The centerpiece of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s subscription concerts this weekend is the world premiere of Song of the Reappeared, a three-movement, full-orchestra suite that its composer, Matthew Aucoin, calls a concerto for soprano. Aucoin, responding to the political moment in the United States, was reading 20th-century South American writers while working on the commission. He wrote Song of the Reappeared with the CSO and the soprano Julia Bullock in mind, and its intensity and wide-ranging scope suited both well.
The texts for the piece come from the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, whose work reflects his experience being detained and tortured by the Pinochet regime in 1973. The “reappeared” in the title reclaims the “disappeared”, people who were arrested and killed by authoritarian governments, their deaths unacknowledged until years later.
Aucoin gives the listener no time to get comfortable. In the first movement, “El mar,” which he marks “uneasy,” the winds enter suddenly and immediately diminuendo, creating an anxious atmosphere. The opening image, translated in the program as “strange baits rain from the sky”, refers to bodies thrown out of airplanes into the ocean, and is even more unsettling in Spanish, as the word for “bait” – ”carnada” – relates to the word “carne”: “meat.” Bullock sang with complementary laser focus, laying into a jumpy line admirably accurately, including regular leaps as wide as tenths, and one that spanned nearly two octaves.
The second movement, “Una ruta en las soledades” (“A path in the solitudes”), spotlights the English horn, played sensitively here by Scott Hostetler. Bullock entered in duet, now singing the wide intervals of her line with a gentle expressivity. Partway through the movement, Bullock goes tacet to give space for a long-developing brass crescendo, which Aucoin described in an interview as letting his inner Mahler run free. The clear direction of the music makes for a successful arc for the second movement, from a place of introspection to a desperate hope for the future.
The third movement, “Rompientes,” refers to breaking waves. It opens with a moto perpetuo in the strings, setting a rhythmic drive that never lets up. Bullock’s part, returning to the imagery of bodies thrown into the ocean, calls for a ferocity throughout that seems difficult to sustain. The rub, as with so much orchestral music with a vocal soloist, is in communicating a full expressive palette within the straitened dynamic range available that will not cover up the singer. The conductor, Petr Popelka, might have called for a greater intensity of articulation and phrasing from the orchestra when Bullock was at her loudest, to give an illusion that the instrumentalists’ mezzo-forte was actually a fortissimo.
Other than the Aucoin, the program consisted of Brahms and Strauss, unusually deployed. The concert’s first half was a piece usually played as the climax of a program, Brahms’s Symphony no. 3, in an earnest, storytelling type of interpretation from Popelka, with plenty of articulation communicated in podium gestures. The always-beautiful third movement was particularly well-painted.
On the second half of the concert, after the Aucoin, the orchestra played Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks and seemed to be having a great time doing it. The sudden shifts, humor, and pastiche flowed naturally from the players. After the heaviness of the poetry in the premiere, the Strauss gave the audience a jolly feeling to go home with (despite the fate of Eulenspiegel).
