Coro Allegro Artistic Director David Hodgkins Discusses the February 23 Concert

We asked Coro Allegro Artistic Director David Hodgkins to elaborate on the works by Daniel Pinkham and Michael Haydn for the February 23rd concert:

David Hodgkins: I wanted to program The White Raven because it’s a work that we had commissioned 11 years ago from Dan Pinkham, and we collaborated very closely with him on it. It seemed only appropriate to perform that piece which is the only work that Coro Allegro had commissioned from him, for this concert, and for the inaugural Pinkham award.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about Daniel Pinkham the person?

DH: Dan was a smart musician, a terrific guy. He was friends with everybody. And he was quite an icon. I knew Dan when I was teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music in the late 1980s when I was the assistant choral director there. I helped him with some projects and we got to know each other. He was always helpful to anybody, and funny. If you were a young faculty member it didn’t matter. It was as if he had been your best friend for forever. He was very open, very warm, and always had a joke to tell. And so 11 years ago when I was already conducting Coro Allegro it probably had been a good eight or nine years that I hadn’t seen him much. When we reconnected it was as if we had seen each other yesterday. I told him that we wanted to commission a piece by him and he said that would be great. It was really an honor to work with him.

Q: Pinkham certainly composed a work that fits the text (by Christopher Smart).

DH: Yes, and the colors of the orchestra are also quite fitting: strings, trumpets and timpani. He gets very interesting colors out of that combination of instruments, really powerful moments and washes of sound, and it’s a great piece. Carole Haber who premiered the Pinkham work with us is once again the soprano soloist, which I’m very excited about.

Q: Why did you choose the Michael Haydn mass as a companion piece, and what is interesting about it musically?

DH: I chose the Michael Haydn piece first of all because it has the same orchestration as the Pinkham work, with the addition of two oboes. The Haydn was performed a few years ago by the Dedham Choral Society, with Barbara Kilduff as soprano soloist. She told me how highly she thought of the piece, and said she’d love to sing it again. I looked at it, and thought it was something that Coro would be very successful at.

The harmonic structure of the Haydn is very interesting. In each movement there seems to be a place where he goes to the flatted sixth scale degree and resolves the resulting tension with an augmented sixth chord en route to the tonic, the “home base” for that key. This is a stylistic convention in use at the time and can often be seen in the works of Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Beethoven. The difference is that Michael Haydn tends to expand the times spent in the flatted sixth key area and uses that harmonic structure as a unifying element to connect the movements. The structure is actually quite striking, and sort of pops out at you. I’m excited about the work. It’s a tough piece, especially for the string players, for whom it is nonstop motion! I think our audience will be excited by these two contrasting and very engaging works.