As the spread of the coronavirus in the winter and spring of 2020 grew into a global pandemic, women and men from all walks of life faced unique challenges. Across industries, ordinary ways of accomplishing the most fundamental everyday tasks required reimagining: from restaurants and grocery stores offering “curbside pickup” and “no-contact delivery” to professional sports leagues resuming play in isolated “bubbles,” the very lexicon of the COVID-19 era has evolved alongside society’s need to adapt.

The performing arts have faced as existential a challenge as any trade in the face of the ongoing health crisis. What, after all, is a performance without an audience? With public gatherings not viable, orchestras, dance and theater companies, and other groups of performers have largely been unable to convene and make art together—let alone share their art with a live audience. 

Nevertheless, a field fueled by creativity has persisted in positing creative solutions. Musicians’ living rooms have doubled as virtual concert halls, while Zoom meetings have become a novel staging ground for new operas, plays, and films. Armed with smartphones and editing software, chamber ensembles, choirs, and even orchestras have refused to stay silent.

Canadian composer Vivian Fung’s Prayer will stand as a twofold document of the time in which it was created. Commissioned by CBC Music in collaboration with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the work was premiered online in June 2020 by 35 musicians representing 26 Canadian orchestras, each playing their individual part in isolation under the virtual baton of Fung’s countryman Yannick Nézet-Séguin. He first led an absent orchestra, in silence, then shared video with each instrumentalist to follow while recording their part. In an interview with CBC, Nézet-Séguin described the experience of bringing Fung’s piece to life: “Imagining the sounds and people around me, conducting in front of a video camera, but imagining everyone in front of me—that was something very special.”

Prayer also reflects, in both its creative genesis and its expressive character, the manifold anxieties surrounding its completion, as well as the resilience required to overcome those stresses. Fung writes, “In times of crisis and peril, we have but the reliance of faith—from the profound faith in humanity, faith in love, and faith that we will persevere and get through this with dignity, to the mundane faith that I would complete this piece within the extraordinary conditions that faced me, with a young child at home 24/7, a bronchial infection, and a very tight timeline (ultimately, a matter of days) to complete the piece in a manner feasible for COVID remote performance requirements.”

Prayer takes as its point of departure the Antiphon for the Redeemer by Fung’s “composer heroine,” the 12th-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen:

O Pastor animarum et O prima vox

per quam omnes creati sumus,

nunc tibi, tibi placeat ut digneris nos

liberare de miseriis

et languoribus nostris.

O Shepherd of our souls, O primal voice,

whose call created all of us:

Now hear our plea to thee, to thee, and deign

to free us from our miseries

and feebleness.

Fung’s five-minute symphonic score emerges from a rumble of low strings and brass, animated by murmuring ululations in the marimba and woodwinds. As the long, sustained exhalations in the strings ascend from the basses and cellos to the violins, a melodic sequence comes into focus, evoking Hildegard’s antiphon. From the meditative solemnity of its opening measures, Prayer inexorably swells into a radiant burst of color. Melodic fragments seem to muster deeper resolve until the antiphon appears as a triumphant brass chorale. Here is the indomitability of the human spirit, even in the face of the greatest hardship, on full display. The score’s final invocations come in turn from a solo clarinet, then oboe, then trumpet, above a primordial drone in the bass. Prayer ends with a single strike of a crotale, like a closing benediction.

—Patrick Castillo

Program notes © 2021. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association, Eleonora M. Beck, Patrick Castillo, and/or Luke Howard.