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Vienna by Way of Philadelphia at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 04 February 2016 22:05
- Written by Jack Angstreich
On the evening of Thursday, January 14th at Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall, I attended a wonderful Viennese-themed concert given by the outstanding Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is perhaps the most exciting young, Classical music conductor working today — and indeed the most entertaining, if only for the comically overt enthusiasm he displays at the podium.
This was the first of two programs given by this ensemble at Carnegie Hall this month — the second, on the evening of Tuesday, January 26th, is reviewed below.
The event began with a beautiful account of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s delightful and ever-popular “Tales from the Vienna Woods” Waltz, a work not heard in the concert hall here as often as one might like. The twenty-year-old Canadian pianist, Jan Lisiecki, then took the stage for a brilliant rendition of Ludwig van Beethoven’s masterful Piano Concerto No. 4, the performance of which could scarcely have been bettered despite this work’s ubiquity on New York concert stages. An enthusiastic ovation elicited a sterling encore, Robert Schumann’s perennially sublime Träumerei from Kinderszenen.The superb first half of the program was matched by the second, which opened with a stirring reading of Gustav Mahler’s engrossing transcription for string orchestra of Beethoven’s great String Quartet No. 11, the “Serioso”, a highlight of the evening if only for the work’s rarity. This was followed by the closing piece, the Carnegie Hall premiere of Austrian composer H. K. Gruber’s ingenious 1981 Charivari, subtitled “an Austrian Journal for Orchestra”, an exhilaratingly delirious parody of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s “Perpetuum mobile” polka, performed with aplomb here by the ensemble under Nézet-Séguin’s confident direction.
As the applause continued, this adorable conductor invited the audience to stay and hear Strauss’s delightful original as an encore, which unsurprisingly was exquisitely played — as the polka finished, Nézet-Séguin turned to the audience and, with a rising intonation, said, “And life goes on . . .”, concluding an evening that can only be described with superlatives.
The program on the 26th was also extraordinary, opening with an unsurpassably elegant reading, notable for its sensitivity to tempo, of Franz Joseph Haydn’s late masterpiece, the Symphony No. 103, the “Drumroll”, with the eponymous drumroll at the work's start launched, in an another jocularcoup de théâtre, before the conductor had a chance to turn around to face the orchestra.
Amusingly, in the midst of the applause consequent upon the work's conclusion, the timpanist repeated his drumroll, at Nézét-Séguin's prompting.
The second half of the evening was even more impressive, devoted to an awesome exposition of the Robert Haas 1878-1880 version of Anton Bruckner’s majestic Symphony No. 4, the “Romantic” — the orchestral texture characteristically lucid in the conductor's meticulous reading.
At the evening's end, Nézét-Séguin was recalled to the stage four times during an exultant ovation and deservedly so, given the supreme musicianship on offer.
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