Photo: Hilary Scott/BSO

Conductor Teddy Abrams led the Boston Symphony Orchestra and bass-baritone Dashon Burton in four performances of MTT’s composition Whitman Songs March 13–16.

In their Boston Globe review, A.Z. Madonna wrote that “the taut and sprightly orchestral textures of the Whitman Songs recalled Copland’s Old American Songs” and shared particular praise for the final two songs, “the misty, slow-flowing ‘At Ship’s Helm,’ with the sea’s vastness and loneliness represented in the orchestra while Burton’s voice glowed like a sunset over water, and then the joyous strides of ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging.'”

The performance also won praise from the Boston Classical Review‘s Jonathan Blumhofer, who wrote:

Fittingly, given its texts, the Songs’ fifteen minutes are packed with multitudinous points of reference and a bristling array of instrumental colors and gestures. Crabbed, punchy riffs define the orchestral fabric over much of the opening ‘Who Goes There?’

Yet by the time its swaggering climax arrives, there are snatches of something sounding not too far removed from Gershwin, while James Brown’s ghost hovers in the near distance. The central ‘At Ship’s Helm’ provides a sumptuous, meditative respite, while the marching refrains in ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’ suggest Ives in one of his sunnier moods; its zenith—proud, warm, affirming—offers a whiff of ecstasy all its own.

On Thursday, the Songs’ quest to answer, as Abrams put it in his introductory remarks, ‘what it means to be an American’ rang with stirring timeliness. Nothing sounded dated about either Tilson Thomas’s edgy, dramatically alert musical language or Whitman’s poems, first published 170 years ago in July. Instead, this was a quarter-hour for the near and distant pasts to speak directly to the present.”

The Boston Musical Intelligencer‘s Geoffrey Wieting praised Abrams and Burton, writing that they “will be powerful advocates for this interesting song set that deals with individuality, artistic identity, and the tension between unconventionality and a conformist society—in short, many of the issues our country is currently grappling with.”

MTT wrote Whitman Songs in 1993–94 and the original orchestration was premiered by Thomas Hampson and the San Francisco Symphony (with MTT conducting) in 1999. The work was revised in 2023. A Bay Area native, Teddy Abrams is currently Music Director of Louisville Orchestra and considers MTT to be his most important musical mentors.

Learn more about Whitman Songs.