Ticheli’s ‘American Dream’ Given Touching Premiere

The climax and denouement of Frank Ticheli’s seven-year tenure as composer in residence at the Pacific Symphony arrived Wednesday night, when the 40-year-old, Louisiana-born composer was present for the world premiere of his fifth work in this tenure, his “An American Dream: A Symphony of Songs,” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Carl St.Clair, the orchestra’s music director, who has overseen all five of the works Ticheli has produced for the Pacific Symphony, conducted this final premiere with both tightness and elan. The able soloist, for whom this 40-minute cycle of seven poems--by Philip Littell--was written, was Camellia Johnson, who sang them with admirable control and ease, though she made little of the words.

The work is, not unexpectedly given Ticheli’s previous orchestral pieces, attractive and accessible. But it has an edge, and it is not, like some of those others, in the least glib or shallow. Littell’s texts have a deep emotional resonance and a mystery, which the composer mirrored with lush, economical and touching sounds.

Littell provided thematic material: the dreams of one woman, the hopes of a nation, fears about the future--all at a given moment, what the poet-librettist calls “the millennial moment.”

The seven poems are connected not by plot but by an accumulation of feelings--starting in darkness, fear and apprehension and arising to confrontation and catharsis and, if not actual triumph, then at least acceptance. Ticheli’s music describes the amorphous feelings in these dreamlike sequences and underlines their nonverbal sense; this is not a literal journey but a traversal of emotions.

There is bleakness in the opening movements, an instrumental transparency mirroring the principal’s sense of being on the outside looking in--not alienation but disconnectedness. After this lonely beginning, the third poem becomes urban and jazzy--Ticheli describes it as “an angry rock tune”--and reflects the character’s disjunct relationship to her surroundings.

The fourth and fifth movements return to a path through darkness, evocation and mystery. The breakthrough, the turning point, the choice to ascend, comes in the sixth poem, which recalls the intimate remembrances of Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Littell’s words are poetry of simplicity and depth, feeling and intuition, and Ticheli sets them in a masterly way. The finale resonates with new-found awe and optimism.

The orchestra was splendid, following St.Clair’s tight conception of the piece and soprano Johnson’s untroubled mellowness.

For a pleasurable second half, St.Clair led the orchestra in a showy, accomplished run-through of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony that demonstrated throbbing strings, expert woodwinds and well-controlled brass. The conductor, however, let the band reach its dynamic peaks too often in the opening movements, so that the finale was confusingly anticlimactic.

The scheduled performance of Barber’s Adagio for Strings was postponed on this occasion because of the unexpected length of the Ticheli work.