United in Song (PBS-TV, aired December 31, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Needless to say, our Viral Dictator transformed the fare that was offered on TV for last night’s New Year’s Eve, including eliminating the New York Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s concert (ironically, orchestras in Europe are mounting full-dress concerts and even opera performances in the COVID-19 era with appropriate precautions, but large-scale public events in this country are still Verboten … unless you’re Donald Trump) and leading PBS to substitute a Washington, D.C.-based virtual concert called United in Song that took place in part at the otherwise empty concert hall for the National Symphony (conducted quite beautifully by JoAnn Falletta – one more glass ceiling cracks! There are at least three first-class conductors these days who are women, Falletta, Marin Alsop and the quite good Simone Young, who so far is the only person who’s been able to make Richard Wagner’s early opera Rienzi sound dramatically interesting and worthy to stand alongside his later works) and part at the George Washington home on Mount Vernon, which is maintained as a museum by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Club (I’m not making this up, you know!). The concert was weighed down by the usual jabber about how arts can uplift our spirits in times of crisis – when Renée Fleming made her first appearance it was not to sing but to drone on and on and on about this as the orchestra played Aaron Copland’s “Variations on a Shaker Hymn” (really an excerpt from his famous ballet Appalachian Spring) behind her. (I’d have liked it better if she’d sung “The Gift to Be Simple,” the melody of which was the basis of Copland’s variations.) One frustration with this program was that the chyrons did not list the names of the composers of the selections performed – not that big a problem for the pop songs and traditional folk pieces but a real annoyance when the classical performers performed and the real authors of the music they were playing weren’t listed.

The concert opened with Patti Labelle singing her 1974 funk-disco hit “Lady Marmalade” – a bit strange as a song choice for a PBS New Year’s show, but she was in magnificent voice and she hit the big climactic high note as firmly, solidly and beautifully as she had 46 years before. The next item up was Renée Fleming’s bizarre recitation, and after that a blonde white woman named Morgan Jones who apparently is a modern-day “name” on Broadway did a nice song called “Travelin’ Through” that sounded more like today’s pop-country than anything else. The next artist up was pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the third and last movement of George Gershwin’s 1925 Piano Concerto in F, and he and Falletta gave this marvelous music the “bite” and swing it deserved – though it upset me that Gershwin’s name wasn’t mentioned in the chyron and it was only because I know the piece well that I was able to supply the name of the composer. Then classical violinist Joshua Bell played a piece with the National “Pops” Orchestra (which I believe consists of the same people as the National Symphony but with a different conductor, Luke Frazier) that had a four-word Spanish title which I wasn’t able to write down even remotely comprehensibly. Then the Colombian singer Juanés came out with a guitar and a second guitarist in tow and did what turned out, much to my surprise, to be a quite appealing Spanish-language version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Afterwards the concert shifted to the Mount Vernon setting for an outdoor performance by Brian Stokes Mitchell of a song called “Make Them Hear You” -- the concert organizers seemed to be going out of their way to address the legacy of slavery in American history in general and George Washington’s life in particular (Washington is sometimes given brownie points compared to Jefferson and some of the other slaveowners among the Founding Fathers because he freed all his slaves in his will, but there were still a lot of slaves on Mount Vernon who were not emancipated because they were in Martha’s name, and Washington biographer Joseph J. Ellis revealed that the real reason he freed the slaves he did was they were old, their useful work lives were just about over, and by emancipating them Washington spared his heirs the expense of taking care of them) and they seemed to have a lot of the African-American performers on the Mount Vernon site for that reason.

Then Renée Fleming returned and actually got to sing the old Quaker hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing?” – which I heard for the first time years ago sung by Pete Seeger on a red-vinyl LP from the 1960’s of highlights from the listener-supported radio station KPFA in Berkeley. I found the song moving (and quite frankly it’s a more appropriate piece of material for Seeger than for an opera star!) but later mentioned it to my Quaker friends, who told me they’d heard it so often at “meetings” (Quaker-speak for their church services) they called it “How Can I Keep from Snoring?” The next Black singer who got to sing outdoors at the Mount Vernon site was a bass-baritone named Soloman Howard (and yes, that is how he spells his first name) doing “Shenandoah” essentially in Paul Robeson’s style and singing it quite beautifully. After that Audra McDonald came on to do a tribute to American women and rattled off a lot of 19th century names I’d never heard of (as well as a few, like Harriet Tubman and American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, I had) as well as more recent social heroines and then dedicated her next song to all the women who had contributed to American history and hadn’t received their due. Alas, the song itself was ill suited to her message: it was “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music, written by two men and with an “inspiring” but not feminist message. (I’d like to have heard McDonald do a more explicitly feminist song, preferably one actually written b

The next performer was Yo-Yo Ma, though either I missed the identification of the piece he performed (a sort of pop-classical selection with the National Symphony), after which we got to hear mezzo-soprano Janis Barton. I remember seeing and hearing her at the 2012 Richard Tucker Gala on PBS and, though she wasn’t the big prizewinner, she seemed to me to be the strongest singer on the program and I’m not surprised she’s become a major star (as major as a mezzo ever gets, anyway). She sang a selection identified merely as “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix,” and you’d have to know enough about opera to be aware that the English title is “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice” and it’s from Camille Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson et Dalila. She sang it beautifully even though, as a “woman of size,” if you saw her in the role you’d have to do a lot of suspension of disbelief to accept her as the evil seductress no man (or at least not Samson) could resist. The next performance was a real surprise because I’ve never been terribly fond either of the song – “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, the 1960’s musical version of Don Quixote – or the singer, Josh Groban. It actually worked; Groban’s voice, annoyingly thin in his regular material, actually projected this song quite beautifully by freeing it from the overwrought straining and heaving it usually gets. After that came yet another classical piece flagrantly underidentified: Joshua Bell and the National Symphony playing something listed merely as “Nocturne in E minor” with no clue as to the composer (and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Chopin, who wrote probably the most famous set of nocturnes and the only ones in the standard repertory – unless you count Debussy’s three nocturnes for orchestra, which are actually elaborate 10-minute tone poems).

After that we returned to Mount Vernon for a presentation by Anna Deveare Smith about the attempts to pinpoint just where on the grounds George Washington’s slaves are buried and to give them a proper memorial (the gravesites – some of them, at least, were identified and crudely marked in 1928, but the memorial wasn’t built until 1982 and there was a competition among design students at Howard University, the first and most prominent of the historically Black colleges and universities, to design it – and the Mount Vernon Ladies Club deserves kudos for working with the people who wanted to honor Washington’s slaves instead of indulging in the sort of pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” romanticism and slavery denialism similar groups elsewhere in the South have practiced. Smith’s presentation led into one of the most beautiful moments in the show: Denyce Graves (who later recalled seeing Leontyne Price on TV and realizing that if one Black woman could have a career doing that, so could she), in a glorious performance of the spiritual “Deep River” at the site of the memorial to George Washington’s slaves. Then Juanés returned for a song a lot more typical of material than “Dancing in the Dark,” a Spanish-language song called “Para Tu Amor.” Then Audra McDonald (who looks astonishingly like Michelle Obama – if they ever do an Obama musical she’d be a good choice for the female lead) and Brian Stokes Mitchell teamed up for yet another self-consciously “inspirational” number, “Wheels of a Dream,” and let’s just say the singers were better than the song.

Afterwards McDonald and Fleming came out for yet another tiresome bit of speechmaking – this time calling for national unity, which at least in the political field seems as elusive as ever (the big news story earlier in the day was about the 140 Republican members of the House of Representatives, about two-thirds of the entire GOP delegation, who have served notice that next Wednesday, January 6, during what’s usually the ultra-routine task of holding a joint session of Congress to receive and tally the votes from the Electoral College and announce the winner, they’re going officially to object – they’re not going to be able to prevent Joe Biden from becoming the next President but they are serving notice to the country, “He’s not our President, and we want nothing to do with him and will obstruct everything he tries to do”) – before Patti Labelle returned with her version of “Over the Rainbow.” I’m impressed with the sheer durability of this song as an anthem of hope, resilience and the expectation of better things to come – Holly Near sang it at Pride events in the 1970’s, and more recently Ariana Grande chose it to close the benefit concert she gave in Manchester, England not only to raise money for the survivors and families of the victims of the terrorist attack on her previous concerts but as a gesture of defiance to the terrorist sickos who’d killed 22 concertgoers -- and though I remember not liking Patti Labelle’s version in the 1980’s (it seemed too overwrought, weighed down with too many “soul” devices, and I missed the equally intense but more restrained version Ray Charles had done on his 1963 album Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul that remains my favorite non-Garland version) I’ve mellowed about it since. (It also helped that though Labelle has dyed most of her hair blonde – a weird look for a Black person but one Beyoncé seems to have made virtually obligatory for Black women performers – at least she’s no longer wearing the bizarre knife-blade wigs she wore in the 1980’s that made her look like an upturned lawn mower.) The concert went out with a fireworks display and Falletta leading the National Symphony in a performance of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” – a piece I remember Charles chuckling over when we heard it on a telecast of a Republican event and he said, “Don’t they know it was written by a Gay Communist?” United in Song was the usual mixed bag, and I could have done with more singing and a lot less talking, but overall it was entertaining and the best performers were genuinely moving.