“Her Story” premiered here on Thursday — fittingly, given its subject, at the Nashville Symphony, alongside works by Joan Tower and Florence Price — with a notice that suggested it would be recorded for future release, as well as a list of heavyweight co-commissioners that promises coming performances in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington.
It joins Wolfe’s body of large-scale, historically minded works that lean toward oratorios — what the National Public Radio journalist Tom Huizenga recently called, to Wolfe’s delight, “docu-torios.” First came “Steel Hammer,” about the legend of John Henry, in 2009; then “Anthracite Fields,” a 2015 meditation on Pennsylvania’s coal mines that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize; and, most recently, “Fire in my mouth,” which premiered at the New York Philharmonic in 2019 with a sweeping account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Like those, “Her Story” resists a heavy hand but is smaller by comparison — in scale, with 10 members of the Lorelei Ensemble in lieu of, say, a 100-plus-person chorus, and in length, with a running time of about a half-hour. Its two movements, though, are just as concentrated, and if anything more poetic and thus haunting in their ambiguity.
It arrived on the second half of what the Nashville Symphony’s music director, Giancarlo Guerrero, declared, with a bit of extravagance (if a whiff of paternalism), would be one of the most historic nights in classical music, featuring what had been billed as “trailblazing women.” In the field’s own progress toward gender equality — programming, while slowly evolving, still overwhelmingly favors white men, preferably dead — a better concert might one day present three female composers without so much fanfare.
