Reviews

Wahnfried is undoubtedly a provocative work, boldly confronting the darkest elements of Wagnerian mythology. Its uncompromising portrayal of fanaticism’s corrosive power is compelling and challenging, a stark reminder that past horrors continue to echo in the present. I greatly admire Longborough for presenting the UK premiere of a large-scale contemporary opera – a feat few opera houses manage today.

Opening music with slide whistles surprised many in the Longborough audience at this UK première of Avner Dorman’s ingenious work Wahnfried: the birth of the Wagner cult. Commissioned by Justin Brown, he asked his librettists, Sarah Nemitz and Lutz Hübner to produce an ‘unWagnerian opera’ where every act will have an end. There is some ‘embedded Wagner’ and those librettists earned accolades on the stage with the composer at the final curtain on opening night. Such warm applause is from an audience many of whom are comfortable being described as ‘Ringheads’ and content to be considered members of a Wagner cult! Longborough Festival Opera, with the renowned Wagnerian Anthony Negus as Music Director, is recognised by many critics as UK’s Bayreuth, but with an absence of the many highly publicised and damaging internal conflicts up on the Green Hill. These have been reported over many decades from Wahnfried, Wagner’s beautiful home in Bayreuth, until it became a museum, and, then elsewhere, in Bavaria. No doubt alternative titles for the production were suggested – ‘The Saga of the Wagner Family’ would seem appropriate. It is their work on these conflicts where Dorman, Nemitz and Hübner have demonstrated bravery in writing an opera about Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British entomologist, race theorist, Wagner fan and Germanophile. Both were very complex individuals, Wagner’s talents gained recognition across Europe giving so many audiences many thrills. Chamberlain, who married Wagner’s daughter Eva, became a very influential member of the family. Following memorable performances last year in Welsh National Opera’s Death in Venice and as LFO’s Siegmund, Mark Le Brocq gives a brilliant depiction of Chamberlain as a failing bug-hunter, author of an authoritative tome on anti-Semitism and scientific racism, influencing a young Hitler and becoming known as Hitler’s John the Baptist. Bravery deserves reward; this colourful Longborough production moves at pace thanks to conductor Justin Brown energising a responsive orchestra led by Darragh Morgan’s violin supporting first class performances by debut-making soloists, notably, Meeta Raval (Anna and Eva Chamberlain), Edmund Danon (Herman Levi and his ghost), Alexandra Lowe (Winifred and Isolde) and, not least, Susan Bullock as Wagner’s wife, Cosima, the High Priestess of Bayreuth. Wagner dies early in this story; Oscar McCarthy accepts the formidable responsibility in the role of Wagner-Daemon, dressed in a bright green outfit made famous by Kermit the Frog. His energy is infectious as a clown character surrounded by a circus atmosphere which permeates much of the two acts. Tamzen Moulding performs remarkable acrobatics; she is accompanied by many vaudevillian colleagues sporting bright red lips and wearing steampunk clown costumes. They are everywhere as they provide a continuity role. Longborough Festival Opera’s Wahnfried: the birth of the Wagner cult © Matthew Williams-Ellis Co-ordinated efforts by Chorus Master James Ham and Movement Director Adi Gortler carefully determine the vaudeville ventures to be, at times, very amusing, whilst ensuring the serious side of the story was not forgotten. Signposting by the clowns, reminiscent of early cinema days, helps develop the saga which begins in BAYREUTH IN 1882, a year before the Master’s death and spans forty years. Cosima senses the need to preserve the great man’s legacy putting her faith in Chamberlain via a deeply moving duet in which she shows the anguish she feels. Another signpost DRESDEN UPRISING 1849 identified a key aspect of Wagner’s life as he became outraged at the refusal of the King of Saxony to rule a unified Germany as a constitutional monarch. Cosima faces setbacks as the infighting for leadership of the Bayreuth Festival gathers pace. Lighting Designer Peter Small lends a hand with what must surely be deliberate misaligned spot lighting; Designer Max Johns ensures the fragility of the family is not forgotten with the imminent danger of four large Wagner statues falling over; finally, Costume Designer Anisha Fields ensures members of her burlesque troupe express their opinions with the failure to manoeuvre the curtains at crucial moments. Were these first night issues, most probably not! Pulling all these controversial matters together is Director Polly Graham, now firmly established as Longborough’s Artistic Director. This production is another success for her. This new opera has a good future; Composer Avner Dorman recognises the strengths of Kurt Weill and Dimitri Shostakovich by including elements of both in the score and he ensures there is a Götterdämmerung finish to the opera. Wagner-Daemon manages a poorly played theme from Tannhäuser on a toy piano – one of several comic moments – another, ‘Houston we have a problem’, best forgotten!! Wagner’s loyalty to his dogs is remembered with one chorus member frequently scampering across the stage depicting Russ, his black Newfoundland, buried at Wagner’s feet at Wahnfried. With Polly Graham at the helm, Music Director Anthony Negus back in 2026 to conduct Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg the Cotswolds Wagner cult will continue!

Richard Wagner’s music holds pride of place at Longborough Festival Opera, which, in its nearly 30-year history, has presented three Ring cycles. With the company’s invigorating season opener, the ‘English Bayreuth’ fearlessly grapples with the dark side of the composer. Marc Le Brocq triumphs in the demanding central role of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who ingratiated himself into the Wagner family. With his frothing anti-Semitism and fanatical belief in German superiority, Chamberlain helped cement the bond between Wagner’s music and Hitler, who appears as a character near the opera’s end, and laid the basis for the family’s Succession-like power struggle that played out for decades. Related to this ReviewThe Flying Dutchman review The Flying Dutchman review Musicals have a lot to teach new opera about the art of telling a story Musicals have a lot to teach new opera about the art of telling a story Confidently directed by Polly Graham, the opera traces Chamberlain’s progress from admirer to insider in a series of vignettes (witty libretto by playwrights Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz). Wahnfried is the family seat in Bayreuth, where the composer’s widow Cosima (the formidable Susan Bullock) presides over the squabbling family and hangers-on. Enter Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his German wife, Anna Chamberlain (Meeta Raval). As her husband joins the Wagner inner circle – after perfecting his German and publishing an intolerant and shamefully influential historical tome – Anna is discarded in favour of Wagner’s daughter Eva. Among those who suffer in the hothouse atmosphere is Wagner’s son Siegfried, forced into the role of heir apparent. He lacks his father’s talent and must conceal his homosexuality, as he laments in a heartbreaking aria. As Siegfried, countertenor Andrew Watts is mesmerising. Equally affecting is Edmund Danon as the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, who first conducted Parsifal. Here and elsewhere, Dorman’s score is colourful and evocative, and blooms in the capable hands of Justin Brown conducting the Longborough Festival Orchestra. Such poignant moments are counterbalanced by the broad burlesque sections. The bawdy Wagner dæmon (Oskar McCarthy), wearing clownish makeup and dressed in vivid green (costumes by Anisha Fields), mocks Chamberlain and accuses him of understanding nothing: “Not me, not life. All of my heroes fail.” It’s notable that the only bump in this otherwise fine opera is a strangely tepid scene near the end, when a young Hitler, a would-be Wagnerian hero, makes the pilgrimage to Bayreuth, where his cause is enthusiastically taken up by Chamberlain. While the Wagner dæmon is right in predicting that Chamberlain, who died in 1926, would only ever be a "footnote to history”, what fascinates and horrifies us about this opera is our knowledge of what was to come, and our fears for what might happen in our own era.

he Israeli-born Avner Dorman’s opera focuses on Richard Wagner’s clan and the composer’s legacy after his death, together with the family in-fighting presided over by his widow, Cosima, at the family home, Wahnfried. When the idea of the opera was first mooted, Wagner’s great-granddaughter Eva approved it, “as long as Cosima doesn’t come out of it very well”. She doesn’t, almost no one does, and certainly not the extraordinary and appalling figure of Houston Chamberlain. Chamberlain is so little known that he could be a figment of librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s imagination, yet the opera’s historical veracity is impeccable. The English Germanophile, a failed scientist and admirer of Wagner, inveigled his way into Cosima’s household, eventually marrying Wagner’s daughter Eva. He was, through his writings on German supremacy, a crucial architect of the antisemitism and hatred that Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler admired and upheld. A group of people standing on stage wearing black-and-white outfits. View image in fullscreen An authentic piece … Avner Dorman’s Wahnfried. Photograph: Matthew Williams-Ellis From the outset, when Chamberlain appears as a naive and ridiculous bumbler who believes that the order of the world is for the strong to kill the weak, the tenor of the narrative is chilling and deeply disquieting, despite moments of clowning black humour. As Dorman observed at the time of the world premiere in Germany in 2017, the same horrors are being perpetrated in the world today – and so much ignored – making Longborough Festival Opera’s UK premiere and director Polly Graham’s brilliant production important and all the braver. symbol 00:00 00:00 Read More The irony in the opera’s title is implicit. Wagner named his home in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Wahnfried, meaning free from delusion, but this is a portrait of madness writ large against a background of blood-red velvet drapes. The deluded fervour first of the Wagnerites and then of Mark Le Brocq’s Chamberlain – simply a tour de force – is monstrous. Le Broq and Susan Bullock’s imperious Cosima are a hateful pair, their philosophy of hate for the Jews carefully delineated. It’s Chamberlain who pushes Cosima to banish her daughter Isolde, spirited into a Tardis-like box with the demand that she reimagine herself in keeping with the true Wagner ethos; he too insists on her brother Siegfried’s homosexuality being hidden. Andrew Watts’s impassioned aria to his lover is a focal point, while the picture of Siegfried’s hardly idyllic marriage to Winifred Williams – the better known figure here for her insidious cosying up to Hitler, sung by the formidable Alexandra Lowe – is a further marker of the authenticity of the piece. Susan Bullock as Cosima with Mark Le Brocq as Houston Chamberlain. View image in fullscreen Impeccable stagecraft … Susan Bullock as Cosima with Mark Le Brocq as Houston Chamberlain. Photograph: Matthew Williams-Ellis Written in 20 scenes, each setting flagged up on a small blackboard, the driving energy of the second of two acts is the more convincing. Dorman’s music, multifaceted in its references – Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Wagner himself – is incisive, with often brittle instrumentation, and dynamically paced by conductor Justin Brown. The impeccable stagecraft carries the evening, but there are two characters who haunt Chamberlain to inject a further dimension. Hermann Levi – the Jew who conducted the Bayreuth premiere of Parsifal, the opera that became core to the family wrangling – is sympathetically portrayed, embracing the terrible and ever-present contradictions, perhaps an alter ego for Dorman. But it is the mischievous figure of Oskar McCarthy’s Wagner-Daemon, the composer’s familiar after death, whose disapproval brings a lighter note. It’s his final judgment that Chamberlain, who aspired to be counted alongside Kant, Goethe and Wagner himself, will – like all Wagner’s heroes – ultimately be a failure. It was Dorman, taking a bow at the curtain call, who was greeted as a hero.

There’s a blood-curdling scream off stage: Richard Wagner has died. The curtain lifts on his funeral and we see the venerated composer’s corpse. He is mourned by his family and acolytes (sporting “W” for “Wagnerian” badges), and the tragedy is underscored in melodramatic, near-comic fashion by wah-wah trumpets. I can’t be the only person who was then surprised when Wagner re-emerged, reborn as the Wagner-Daemon, dressed head to toe in a lime green outfit to rival Kermit, although the frog doesn’t sport such a fetching beret. That surreal twist matches the heightened aesthetic of Polly Graham’s high-energy new production of Avner Dorman’s Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult, given its UK premiere, aptly, at the British Bayreuth, Longborough Festival Opera, and conducted by Justin Brown, who commissioned the piece. With a pacey libretto (bad puns aside) by Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz, Wahnfried tackles big themes (art, nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, homophobia, politics and power) with a strong feel for balancing acerbic satire, absurdist theatre and harrowing history. That’s reflected by a compelling score that stylistically zips from sharp Kurt Weill to manic Shostakovich, dissonant Berg to military marches, lilting waltzes to pulsating minimalism. Despite its sometimes homemade feel, and a second act that occasionally lags, the Weimar Republic cabaret-inspired production is more hit than miss. The death of Wagner is the plot’s catalyst for a Succession-style wrangling for power over both his Bayreuth Festival and his legacy — and the Wagner-Daemon, performed with wonderful physicality by Oskar McCarthy, keeps his artistic spirit alive. But the looming Wagner is not Wahnfried’s main character. That’s Houston Stewart Chamberlain, excellently sung by Mark Le Brocq, a bumbling, butterfly-hunting British outsider who becomes an influential insider, welcomed for his horrific antisemitism. (Tracing his journey, the opera moves from English to German.) Ditching his first wife, Anna, Chamberlain marries Wagner’s daughter Eva (both roles appealingly sung by Meeta Raval) and publishes a book on Aryan racial supremacy, which catches the attention of the young Adolf Hitler (Adrian Dwyer). The extent to which our image of Wagner has been twisted and distorted by Chamberlain, the widowed Cosima Wagner (a formidable Susan Bullock) and the Nazis fuels Wahnfried. The brunt of the antisemitic abuse is borne on stage by Edmund Danon’s Hermann Levi (alive and as a ghost), the first conductor of Parsifal. Does Dorman answer the questions about Wagner and the Nazis that he poses? Perhaps not — but he holds up a timely mirror to the malevolent and racist ideologies that still exist today.

After the ensemble gave a solid (if perhaps unnecessary) performance of Air on the G String from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, Dorman introduced his new work, A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance, Concerto for Two Violins and Strings. He wrote it for Anthony and Shaham as a “companion” to the Bach Double. Like Diamond’s Rounds, which borrows the concept of imitative counterpoint yet sounds thoroughly American and modern, Dorman’s work is not in the least neo-Baroque. It is, however, an important example of programmatic instrumental music. The title is taken from the biblical passage in Ecclesiastes that starts, “For everything there is a season,” which pairs the necessary opposing elements of existence: living and dying, sowing and reaping, and so forth. Dorman explained that the only pair he didn’t understand was “A time to mourn and a time to dance.” So he composed this four-movement concerto to explore that concept, alternating between mourning and dancing. The result is a deeply true exegesis of the experience of grief. The concerto’s opening movement is “Meditative”; it and the parts that follow have a fundamentally Jewish sound, both in their combination meters and the use of minor mode with an augmented second in the scale. Anthony started with a passage laying out that distinctive interval, then picked up by Shaham, who played it against her counter-subject as the orchestra sustained quiet notes. The movement blossomed out suddenly; it is prayerful, yet interrupted by motion, like a distracted mind that can’t concentrate. The beautifully played solos snatched ideas from the orchestra and tossed them back. “Upbeat,” the second movement, is fast and frantic. Although Dorman described it as a dance, it evoked a grieving person determined to stay busy, to put off processing grief. In its forced jocularity, countless short ideas were glued together. Anthony and Shaham played rapid-fire 16th notes and triplets that blurred into an orchestral tempest. In the Kaddish-like “Lamentful,” the aching solos against held notes returned. For one moment the minor turned major — but that raised scale pitch quickly disappeared, like the momentary smile when a friend says something kind and the weight of grief is lifted for a second. Long, even chords in the orchestra, textured with smatterings of tremolo and fast upward scales, gave the sense of plodding through life. In one memorable passage, the solo violins played harmonics in counterpoint, then the orchestra took up the harmonics as the soloists switched to pizzicato. For the “Exuberant” finale, Shaham entered with a galloping pizzicato against Anthony’s fleet bowing. The rousing syncopation indicated glimmers of hope; this truly felt like a dance, not just nervous energy. After an extremely complicated, fast duet, the whole orchestra joined in with impossibly complex layers of accentuation. By the end of the dance, there’s unabashed happiness. Dorman has found a way to communicate an essential part of the human condition in a work that is highly listenable even without our knowing the subtext. The only reason this wonderful piece might not achieve the popularity it deserves is that so few chamber ensembles could play it well. One hopes the strings from major orchestras will give it a try.

מקווה שזיכרוני לא מטעה, כשהוא מוליך אותי לכתוב שביצוע "שיחות על האהבה" של אבנר דורמן היה מעמד לא רק חשוב אלא גם חריג בדרכה של התזמורת הפילהרמונית הישראלית. חריג — בהיותו מוקדש ברובו ליצירה ארוכה מאוד של קומפוזיטור ישראלי עכשווי. תודה להנהלת התזמורת, למנצח יואל לוי, למקהלות הישראליות שהשתתפו ולמדריכיהן, רונן בורשבסקי ("מקהלת ברתיני") ודפנה בן יוחנן (מקהלת הנערות "אנקור"). "שיחות על אהבה" היא דיון מוזיקלי בתופעת האהבה. דיון משלושה כיוונים: האהבה כתשוקה, האהבה כמטאפורה לתופעות פיזיקליות (כגון כוח המשיכה), התמוטטות האהבה. התרשמתי מאוד, בהאזנה הראשונה בהיכל התרבות, מהקטע "בוא איש נאהב" (הלחנה ממכרת בפשטותה של מילים שחיבר משורר גרמני בן המאה ה–14), וגם מהקטעים הכליים, נטולי הזמרה. בהאזנה להקלטת ביצוע אחר, שהיה במישיגן לפני כעשר שנים, לכד אותי קסמם של קטעים נוספים. "שיחות על אהבה" כתובה בשפה מוזיקלית נגישה אך מלוא ערכה אינו נגלה בהאזנה אחת.

The music of the Israeli composer Avner Dorman impresses with its diverse rhythms and the staging through oriental splendor of colour. The school performance of "The Sultan's Children" ended with thunderous applause, shrill screams of enthusiasm and calls for an encore. 800 children came to the opera with their school classes to see the fantastic fairy tale opera.

The librettist, the well-known children's and young people's theater author Ingeborg von Zadow, really knows her craft, because she combines a contemporary story of a separated, intercultural family with elements of oriental fairy tales and diverse allusions to classical operas. She uses witty alliteration and creates three exciting exam situations that the children will prove themselves in, and a happy ending.

Around the World in Four Movements The meat of the program commenced when Lara St. John stepped in front of the white-clad orchestra. Nigunim is a violin concerto rooted in melodies inspired by Jewish songs from around the world. The piece won the Azrieli Prize in 2018. In a recent interview with Blogcritics the composer told us that in writing it he created new melodies inspired by “listening to music from Jewish communities around the world, recalling music I had heard from different diasporas, and internalizing the styles and gestures. I also analyzed these melodies and found some surprising commonalities.” Photo credit: Oren Hope Media The melodies are certainly evocative of Jewish songs. But Dorman develops them using a musical language all his own. The spectral beginning has a mournful air, the violin speaking first in a thin, keening voice. A klezmer clarinet explodes into the mix, touching off thunder from the orchestra and a sequence of thrilling violin-and-orchestra passages. Right away it was clear that the soloist and the orchestra, as led by Knights co-artistic director Eric Jacobsen, had locked together into the music. They remained perfectly in sync even at its most challenging. avner dorman Avner Dorman Marked “Adagio Religioso,” the opening movement evolves into a dirge alternating between dissonant harmonies and folk song-suggestive motifs. The Scherzo that follows shifts the mood dramatically. A feisty dance rocked by furious pizzicatos, it fuses celestial and macabre elements and includes a barrage of violin fireworks that generated spontaneous applause. The third movement (“Adagio”) draws a pointillistic curtain of sound; then a solemn ringing of bells leads to a gorgeous violin melody couched in modernist harmonics and glassy songplay. This movement flows directly into the finale, a scampering “Presto” dominated by a hurried 7/8 rhythm that rides over muscular groans and anguished chirps. Soloist and orchestra alike negotiated the movement’s complex rhythms brilliantly. The composer, my wife suggested to me afterwards, “was trying to kill the violinist.” If so, no such luck. Lara St. John is a force of nature. After the concerto she dazzled the crowd with a concoction of her own, a tour-de-force dazzler she said she “sort of made up based on some old Oltenian tunes (a province in Romania). I call it: ‘Oltenian Hora.'” It fit right in with the boisterous good feeling a Knights concert routinely creates.

Dorman's Piano Concerto No. 3 left a tremendous impression. The pianist Mackenzie Melemed played through this three-movement work with breathtaking runs, creating passionate soundscapes and especially in the second movement calm and beautiful moments. The orchestra was fully involved in the intense energy of the last movement, which concluded with a powerful, exhilarating dance-like finale.

Impressive…a terse, blistering tone poem on the biblical story of King David and Bathsheba from the point of view of Bathsheba's husband, Uriah the Hittite, who is sent by the king into battle (and to his death) after Bathsheba becomes pregnant with David's child. The piece begins with an outburst of dissonance, and there is an undertone of violence even in its softer moments. Uriah's death at the hands of enemy soldiers is marked by grinding chords and percussion, but the piece is best heard not as a narrative but as a general indictment of the story's cruelty, which comes through in the anguished string melody that follows.

The work shares a name with a live jazz album by Don Cherry and this would appear to be no accident. Dorman uses sharp, strong rhythmic effects that share elements found in jazz as well as other popular forms of music such as progressive rock and house music. (And as a pleasing coincidence, Cherry's 1968 album was recorded in Berlin just as Dorman's Eternal Rhythm was first heard in Germany.)
 
The piece opens with a strong strike on the tamtam, a brash doorbell sound announcing the doorway to the music. [Cynthia] Yeh then offered a pretty melody on the crotales, shimmering and gleaming. Devotees of gamelan music will immediately realize the composer shares affection for these sounds (he regularly participates in making gamelan music in Pennsylvania, where he lives). It is a pleasing way to bring twinkling gentleness to the music before the percussion soloist moves on to music-box-like sound from the glockenspiel.
 
The main instruments that Dorman uses for the soloist are vibraphone and marimba. Yeh's great talents meant that the music proceeded with ease even as tempos heated up and the passages became rapid and complex. It is a credit to Yeh that she lets the music speak without showboating or employing silly affectation. She moved about the front of the Orchestra Hall stage from [James] Gaffigan's right to his left with cat-like calm and elegance, never making it seem as if the travels between instruments was some kind of race or madcap game of musical chairs.
 
Dorman often gives the orchestra a muscular sound, at one point with brass and low strings issuing burping-like notes to punctuate the solo lines. Gaffigan's only gaffe was to occasionally let the orchestra overpower the solo percussion leaving the listener straining to hear the more delicate shimmering of the vibraphone or the rich tones of the marimba.
 
There is an extended section for timpani, tom-tom, and "tin cans (or cow bell)." For the last, Yeh employed a small set of kitchen pans and one metal bowl. Dorman told me that this set of instruments are to be chosen by the soloist and that they should be "found instruments," which appears to be a corollary of the "found objects" sometimes seen in other forms of art.
 
The 4th movement, marked Adagio and which the composer explains is the heart of the concerto, contains a haunting melody for which Dorman offers the soloist a choice of singing or playing vibraphone. The text employed is one that the composer told me he has admired since high school, an 11th-century Hebrew poem which opens with the line, "Does the tear know whose cheek it runs down…?" The original soloist was also an accomplished singer, says Dorman, and that gave him the inspiration to employ voice. But since he knew not all percussionists would want to sing, he included the vibraphone solo as an option, which is what Yeh choose to perform. In his program notes, Dorman explains that, "At this point in the piece, we realize that the rhythm of life and the rhythm of the universe are the same…"
 
It was a vibrant 25-minute performance, with masterful work by Yeh and admirable sound from the orchestra.

Several aspects of this work, which runs about 25 minutes, set it apart, starting with its unusual five-movement structure, which allows for considerable variations in mood and color. Unlike some percussion concertos that feature an overblown variety of instruments and make a point of including the exotic and unexpected, Dorman kept his selection reasonably modest and almost all of it standard. His only deviation from the conventional was a half dozen or so of what he calls "tin cans" in the score but looked on stage to be upside-down metal pots and bowls that provided a dull clanging sound when struck.
 
Dorman created three fascinating groups of instruments in his writing for the soloist, starting with a combination of glockenspiel and crotales — tuned bronze or brass disks about 4 inches in diameter arranged on a rack horizontally. Because hard mallets are used to strike metal disks or bars with both of these instruments, they generate similarly penetrating, ringing tones that provided a compelling, other-worldly mix when played side by side. Similarly complementary effects were achieved with the pairing of the vibraphone and adjacent melodic tom-toms and the largest and most complex set of instruments — timpani, tuned tom-toms, and the metal pots and bowls. Rounding out the array was the marimba. The solo instruments were grouped in a horseshoe shape around the podium, with the soloist moving to each station as needed.
 
Adding yet another dimension to the sound colors in this work were more percussion instruments in the orchestra, including many of the same ones being played by the soloist. This allowed for dialogues among these instruments as well as some intriguing, at times strange echo effects heard virtually from the beginning of the work with the orchestral percussionist entering seven bars in on the glockenspiel as the soloist played the crotales. Some bars later, the two were engaged in a dialogue between the marimba and vibraphone. And still later in the first movement, the soloist on the tom-toms was backed in the orchestra by the timpanist and the orchestral percussionist on tambourine, along with the rest of the orchestra.
 
Eternal Rhythm checks off many boxes. It is an engaging, well-integrated, and well-crafted work with an unstoppable sense of forward momentum as it proceeds uninterrupted through its five movements. Moods and sound colors shift constantly as the soloist switches instruments, different parts of the orchestra come into play, and tempos as well as dynamics change. It is variously mysterious, reflective, exuberant, and even jazzy at times, concluding with a kinetic fifth movement containing roller-coaster runs for the strings and galloping passages for the soloist on marimba and tom-toms.
 
Indeed, the work is a first-rate showpiece for the soloist, and the orchestra's masterful principal percussionist, Cynthia Yeh, made the most of it. Unflappable and undaunted, she handled every challenge this work threw at her with seeming ease, delivering a virtuosic and captivating performance. And Gaffigan made sure the orchestra was right there with her, ably supporting and augmenting everything she was doing.

The concerto launches as if rising from the depths of nothingness, tinged with the quiet shimmer of crotales and glockenspiel, and soon sets Yeh to wildly undulating mallet work and drumming.
 
On paper, Dorman's permutations look alive, improvisatory, with Balinese gamelan and Bach among strong influences. It's hypnotically repetitive music that mutates easily and seems to suggest a spiral naturally upward and outward toward greater mystery and, perhaps, the rhythm of the infinite. But the concerto sounded tentative at the Oct. 3 first performance, as if the conductor, orchestra and Yeh were still focused on integrating the intricacies of its rhythmic footwork, and therefore not quite free to dance.
 
One of the five movements gives the soloist the option to intone vocally, as a cantor would, some ancient Hebrew words on the nature of death in the everlasting universe. That text comes as a bolt of revelation at the concerto's pivot point. These concerts marked the world premiere of the "unsung" version. Yeh just played, without singing. Was this option offered as an afterthought by the composer? It seemed that something was missing. Still, the overall impression that the concerto left was of a distinctive, authentically American voice imbued with appealing threads of Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein, Brubeck and living composers Steve Reich and John Corigliano (Dorman's teacher) in his DNA, without directly imitating any of them.

The first half of the concert was devoted to Eternal Rhythm by Avner Dorman. Unveiled a year ago in Hamburg, the Israeli composer's concerto was presented Thursday night in its U.S. premiere with CSO principal percussionist Cynthia Yeh as solo protagonist.
 
A substantial work at 25 minutes, Eternal Rhythm is cast in five unbroken movements. As per the genre the soloist is called upon to perform on a variety of far-flung hammered instruments including timpani, melodic tom-toms and cowbells.
 
Yet Dorman deftly avoids most of the standard percussion-concerto tropes. His engaging score is skillfully varied, melodic, and effectively deployed between the soloist and orchestra.
 
Rather than presenting the usual spectacle of a soloist dashing between a bestiary of instruments, the composer focuses most of the solo writing on the crotales, vibraphone and marimba — often for extended passages, which cuts down on the footrace around the stage.
 
In fact, soloist and orchestra are on an equal footing throughout Eternal Rhythm, to the music's benefit. An ominous tam-tam strike opens the concerto, soon contrasted with an introduction of harmonic overtones, which serves as a bridge of sorts between sections. In the first movement, the soloist plays crotales, which lends a high shimmering quality. The tempo accelerates and the Balinese gamelan style seems to channel Lou Harrison at times, leading to a fast drumming section by the soloist.
 
The second movement is a kind of pastoral idyll — relaxed and mellow with a beguiling naive lyricism and some delicately diaphanous sounds conjured up by the soloist. The middle movement provides immediate contrast with hard-driving music of jagged angularity played on timpani and drums. The marimba is to the fore in the bravura finale, fast and exhilarating music that closes the concerto with a display of solo brilliance that the composer says represents "life, energy and an ever-present and eternal rhythm."
 
Ironically, the one part of the concerto that fell flat Thursday was the fourth movement, which Dorman calls "the heart of the piece." The music is set to the words of an 11th-century Hebrew poem by Yehuda Halevi, which connects the rhythms of daily life with the (eternal) rhythm of the universe. The soloist is given the option of singing the vocal line or performing it on the vibraphone; Yeh chose the latter but the instrument's blandly ping-pongy timbre in no way conveyed the expressive depth or metaphysical thrust of the text.
 
That apart, Cynthia Yeh was a vital and conscientious solo protagonist, though at times one wanted more fiery virtuosity, as well as greater power and sonic punch for the solo line to be heard over Dorman's rambunctious orchestra.
 
Gaffigan led a well-prepared and alert accompaniment by Yeh's orchestra colleagues. Dorman's concerto proved a big hit with the audience, earning warm applause and vociferous cheers and repeated curtain calls for Yeh and the composer.

Cynthia Yeh, principal percussion of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, typically works at the back of Orchestra Hall's stage.

On Thursday night, she stepped dramatically to the front.

The occasion was the United States premiere of Avner Dorman's Eternal Rhythm (Percussion Concerto), a 2018 work that places enormous technical and musical demands on the soloist. Yeh finessed them with elegance, especially considering the intricacies of her part and the rhythmic disruptions emanating from the orchestra, conducted by James Gaffigan.

This was a concerto of ample restlessness, the soloist logging quite a few steps as she paced from one battery of percussion instruments to the next, all arrayed toward the lip of the stage. In effect, Yeh was operating a mini-orchestra of her own, drawing upon the vast array of colors that composer Dorman had written into five movements played without pause.

From the opening pages, it was clear that Eternal Rhythm was going to be as much tone poem as concerto, composer Dorman having conceived the solo part for marimba, vibraphone, timpani, melodic tom-toms, tin cans and whatnot. Eternal Rhythm, in other words, was as much about timbre and line as it was about pulsation and syncopation.

The work had a distinctive protagonist in Yeh, who was every bit as concerned with melodic phrase and tonal shading as she was with rhythmic accent and forward motion. This was a poetic reading of a piece that others might have performed with more aggression and noise.

Yet Yeh did not miss the score's rhythmic urgency. In the opening movement, the buoyancy of her articulation — with double mallets in each hand — brought forth the inherent jazziness of these pages. Conductor Gaffigan similarly emphasized the joy of perpetual motion, orchestra and soloist conjuring something delightfully close to all-American swing.

Though it would be easy to peg Eternal Rhythm as an engaging but light-hearted romp, its fourth movement dug into somewhat deeper contemplations. Composer Dorman, who was born in Israel and now lives in the U.S., drew inspiration for these passages from an 11th century Hebrew text. Even if you didn't read those philosophical words in the program book — with the opening line "Does the tear know whose cheek it runs down" — there was no missing the plaintive, Hebraic character of the clarinet lines. Nor the delicacy with which Yeh shaped the haunting melody, nor the serene wonder of Dorman's writing for strings.

Not surprisingly, the concerto then races to its finish, the solo part ricocheting from the lowest pitches to the highest and back in a burst of rhythmic exultation. Considering the concerto's charismatic appeal, it's not difficult to envision it receiving many performances to come, though surely few as sensitive as Yeh's.

Composers who write works about war often gravitate toward vocal settings—nothing evokes the mixed currents of terror, bravery, pain and confusion as unequivocally as the human voice—and for the most part, they seek their texts in the works of battlefield poets and chroniclers, from Homer and Li Po, to Walt Whitman and Wilfred Owen, whose work captures both the immediacy of mortal danger and the tragedy of wasted life. When Avner Dorman was commissioned by Gettysburg College, where he teaches composition, to write a work commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War battle that was fought in the school’s vicinity, he decided to look for street-level realism rather than poetic artistry. His first stop was the college’s Civil War Institute, where he examined soldiers’ letters, and opted to focus on a single combatant, on the theory that one soldier’s observations could yield universal truths about the experience of war. The soldier he settled on was Lt. Rush Palmer Cady, a New Yorker who was wounded on the battle’s first day—a bullet passed through his arm and lodged in his lung—and died 23 days later, on July 24, 1863. Cady’s letters, and some from his mother, who traveled to his bedside and wrote to her husband as she grappled with the inevitability of their son’s death, are the basis of “Letters From Gettysburg,” a wrenching score for choir, soprano and baritone soloists and percussion ensemble that had its premiere at the college in April 2013. It is now the title piece of a new collection of Mr. Dorman’s works on Canary Classics, the label run by the violinist Gil Shaham. (Works Mr. Dorman composed for Mr. Shaham and his sister, the pianist Orli Shaham, fill out the disc.) Mr. Dorman, a prolific Israeli composer who studied with John Corigliano and shares his former teacher’s penchant for an eclectic, emotionally direct musical language, chose not to set the letters intact, but to instead use fragments, mined for their imagery and emotional punch. Some are long enough to paint vignettes from the battle; others are splintered into short phrases, or even single words, distributed through the choir. In “Battle,” the third and most complex of the work’s five movements, phrases like “Ammunition—sixty rounds apiece,” “Military honors—of his soldier grave,” “So much blood and suffering,” “fires all night,” and the words “death,” “mud,” “pain,” “rain” and “remains” are chanted chaotically and ad libitum by the choir, effectively compressing Cady’s narrative into the aural equivalent of a brisk film montage. A more formal choral setting emerges from this improvised stream of images, offering a more conventional narrative (“A shell which struck our rear hit a large stack of guns, killed a captain lieutenant and took off the arm and leg.…”), and leads to the choir singing the word “Blood!” repeatedly, in a three-note harmonic cluster.In parts of the first and fourth movements, “Kiss Me Mother” and “Dear Brave Boy,” which draw on the letters from Cady’s mother, Mr. Dorman’s choral writing moves inexorably from consonance to dissonance, increasing the tension with each syllable. Amanda Heim, the soprano soloist, sings the mother’s text, in the finale, with a moving sense of pained calmness—a quality heard in much of the choral writing as well. Lee Poulis, the baritone, gives a trenchant account of Cady’s first letter home in “Since I Was Wounded,” the work’s fifth movement Mr. Dorman’s colorful but disciplined, intensely focused style is suited to the subject matter, and he has produced a work that appeals to pacifist sensibilities by showing the devastation of war as human, personal and direct. The Gettysburg College Choir and the Tremolo Percussion Ensemble—which is used vigorously in the “Battle” movement, and more subtly elsewhere—perform the piece with eloquence and precision under the baton of Robert Natter in this 2015 studio recording.Different sides of Mr. Dorman’s instrumental writing are on display in “After Brahms—Three Intermezzos for Piano” (2014) and “Nigunim (Violin Sonata No. 3)” (2011). “After Brahms” channels the sensibility of Brahms’s late piano music, in both its explosively turbulent and gently introspective manifestations, and is played with both power and poetry by Orli Shaham. “Nigunim” builds on the modal melodic turns of Jewish music (a nigun is a short, repeating melody that can be used in anything from prayer to klezmer performances; nigunim is the plural), expanded upon and recast in the Romantic bravura style. In that spirit, Gil Shaham gives the piece a high-energy, virtuosic reading, with firm support from Ms. Shaham on the piano.Still, both works have been issued on earlier Canary Classics discs, so while it’s good to revisit them, listeners interested in Mr. Dorman’s work would undoubtedly have preferred music that has not yet been recorded.

It’s an energetic and enlivening score beguilingly wedded to plangent minor modes but frequently exuberant and always strongly rhythmical.

Unsurprisingly Zukerman and Forsyth were as one throughout, Dorman cleverly intertwining Zukerman’s golden tones in the violin’s lower register with Forsyth’s warm cello sonorities to form a rich tapestry.

A cut-down ASO directed by Benjamin Northey provided plenty of bounce and vitality throughout and this absorbing piece will surely become a regularly performed addition to the repertoire.

Dorman’s rethinking of two Brahms intermezzi (Op. 118, No. 1 and Op. 119, No.1) are wildly virtuosic. I will not be able to hear the originals without thinking of Dorman’s clever settings, which were startling at times, but satisfying.

I have listened to this ingeniously crafted piece a half dozen times and each time I have been moved anew, mesmerized by Dorman’s brilliant treatment of Lt. Cady’s words, and by the exquisite performances by soloists Amanda Heim and Lee Poulis, the Gettysburg College Choir, and the Tremolo Percussion Ensemble under the direction of Robert Natter.

[Nigunim] is a wildly demanding piece, an ambitious multicultural grab bag. The composer infuses his own made-up Jewish tunes, or nigunim, into a wide variety of cultural alternatives: traditional Arabic music, Georgian folk, Macedonian dances, and tunes from a Libyan synagogue.

Now in his sixth season as music director, Avner Dorman is also an excellent and engaging composer. Able to create dramatic narrative arcs along with vivacious orchestral writing, he doesn’t shy away from the tonal resources of the past or refrain from reveling in dissonant flurries of sound. With the educational pedigree of a doctorate from Juilliard, he has built up an assured body of music that draws on minimalist soundscapes, Jewish musical traditions, and the attractive American academic style of his teacher John Corigliano. His Violin Concerto No. 3, Still, takes meditation as its main metaphor. Shoji, who has previously performed concertos by Brahms and Tchaikovsky with CityMusic, at various points played havoc-ridden ascending scales, calm Baroque-quoting trilling melodies, a pained and craggy climactic line that would put Berg to shame, and what might be the longest open-G-string note in the repertoire. Laid out in four continuous, broad sections, the work leads from a gorgeously clear opening that introduces old music references, through a vigorous storm of notes, throwing the violinist into the tailspin of a long, powerful cadenza that seeks to restore the calm. The orchestra then fights to dislodge the violinist from her low G, but those intrusive thoughts slowly disappear to the end. It is possible to follow this well-crafted music as if struggling to meditate in a world of distractions and terrifying news. Dorman led an exciting and moving performance, and the orchestra played all the trills beautifully and handled their angry outbursts with precision in the boomy church.

Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto was crammed with incident and, at its best, tenderly engrossing. ****

Avner Dorman's 2006 concert aimed to reflect aspects of a young Israeli culture that is often closer to the Arab World than official politics would like. He succeeded, his highlights on the great joie de vivre and energy of a whole generation are equally musically interesting and touching.