The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, the musical pride of Sioux Falls, has an annual budget of $2.3 million, which is microscopic by the standards of America’s leading orchestras. The Chicago Symphony spends more than that each year on Riccardo Muti’s salary. Nevertheless, the South Dakota Symphony is bolder and savvier in its programming than all but a handful of American ensembles. Delta David Gier, the S.D.S.O.’s music director, recently won the Ditson Conductor’s Award, which Columbia University gives to notable advocates for American composers. The citation called Gier “the model of an engaged conductor.” His group is the model of an engaged orchestra.
The S.D.S.O. celebrated its centennial this season, in ambitious style. The roster of composers included not only Beethoven, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky but also Stephen Yarbrough, David M. Gordon, Jessie Montgomery, Anna Clyne, George Walker, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and Malek Jandali. One concert was given over to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; another featured works by student composers from Lakota and Dakota tribes. (The orchestra has a series called the Lakota Music Project.) The season ended with a program that consisted of Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”; “The Great Gate of Kiev,” from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”; and “An Atlas of Deep Time,” a sprawling new score by John Luther Adams. I flew in for the occasion, having long admired the group from afar.
The program would have tested any top-rank orchestra. The S.D.S.O., which deploys nine full-time musicians and a large array of freelancers, struggled in spots. Yet the performances were never less than creditable, and the focussed energy of the playing overrode any worries about precision. Furthermore, I’ve experienced very few concerts at which a classical-music organization seemed so integral to its community. During some announcements from the stage, Jennifer Teisinger, the orchestra’s executive director, asked former members of the ensemble to stand up. In a crowd of more than a thousand people, dozens rose to their feet. Nothing of the sort could have happened in New York, Los Angeles, London, or Berlin.
The founder of the S.D.S.O. was the conductor, violinist, and composer Marie Toohey, who launched it when she was still in her twenties, after a period of study in Germany. One of very few female conductors who have ever played such a role, Toohey died tragically young, at the age of thirty-two. At first, the orchestra was made up of students from Augustana University, in Sioux Falls; later, it was known as the Augustana Town & Gown Symphony and then as the Sioux Falls Symphony, before settling on its current name in 1977. In 1999, it took up residence at the Washington Pavilion, an arts venue and science center downtown.
Gier, who is sixty-two, arrived in 2004. He had attracted early attention at the New York Philharmonic, serving as an assistant conductor and leading Young People’s Concerts. When he was trying out for the S.D.S.O. job, he gave an interview to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in which he expressed enthusiasm for living composers. The headline was “orchestras need contemporary music, conductor says.” Gier thought that he had doomed his chances, but he was hired nonetheless. During his first season, each concert featured an American composer who had won the Pulitzer Prize. As Gier told me, he reasoned that skeptical listeners might feel assured by the Pulitzer imprimatur. “The idea was ‘You don’t have to take my word for it,’ ” Gier said.
There was resistance all the same. When John Corigliano’s uncontroversial Second Symphony appeared on one program, a donor threatened to pull his money. Gier, uncertain how to proceed, called Chad Smith, who was then the artistic administrator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and is now that orchestra’s chief executive. The L.A. Phil had faced similar pushback during its decades-long drive to renovate its repertory, especially in the early years of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure. Smith told Gier that he shouldn’t retreat from his convictions; rather, he should make sure that the staff and the orchestra were speaking the same persuasive language. Gier told me, “You have to know how to answer complaints. Because people are going to complain. They’re going to complain about your Berlioz!” It’s a philosophy of ingratiating stubbornness, and, over time, it tends to disarm opposition. In Sioux Falls, audiences began falling in love with some of the novelties and learned to tolerate the rest.
Adams first visited Sioux Falls in 2016, when the orchestra offered his symphonic work “Become Ocean,” which had won the Pulitzer two years earlier. Although Adams is now based in New Mexico, he lived for decades in Alaska and played percussion in the Fairbanks Symphony. In a public conversation with Gier, Adams said that the spirit of the S.D.S.O. had won him over and had also reminded him of his own past: “I’m used to audacious orchestras outside the cultural capitals who don’t know what they’re not supposed to be able to do.”
“An Atlas of Deep Time” is the latest in a series of large-scale pieces in which Adams evokes elemental landscapes; in addition to “Become Ocean,” these include “In the White Silence,” “Become Desert,” and “Ten Thousand Birds.” The new work conjures the vastness of geological time—“deep time,” as John McPhee dubbed it in his book “Basin and Range,” which grew out of articles that appeared in this magazine in 1980. “Atlas” lasts around forty-five minutes; if the score were mapped against the life span of Earth, each minute would be equivalent to a hundred million years. The formal structure is modelled on the basin-and-range topography of western North America, with its relentless alternation of mountain uplift and desert flats. Five orchestral aggregations unfold in sequence, gathering force and then subsiding.
The ensemble is divided into six spatially distinct choirs. At the Washington Pavilion, strings and percussion were placed together onstage; four groups of brass and winds occupied balconies to the right and to the left; trumpets and trombones thundered from the rear. An ever-changing scheme of superimposed tempos conveys the complexity of geological layering. The harmony, likewise, is governed by mutating stacks of intervals. At the midpoint of each “range” section, the chords assume a snow-capped tonal grandeur. The “basins” are interludes of tremulous repose, with bursts of drumming breaking through shimmery string textures.
Many of these elements are familiar from “Become Ocean,” which has hypnotized audiences around the world. “Atlas” is a craggier, denser, more unsettling score, too charged with seismic tension to send listeners into a trancelike state. It may take time to figure out how best to present it. At the dress rehearsal, I sat in the orchestra; at the performance, I was in the mezzanine. Neither perspective was ideal. Down below, the choirs in the balconies seemed a bit distant. Up above, the sound was more immersive, although a phalanx of eight French horns kept blotting out everything else. Both times, murk prevailed at the climaxes. A recording was made in the hall the following day; this will undoubtedly provide clarity.
Still, the première had the air of a major occasion. As often with Adams, I had the sense of entering a physically palpable space, one in which the mind can go roaming. Gier pictured the rugged expanse of the Black Hills, in western South Dakota. My thoughts went to Willa Cather, who grew up in Nebraska, about two hundred and fifty miles to the southwest. In a famous passage in “My Antonía,” Cather contemplated the unending vistas of the plains and wrote of the joy of being “dissolved into something complete and great.” The sounding immensity of “An Atlas of Deep Time” afforded the same uncanny pleasure. ♦
