A soldier deserts his duties to return to his beloved and faces some devastating realities along the way.
It’s an epic tale of love, war, and death. And the Central Ohio Symphony will tell it in the Ohio premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain Suite.
The Central Ohio Symphony will open its 2023-24 season with the Ohio premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain Suite, Saturday, Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m. in Ohio Wesleyan University’s Gray Chapel.
Central Ohio Symphony Music Director Jaime Morales-Matos will conduct the concert, which will also feature noted violinist Guillermo Figueroa as soloist in the Violin Concerto by Miguel Del Aiguila and Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, “Organ.”
Higdon derived her Cold Mountain Suite from her award-winning 2015 opera, Cold Mountain, which sets a libretto by Gene Scheer based on Charles Frazier’s 1997 National Book Award-winning novel of the same title. Frazier’s novel and Higdon’s opera chart the course of protagonist W.P. Inman, an American Civil War soldier who deserts the Confederate Army and walks for months to return to his beloved, Ada, and their village near North Carolina’s Cold Mountain.
Higdon says she chose Frazier’s Cold Mountain as the subject for her opera because the novel’s characters felt familiar to her.
“I grew up in an area of East Tennessee not far from Cold Mountain, so I recognized the spoken language of the characters, and there was something about the pacing of the words in Charles Frazier’s novel that resonated with me very strongly. The story felt like a pair of familiar shoes that I was putting on,” Higdon said.
In crafting her Cold Mountain Suite for orchestra, Higdon made considerable changes to the music of the opera, to retain its dramatic feel in the absence of the words with which the characters sing their stories.
“With an opera you’ve got the story and the text weaving it all together. When you pull the singers out from this and you don’t have a text, it means you can kind of re-examine the music,” Higdon said. “For me as a composer, it was really challenging to try to figure out, okay, how do I do this just with the instruments, with a small orchestra, and make it an engaging experience?”
The suite is notable for changes in orchestration, as the singers’ melodies are given to instruments in the orchestra. It also includes distinctive musical and dramatic highlights from the opera’s score – the bluegrass duet “Bless you, Ruby,” the tender love duet “Orion,” in which Inman tells Ada that she can look at the constellation Orion and know that he is watching it with her from wherever he may be, the dramatic music for the storm Inman gets caught in while trying to make an escape.
“I looked for beauty, I looked for melody, I looked for things that would make your heart race and your toe tap,” Higdon said. “Those were the main things that I thought, alright, this is what the music needs to do.”
Higdon’s Cold Mountain Suite and the Central Ohio Symphony’s Ohio premiere of it are both made possible by New Music for America, a commissioning consortium of 37 U.S. regional orchestras, most with budgets of less than $1 million per year. The program enables orchestras with smaller budgets to pool their resources to meet the often hefty expenses involved in commissioning new musical works from major composers.
With assistance from a variety of funders, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Music for America program also gives the commissioning orchestras the first opportunities to perform the new musical works for their audiences.
“This is a project that has been driven by the orchestras themselves – smaller ones – and (by) the importance of working with composers and particularly significant composers and being able to do commissions and introduce new music to the audiences,” said Warren Hyer, executive director of the Central Ohio Symphony. “Big orchestras can manage these things fairly well, but when you’re a small orchestra, and with a major composer, that’s almost impossible to do.”
The Delaware Symphony Orchestra, in Wilmington, Del., gave the world premiere of Higdon’s Cold Mountain Suite in September 2022. The Central Ohio Symphony’s Ohio premiere of the suite will enable musicians and audiences in communities around central Ohio to experience the premiere of a new work by a composer of international stature.
And for Higdon, a graduate of Bowling Green State University, in Bowling Green, Ohio, the Central Ohio Symphony’s performance feels special.
“This (performance) feels personal, really, for it to be in central Ohio,” Higdon said. “It has a lot of meaning for me.”
The Central Ohio Symphony will perform the Ohio premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain Suite on Saturday, Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m. in Ohio Wesleyan University’s Gray Chapel.
