For three years, Phillip Nuzzo has been planning a tribute to Brooklyn’s great composers.
On April 11, his vision will finally come to life as he conducts the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra in “Born and Buried in Brooklyn,” a one-night only concert celebrating the lives and work of three beloved musicians who called the borough home in life or in death: George Gerswhin, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.
Nuzzo, the founder and artistic director of BCO, is a lifelong Brooklynite himself, and has tremendous pride in his home and its rich musical history.
“I was born and raised in Brooklyn, absolutely. And there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “There needs to be no odium on the podium.”
As Nuzzo planned the concert, he struggled to whittle down the long list of composers with ties to the borough. There was John Corigliano, who graduated from Midwood High School in the 1950s; Benjamin Britten, a Brit who spent a year living in an artists commune in Brooklyn Heights in 1940; and, of course, a host of contemporary composers still working today.
In the end, he opted for two of the most influential composers born in Brooklyn and one who became a permanent resident after his death.
“Gershwin lived in Brooklyn for exactly six weeks, but he was born here,” Nuzzo said. “And Copland was born on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, his family — Russian-Jewish immigrants – owned a store on Washington Avenue. And Copland, of course, is the ‘Dean of American Music‘. A great teacher to even Bernstein.”
Bernstein, who learned from Copland, is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery. So is Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Nuzzo noted, “the first great American pianist.”
“His music doesn’t lend itself to be orchestrated, so we had to leave Gottschalk where he is, for now, in Green-Wood Cemetery,” Nuzzo said.
All three created a lot of “serious works,” but for this concert, the BCO decided to go light.
From Gershwin, who Nuzzo described as “universal,” they’ll play the famous “Rhapsody in Blue” and the jazzy “Summertime” from the musical “Porgy & Bess,” along with a few musical interludes.
He made his selections from Copland’s catalogue with a sense of humor. Accompanied by bass-baritone singer Rocky Sellers, the orchestra will perform Copland’s “Old American Songbook, Book 1,” filled with folk-adjacent songs; and the bouncy “Hoedown.”
“Where did this come from?” Nuzzo said. “This Jewish kid from Brooklyn, writing cowboy music. Which is why I picked these pieces, because they have a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek irony in saying, ‘Oh, that guy’s from Brooklyn — hey, wait a minute, that’s a lot of cowboy music.”
The evening will end with Bernstein, famous for his high-energy, expressive conducting.
“We’re going to do the overture from “Candide,” his most famous stage work, and, of course, a magnificent arrangement of “West Side Story” for solo violin and strings,” Nuzzo said.
Each arrangement has been tweaked some, Nuzzo said, to make them “a little bit more Brooklyn.”
“If [people] have not experienced a Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra concert before, they should come,” he said. “It really does smack of Brooklyn. Because it is a little – it is a lot less formal than Manhattan. Come as you want.”
The acoustics at the historic St. Ann’s Church, where the concert will be held, are “perfect,” he said, and the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra is “the most versatile” group he’s conducted in his decades-long, globe-spanning career.
“There are no divas in the orchestra. It’s a blue-collar group … and I have to have the same attitude,” he said. “This has to be lunch-pail, get-your-hands-dirty, blue-collar way of doing things. And that’s not necessarily bad, and that does not take away from music. You don’t have to be a snob to do this.”
“Born and Buried in Brooklyn” will take place for one night only on Saturday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. at St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights.
