Berkeley Symphony Vivifies the Immigrant Experience

You’re stuffed into a car trunk with three people for so many hours that, when you’re let out into the dark night, your eyes don’t work at first. To your horror, you discover you’ve been dumped off in a cemetery in a foreign country. To the sound of ghostly church bells, bizarre yellow dots flash before your eyes. As you sway from cramped limbs, you fear that your eyesight is forever damaged. 

This you can experience — what a Latina immigrant endured on her arrival in the U.S. and saw fireflies for the first time — when you hear one of the testimonios (testimonies) set to music by composer Gabriele Lena Frank at the Berkeley Symphony’s season-opening concert under its new music director, Joana Carneiro.

Thanks to an innovative grant, Frank had the opportunity to work with Latino immigrants in one of the less-predictable destination cities, Indianapolis; internalize their stories over time; and translate their hopes and dreams into the orchestral suite Peregrinos (Pilgrims). Frank herself is no stranger to diversity, having a Chinese/Peruvian mother and a Jewish/Lithuanian father.

“We’re at too important a moment of history to not look for connections in the community,” Frank, a resident of Berkeley, relates in a PBS documentary chronicling the creation of her work (shown two days before the concert — details here). “When I’m looking at my own truth and my own humanidad, my own humanity, I try to keep on with creating music and with everything that I’ve got, to tell a story that really resonates.” Like Béla Bartók’s masterpiece Concerto for Orchestra that will conclude the program, Peregrinos is in five movements.

Besides the already mentioned movement, “Fireflies,” the suite begins and ends with “Arbol de sueños” (Dream trees), laundry racks that social workers encourage immigrants in group sessions to festoon with colored ribbons on which their hopes for the future are written. The remaining movements are “Heroes,” a jaunty description of two close preteen brothers, and “Devotional for Sarita Colonia,” a visionary depiction of the Peruvian patron saint of immigrants.

The concert launches the Symphony’s first season with Music Director Carneiro. Each concert includes a work by at least one living composer, along with fairly heavy-duty favorites from the standard repertoire. It’s always a test to see how brilliantly any conductor can handle the alternating hell-bent, then deliberately sluggish, pacing of the Bartók concerto’s last movement, and finally bring off its final flourish, a race to the skies that leaves hearts in throats when done well. You probably can ask Carneiro yourself how she’ll manage it if you attend her interview by pianist Sarah Cahill at the Berkeley Public Library on Saturday, Oct. 10, at 3:00 p.m.

The concert opens with music by another Berkeley composer, John Adams’ Chairman Dances, derived from his groundbreaking opera Nixon in China. It’s worth fox-trotting up to Zellerbach Hall to give it a listen.