The Rosa Parks Boulevard movement from Michael Daugherty's Motor City Triptych was given its Irish premiΦre by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at the NCH on Thursday under Leif Segerstam, who was standing in at late notice (unable to conduct the pre-tour concerts in Detroit) for the indisposed Detroit music director, Neeme JΣrvi.
The movement celebrates the achievement of Rosa Parks, the woman who, in 1955, stirred up a civil rights storm by refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus in Alabama.
Three trombonists spaced across the orchestra adopt a range of musical attitudes to represent the African-American preachers she views as a source of strength. Undercurrents of more violent writing tell of the fraught bus ride.
Daugherty is a composer whose distinction lies in the way he engages with popular American culture. The surprising thing about Rosa Parks Boulevard is the amount of melting schmaltz he's dribbled over this piece through the swooning slides and vibrato of the trombones. He doesn't demand a long attention-span from his listeners, and rings the changes as you might expect; but the soft-core atmosphere that he sets at the start never quite dissipates.
Lars Vogt showed none of the modern fear that some pianists display in the face of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. He played it with an unselfconscious noble sweep, the nobility compensating for some roughness of tone, under pressure, and a delicate inwardness when the music retreated to the other end of the dynamic spectrum. His approach was well matched by the unproblematic directness of Segerstam and the Detroit players.
Arvo PΣrt's doleful Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten is created from a single minor scale descending at different speeds within a string orchestra, the slowly shifting patterns which evolve being interspersed with the tolling of a lone bell.
In the performance he rather tugged at the lines, as if expecting them to yield the espressivo results of an earlier musical era. This made the music sound a little ragged, but at the final climax he managed to yield a super-charged thrust.
Rachmaninov's late Symphonic Dances are a fine display piece for an orchestra, and the Detroit players shone in a way that bespoke not showiness but well-grounded musicianship.
