Washington Classical Review

Marin Alsop conducted the National Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at the Kennedy Center. Photo: Scott Suchman

Four years is a long time. The coronavirus pandemic canceled the National Symphony Orchestra’s originally scheduled world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Her Story back in 2021. After the work made the rounds of the other co-commissioning orchestras since then, it finally came to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall Thursday night. The context, in the wake of a Republican takeover at the performing arts center earlier this month, felt completely different.

Inspired by the centennial of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote, Wolfe’s new piece “dramatizes text from the fight for women’s equality.” A sort of choral pantomime, created for and by the ten women of the Lorelei Ensemble, it combined their voices, which had to be amplified to carry at all over the orchestra, with choreographed movement and some dramatic lighting effects (directed by Anne Kauffman and Asher Lloyd Ehrenberg).

Marin Alsop, music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, opened the work with an insistent string unison. The ten singers filed in dramatically to places in the chorister seating above the stage, wearing black dresses and red gloves on their right hands. The singers chopped up the text of the first movement into vocal fragments, drawn from a letter written by Abigail Adams to her husband, President John Adams, but it was projected in its entirety on a large screen.

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands,” the text read at its climax, “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.” Soloist Sonja Tengblad sang out the word “Remember” at the top of the female range, as the other singers descended to the stage, taking positions on platforms within the orchestra. The latter line, whispered at first, grew into an indignant howl of rage, leading to a strident conclusion of the first section.

The middle section of the piece set a series of words, expressing the accusations against women seeking equality (“Unruly, Unstable, Unmarried,” and so on). As they sang these words, again in dissonant homophonic clusters, the singers held up large cards displaying the words, a helpful guide, since bars seemed to censor the text projected on the screen. At the climax of this angry section, they spelled out the word “Un-American” in red letters on the folders they carried.

The Lorelei Ensemble performed in Julia Wolfe’s Her Story Thursday night. Photo: Scott Suchman

After the ten singers, now arranged on a bench in front of the orchestra, helped each other loosen and remove the upper part of their dresses, they sang the final section, set to words from a speech given by Sojourner Truth. Like most of the piece, this final section rumbled with an insistent anger, as electric and bass guitar pulsed along with a largely unvaried orchestration. The score relied heavily on the extramusical elements of the performance to make an impression, but a memorable impression it did make.

As in some of the previous performances of the Wolfe piece, Alsop paired it with Rimsky-Korsakov’s tone poem Scheherazade. Here indeed was a tyrannical husband with unlimited power, drawn from the Arabian folk tales of The Thousand and One Nights. Represented by a menacing bass theme heard at the start of the piece, a cruel king named Shahryar executes his wives after a single evening with them. Only one of them, Scheherazade, manages to avoid death by telling him stories, ending with a cliffhanger so that he lets her live.

Associate concertmaster Ying Fu, sitting top chair all evening, played the violin solos portraying Scheherazade’s narration with vivid, honeyed tone. In the more challenging cadenzas, especially in the fourth movement, he rendered the double and triple-stops with impressive virtuosity. Other principal musicians rendered their crucial solos with equal savvy; only some errant tuning among the high woodwinds caused trouble at crucial moments.

Alsop brought a lumbering energy to the Wolfe work, yet struggled to keep the slow opening movement of Scheherazade, depicting the sea and Sinbad’s ship, on track with her sloppy, rocking beat. The variations of the second movement, on a melody first presented beautifully in the bassoon, featured some sharp sounds from menacing trombone and trumpet. Alsop had her strongest moments in the third movement, with lush string playing, especially from violins and cellos. She showed a clear ear for orchestral balances as well, adding just the right tinge of percussion in the middle section.

The fourth movement, given color and verve by Alsop, combined a boisterous range of sounds to represent the festival at Baghdad. Brass and percussion drowned out the chromatic swells of the woodwinds as the music of the sea returned toward the end. Just as the story climaxed with a dramatic shipwreck, Ying Fu’s sweet violin returned, reminding the king that he must keep her alive for another day if he wants to know how the story ends.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday. kennedy-center.org