Chris Brubeck was leaning into his trombone with everything he had, shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair swinging wildly as another string of deep, brassy moans escaped the instrument to meet Guillaume Saint-James’ soaring saxophone. Behind them, a blue-tinted, clean V of fighter jets had taken to the sky, launching missiles at their targets — ships moving fast through the grey water — as they pushed toward the horizon. A ship was hit, its heavy body exploding into a burst of violent orange. A few audience members flinched.
Welcome to Brubeck and Saint-James’ Brothers In Arts, an aural odyssey from the first note of its first movement. As the cornerstone of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s (NHSO) fourth concert of the season, the work made for a memorable and musical Veterans Day when it enjoyed its New Haven debut at the Shubert Theater downtown. Written in 2014 to commemorate the 70-year anniversary of the liberation of Paris, Brothers In Arts left the night equal parts celebratory and emotional, hanging on a narrative refrain “we will never forget.”
Lucy Gellman Photos
“I’m very excited to be with all of you for a truly meaningful and significant evening of music and tribute,” said Mayor Toni Harp, declaring Nov. 12, 2015 the city’s “New Haven Symphony Orchestra Day” as she introduced the performance and honored longtime cultural advocate William Curran. “This evening, a national treasure is being launched … Brothers in Arts honors veterans and their families for the monumental contributions they make day to day.”
That’s right on for the ambitious, eight-movement composition for jazz quintet and orchestra. Reaching through all the Star-Spangled goop and blind fanfare that has come to represent Veterans’ Day, Brothers in Arts proposed something new, a transatlantic conversation in classical composition and jazz music that reveled in an utterly genuine Franco-Americanness. Paired with archival footage from the Second World War, the work left no stone unturned, few memories untouched.
Ithursarry
That’s owing to Brueck’s collaborative practice, on robust display throughout the piece. An exuberant third movement (“The D‑Day March for Freedom”) brought with it a brassy, lush version of La Marseillaise. In subsections of the fifth, Aric Isaacs’ whimsically produced “Wolfpack Boogie” rose up to meet a booming, resonant and richly orchestrated reminder of the Battle of the Bulge. A deliciously not classical, brass-and-woodwind-heavy section led up to the last movement, showcasing accordion virtuoso Didier Ithursarry.
What that left listeners with — particularly in the wake of a new kind of siege on Paris, which began not even 24 hours after the concert — was not the reality of we shall not forget or we will not forget, but that we cannot forget, lest anything of that magnitude happen again. Buttressed by Aaron Copland’s somber, slightly haunting Quiet City and a dessert and dancing Gala, Brothers in Arts very literally straddled worlds conflict-ridden and celebratory, dropping in tonal, low-bellied instrumental reminders of malevolence along the way — just in case listeners got to comfortable at any one part.
This aspect, too, made the work stand out; while it was entirely finished, it never felt entirely over, a loose, way too of-the-canon eighth movement (either aptly or unfortunately titled “Epilogue”) coming off as the only disingenuous part of the piece. Brothers in Arts, after all, was about miming interwar conversation: messy, organic, improvisational and challenging. Anything less, Brubeck seemed to say with the rest of the work, wouldn’t have ended in the same victory.
Or as he said after the concert, “It’s kind of a miracle that it happened.”
