Classics & Contemporary Music With the New York Philharmonic

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 29 April 2022 14:11

Written by Jack Angstreich

Jaap van Zweden conducting the New York Philharmonic. Photo by Chris Lee

At Carnegie Hall, on the evening of Wednesday, April 27th, I was fortunate to attend a wonderful concert presented by the accomplished musicians of the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Jaap van Zweden.

The program opened gloriously with a confident reading of Claude Debussy’s magnificent tone-poem, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. The celebrated soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, then took the stage for an engaging performance of contemporary composer Nico Muhly’s interesting In Certain Circles: Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, here receiving its US premiere. The first movement, titled L’Enharmonique, is moody and ends abruptly. Muhly’s program note states:

In Certain Circles is in three movements. The first contains a little fragment of a piece by Rameau, L’Enharmonique. The movement is about uncovering it through various disguises and lifting those disguises. From time to time, the tune from the Rameau appears and quickly vanishes; while it’s not always meant to be fully audible, there should be a sense of “hauntology” here, in which the simple intervals of the Rameau permeate the texture in oblique and sometimes obscure, ghostly ways. A very simple gesture permeates all three movements: a rising second, forcefully declared by the brass in the very first bar; the brass often insists on these intervals even when they antagonize the pianos.

About the second movement, Sarabande & Gigue, he writes: “The second movement is a pair of dance-suite movements,” but it is nonetheless strangely impressionistic with passages strongly influenced by minimalism. He adds:

I tried to call on my knowledge of French Baroque music to make something I’ve never done before—which is to say, music that more or less obeys the rhythmic rules of a received form. Here, the pianos go in and out of rhythmic unison with one another—a little mechanical, a little expressive. While the sarabande is quite supple, the gigue is explicitly mechanical and a bit unstable. The normal sets of six and 12 beats are often interrupted with unwelcome little hiccoughs of four or five beats, creating a sense of anxiety despite the explicitly diatonic harmonies.

The third movement, Details Emerged, could perhaps be described as more dramatic and more impassioned. Muhly comments:

The third movement begins with the pianos in completely different rhythmic worlds from one another. “Disconnection” is the guiding musical principle here; the music shifts quickly from very dark to very bright, from jagged rhythms to simple ones, and from delicate to quite violent. Every playful moment is offset by something severe and mechanical. After a relatively joyful, pulse-based episode, we perceive a final specter of L’Enharmonique, and the movement ends abruptly.

The second half of the event was also impressive, beginning with an effective account of Richard Wagner’s sublime Prelude and Liebestod from his opera Tristan und Isolde. The evening concluded memorably with a convincing realization of Debussy’s subsequent programmatic masterwork, La Mer. The opening movement, From Dawn till Noon on the Sea, was lively, although with moments of stillness, and finished grandly. The ensuing movement, The Play of the Waves, was more ebullient and more volatile. The turbulent closing movement, Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, was often suspenseful, punctuated by brief, mysterious episodes, with passages of intense excitement as well as majesty. The artists were rewarded with appreciative applause.

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