Music and Democracy: Apollo Chamber Players garner national attention for their advocacy-centered programming

Steven Brown·
HoustonMusic
·

Houston’s Apollo Chamber Players have received plenty of media attention, but this was different. Rather than focusing on a single upcoming concert, NPR’s Weekend Edition spotlighted Apollo for building its entire season around real-world events.

“These musicians believe what they play should speak to the historical moment,” reporter Neda Ulaby said at the opening of her story last March. She went on to tell listeners about Apollo’s then-current season: “Silenced Voices,” which looked at creative artists facing forces such as book bans, censorship and the ultimate form of silencing—killing through genocide and war.

NPR’s report was “a news story. It wasn’t just, ‘This is a great group and it’s playing music,’” recalls Matthew Detrick, violinist and co-founder of Apollo. “I was particularly proud of that, and it gave us the confidence to move forward with a season like … ‘We the People.’”

That’s Apollo’s label for 2024-25. As you might guess from the nod to the U.S. Constitution, the concerts will spotlight American ideals such as liberty and democracy, as evoked by an array of composers and writers. Even Houston teenagers will have their say. The season will open as a tumultuous election campaign nears its climax.

“We’re not telling people … how they should vote, but talking about the issues that are important to all of  us, especially now,” Detrick says. He thinks examining big topics through art and music offers “an opportunity for Apollo to take a stand, but do it in a way…that is as non-threatening as possible. Bring people into the conversation, have a conversation. A lot of the problem is that people just don’t talk to each other. There’s no hope when people don’t talk, right?”

For Apollo’s opening concert (Oct. 5), veteran composer John Corigliano has recast his One Sweet Morning, a song cycle for singer and orchestra, to give the instrumental side to a string quintet. Written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, One Sweet Morning draws on writers from Homer to Hollywood lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg to envision a world that faces and overcomes strife.

In the cycle’s finale, Harburg’s poetry helps conjure up a future in which “the rose will rise…spring will bloom…peace will come….one sweet morning.” While the songs originally featured a mezzo-soprano, the vocal part will here be taken over by countertenor John Holiday, a Houston native who has gone from TV’s “The Voice” to perform with the Metropolitan Opera and other leading companies.

The concert will also recall a lapse in American ideals: the forcing of thousands of Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II. Apollo will bring back one of last season’s premieres, Marty Regan’s The Book of Names, in an expanded version incorporating narration written and delivered by actor George Takei. Yes, the Star Trek veteran—who spent part of his youth locked into a camp with his family—will join Apollo to recall the experience and its lessons.

“Throughout it all, my parents never lost their moral compass, and continued to raise us by example and with dignity,” Takei says in his script. “Our parents had lived through the darkest breakdown of our democracy, and yet our father taught us the significance of participation in a … democracy.”

He goes on to recall the 1980s campaign to win restitution for the camps’ survivors, ultimately signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. “Our democracy,” Takei says, “is a precious ideal that requires all of us, as Americans, to actively engage with it to keep it strong and true and shining.”

Apollo’s second program (Jan. 4) will spotlight composers who have come to the United States seeking refuge or opportunity. “We’re all immigrants in some way, whether we’re first generation or fifth generation,” Detrick says.

Many concertgoers may not realize that English icon Benjamin Britten came to the United States as World War II battered his homeland. Britten’s string quartets are “amazing and tough,” Detrick says, and Apollo will play the second. Britten returned home, but Apollo will complement his example with a sonata by a war refugee who stayed here: Hungarian-born Miklós Rózsa, who settled in Hollywood and became a mainstay of Golden Age movie scores.

The January concert will also feature four Houston Ballet dancers—including Mónica Gómez and Estheysis Menendez, who will choreograph Cuban composer Leo Brouwer’s Nostalgia de las Montañas. Brouwer, trained largely in the United States, has “a compelling voice…reflecting his Cuban heritage and his love of different cultures,” Detrick says.

Nostalgia de las Montañas, one of Apollo’s 20×2020 commissions, is especially “apt for choreography,” Detrick notes, thanks to its varied moods and shifting rhythms. He adds that dancers Gómez and Menendez may have seemed very young when they first collaborated with Apollo several years ago, but now “they’re in a very different place. They’re mentoring others.” He delights in that. Gómez will also choreograph a Cuban classic, Ernesto Lecuona’s Canto Siboney.

In honor of Houston’s famously multicultural population, Apollo’s third program (March 21) will celebrate diversity. Daniel Bernard Roumain, a Haitian-American violinist and composer sometimes known simply as DBR, celebrates civil rights icon Rosa Parks in his String Quartet No. 5. “He’s a really important Black voice in the classical music world,” Detrick says, “and we have not played any of his music.” Obviously, that’s about to change.

The March program will include the premiere of another in Apollo’s extensive series of commissions:Bandari, by Iranian-American composer Reza Vali. A longtime composition teacher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Vali explains in his program note that the title refers to a musical genre associated with the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr. He likens the city to New Orleans as a cultural melting pot.

“African slaves were brought to Bushehr by the Portuguese and the British colonialists, very much the same as in the U.S.,” Vali writes. “However, the comparison ends here. I do not know of (any) lynching of a black person in Iranian history. We never had Ku Klux Klans, and there was never a Jim Crow segregation law in Iranian history. The Afro-Iranians were accepted in the web of Iranian society and their music highly enriched the music of the south of Iran.”

Vali’s Bandari will feature Iranian-born percussionist Pejman Hadadi, who first collaborated with Apollo virtually during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the music will keep Apollo’s musicians extra busy, singing and playing percussion instruments in addition to their regular roles. “I had so much fun writing this piece,” Vali says in his note.

Apollo will round out the March program by reprising two past commissions: Lullaby for the Children of the Sun, by Palestinian composer Muyassar Kurdi and Three Goat Blues, by Israeli Gilad Cohen. The two works “stand on their own as pieces,” Detrick says, but their pairing has a purpose. Diversity, Detrick notes, takes more forms than national or ethnic ones.

“I don’t want to make this about the war in Gaza,” Detrick says. “But I do think it’s reflective of why it’s important to have diversity of thought in a society, even when people disagree—especially when people disagree.”

Yet another commission is in store for the season finale, when Apollo’s guest will be the choir from Kinder High School for the Visual and Performing Arts (May 10 and 18). After the group performs Howard Hanson’s Song of Democracy, based on poetry by Walt Whitman, the young people will share the thoughts of their own classmates—as set to music by the University of Houston’s Marcus Maroney.

“We’re very intrigued about what these students will say,” Detrick says. “My feeling is that there’s an intergenerational divide in this country,” with young people feeling a “malaise” about their prospects.

“You read about young people, generation Z, and their view of democracy. It’s so low that it doesn’t portend well for the kind of representative democracy we need. I think … there’s genuine concern from young people about how they’re represented.”

Students from HSPVA’s American history and creative writing departments will give their side of things in essays they write this fall, Detrick says. Maroney will take those, craft a libretto from them and set it to music. To give the up-and-coming generation another opening, Apollo will premiere works by the winners of its international commissioning contest.

In the meantime, Apollo’s annual Miller Outdoor Theatre appearance comes Aug. 24. Houston Ballet’s Connor Walsh and Chae Eun Yang will take center stage in Marty Regan’s Splash of Indigo, which draws on Japanese folk music. More guests will step in for Mekong: SOUL, a multimedia salute to life on the Southeast Asian river by composer Vân-Ánh Võ and collaborators.

As the season unfolds, Apollo will offer its annual Czech Heritage Month concert (Oct. 17) and holiday concert (Dec. 14). It will complete its four-year concert tour of all 26 Harris County Public Library branches—having racked up more than 2,000 miles of driving, Detrick says.

In all its projects, Detrick says, Apollo’s growing repertoire of commissioned works pays constant dividends. Not only are they a musical resource, but they have helped donors bond with the group. And they keep concertgoers interested and engaged.

“Apollo’s in its middle-aged years, if you will,” Detrick says. “We have a lot more of our work to draw on. You don’t have that when you start out. That’s one of the things that has been most special to me. … Our legacy will be our commissions, and hopefully our programming, too. I hope people look at what we do, and are inspired to take some chances.”

-STEVEN BROWN

Steven Brown

Steven Brown is a Houston writer who has been classical music critic of the Houston Chronicle, Charlotte (N.C.) Observer and Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel.