Juilliard Orchestra Perform at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 05 December 2023 14:45

Written by Jack Angstreich

Thomas Wilkins conducts Juilliard Orchestra, photo by Claudio Papapietro

At Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on the evening of Monday, November 20th, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a superb concert featuring the excellent musicians of the Juilliard Orchestra, here under the impressive direction of Thomas Wilkins.

The program began auspiciously with a thoroughly engaging account of George Gershwin’s marvelous, enormously popular An American in Paris from 1928.The composer commented interestingly upon it that, “if it pleases symphony audiences as a light, jolly piece, a series of impressions musically expressed, it succeeds.”

Four admirable soloists—Paige Quillen, Carys Sutherland, Emily Howell, and Colby Kleven—then took the stage for a pleasurable rendition of Robert Schumann’s fine, too seldom performed Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra in F Major, Op. 86, from 1849, played here in the early 2000s arrangement by Kerry Turner which, in the program note by Sutherland, is described as “audibly indistinguishable from the original for the audience,” adding:

Schumann’s original manuscript gives nearly every virtuosic passage to only the first horn, with the other players mostly serving as backup harmony. This arrangement divides the high passages between the first and second horns, and the third and fourth horns dazzle in the Romance while the first two take a much-needed rest. The overall result is that the players are equally involved technically and melodically, making this truly a four-horn concerto.

The spirited initial movement has a Mendelssohnian quality that persists throughout the work as a whole, while the slower Romance that follows is contrastingly elevated and the very fastfinaleis exuberant and propulsive, returning to something closer to theethosof the first movement. The artists earned vigorous applause.

The second half of the event was even stronger, a sterling realization of Florence Price’s extraordinary, recently rediscovered Symphony No. 3 in C Minor from 1940, which reverts to an approach involving popular idioms that is closer to that which characterizes An American in Paris. The opening Allegro—which has a solemn, Andante introduction—is frequently boisterous—but with echoes of Gershwin and Aaron Copland that can seemingly be discerned elsewhere in the piece as well—and ends abruptly. The ensuing movement, marked Andante ma non troppo, is more inward in orientation while the buoyant and playful third movement is anAllegrowith some placid moments that iscast in the form of thejuba,explained by the annotator as:

...a style of dance originating from Kongo slaves in the pre-Civil War South. Because drums were forbidden on many plantations, the dance involved clapping and stomping, and may be the origin of modern tap dance...

Thefinale—aScherzo—is ebullient with dramatic passages and closes powerfully. The performers were rewarded with an enthusiastic ovation.

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