It doesn’t matter whether New Century Chamber Orchestra and its music director, Daniel Hope, anticipated the cascading disruptions and anxieties of 2025 when they planned “A Prayer for Peace,” last weekend’s concert set. A well-balanced, beautifully played program like this one, which saw its first performance on Friday, April 4, at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, would be a welcome respite at any time.
The centerpiece was Richard Strauss’s monumental Metamorphosen, one of the most inspired works in the chamber orchestra repertory. Balancing this was a first half featuring two American works, Adolphus Hailstork’s Sonata da Chiesa (1992) and the West Coast premiere of Jungyoon Wie’s A Prayer for Peace (2024). Both of these composers, eschewing more esoteric modernist practices, write in an idiom that Strauss would have had no trouble understanding or enjoying.
Hailstork has written a number of great works based on his childhood in the Episcopal Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, New York, where he was a choirboy. That formative musical experience explains the conjunction of delicate counterpoint and impressive, massed sonority in many of his compositions.
Sonata da Chiesa, written for a student string orchestra, also reflects Hailstork’s faith life, using snippets of liturgical chant as the basis of its seven movements. The last movement returns to the first, both of them titled “Exultate” (Exult), which would be a fitting subtitle for the piece. The sonorous, lively fourth movement, “Jubilate” (Rejoice), is a partner to that mood. The movements in between are more meditative, but throughout Hailstork develops ear-catching melodies from his material. Clearly the voice, his first instrument, is the reference point for this fine piece.
Wie’s work, a co-commission from NCCO and the Boston-based chamber orchestra A Far Cry (which premiered it), is an introspective piece that the composer describes as her own “journey of immigration,” progressing from loneliness and isolation through anger to peace (although she notes with graceful self-knowledge: “Sometimes I can find myself indifferent to the tragedies of others.”)
The work’s four movements, 18 minutes total, are built over a short motive, minimally elaborated, that begins in the violas. The first violins add a lonely, high-lying descant at almost a remove, and the music grows to an initial climax that involves the whole string orchestra. In the angry second movement, palpable dissonance appears (of course), along with tremolos and repeated piano-forte contrasts, ending in stasis on a dissonant chord. The third movement features glissando-heavy phrases culminating in high harmonics, which lead to the finale, where a solo violin spins out a melody climbing higher over the bedrock motive, now extended. The work ends with a short dialogue between the sections (indifference).
A Prayer for Peace is a beautiful work, even in its “anger” movement. The contrasts and the counterpoint are presented so clearly that the music is intelligible and moving, even if you don’t know the story behind it. And that’s also a tribute to the fine work of the NCCO players, who produce a fat, unified sound that makes virtually any piece sound great.
But the orchestra’s true test was Metamorphosen. Written in 1945, this score contemplates the search for comfort in the wake of tragedy, a very different prayer for peace. When Strauss notes that the work is for 23 solo strings, he isn’t kidding. The counterpoint here goes beyond what mere mortals can normally achieve. Even the opening chords, undergirded by a descending chromatic bass, are magical: Time seems suspended as the music continually unfolds, and form is elided by the continually shifting harmonies and sonorities as individual instrumentalists enter the fray or leave. The climax is glorious, the disintegration at the end shattering.
The musicians have to go all in when performing Metamorphosen. There’s nobody around with whom you can sync your bowing. NCCO played this complex masterpiece full out. It’s just 26 minutes, but it takes up all your psychic space. Nothing can follow it. There were no encores. I left amazed at the secure and confident musicianship of each and every player.
