Written between 1927 and 1935, the Violin Concerto (crafted for solo violin and, wryly, an orchestra without violins) was not performed by a professional orchestra until 1947 after legendary soloist Albert Spauling failed to grasp the finale. Although it constitutes Sessions's turn toward abstraction, critic Ruth Dreier has characterized the piece as a Whitmanesque pageant belying the composer's stodgily "academic" reputation in which "one’s breath is taken away by the sheer audacity of a youthful composer coupling joyously, openly and accessibly with his muse." Alien as it may sound to many contemporary listeners at first listen, the Concerto's exciting wave-like structure makes for an engrossing experience.
As noted by musicologist Andrea Olmstead, a key component of Sessions's artistry was his disavowal of nationalism (including the Americana of Copland and others) as an aesthetic force. In many ways, this extended to a lack of engagement with the varieties of popular culture intertwined with these provocations. For Sessions, "the idea," according to Olmstead, "was to create an 'ideal inner world.'" With his Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies (1966-1968), however, Sessions consciously fashioned "a kind of series connected with the events of that time"—namely, the Vietnam War. Breathlessly cinematic in its scope, the dolorous Seventh invokes the banality of war while also hearkening back to the frenetic letters Sessions would write to his mother while studying at Harvard. In this sense, the preservation of the interiority and intimacy of his visions was a lifelong concern.
Sessions's only major opera, Montezuma (c. 1940-1962; with Giuseppe Antonio Borgese), a dramatization of the fall of the Aztec Empire, is often cast as his magnum opus. In line with much of his oeuvre, it was first performed as an unsuccessful German translation in 1964 and did not receive its New York premiere until 1982. (A recording of the 1976 American premiere by Sara Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston is included above.) Sessions himself characterized the opera as "difficult, hard to play, hard to sing"; lacking the verve of so many of his successful pieces (perhaps attributable to its long gestation) and weighed down by Borgese's cumbersome libretto, it invites comparisons to one of his main antecedents: Alban Berg, who strove for a more successful fusion of crypto-Romanticism and twelve-tone technique in Wozzeck (1930) and Lulu (1929-1935).
What sets Montezuma apart despite these shortcomings is its pioneering engagement with a non-Western culture. Much as modernist poetry turned to Chinese ideograms (Ezra Pound) and Mayan hieroglyphs (Charles Olson) for inspiration, Sessions's work anticipates the more refined pluralism of the postmodern era.
