REVIEW: POA WORLD PREMIERE OF "HOLD FAST TO DREAMS"
A Choral/Orchestral Fantasy by Nolan Williams, Jr.
On Tuesday, July 25, 2017, The Philadelphia Orchestra performed the world premiere of Nolan Williams Jr.'s Hold Fast To Dreams, a song cycle for orchestra, choir, soloists and narrator, commissioned by the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. The work was composed to honor African American pioneers of the American space program, especially Colonel Guion Bluford, Jr., first African American NASA astronaut in space, who was honored on stage during the event.
Below is the Philadelphia Inquirer review of this performance along with a video tribute and two musical excerpts of Nolan's work.
Photo Credit: Jordan August
Philly astronaut Bluford gets his props at the Mann - and a soaring orchestral number in his honor
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - 8:34 AM EDT
By Peter Dobrin, Culture Writer
From Richard Strauss to Haydn, John Williams to Puccini, and with a stop at a lovely new commission, Tuesday night's Philadelphia Orchestra concert moved fast. But then again, space travel is like that.
If the Mann and Williams succeeded in anything Tuesday night, it was in creating a vibe of warmth and quiet awe.
...Nolan Williams Jr. had big forces at his disposal for Hold Fast to Dreams: the Mann Festival Choir drawn from local groups, two excellent soloists -- soprano Leah Hawkins and bass-baritone Frank B. Mitchell 3d -- plus the clarion narration of Franklin Institute astronomer Derrick Pitts. With various texts, including some from Bluford, the piece's four movements mixed and matched forces in canny ways to explore dreams -- dreams stirred and realized, and dreams dashed.
Williams has a musical language all his own. It brims with vernacular American optimism, but is always in service to the text. Pitts' narration over a jazz band cool breeze in the second movement caught Langston Hughes' sense of language perfectly, with Williams' giving a "broken-winged bird" more hope than the poetry itself by assigning the image an oboe figure that persisted in trying to take flight.
Williams' gift for warmth glowed in the last song. In "Hope Renewed: Child of the Universe," Hawkins took on the tone of maternal authority, assuring, with Max Ehrmann's words, that the "world is beautiful still." Williams' dreamily upbeat piece left no other choice than to believe it so.