Music: Masterpiece in Louisville?

When a composition by Roger Sessions is played, it is a major event. Reason: his music is so imposing and complex that few orchestras dare to try it. But this season. Composer Sessions, 59, unveils four major new works in a row: 1) a cantata; 2) a Mass, to be performed at Kent School, Conn.; 3) a piano concerto, to be played at Manhattan’s Juilliard School of Music next month; 4) a symphony, his third, which the Boston Symphony Orchestra expects to play in March. The Louisville Orchestra, under Robert Whitney, premiered the cantata—really a solo aria the size of a full-grown concerto. Titled Idyll of Theocritus, it was even more imposing than previous jam Sessions.

The text is the second Idyll, one of literature’s great love poems, by 3rd century B.C. Greek Poet Theocritus. The piece divides into four moods, as the forsaken girl Simaitha gathers magic spells, then tells the moon goddess how she met her lover, goes on to tell how she became his mistress, and finally explains his desertion and her determination to win him back. Sessions scarcely lets the soprano come up for air. At Louisville, Oklahoma-born Singer Audrey Nossaman needed all her excellent technique—and her strength —for some 40 minutes of music.

The solo part inflects the words so poignantly as to enhance their individual meanings, spinning a melodic line of horizon-to-horizon dimensions. The vocal line almost never goes where ears accustomed to traditional melody expect it to go. But the effect is not selfconscious; before the work is over, the melody attains a sort of naturalness of its own.

Louisville critics, softened up by two years of modern music acquired under a $400,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant, were deeply impressed. “History may record,” said the Louisville Times, “that a masterpiece was unveiled.”