Waltzing with the MET Orchestra

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 20 June 2022 13:56

Written by Jack Angstreich

Christine Goerke performs with the MET Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Carnegie Hall, on Wednesday, June 15th, I was privileged to attend the first of two extraordinary concerts on consecutive evenings featuring the outstanding musicians of the MET Orchestra under the exhilarating direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, one of the most engaging conductors working today.

The program opened brilliantly with an exuberant rendition of Richard Strauss’s amazing Don Juan, inspired by a work by the great German Romantic poet, Nikolaus Lenau. The program note adds that the composer “refrained from providing a dramatic key to his tone poem, though he did preface the score with extracts from Lenau’s verse play.” There’s a satirical—and thereby comic—thrust to much of the score but as important is a sensuous lyricism as well as an evocation of nobility. The music becomes turbulent, dramatic, and suspenseful, ending on an enigmatic, if pessimistic, note.

Nézet-Séguin briefly addressed the audience, expressing his happiness about returning to public performance after the COVID disruption, before leading the musicians in a marvelous realization of contemporary composer Missy Mazzoli’s enjoyable, surprisingly accessible, and beautifully orchestrated Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) from 2014, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and which received its Carnegie Hall premiere with this performance. Intriguingly, the piece is additionally scored for piano, synthesizer, and harmonicas. The composer’s own description of the work is worth quoting—she said that Sinfoniais:

music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word ‘sinfonia’ refers to Baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.

Mazzoli entered the stage to receive the audience’s acclaim.

The second half of the evening was arguably the highlight of the concert, a magnificent account of the first act of Richard Wagner’s major opera, Die Walküre, with soprano Christine Goerke as Sieglinde, tenor Brandon Jovanovich as Siegmund, and bass-baritone Eric Owens as Hunding. The music began thrillingly and built to an overwhelming conclusion; the singers were all excellent while Goerke--one of the most gifted sopranos working today—was exceptional. The artists were rewarded with a standing ovation.

The following night’s performance—devoted to the music of Hector Berlioz—was equally enthralling, opening with an exquisite version of the Le corsaire Overture, which has a stirring beginning, succeeded by a slower, more introspective theme, and then quickens excitingly, eventually attaining a stunning climax. Joyce DiDonato—one of the finest contemporary mezzo-sopranos—then joined the musicians to fabulously sing two glorious arias—with theirreçitativeintroductions—from the towering opera, Les Troyens, after Virgil’s Aeneid: “Chers Tyriens” and "Adieu, fière cité.” In between the two arias, the orchestra played a gorgeous, at times tempestuous, instrumental interlude from the opera, "Chasse royale et orage,” about which Carnegie Hall’s program note informatively says:

Dido’s fateful dalliance with the Trojan hero Aeneas is depicted in the orchestral interlude “Chasse royale et orage” (“Royal Hunt and Storm”). In pantomimed action that Berlioz annotates in the score, the lovers seek refuge from a torrential squall in a woodland cave, where they consummate their passion wordlessly and unseen. (This erotic tableau was cut after the first performance at the Opéra-Comique, ostensibly because the elaborate set change took too long.)

DiDonato garnered a deservedly enthusiastic ovation.

The second part of the event was also stupendous: a magisterial interpretation of Berlioz’s early, pathbreaking masterpiece, the Symphonie Fantastique. A haunting introduction precedes the ebullient, sometimes agitated, Allegro, which unexpectedly contains some of the composer’s mostavant-gardemusic. After this, “A Ball,” is fittingly a splendid waltz movement which builds to a dynamic close. The next movement, “Scene in the Country,” opens quietly and is evocatively pastoral; it becomes more forceful and ends portentously. The ensuing “March to the Scaffold” is mesmerizing and astonishingly intense while the finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” is comprised of the most ominous and propulsive music yet—it is too an epitome of the grotesque—indeed, the most breathtaking of all. Rapturous applause drew DiDonato back to the stage for an incredible encore: an unutterably lovely performance of Strauss’s incomparablelied,“Morgen!”

I look forward to the return of these terrific musicians to Carnegie Hall next season.

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