Juilliard Orchestra Performs at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 08 April 2022 17:14

Written by Jack Angstreich

Barbara Hannigan with the Juilliard Orchestra. Photo by Steve Sherman.

At Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, on the evening of Thursday, March 31st, I was privileged to attend a terrific concert presented by the excellent musicians of the Juilliard Orchestra under the assured direction of the esteemed and attractive soprano, Barbara Hannigan, a 2021-22 Creative Associate of the ensemble.

The program opened brilliantly with a marvelous reading of the magnificent Symphony No. 26, “Lamentatione,” of Franz Joseph Haydn, a composer in whose music the conductor has had an abiding interest. In this work, the influence of the Baroque style is much stronger than in his later, more familiar symphonies. The opening Allegro is stirring, while the ensuing Adagio has an almost elegiac quality, and the concluding Menuet is unusually weighty for a dance-movement.

An extraordinary soprano, Nicoletta Berry, then took the stage for an impressive performance of the mysterious, powerful, and unexpectedly dramatic Lonely Child of 1980 by the acclaimed French Canadian composer, Claude Vivier. I found the work surprisingly accessible despite the author’s serialist affinities—Hannigan has had an enduring commitment to modernist and contemporary music.

After an intermission, the event resumed with an arresting account of Haydn’s outstanding “Representation of Chaos”—the prelude to his celebrated oratorio, The Creation—which has an awesome, thrilling character even as it has a slow tempo. In an unexpected and innovatory move, this was followed without a pause by an exquisite rendering of Ferruccio Busoni’s haunting, enigmatic Berceuse élégiaque.

The evening ended stunningly with an exalting version of Claude Debussy’s sublimely beautiful, sumptuous, and ethereal La damoiselle élue, an early cantata that contributed to fulfilling an obligation acquired by winning the Prix de Rome, and based on an adaptation of a text by the great English poet and Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Two outstanding singers joined the ensemble—soprano, Seonwoo Lee and mezzo-soprano, Maggie Reneé—along with the admirable Musica Sacra chorus under the distinguished direction of Kent Tritle.

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