The Music School Festival Orchestra and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, under the baton of Chautauqua School of Music Artistic and Music Director Timothy Muffitt, rehearse Wynton Marsalis’ “All Rise” Tuesday in the Amphitheater.
With Wynton Marsalis’ epic “All Rise,” the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Music School Festival Orchestra, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus come together at 8:15 p.m. tonight on the Amphitheater stage for a work about the power of collaboration and creativity, and of the universal language of human experiences.
It’s the first of two back-to-back evening performances of “All Rise,” both under the baton of School of Music Artistic Director Timothy Muffitt, who described the work as a “melting pot of music,” one that melds musical languages into something wholly unique.
“It’s a great reflection of our culture,” Muffitt said. “The beauty of its diversity and the depth and intricacy of the societal fabric of the United States is reflected in this work.”
There is a dichotomy in the emotionality of “All Rise” that challenges the listener to feel their full range of emotions — it’s altogether dark, brilliant, joyful, and full of grief, Muffitt said. The program asks the larger question of our modern moment, according to Marsalis’ program notes: How will we translate our differences into a collective creativity?
“There’s a beautiful complexity to the music, and not complex for the sake of complexity, but just the nature of his musical language,” Muffitt said. “It’s a lot to figure out and we’re constantly shifting emotional and expressive and stylistic gears, so you’re never on cruise control.”
Both Maestro Muffitt and Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus Music Director Adam Luebke have been working toward this performance since early this year, building bit by bit up to this week. Having performed with Marsalis in 1991 while studying at the American Boychoir School, Luebke remembers how wonderfully eye-opening and joyous the experience was; to collaborate with Marsalis as an adult is something of a full-circle moment for him.
“All Rise” is big — two hours long, the 12-part composition for big band, choir and symphony orchestra represents distinct moments that punctuate the progression of our lives. The first section is concerned with birth and self-discovery; the second four movements focus on mistakes, pain, sacrifice and redemption; and the last section has to do with maturity and joy.
Marsalis’ “All Rise” will be performed tonight and Thursday as part of the evening entertainment series. The piece will be performed twice as part of an ongoing collaboration between the Institution and PBS, which is on-grounds this week filming for the documentary “Chautauqua At 150: Wynton Marsalis’ All Rise.” Black Robin Media, the production company behind the documentary, will also produce a full-length version of the “All Rise” performance for streaming.
For Deborah Sunya Moore, senior vice president and chief programming officer at Chautauqua Institution, the collaboration to create something that transcends any specific group is a historic opportunity. The work, she said, will resonate with Chautauquans in the audience both evenings this week, and viewers of the subsequent video production with PBS.
For the PBS documentary, she said the Institution wants to document both performances “so that this historic piece, performed in Chautauqua’s sesquicentennial season, can go down in history in a way that makes everyone proud — in a way that captures the emotion of the piece, in a way that captures the passion of musicians on stage and in a way that captures the reactions and the emotional experience of audience members in the Amphitheater.”
The elements combined in “All Rise” might seem unrelated on their face — like the didgeridoo and ancient Greek harmonies, but to combine them, Marsalis listens for their similarities.
“In attempting to unite disparate and large forces, everyone has to give up something in order to achieve a greater whole,” Marsalis wrote in his program notes.
Having a week in collaboration with Marsalis, Muffitt said, provides an opportunity to “see the many facets of artistry and humanity” of the composer. Among Marsalis’ numerous achievements are nine Grammy Awards, and his oratorio Blood on the Fields, which was the first jazz composition to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music.
“There’s a perfect storm, I think, with the creation of a guy like Wynton; he just started out as a great musician, but then underneath all of that, was a very complex individual who was watching what was happening in the world around him and noticing that he had some influence as this great musician, that he had things to say,” Muffitt said. “He was creating a platform for himself to do that.”
