By Robert Croan
South Florida Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Sebrina Maria Alfonso, led one of her orchestra’s most adventurous and interesting programs ever (seen Feb. 18 at The Parker in Fort Lauderdale) with two nearly brand-new works by composers who are at the cutting edge of today’s classical music scene.
Four Black American Dances, by Carlos Simon (b. 1986), was premiered by the Boston Symphony in 2022; Had to Be, by Nathalie Joachim (b. 1983), was first performed at the Spoleto Festival USA in 2024. Each work, in a very different way, integrates African and African American elements, including American jazz, into a traditional Western symphonic context.
Simon’s Dances, which opened the concert, has already become part of the repertory, having been played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Atlanta Symphony, the Nashville Symphony, Montreal’s Orchestre Metropolitain and the Vancouver Symphony. It’s a compelling, vibrant work, hard to resist for its rhythmic momentum, wide coloristic palette and melodic invention, to all of which Simon imparts a personal stamp.
The first of the dances, “Ring Shout,” is a percussive ritual circle dance recalling early enslaved Africans in the West Indies. A contrasting “Waltz” derives from Black debutante balls of the 1920s, while in “Tap!” the snare drum suggests the sound of the dancers’ shoes. An exuberant, jazzy “Holy Dance” concludes the work with the evocation of Black Protestant church services. In all this, the orchestra played the new music as if it were familiar and natural to them, with virtuosity as an ensemble and in individual moments to shine.
Joachim’s Had to Be, co-commissioned and performed shortly after its premiere by the New York Philharmonic, is a more introspective piece: a cello concerto written for the versatile, genre-crossing Seth Parker Woods — who made headlines this month by withdrawing from Kennedy Center performances with the National Symphony Orchestra to protest the renaming of the venue.
His performance with SFSO was remarkable, not merely for his technical skills but for his ability to adjust his sound to each of the expressive levels demanded during the work’s emotional journey. From Joachim’s subdued, “Homegoing,” a Caribbean-inspired “celebratory funeral march” that introduces the soloist as part of a larger entity, to the middle movement’s raucous, syncopated jazz-style riffs, Woods created the sweetest violin-like lines in his upper register, then purposefully raspy outbursts in the middle movement to complement the dominating percussion (special kudos throughout the evening to percussion co-principals Lucas Sanchez and Guillermo Ospina). The composer, Brooklyn-born of Haitian parents, managed to differentiate Haitian, Creole and American jazz language in ways that give her music a flavor quite unlike any other.
The cellist came into his own in the work’s finale, which brings his instrument to the forefront and allows him some fireworks that ultimately give way to a lyrical conclusion.
The second half was traditional: Mozart’s Haffner Symphony (No. 35, in D major, K. 385), followed by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol. Mozart’s 1782 symphony was an offering to a would-be employer at a crucial point in that composer’s career. This irresistible music was simply and elegantly rendered under Alfonzo’s baton, the conductor imparting a sense of the joy she perceptibly feels emanating from this festive score — not just in the brassy outer movements but even more so in Mozart’s exquisite Andante, which omits the trumpets and timpani.
The joy extended into the finale, a comic opera takeoff on Osmin’s “Triumphieren” aria from his successful opera of the previous year, The Abduction from the Seraglio.
Capriccio espagnol is a colorful orchestral showcase, a lightweight crowd pleaser perfect for sending an audience home in a good mood. It’s based on Spanish dances (although the Russian composer had never visited Spain), and the players reveled in opportunities to show off — with ingratiating solo bits from the expert concertmaster Huifang Chen, and in the second movement variations, from principal horn Davide Fanchin.