At the Kennedy Center, the NSO offers a bracing history lesson

The Lorelei Ensemble joined the National Symphony Orchestra for the D.C. premiere of Julia Wolfe’s engrossing oratorio “Her Story.”

The Lorelei Ensemble joined the NSO for Thursday night’s performance of Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story,” conducted by Marin Alsop. (Scott Suchman)

February 28, 2025
Review by Michael Andor Brodeur

On Thursday night at the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony Orchestra gave the D.C. premiere of Julia Wolfe’s masterfully crafted two-movement piece “Her Story,” in a riveting performance led by Marin Alsop and enhanced by the 10 voices of the Grammy-nominated Lorelei Ensemble.An urgent, engrossing 30-minute oratorio on the fight for women’s suffrage, “Her Story” is the kind of provocative, inventive music that American orchestras — and American arts centers — should pursue and program (posthaste). If you can make the repeat on Saturday, you should.

Though composed by Wolfe in 2022 — as a co-commission among the NSO, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony — this premiere performance by the NSO felt charged with relevance at the Kennedy Center, where abrupt changes of leadership and culture have raised questions about what direction the center’s programming may take.

In this context, “Her Story” felt at once like a tribute to a hard-fought history and a defiant salvo aimed at an uncertain future. It’s at once musical, theatrical and, over time, incantatory — less about telling a story than about approximating an experience, putting it into words and then pulling the words apart.

Dressed in black gowns and single bloodred gloves, the singers of the Lorelei Ensemble felt like the lungs of a larger body, their voices gathered in angular harmonies that sliced like blades. Wolfe’s text is full of small surprises and big reveals, as when the slowly recited “Dear John” letter that opens the work is signed by Abigail Adams, who offers a stark warning over Wolfe’s shimmering strings:“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands,” the women sang, their voices weaving together in tight, tessellated melodies.

Wolfe also pulls text — displayed on a screen above the stage — from abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s landmark “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech and gives a knife-sharp twist to a 1915 pacifist tune “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” (That is, “I didn’t raise my girl to be a voter.”)The Lorelei singers moved through a precise choreography of gestures: Sometimes they held hands like a row of paper dolls, sometimes their red-gloved hands blocked their own mouths, sometimes they leaned in and whispered into one another’s ears, the guise of gossip cloaking something more like a survival strategy. One passage found them holding up signs displaying a litany of barbs flung at suffragists of the past and women of today: “unloving, unstable, unruly, unnerving, unrighteous, unbalanced, unnatural, unmarried,” and on and on — generations of women defined by what men claim they are not. I heard a collective gasp when they flipped their binders to spell the word “UNAMERICAN.”

I would call “Her Story” a monumental work of art, but for the way it lives and breathes onstage — Wolfe’s music felt alive and vital on Thursday, its trancelike repetitions often building to a boil under Alsop’s attentive leadership. There was a painterly quality to her approach to Wolfe’s colors, which gradually sharpened and deepened. Alsop allowed the work’s details (like bright harps, twinkling chimes and gleaming contrails of brass) to illuminate the edges.

The second half of the program offered Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” as both counterpoint and kindred spirit. Composed in 1888, and based on the tale of the Persian queen who saves her life through 1,001 nights of storytelling, the four-movement suite couldn’t be more different musically — its entangled themes and decorative solos a far cry from Wolfe’s more holistic mass of sound.
But the NSO’s approach under Alsop was vibrant and meticulously realized. Associate concertmaster Ying Fu made for a dynamic narrator in his lithe, racing solos. And the suite’s familiar procession of themes and motifs found new life in the hands of the principal players — notably Jamie Roberts on oboe, Aaron Goldman on flute, Sue Heineman on bassoon, Adriana Horne on harp and Abel Pereira on horn.

This was also a fine opportunity to watch the natural rapport between Alsop and the NSO. I loved the easy grace and naturalistic tempo she brought to the third movement (“Andantino quasi allegretto”), and she conjured a rustic, windswept energy in the finale (“Allegro molto”), coaxing lovely heft from the violas and basses.

Lovely little moments from “Scheherazade” replayed in my memory the rest of the evening, but the most memorable hook came from Wolfe and clung like a claw: “Remember,” the women warn, halting the music around them: “All men would be tyrants if they could!” For a fresh and freshly essential work like “Her Story,” there’s no time like the present.