From the Dec 4 – Dec 10, 2003 issue

Music

Classical, Jazz, & Avant

Ffrom Times of War

by Christopher DeLaurenti

What is the obligation of composers in times of war? To salute the flag or protest bloodshed? To capture, portray, and memorialize events directly? Or just duck, cover, and survive? In 1964, Benjamin Britten wrote, "[I]t is the composer's duty, as a member of society, to speak to or for his fellow human beings." By contrast, two years later Igor Stravinsky grumbled, "As I see it, even the greatest symphony is able to do very little about Hiroshima."

The Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras' first concert of the season features works created in times of war and raises questions about "political" art-music. The SYSO serves up George Butterworth's seldom-heard A Shropshire Lad, which illustrates the problem of binding works to an artist's biography. Butterworth was killed at the Somme in 1916 at age 31; had he survived, how would we hear this song cycle, based on the poetry of A. E. Housman, differently?

Also on the program is Benjamin Britten's great Sinfonia da Requiem. Commissioned in 1939 by the Japanese government--then busy plundering the rest of Asia--the ponderous and looming Sinfonia aims to portray the horror of war. Britten, a committed pacifist, surely had decided to send a message, which, of course, was ignored; Japan rejected the piece.

The rest of the concert consists of the first movement of Samuel Barber's 1941 Violin Concerto and Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, which was written during the Napoleonic Wars. Like the Sinfonia, both works may or may not bear witness to their respectively turbulent ages, but they have survived as raw art that still moves souls. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI

Catch the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras Sat Dec 6 at 7:30 pm (Meany Hall, UW Campus, 362-2300), $7-$35.

chris@delaurenti.net

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