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For soprano Laquita Mitchell, returning to the orchestral stage in Duluth means revisiting two works that reveal very different sides of the human experience.

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 offers a glimpse of a child’s imagined heaven, filled with innocence and wonder. Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 evokes a quieter world of family, summer evenings and the bittersweet awareness that nothing lasts forever.

Mitchell will perform both works with the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 24, reuniting with conductor Dirk Meyer for a program that pairs two of the most distinctive voices in American and European classical music.

The engagement marks Mitchell’s return to Duluth after her previous appearance in 2022, when she performed Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem, a demanding work that she recalled as a particularly challenging undertaking.

The contrast between that earlier performance and the upcoming program is considerable. Mahler’s 4th Symphony, Mitchell said in a conversation ahead of the concert, is comparatively comfortable for her, especially alongside the more vocally demanding Vaughan Williams composition.

But comfort does not mean simplicity. Mahler’s music requires a singer to inhabit a delicate sound world in which expression often depends on restraint rather than sheer vocal power.

“I’m always happy to return to the world of Mahler,” Mitchell said. “Somehow, every time I’m in the middle of the orchestra and I can hear this music, it’s just quite stellar.”

For Mitchell, the pairing with Barber is especially meaningful because the two works, despite their differences, share an emotional connection to childhood, memory and the fleeting nature of life.

Finding her place in Mahler’s world
Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, completed in 1900, occupies a distinctive place among the composer’s symphonies. After the expansive, often monumental sound of his earlier works, Mahler created a symphony that is comparatively compact, transparent and playful. Its final movement, “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”), sets a German folk poem describing heaven through the eyes of a child.

The child imagines a paradise where music, food and celebration abound. Saints and angels appear in familiar, almost everyday roles, and the heavenly feast is described with an innocence that can be both charming and unsettling.

The soprano’s voice becomes the listener’s guide to this imagined world.

Mahler’s decision to end the symphony with a child’s vision gives the entire work a particular character.
Its opening movements contain humor, mystery and occasional flashes of unease, while the third movement unfolds with a spacious, contemplative beauty. The final song then opens a window onto a world that seems removed from earthly troubles.

Mitchell hears that quality as a kind of childlike wonder — an imaginative space where the smallest experiences can become extraordinary.

She remembers growing up in a Brooklyn brownstone, spending time in the backyard and experiencing the simple pleasures of the outdoors. Those memories inform her understanding of Mahler’s music.
“We weren’t making a bunch of noise,” she recalled of her childhood. “We were experiencing the grass, experiencing the fruits and things that my godparents grew.”

That sense of discovery, she suggested, is central to the symphony’s appeal. Mahler’s heaven is not simply grand or bombastic; it is a place where the imagination can transform ordinary pleasures into something magical.

Mitchell also has a personal history with the work. She first explored Mahler more seriously after the pandemic, when Meyer invited her to perform Mahler’s 3rd Symphony in Augusta, Georgia, in a concert honoring the late soprano Jessye Norman, who had been her mentor.

Mitchell decided that the 3rd Symphony, with its substantial lower vocal writing, was not the right fit for her soprano voice. Meyer suggested the 4th instead. When she examined the score, she recognized that its writing suited her much better.

The resulting performance opened the door to further engagements with the symphony, including performances with other conductors and orchestras.

One especially memorable experience came in Sarasota, Florida, with conductor Peter Oundjian. During the transition from the symphony’s slow third movement into its final movement, Oundjian suggested that Mitchell make a subtle entrance at a pivotal change in the music, helping to give the transition the feeling of a door opening onto a new world.

The idea appealed to her, and the performances demonstrated how much a singer’s interpretation can shape the audience’s experience of a familiar score.

For Mitchell, Mahler’s 4th also offers smaller and regional orchestras an opportunity to engage with the composer’s expansive imagination without necessarily requiring the enormous forces associated with some of his other symphonies.

“It’s fantastic for smaller symphonies to do,” she said, noting that performers can take pride in having Mahler in their repertoire.

Barber’s portrait of a summer evening
Where Mahler imagines a child’s vision of heaven, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 finds its poetry in the world of childhood itself.

Composed in 1947 and premiered the following year, the approximately 17-minute work sets passages from a prose poem by James Agee, the Knoxville-born writer whose autobiographical recollections would later serve as the preface to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family.

Agee’s text describes a summer evening in the American South through the eyes of a young boy. Families sit outdoors, neighbors talk quietly, insects fill the air with sound and the stars emerge overhead.

It is a scene of domestic contentment, but one shadowed by the child’s awareness that the world is larger and more mysterious than he can understand.

Barber was deeply moved by Agee’s writing. The composer recognized something of his own childhood in the imagery and rhythms of the prose, and the work became an intensely personal musical statement. He dedicated it to his father, who died in 1947, the year he composed the piece.

The music follows the natural rhythms of the language, moving between gentle lyricism and moments of greater emotional intensity.

Rather than treating Agee’s words as a conventional song text, Barber creates a continuous musical reflection, with the soprano voice emerging from the orchestra as though recalling a memory that is at once vivid and distant.

The result is a work about more than nostalgia. Beneath the warmth of the summer evening lies an awareness of mortality, family bonds and the uncertainty of growing up. The child does not fully understand the feelings the music conveys, but the adult listener recognizes the fragility of the moment.
For Mitchell, that emotional dimension has taken on particular significance. Her mother died unexpectedly in mid-August, she said, making this performance season a difficult personal transition.
She had recently returned to working on the music with a coach, and the experience felt different from previous preparations. Both pieces now carried an added emotional weight, though in different ways.

“Knoxville definitely lends itself to the sadness of not having these people around anymore,” she said.
Mahler, by contrast, offers a more tender and imaginative landscape. Mitchell described the 4th Symphony as lighter in feeling and texture, even while acknowledging the depth beneath its apparent simplicity.

The difference between the two works is also a difference in how they communicate emotion. Mahler invites the audience into an imagined world of innocence, while Barber asks listeners to look backward at a real world that can never quite be recovered.

Together, the pieces create a program that moves between wonder and loss without treating them as opposites.

The art of listening together
Mitchell’s musical partnership with Meyer is an important part of what she hopes will make the Duluth performances successful. She describes him as a conductor who listens closely to singers and respects their individual musical instincts.

For her, that relationship is essential. A performance is not simply a matter of executing notes and following a fixed interpretation. It requires the singer and conductor to respond to one another, sometimes adjusting tempo and phrasing through subtle gestures rather than explicit instructions.

“You feel when the conductor is listening to you,” she explained, describing how a conductor can respond to a singer’s phrasing and musical breathing. When that mutual understanding develops, she said, the performance becomes organic rather than rigid.

Mitchell first worked with Meyer during the pandemic, when performances took place under the constraints of COVID-19 precautions. She remembers standing near him, both masked, watching and breathing with him to understand where he wanted the music to go.

Returning to work together again offers an opportunity to build on that shared experience.

The singer also brings a distinguished career to the engagement. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Mitchell has appeared on major opera and concert stages internationally, earning recognition for her work in both the operatic repertoire and large-scale orchestral vocal works.

Her career has included performances with leading orchestras and opera companies, as well as a Grammy nomination connected to her participation in the world premiere recording of Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road.

Her development as an artist was shaped in part by her relationship with Jessye Norman, one of the great dramatic sopranos of the late 20th century. Mitchell met Norman when she was 14 and has continued to regard her as a mentor. That connection helped shape not only her musical understanding but also her appreciation for the responsibility artists carry when they interpret emotionally complex music.

For Mitchell, the opportunity to perform works such as Mahler’s 4th and Barber’s Knoxville outside the largest cultural centers is part of a larger argument for the importance of the arts.

She believes communities should be able to experience exceptional music without traveling thousands of miles to major metropolitan areas. Local orchestras, opera companies, theaters and dance organizations, she said, are essential to a community’s cultural life. Supporting them also helps create opportunities for musicians who study at conservatories but ultimately build careers in the Midwest and elsewhere beyond the biggest cities.

“It’s essential to life,” Mitchell said of the arts. “Not everything is being done in the big cities.”

Her hope is that audiences will approach the concert with open minds and hearts, allowing themselves to be drawn into two very different musical worlds.

Mahler’s child sees heaven through the eyes of wonder. Agee’s child looks at a summer evening filled with family, comfort and the first intimations of life’s mysteries.

Through Mitchell’s voice, both perspectives become invitations to remember what it means to be young, to love the people around us and to recognize the beauty of moments that cannot last forever.

For a singer preparing to return to the stage after personal loss, those themes are more than musical ideas. They are part of the life the music seeks to express.

And that, ultimately, is what Mitchell hopes the Duluth audience will hear: not simply two celebrated compositions, but two profoundly human reflections on the world we inhabit and the memories we carry with us.