Review: AMERICA'S REQUIEM: A KNEE ON THE NECK and Mozart's REQUIEM at Strathmore Music Center

It was in response to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy that composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein chose Mahler's Resurrection Symphony to play at a New York Philharmonic memorial for the fallen president.

Bernstein explained of the performance that "this will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."

That quote was fittingly referenced at the impressive world premiere Saturday night, by the National Philharmonic at the Strathmore Music Center, of Adolphus Hailstork's America's Requiem: A Knee on the Neck. While it is a requiem focused on the death of George Floyd, it is a work brimming with life - albeit threatened, difficult life, African-American life, too often overflowing with worry and insult, hardship and pain.

Hailstork's ambitious score is set to a libretto by the poet and scholar Herbert Martin, a professor emeritus at the University of Dayton, that also touches on the Covid pandemic. The philharmonic, superbly conducted by Piotr Gajewski, was joined by the orchestra's chorale and members of the Washington Chorus and the Howard University Chorale, the combined singers well prepared by chorus master Eugene Rogers.

The inspiring soloists, precisely leaping challenging intervals and parrying constantly shifting chords and syncopations, were mezzo soprano J'Nai Bridges, tenor Norman Shankle, and baritone Kenneth Overton. Hailstork's work was paired with Mozart's Requiem in D minor, with those same soloists plus soprano Janai Brugger. Broadway star Norm Lewis acted as an emcee.

Hailstork's score is instrumentally colorful and dramatic, restless, tonally nomadic, bluesy, jazzy, and punctuated by African drum and other crackling percussion flourishes. It features frequent string scampers, away in terror then back in strength, chromatic chordal shifts that resolve effervescently in bright major-key spiritual light only to cloud over again in minor-key fear and fret.

The music stylistically fuses with Martin's libretto, which combines the colloquial, the formal, the poetic, and the spiritual. The text draws from Floyd's tragic end but magnifies that to include a centuries-old Black history and tradition.

Interestingly, it is not God's commandment but a mother's commandment that frames this telling. If you are taken by the police, she says to her son, "dress yourself in politeness," for that will "restrain / the police and it will / Protect you until I can get there." It is not Christ heralding the promise of salvation in this streetwise saga but a lawyer on the way.

Floyd becomes another casualty in a long-running war for freedom and justice. A folk song section chillingly marries lightly skipping rhyme and rhythm with ominous warning. "Every mail day . . . I get a letter / Mama say come home boy My Lord come on home . . . / I write and tell her Justice bars the way . . . / I write and tell her freedom has lost the way."

"Have you ever seen a knee on a neck / Chile that stops all breathing. Home, home." Home is the dreamed-of respite from violence. Home is also, horribly, death, the culmination of violence.

Here Covid enters the picture too. "There's a virus going round taking names / It has taken my neighbor's name / And has left my heart in pain."

Black life in America is portrayed as a scary bet in a brief "Gambler's Rhyme." "A knee to the neck / Make you lose a human bet / Put you in a whole lot of debt."

In a few spots, potential double readings present themselves. That "whole lot of debt," for instance, can be seen as the closed windpipe, the debt of oxygen. It can also be seen as society's ongoing debt to those it has oppressed by race and class.

Similarly, darkness and shadow are treated ambivalently. On one hand, "We are dark, but we are not the night / We are skin but we are not the darkness." And yet, "Our mothers raised us in the shadow of love / They infected us with the stamina of strength."

Think about that. Dark skin does not signal dark intent, but love is in the shadows, in that darkness. Darkness shunned and darkness embraced. Strength is a gift but also an infection, inherited, like it or not, by a people too frequently fated to persevere, even when they're down, even when they're attacked, even when they're exhausted.

It's a strange libretto but a multifaceted and eerily, austerely beautiful one the seeming simplicity of which can be misleading. It ends with a hymn culminating in a Civil Rights era declaration. "We shall abide together / To sing a worthy song / For the road is harsh and long / Our feet are tired / But our will is strong . . . / And we / Shall overcome!"

Hailstork and Martin's work is a grand, troubling, rich, and worthy song indeed, a requiem for an America still struggling to rise from its sometimes sordid history and violent predilections toward its lofty goals and promise.

To turn from this roughly 45-minute opus to Mozart's 1791 masterpiece is a bold exercise in tradition and contrast. The work is fogged in rumor and mystery. It was commissioned by a count to commemorate the death of his wife. Mozart's widow suggested that the origin of the commission was not entirely clear and that the ailing composer wrote it with his own end and memorial in mind. It was unfinished, then completed by Mozart's colleague Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

The work has a vast spectrum of tonal and emotional hues: sweet or rousing pleas for mercy, adamant warnings about God's wrath and fury; humble and tender entreaties to Jesus.

There were occasional intonation issues in the violins and one could wish for a little better enunciation from Brugger. But on the whole, the performance was splendid and well paced by Gajewski, conducting without a score. He brought out a fabulously rounded tone and vigor from his players and the large chorus.

A double-billing of requiems is a heavy program but, as Bernstein put it, great art can be a wonderfully fitting "reply to violence" - necessary if obviously not sufficient. As mankind tumbles from one crisis to another, pandemic and racist brutality to vicious imperialism in Ukraine and the renewed threat of world war, even nuclear annihilation, what kind of work is more appropriate to our moment than a requiem?

As in Mozart's "Lacrimosa," the "day of tears and mourning" remains all too constant. We wake to it each morning. The National Philharmonic's gorgeous, ambitious program expertly urges us to take stock, to take heed, to aim higher, and to do much, much better.

**

(Photo, by Elman Studio, of Mezzo soprano J'Nai Bridges, one of the program's soloists.)

Program run time: about two hours, including intermission. The program will be repeated Monday, March 28, at 7:30 p.m. in Capital One Hall. Purchase tickets here.

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