Kansas City Symphony
Michael Stern, conductor
Julia Bullock, soprano
Helzberg Hall
Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts
Kansas City, MO
June 3, 2023

Delius: The Walk to the Paradise Garden
Montgomery: Five Freedom Songs
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G major

Under the baton of music director Michael Stern, the Kansas City Symphony’s program for the first weekend of June paired the most charming of the Mahler symphonies with a certified rarity and a recent work which the ensemble co-commissioned. Frederick Delius’ The Walk to the Paradise Garden, an extended interlude from his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, made for a lovely opener. Marked by a gentle, rising theme, there was especially fine playing from the oboe. Lush textures and surging phrases in this gem of a piece piqued my interest in exploring more Delius.

Jessie Montgomery’s 2021 work Five Freedom Songs takes its texts from the anthology Slave Songs of the United States and featured soprano Julia Bullock, whom the composer collaborated with in the song cycle’s conception. Between Bullock being amplified and the inclusion of a drum set, it had more of the guise of a popular idiom, contrasted by the sophistication of Montgomery’s orchestration – which in the opening “My Lord, What a Morning” included the delicate addition of glockenspiel; concertmaster Jun Iwasaki’s passage in the reflective “I Want to Go Home” was fittingly wistful.

“Lay dis Body Down” amounted to a somber funeral procession, wherein different groups of instruments plodded along at different paces – not unlike something one might encounter in a Mahler symphony. “My Father, How Long?” was a work a defiance, its text emanating form a jail in Georgetown, South Carolina on the brink of revolt, a theme explored further in the closing “The Day of Judgment,” with a percussive effect achieved by the string players tapping on the body of their instruments.

Like the Delius that opened, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony depicts entry to paradise (sharply contrasted from the Montgomery which concerns the struggle to find a higher place). Bright sounds of sleigh bells opened, limpid and graceful in this tautly proportioned work – much leaner than the composer’s previous symphonies, but a work that nonetheless manages to be just as all-encompassing. Crisply articulated, Stern purveyed a rich lyricism, though there was certainly no shortage of dramatic tension – one even encounters the germ of the funereal theme that famously opens the Fifth Symphony.

The scherzo saw Iwasaki playing a detuned violin, gritty and rustic. Clarinets were pointed outward for their shrill interjections: Mahler at his satirical best in this deconstructing of the presumably innocuous ländler. The Ruhevoll is one of my favorite things Mahler wrote: beginning with singing cellos, it surged to pained lyricism, reaching and reaching for a higher spiritual plane, a destination achieved in Das himmlische Leben, for which Bullock returned. Honeyed clarinet conveyed a childlike innocence, and without amplification here, Bullock nonetheless projected well and with clear German diction in this wonderfully touching portrait of the afterlife.