By Aaron Keebaugh

It is only a month into the current season,  and the Boston Symphony Orchestra has offered three pieces that have either been heard for the first time in Symphony Hall or given that more rare honor that evades most premieres — the deuxième performance.

Organist Olivier Latry and BSO Assistant Conductor Samy Rachid perform Gandolfi’s Ascending Light. Photo: Hilary Scott

The honor of redux recently fell to Michael Gandolfi’s Ascending Light, a bold and life-affirming memorial to victims of the Armenian genocide that had first been performed in Boston in 2015. The performance by organist Olivier Latry and conductor Samy Rachid earlier this month made for a welcome local revival.

After receiving the commission in 2009, Gandolfi took five years to research the horrors of the genocide. He examined photographs of the victims that gave him pause — these weren’t poverty-stricken abstractions but young men and women, artists and intellectuals, who had led vibrant and idealistic existences. Inspired by that perception, the ideas for the piece turned away from somber cliches to sounds that Gandolfi believed would capture the vitality of the lives lost and a hope for cultural rebirth.

That the commission was to feature both the orchestra and Symphony Hall’s then newly refurbished Aeolian Skinner organ seemed like the right fit. The 2015 premiere, marking the centennial of the genocide, was propelled by the forces of organist Olivier Latry and conductor Andris Nelsons, then in his first year as music director.

Even then, Ascending Light had all the makings of a score that deserves repeated performances. Its emotional affect was simple but penetrating. At its opening, resonant chords rang out, an ominous call to action. Latry’s role was paradoxical: a solace borne out of sheer defiance, the organ harmonies building into stacks of stinging dissonance. At the heart of the score is an Armenian lullaby as well as an ancient hymn tune entitled “Aravot Lousaber,” which was harmonized by Vardapet Komitas, an Armenian priest, composer, and musicologist who was arrested by the Ottomans at the onset of the genocide in 1915. (Komitas was the founder of the Gomitas Organ Fund, which supported Gandolfi’s commission.) Heard first in the flutes, then by French horns, the hymn conveys a haunting ambience that the organ brought to reverent fruition. At the end, the opening chords returned, though they rang with hope, even if it was world-weary.

The BSO’s most recent performance reminded me why traumatic memory and inspiration sometimes go hand in hand. Gandolfi treats the dark subject with sensitivity, avoiding such obvious potholes as despair and earnestness. Indeed, there’s not all that much darkness in Ascending Light; there are no funeral rituals or Requiem-like cliches. Rather, struggle and determination serve as the bracing subtext. Putting the piece across is a community effort. In this robust rendition, Latry and Rachid worked less like adversaries in a warring concerto than equal narrators, each telling stories of the Armenian genocide. One responded to the other with equal force. The result: healing and injury felt less like opposites than conjoined strands in a single thought. This was music to ponder and consider — as the most moving memorials invite us to do.

Andris Nelsons conducts Carlos Simon’s Wake Up! Concerto for Orchestra. Photo: Michael J. Lutch

The subscription series opened late last month with Andris Nelsons leading Carlos Simon’s Wake Up! Concerto for Orchestra. As the BSO’s inaugural composer chair, Simon has been busy of late, completing more than a dozen orchestral works over the past five years. And the bigger the forces he asks to command, the more fervently his social justice message comes across. Simon’s music accomplishes the trick of being powerful without becoming preachy. Requiem for Enslaved, which I had the pleasure of hearing at the Gardner Museum a few seasons ago, stands as his most significant achievement in that political arena. And he sharpens his interrogations of history by drawing on just about everything he has encountered in his musical education: jazz, blues, and the call-and-response vigor heard in the Black Pentecostal church. Simon’s Four Black American Dances, heard in Boston last season, packs its punch with tap dances and shout choruses. These pieces have the strength and vigor of provocative speeches: details of a harrowing past are etched into every musical phrase.

Wake Up!, however, focuses on the present. Simon’s inspiration was Rajendra Bhandari’s poem “Awake, Asleep”, which warns of the dangers of staying unconscious in a world rife with injustices for people of color. (“The slumbering public is innocent,/ like a slumbering child”) The score implores listeners to become more aware of this disturbing reality. Simon achieves this ‘awakening’ via a simple two-note phrase –“Wake Up!” — that ties together the disparate elements of the composition across its 20-minute span.

Appropriately, the music never quite calms down. Simon channels many diverse elements from Debussy-ian washes of color to big-band style shout choruses. Elsewhere, the piece is noisy, almost to the point of calamity: passages rattle, shake, and thump like an afternoon at an industrial park. Still, the experience palpably evokes the anxieties brought about by reflecting on wrongs. In that sense, the music poses a stark challenge to listeners, making us consider our place in the world. Asking hard questions, Simon’s music suggests, was never supposed to be comfortable. With Nelsons mining the music for all of its gritty detail, the BSO’s performance put across the slap across the head that the composer intended.

Xian Zhang conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Photo: Michael J. Lutch

The most recent new score, heard last Thursday under the baton of Xian Zhang, was Chen Yi’s Landscape Impression. Colorful and teeming with energy, this was a nine-minute sonic tour of the vivid imagery suggested by two 1000-year-old Chinese poems by Su Tong-Po.

Winds and strings don’t grind against each other in this piece so much as blur into a bright sheen. Yet there’s sparkle and zest in every turn. Lines frolic gleefully between moments of static calm supplied by the strings. The composer’s intent was to capture, with impressionistic sweep, the poems’ vision of ‘glittering waves” and “dimming hills.” The work culminates with triumphant chords that feel like an act of hard-won resolution. Landscape Impression’s questions are aesthetic rather than social (most of his life the poet was employed in various governmental positions); the piece knits together European modernism and Chinese folk elements. The former wins out, but Chen Yi’s use of the latter reflects considerable experience and thought. Like her teacher, the composer Chou Wen-Chung, Chen’s music invites contemplation. Last Thursday’s performance couldn’t have had a better advocate than conductor Xian Zhang, whose bold gestures and swift tempos permitted the music to ebb and flow via large waves.

Still, these performances, however superb, remind us of the vulnerability of new works in the repertoire. National statistics from 2023, posted by Bachtrack earlier this year, show that the programming of music by living composers increased from 7.5 percent to 20 percent over the past decade. But, less encouraging, audiences still tend to be drawn to the same familiar concertos and warhorse symphonies by Rachmaninoff, Dvorak, Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. Organizations like the BSO are caught in a dilemma: to balance a hankering for the new and diverse while serving up traditional fare, with the latter tipping the scale.

But, if one of the purposes of music is to break us out of our comfort zones, these recent works address that challenge with an admirably unapologetic fervor. So, here’s hoping for the arrival of more novel experiences.

Aaron Keebaugh has been a classical music critic in Boston since 2012. His work has been featured in the Musical Times, Corymbus, Boston Classical Review, Early Music America, and BBC Radio 3. A musicologist, he teaches at North Shore Community College in both Danvers and Lynn.