The Jacksonville Symphony Celebrates Spring in a Program of Debussy, Tao, and Stravinsky
By Matt Bickett
In the warm sun of spring, ice falls from the wintery trees, crashing down as the once-frozen ground cracks opens. Nature announces the arrival of this season’s listless heat with violent sounds—at least in colder climates, as Courtney Lewis, Music Director of the Jacksonville Symphony, explained at Friday and Saturday night’s concerts. Under Lewis’s baton, the Symphony celebrated the wonderful and at times terrifying changes of the season with a cohesive program of Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes, pianist Conrad Tao’s new Clang and Shudder and Igor Stravinsky’s classic The Rite of Spring.
But before the days of spring could lengthen, the program meditated on the winter sun’s twilight in the three movements of Debussy’s Nocturnes. The winds took the lead with a clear sound and unified pace through the mysterious main theme of “Nuages.” The winds’ beautifully shaded tone colors, assisted by the room’s acoustics, evoked more than just the shifting grays of clouds, also recalling the brighter hues of a northeast Florida winter sunset.
The second movement, “Fêtes,” captured the energy of its namesake festival but with a Parisian reserve appropriate to the score. Responsive strings and crispness in the muted trumpets foreshadowed the buzz to come in the second half of the evening’s program. With the final movement, “Sirènes,” the women of the Jacksonville Symphony Chorus contributed the sound of these mythical creatures to the ensemble. The performance went in and out of the score’s dreamy quality, the chorus at times disagreeing on tone quality and hesitant in Debussy’s demanding phrases. The close of the movement left a suspenseful and unsettled mood, perhaps exactly as Debussy intended.
Next, Tao’s newest work, Clang and Shudder, received its world premiere with the Jacksonville Symphony. The piano concerto’s premiere, featuring the piano almost throughout the entire work, accurately captured Tao’s description. Wild rhythms and repetitions conveyed the play of puppies and toddlers, extending the traditional techniques of classical composition toward an elemental curiosity.
At the same time, the score easily fixated on details, impressive and creative delights, losing track of a bigger picture appropriate to a lay audience. A coherent compositional voice could not emerge, but perhaps this was Tao’s intent. In a world of carefully curated voices, the performance left conscious command for a music of the moment. While the music itself may have been unable to transcend the particular time of its composition, the composer’s performance pointed to a different level of engaging the work. The score staged a turn from the wild music of puppies and toddlers to the political animality of Symphony concert-goer.
Clang and Shudder continued the program’s seasonal focus in moments evocative of the icy themes of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s work. Tao’s glacial pace of musical development, with the bright sounds of extended techniques searing through, made us ponder our shuddering in the cold we’ve left behind as we looked to the The Rite of Spring following intermission.
The Jacksonville Symphony boldly presented a timely and daring rendition of Stravinsky’s classic. In the program’s second half, the stage featured a much larger cast (some of whose names we unfortunately did not learn), and the performance made the case for inviting this enhanced ensemble to return. The strings’ larger presence brought a seriousness to the program that better balanced with the winds, who were freed to focus more on interpreting the intricate score.
The Symphony dutifully executed Stravinsky’s saga of shifting meters and unpredictable harmonies, bringing us along for a raucous ceremony of springtime irrationality. Through the wails of exotic instruments and the skips of twitchy rhythms, the Symphony showed off its players’ range of skill. This somewhat polite performance did not conclude with a rioting audience, unlike at the work’s 1913 premiere, but did send us into a world of a melting status quo.
The Symphony’s presentation of Debussy’s Nocturnes, Tao’s Clang and Shudder and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring demonstrated that, as the ice of indifference falls away, our inevitable celebrations of the irrational and unpredictable come with sacrifices. Like Stravinsky, perhaps we ought to pay more attention to our ceremonies for deciding how we pay these. Although how we do so may cause onlookers to riot.
Review by Matt Bickett | Concerts were April 4 & 5, 2025
Matt Bickett is a musician and scholar living in Jacksonville, FL.
