Harping on

The PSO’s “Sacred and Profane”

By Doug Hubley

The Portland Symphony Orchestra performs “Sacred and Profane” Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Rockland District High School Auditorium, and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at Merrill Auditorium.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY’S Danses sacrée et profane offers harpist Jara Goodrich her first PSO star turn since 1987.

From the titles of recent programs you might suspect that the Portland Symphony Orchestra has gone New Age on us. The other week there was “Myths and Legends.” This weekend it’s “Sacred and Profane.” And there’s always drumming. If they lay on a “Quests and Visions” concert, I’m out of here.

Yet the “Sacred and Profane” program, going to Rockland District High School Saturday evening and Merrill Auditorium the following afternoon, does have a basis I can accept. Claude Debussy’s Danses sacrée et profane (which I hope I don’t need to translate), is the centerpiece, giving principal harpist Jara Goodrich 10 minutes in the spotlight. And Music Director Toshiyuki Shimada has bracketed the Debussy with works that, without too much stretching, speak to the spiritual extremes in question. The program begins with Festina Lente, by Arvo Pärt, an increasingly acclaimed Estonian composer much inspired by church music. Following the Debussy is Jeremy Beck’s Sparks, and Flame (Ash), a work whose title at least has hellish implications, and that sounds pretty profane to me.

Then there’s Mozart’s Serenade No. 9 (“Posthorn”). It has no sacred or profane implications as far as I know, but since the concert is part of the PSO’s Mozart & More series for small orchestra, they had to work Wolfgang in there somewhere. That’s a neat thing about this series: with classical music’s No. 1 bad boy promising crowd appeal in every show, the series gives Shimada some latitude for experimentation. There’s no expectation to fill Merrill Auditorium the way there is in other series, and the reduced orchestra opens up new realms of repertoire.

Aside from the Nutcracker excerpts that she does ad infinitum in the annual Magic of Christmas series, the Debussy is Jara Goodrich’s first PSO star turn since 1987. A Limerick resident and PSO player since 1982, Goodrich does not spend her days off from the symphony on the sofa watching soaps. Her work week is often seven days, thanks to commitments with the Bangor Symphony, the Portland Opera Repertory Theatre, the Portland Ballet, the Maine Music Society, and the Connecticut-based National Lyric Opera. Goodrich also books her own gigs, and teaches privately and at the University of Southern Maine. “It’s not a simple life,” she says.

Despite its portentous title, the 1904 Danses sacrée et profane was born of a prosaic need: a manufacturer commissioned Debussy to compose a demonstration piece for a particular style of harp in its line. The “cross-strung” or chromatic harp had a string tuned to every pitch in its range, strings for all the sharp and flat notes as well as the naturals.

The alternative was the pedal harp, whose strings were all tuned to naturals but could be raised a half-step with the pedals. Over time the unwieldy chromatic harp went away, the pedal harp stayed with us, and happily the Debussy was easily transferred to the pedal model. But not without a hangover, as the harpist has to do a lot of pedal-pushing to compensate for all those missing sharp and flat strings that the harp maker wanted to show off. “It’s quite busy in the feet,” says Goodrich, which is a problem only if listeners become fixated on them.

A French composer, Debussy was reluctantly categorized with the so-called Impressionists, known for their emphasis on tone color and texture over structure. So it is with the Danses. Goodrich hears in them strains of La Mer (“The Sea”), a popular Debussy work for full orchestra, which he was writing about the same time. Other commentators mention a vaguely Spanish flavor and hints of Erik Satie, a strong influence on Debussy.

The two dances are scored for string orchestra and harp. The “sacred” dance is slow, gracious, and distinguished by a theme built of chords moving through close intervals. The following “profane” dance is a vigorous waltz that intensifies to complex syncopations and a big solo rippling with glissandos — those lush streams of notes that a harp makes just as a sitcom character falls into a flashback or a reverie. “Although they’re a cliché sometimes,” Goodrich says, “they’re very attractive to people.”

Written in 1779, a hit then and popular now, Mozart’s “Posthorn” Serenade gallops cheerily over seven movements and gives most of the players a little something to shine on, especially the wind and brass players left out of the Debussy and Pärt. Principal trumpeter John Schnell will use a flügelhorn to play the “posthorn” bit in the sixth movement.

Composer Jeremy Beck is coming from California, where he teaches, to tell the Portland audience about his 4-year-old Sparks, and Flame (Ash) — a work that traces a fire’s progress through musical gestures. (Shimada has recorded the piece in Europe with the Moravian Philharmonic, his other band, on the Vienna Modern Masters label.) As for the Pärt, Festina Lente means “fast slow”: to achieve its splendid contrapuntal structure, the piece juxtaposes the same theme played at three different tempos. Bell-like sounds and the harmonic purity of the piece reflect the influence of Renaissance church music on Pärt.

Jara Goodrich, by the way, has her own ideas about what’s sacred and profane. Last year Goodrich had saved up for what she calls the “harp of my dreams” — but then seized an opportunity to buy 60 acres of land near her house. This wooded land, with two streams and plenty of wildlife, had been roughly cut over to prepare for a subdivision that was never built.

Goodrich is rehabilitating the property into something like a natural state, and wants to protect it legally from development forever. Meanwhile, she’s renting a harp. “One hundred years from now my life won’t mean anything,” she says, “but 60 acres of protected land might mean a lot.”

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.