November 2, 2024

“The life I love is making music with my friends.” I’m sure most of us who get to make music for a living share Willie’s iconic sentiment. I had the opportunity to make music with my long-time friend, pianist Willis Delony last night with my other long-time friends, the members of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra.
 
Willis and I go back several decades and have shared many performances together. One of those was a work we premiered with the Baton Rouge Symphony 7 years ago, Greg Yasinitsky’s Jazz Concerto for Piano and Orchestra which was featured on the Lansing Symphony’s second Masterworks concert last night.
 
The story of how this program took shape and came into being is kind of interesting. About a year ago, I got an e-mail from Willis where he brought up the “let’s get the band back together” idea of doing Greg’s work again. I had thoroughly enjoyed our first performance but had not really gotten to the point of programming it again. Being a real jazz concerto, it is a bit problematic to find the right context. It doesn’t work in a program of Brahms and Beethoven, yet it’s not pops concert material either.
 
It was serendipitous that I was also considering William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2 “Song for a New Race” for the season in question. Still’s work is one of the great American symphonies, sadly still under-performed, but always immensely appreciated by audiences and the players alike.  Since my first hearing of this work, I have wanted to find a place to share it with our audience.
 
Jazz, of course, is an outgrowth of the blues and the African-American experience, so in the concert-planning process, there was a nice connection developing between Still’s symphony and Yasinitsky’s concerto. There was just one problem, I now have two works on a program that few of our audience actually know. Will they buy a ticket and come to a concert of entirely unknown music? My experience told me “No”.
 
This brought me to my next question for Willis. The nice thing about making music with your friends is that you can ask the outrageous of them, something you can’t do with a stranger.
 
We needed an audience-familiar work on this program, one that lined up with the emerging blues/jazz /American theme. Coincidentally, 2024 is the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, soooo…we’ve already got the piano out there and a person to play it. Would Willis be willing to take on an 18-minute virtuosic “encore” after the demanding 30+ minutes of Greg’s concerto? It never hurts to ask an old friend, right? As it turned out, yes, he was up for it, and the program was complete.
 
The takeaway from this evening is that here are two works (Still, Yaz) that deserve more hearings, many more. Greg’s work is an important and significant addition to the piano repertoire and American symphonic music in general. It is not a novelty item, but a beautifully crafted, deeply-inspired work whose roots are in America’s most important contribution to world music, and audiences love it.
 
And the Still is a masterpiece. I mentioned the idea of “great American symphonies” earlier.  The greatest are Copland’s Third, Roy Harris’s Third, William Schuman’s Third, Barber’s First, Corigliano’s First. You could easily make a case for Dvorak 9 as well. Still’s Second deserves a place in that pantheon without question. In fact, I would put it ahead of some of those.
 
Still was born and raised in Woodville, Mississippi on the “Blues Highway”, US 61 running from New Orleans into Minnesota. (Woodville is just about 25 miles north of Baton Rouge btw, and Willis told me his father, a cattle rancher, took cattle to market there back in the day…another connection). Still’s music echoes his heritage, and this symphony does so in an elegant and gracious manner. We feel the blues element, but it is an optimist work overall and unlike anything else in the repertoire. Dvorak’s got nothing on this guy. For those looking for a symphony “from the new world”, WGS has a beautiful and fresh alternative in his Symphony No. 2.
 
As they tend to do, the members of the LSO knocked this one out of the park, embracing the range of styles and unfamiliar music with great aplomb, and as if two major piano works back to back weren’t enough, Willis offered his own improvisation on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as an encore. The audience loved it.
 
NEXT UP:
 
Flint Symphony Orchestra
Guest artists from Collage Dance Collective
Dancers from Flint School of Performing Arts
The Whiting, Flint Michigan
December 7 at 7:30 p.m. and December 8 at 3:00 p.m.
 
Tchaikovsky    The Nutcracker
 
#lansingsymphony #flintsymphony #willisdelony #gregyasinitsky #williamgrantstill