January 20, 2008 3:00 pm
Brown Theater, Louisville
Messengers of Christ Choir, Ronn Norfleet, director
Stewart Goodyear, piano
traditional – We Shall Overcome
traditional – Let My People Go
Still – Lenox Avenue: Blues
Ray Horton – Make Gentle the Life of This World [world premiere]
George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue
traditional – I Heard de Preachin’ of the Elders
Related post – He got rhythm
Related post – LO honors MLK
Musical tributes eloquent
by Andrew Adler
The Courier-Journal
January 21, 2008
In song and speech, with voices solitary and combined as one, from instruments handed down through the ages and memories that after 40 years seem ageless, Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy was celebrated yesterday at the Brown Theatre.
The Louisville Orchestra's annual MLK concert offered typical points of resonance -- principally multiple iterations of King's "I Have a Dream" speech (most powerfully by Norman Seawright), which by now has evolved from iconic to defining a universal moral truth. Yet as we approach the 40th anniversary April 4 of King's 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tenn., it's appropriate to ponder just how much of his hopes have been borne out in practice.
Just two months after King was shot, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, hours after winning California's presidential primary. But on the day King was murdered, Kennedy was in Indianapolis to deliver a campaign address. Instead, Kennedy gave a remarkably eloquent, affecting plea for unity and love.
Using a recording of Kennedy's Indianapolis speech as a narrative anchor, Louisville Orchestra bass trombonist Raymond Horton has written a modest, skillfully crafted score called "Make Gentle the Life of This World," which had its premiere yesterday. Persuading as much through understatement as through grand gestures, the piece honored its subject in a tellingly fresh perspective. Bass Lewis Washington sang the concluding texts with quiet eloquence.
Elsewhere yesterday, the Messengers for Christ Choir launched the afternoon with a somewhat tepid account of "We Shall Overcome," returning a few minutes later in far more impassioned voice for "Let My People Go." Between the two selections, Mayor Jerry Abramson presented this year's Mayor's Freedom Award to James O. Chatham, who spent 25 years as pastor of Highland Presbyterian Church (and who now lives in North Carolina, where a recent ice storm kept him from accepting the award in person).
For sheer, old-fashioned excitement, though, yesterday's top honors went to pianist Stewart Goodyear, who played the solo part of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Partnered in brisk, idiomatic fashion by associate conductor Jason Weinberger and the orchestra, this was an account where verve and nerve combined to luscious, brilliant effect.
Note: All reviews are edited for length and spelling.