{"id":11952,"date":"2023-05-08T17:58:46","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T21:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=11952"},"modified":"2023-06-28T18:02:16","modified_gmt":"2023-06-28T22:02:16","slug":"teddy-abrams-yo-yo-ma-go-underground-with-the-louisville-orchestra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/teddy-abrams-yo-yo-ma-go-underground-with-the-louisville-orchestra\/","title":{"rendered":"Teddy Abrams & Yo-Yo Ma Go Underground with the Louisville Orchestra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yo-Yo Ma Goes Underground with the Louisville Orchestra<\/strong>
\nTeddy Abrams, the ensemble\u2019s music director, has created a work about Mammoth Cave\u2014and staged the piece inside its reverberating walls.<\/em><\/p>\n

From The New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n

By Alex Ross<\/p>\n

Abrams\u2019s gifts as a conductor were evident at a gala concert in Louisville last month, at the Kentucky Center. He leads with a clear, fluid beat, somewhat in the Tilson Thomas manner. Aspects of the orchestra\u2019s Whitney-era sound remain\u2014a straightforward, pungent, propulsive approach\u2014but Abrams has fostered greater precision and vibrancy. Rhythmic zest lit up the final movement of Henk Badings\u2019s Seventh Symphony, a spiky Louisville commission from 1954. Ma took the stage for Shostakovich\u2019s First Cello Concerto, summoning its frenzied and desolate moods with equal conviction. The orchestra provided unfailingly alert accompaniment, resulting in an interpretation of real heft. Whenever I visit so-called regional orchestras, the story is the same: an influx of skilled younger players has raised technical standards to a startling degree.<\/p>\n

The venture into Mammoth Cave, which took place two days after the gala, is Abrams\u2019s most ambitious undertaking to date. Mammoth, the longest cave system ever discovered, is about seventy-five miles south of Louisville and is under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. Abrams\u2019s idea of staging a work at and about Mammoth intersected neatly with Ma\u2019s current interests. In the past couple of years, the cellist has been participating in informal concerts and community events across the national-park system, under the banner of a project called Our Common Nature. Abrams won approval from park administrators and set about composing a ninety-minute oratorio that includes a series of instrumental soliloquies for Ma.<\/p>\n

\u201cMammoth,\u201d as Abrams\u2019s piece is called, attempts to sum up the entire five-thousand-year history of human exploration of the cave: Native questers, enslaved Black miners, rival cave exploiters, and latter-day park rangers. The libretto includes poetic meditations from three writers associated with Kentucky\u2014Robert Penn Warren, Wendell Berry, and Ada Lim\u00f3n. Abrams incorporates into his score pre\u00ebxisting hymns, Appalachian folk songs, fiddle-band music, bugle calls, and a ballad in honor of the spelunker Floyd Collins, whose death at Mammoth, in 1925, caused a national-news sensation. Playing the part of Celebrant\u2014essentially, a narrator with a singing role attached\u2014was the nobly urgent bass-baritone Dav\u00f3ne Tines, who grew up on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains, in Virginia. Tines\u2019s longtime collaborator Zack Winokur directed the show, overcoming the logistical challenges of organizing a quasi-operatic event in an exceedingly unconventional space that allowed for only a few days of on-site rehearsal.<\/p>\n

The beginning was intensely dramatic. Audience members, numbering five hundred, walked down the sixty-eight steps of the cave\u2019s Historic Entrance. Inside, voices floated out of the murk: members of the Louisville Chamber Choir and of the orchestra were singing a wordless, rising-and-falling chant that started out as a unison and then grew in polyphonic complexity. After walking a quarter mile or so, spectators took up positions on the sides of Rafinesque Hall, one of Mammoth\u2019s largest internal chambers. The orchestra was to one side; Tines and the choristers paced about; Ma sat at the center. The acoustics were, needless to say, reverberant, yet individual lines remained distinct. Despite the damp, cool surroundings, the sound had an unexpected warmth.<\/p>\n

Read the full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yo-Yo Ma Goes Underground with the Louisville Orchestra Teddy Abrams, the ensemble\u2019s music director, has created a work about Mammoth Cave\u2014and staged the piece inside its reverberating walls. From The New Yorker By Alex Ross Abrams\u2019s gifts as a conductor were evident at a gala concert in Louisville last month, at the Kentucky Center. He … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3633,4256,3613,7258,7259,4585,3931,4437],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11953,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11952\/revisions\/11953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/8645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}