Barron Ryan's "There Arises Light (in the Darkness)"
September 29, 2023
Guthrie Green
Tulsa pianist Barron Ryan’s work, indeed his general vibe as a performer, has typically been draped in cool, from his online tagline of “Classic Meets Cool” and his bowtied collaboration with his pianist father, Ryan & Ryan, to the pop-classical Suite Thing which comprises the first half of his 2021 album First of Its Kind. That album was the first of his four to feature original compositions longer than songs, and it revealed him to be a highly competent composer as well as a talented performer. And while Suite Thing worked as an impressive and flavorful piece of genre-mixing pop-adjacent work, it was with his “Magic City” Sonata that Ryan showed his chops as a classical composer—abandoning cool entirely and tapping into strong human emotion—and hinted at further classical ambitions.
Those ambitions arrived bearing proof—and surprising teeth—last Friday night, when a packed and enthusiastic crowd at Guthrie Green watched Ryan premiere his new composition, “There Arises Light (in the Darkness),” a memorial piece for the Tulsa Race Massacre, commissioned by Chamber Music Tulsa. Two thousand battery-powered candles surrounded Ryan and his string section—Alex Cox (violin) and Christopher Whitley (cello) of the Thalea String Quartet—as the sun went down.
The trio set the theme with several opening pieces by other composers. First came the brooding, mournful Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G Minor by Rachmaninoff and the horrifying and deeply Catholic Libera Me from Fauré’s Requiem (“Deliver me, Lord, from death eternal,” the original text reads). Then came Ryan’s adaptation of Gounod’s version of Bach’s Ave Maria, and finally, a version of Chopin’s Polonaise Héroïque—adapted by, he noted from the podium, the winner of the 1975 Chopin competition in Warsaw, Poland: his own father, Donald Ryan.