Or as Gandolfi quotes Mencken at another point in the score: “Our nation sold its honor for a phrase. The vocal soloists weave a complex quilt with clichéd phrases numbingly strung together: “As easy as pie”! “Pie in the sky”! “The whole nine yards”! “A piece of cake”! Below the humor there seems to lie a subtler point about the debasement of language and its alarming dissociation from truth. The second song, “In America We Coin a Phrase,” is for instance a hilariously wry sendup of American bromides. The piece, however, is at its most artistically persuasive not in its many high-exhortatory moments but on the rarer occasions that it tacks obliquely. And lest anyone’s attention drift off message, two maraca players stood at the edge of the stage on Sunday, emphatically driving the point home. The score includes musical satire of American bombast, and overtly rageful passages in which voices lash the air like whips. You sense Gandolfi’s visceral struggle to remain optimistic in these politically surreal times. Gandolfi has arranged his selections in three broad “panels” and set the texts to darkly dramatic music. The perennial struggle toward a more perfect union became the work’s overarching theme, or in a Rosa Parks line prominently included near the end: “Stand for something, or you will fall for anything.” Mencken, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Bernstein was a staunch advocate for the composer as well, and unlike his late Sibelius on Deutsche Grammophon, nothing is mannered or over-personalized. So he instead chose the longer view, collecting texts dating back over two centuries from poets such as Claude McKay and Alexander Posey as well as figures such as Walt Whitman, H.L. Better yet, its coupled with Leonard Bernsteins amazing New York Fifth. But while Gandolfi’s focus was initially on responding to contemporary life and politics, as he explained in a program note, the relentless daily news cycle routinely knocked him off his track. In approaching his assignment, Gandolfi apparently channeled something of Bernstein’s impulse to reflect the great American experiment back on itself through an eclectic choice of texts and musical styles. The piece, scored for six vocal soloists and orchestra, was commissioned by the TMC as a response to Bernstein’s “Songfest,” which was itself originally commissioned to mark the US Bicentennial. On Monday evening, the attention shifted to Ozawa Hall, where the students at the Tanglewood Music Center were entrusted with one of the summer’s big premieres: a new work by the prominent Boston-based composer Michael Gandolfi titled “In America.” Gemma New directed the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and Vocal Fellows in the world premiere of Michael Gandolfi’s “In America” Monday night at Seiji Ozawa Hall.
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