worked with environmental matters for so long that some part of me has become numb to them… but I don’t think that’s the case.
The crowd went absolutely insane for the more traditional, operatic offerings, which were for the most part better suited to Fleming’s voice, more profoundly evocative of intense emotions, and–for most of the audience–likely more familiar as pieces one might hear in the symphony hall. I wouldn’t say that the full program did a disservice to the environment in any way, shape, or form, but it did make me more curious about what music is doing within the environmental humanities family.
I won’t say that visual arts have it easy. But at least people can distinguish some portion of environmental painting without needing everything explained. Each year at Breadloaf, the fiction group would sit down to our first workshop, all feeling tremendously out of place and questioning if we really fit into this organically un/defined category of prose, but inevitably reassured by everyone else–with their fantastically different approaches–that yes, you and your work belong. But music is a bit enigmatic to me. Classical composition has always appropriated from, appreciated, emulated, uplifted, challenged, complicated, flattened, curated, pruned, mythologized, and satirized slices and crumbs of the world beyond human constructs. Because birdsong and the rolling of the tides and sharp summer storms are as given within the canon as flowers are in works populating the worlds’ museums and galleries, great and small, it seems that music might have a bit of an identity issue in asserting itself within the conversation barring new, flagrantly activism-oriented compositions.
I love watching cute baby animals and the majestic undulations of aurorae as much as the next person with eyes and a soul, but in the program they felt like a simultaneously inadequate and unnecessary crutch for the curation of a music-centered experience of environmental appreciation, contemplation, or even mourning.
For all my doubts about Voice of Nature, the program as a whole was still a great time. New Jersey crowds have a particularly wonderful energy that Fleming was chuffed to play with. When she invited the audience to sing along for the final song, which she asserted we would all know (reader, we did not all know–largely due to the NJS’ wonderful success in attracting a demographically and psychographically broad audience, ranging from teens who were watching Taylor Swift TikToks during the intermission, to multigenerational families accompanied by little ones who produced unscripted, delightful3 sounds during the performance, to large gatherings of non-native speakers of English who chatted in Spanish, Russian, and Tagalog before the show started, to the stereotypical bread-and-butter consumers of classical music, including the former band kids and our most glorious elders), I’d estimate that more than half of the audience participated for at least a few lines of the chorus, numbers growing as understanding grew, as more folks learned how we might be expected to apply melody to the words wiggling on screen. And when Fleming complimented the group on “how good” we were–if you’ve ever wanted to capture the sound of people blushing and tucking their hair back behind an ear… there you have it.
Fleming came in willing to have fun with an audience who was more than willing to oblige–while remaining serious about the performance, remarking about songs that weren’t the best suited for her voice’s current range, and not producing too much auxiliary noise relative to the size of the show. Some of the timing of footage and transcriptions was off–we survived. Some of the transcriptions were incorrect–we survived. People did not seem to know when to clap, as is par for the course with programs containing a million tiny pieces–we survived. We survived, and I think I wasn’t the only one who had a good time.
I had an especially good time watching the much-lauded Xian Zhang and her extremely energetic–competent, precise, effective–conducting. She reminded me of one of my greatest unsung heroes: Rachel Friedman, the most sincerely enthusiastic, bubbly, nigh-absurd in her pervasive joy, Israeli woman who taught music at the public middle school I attended, up until her quite recent retirement.
Whether at the piano, conducting across the classroom, or strapping her accordion to her chest to lead us in a rousing rendition of something or other from whichever historical or world tradition we were learning about that week, Mrs. Friedman was loved. Truly and thoroughly. Even kids who were not terribly interested in music, not interested in performing music, not interested in her more traditionally oriented choir rather than the other music teacher’s pops orientation, were always happy to see Mrs. Friedman and be in her classroom. We loved her because she never fell out of love, at least not to my witness, with her subject. She left no room for us to question the authenticity of her passion, and even tweens and teens who are too cool for anything or anyone at school, have to sit with an honest respect for someone who is that unabashedly into her thing.
Some of the similarities are physical, of course. Neither Mrs. Friedman nor Zhang is a terribly tall woman. Both are dark haired. And both were charged with charging up and supporting musicians, though Zhang’s group are all professionals who are at least for the most part there by choice.
In seeing those same shocks of energy flying out of a small woman, being forced to think about the physicality of the profession, I thought of the remarks for which Jorma Panula–the acclaimed Finnish conductor often credited with causing the avalanche of Nordic batons that have descended on ensembles the world over–came under fire some years back. I wouldn’t have said what he said, certainly not how he said it, but I can understand why he would have made gendered remarks about conducting: we live in a gendered world, and one of the great dramas of all of these mixed-gender experiences is that we each enter into them with different expectations. One man’s masculinity is another guy’s “bro, that’s so gay.”
He said, specifically, that women aren’t well-suited to conduct Bruckner.4 I’d argue that most people aren’t well-suited to conduct Bruckner, and that any shortcomings held by women in this measure are part of the statistical realities of there being fewer women conductors and their being newer to the profession. Which is to say that across an infinite timespan and pool of talent, I believe that women will come to conduct Bruckner just about as poorly as men do. He can think it’s about some sort of inherent masculinity to Bruckner’s work–or he can acknowledge that while this generation is more accepting of women conductors, ensembles still contain a great number of men who can’t play Bruckner under a woman’s baton less because of her inability to gesture convincingly without sending her blood pressure through the roof and more due to their inability to listen to a woman’s direction after a lifetime of acculturation against such a superlative indignity.5
Given the reality that conductors’ auditions are not able to be “blind,”6 I would be curious to see the extent to which there are any demographic trends in which music directors are tasked with piles of administrative and community-building work, which are saddled with fundraising demands better suited to professional staff, and which are allowed to focus the majority of their work on their art.
NJ Symphony is a tremendous state institution, performing in five venues in addition to various other community service programs in different locations. They’re slated to be opening a new, additional venue in Jersey City sometime in the spring of 2026.
Though their official season program feels—and is—somewhat lightweight compared to neighboring orchestras, factoring in public service programs and traipsing around the state renders it reasonably robust. It’s also, to my mind, what a “something for everyone” program looks like in practice, with the ecotones between pops-y “cinema concerts” and family-oriented programming providing a warm enough welcome to actually convince young folks to try classical.
I would have been a subscriber if I hadn’t already built out my schedule with each of my main haunts. There were a couple of other programs that interested me, but timing didn’t quite work out. Still, I look forward to any occasion I do have to return and hear them again.
Admittedly, I did not subscribe to NJS during the time I actually lived in NJ. It would have been a short and comfortable train ride to any number of their locations, but the same train that would take me to Newark would also take me into Manhattan. That is indeed a challenge for many symphonies, but NJS under Zhang’s leadership have met it in good posture.
I don’t think The Garden State is really suffering for the lack of Bruckner.
From me, this is a compliment.
My mother has been subscribed to National Geographic since before I was born. The magazine was always available at home, both for reading, and for perusing in pursuit of best-in-class photographic components for the seemingly endless collages and other art projects that populated my elementary school years. There was a rule, spoken or not, about the sanctity of the work, that if I was going to cut out a fluffy penguin chick to stick into a diorama, I had to read the article on the back, first. Which is all to say… I would have showed up for Nat Geo, alone. If you’re bringing a brass section, that’s just gravy.
To me, at least.
A notoriously “love him or hate him” composer, perhaps most people aren’t even suited to listen to Bruckner. It’s not a value judgment!
In high school, the teacher who had been advising our debate club stepped back from it, with a different teacher picking up the responsibility part of the way into my junior year. When I walked into the “new” debate club, I found that I was the only girl, and for some reason everyone was playing setback. A foreign-born classmate [feel free to guess the country!] bemoaned that it was no longer a “boys’ club,” and the new advisor attempted to get me to “debate him” about my right to be there. “We all know each other from last year. Nobody has a problem with my being a girl. [Agitator] is only mad because he knows he only stands a chance against me in a debate if he just straight up lies.” This house is resolved… that… hit the nail on the head. But conductors often don’t have the leeway to be so direct about matters beyond the music.
Perhaps a very well-funded ensemble could do something like “The Masked Conductor,” having candidates perform in weird mascot suits, or put the conductor behind a screen that projects a fine-line stick figure–all fingers and baton intact–and distorts their voice into something akin to Microsoft Sam’s. That’s the kind of trash I’d love to see, but it’s not a scalable or even desirable idea for the reality of choosing someone who is meant to provide not just artistic direction, but to serve as a repository for the myriad assets and liabilities of the ensemble.