40 years after its composition, Symphony No. II - The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend's Love for the Beloved by Julius Eastman has been recorded by conductor Dalia Stasevska and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Eastman’s sole surviving composition for orchestra is now available to hear worldwide on the Platoon label.
A haunting, single-movement lento, the Symphony evokes Eastman’s feelings after parting with his lover R. Nemo Hill in the early 1980s. It is a melancholy map of their relationship, scored for large orchestra with added bass clarinets, contrabassoons, and timpani.
Symphony No. II appears on an album titled Dalia’s Mixtape, which also includes the first recording of Still, Glowing from composer Judith Weir. Both works feature massive waves of orchestral sound, foreboding timpani rolls, and a potent sense of longing.
Listen: Dalia Discusses Symphony No. II with Apple Music
G. Schirmer’s performance edition of Symphony No. II was premiered in 2018, with its editor Luciano Chessa leading the Mannes Orchestra at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.
Read: Luciano Chessa on Eastman’s Symphony No. II
Chessa’s subsequent revisions were brought to life in post-lockdown performances by the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic (where Eastman performed as a vocal soloist in the early 1970s under Pierre Boulez). In contextualizing Symphony No. II, Chessa invokes the work of Morton Feldman, while Stasevska cites Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7 and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as points of reference.
The posthumous canonization of Eastman’s music is bittersweet, but his legacy as a brilliant, radicalized, fluid, queer artist of color grows stronger as the values of classical music continue to evolve.
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