MET Orchestra Presents “Fall of the Weimar Republic"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 07 February 2024 16:09

Written by Jack Angstreich

Lise Davidsen (L) with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Stern Auditorium, on the evening of Thursday, February 1st, I had the pleasure of attending a rewarding concert featuring—as part of Carnegie Hall’s current festival, “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice”—the excellent musicians of the MET Orchestra under the direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The program began auspiciously with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fuga (Ricercata) a 6 voci from Musical Offering, BWV 1079, presented in the brilliant arrangement by Anton Webern, who wrote about the score as follows: “My orchestration is intended … to reveal the motivic coherence. Beyond that, of course, it is to set the character of the piece as I feel it. What music it is!” (George Balanchine’s ballet,Episodes,is set to works by Webern, including this one for its extraordinary final section.)

The outstanding Norwegian soprano and Metropolitan Opera star, Lise Davidsen, then entered the stage for what proved to be maybe the highlight of the event, an enthralling rendition of Ricard Wagner’s magnificent set of songs, the Wesendonck Lieder, partly “orchestrated with the composer’s approval by Austrian conductor Felix Mottl,” according to the useful program note by Jay Goodwin. An enthusiastic audience was surprised when its applause elicited a fabulous encore: Wagner’s beautiful aria, "Dich, teure Halle" from his early opera, Tannhäuser.

The second half of the evening was also memorable, consisting of Gustav Mahler’s monumental Symphony 5. The composer wrote this about the piece in a letter to his wife Alma in 1904: “And the public—heavens!—how should they react to this chaos, which is constantly giving birth to new worlds and promptly destroying them again? What should they make of these primeval noises, this rushing, roaring, raging sea, these dancing stars, these ebbing, shimmering, gleaming waves?” The work opens with a fanfare and a stirring funeral march; some recurring, more frenetic music intercedes and later some dance-like passages and some more lyrical interludes. The second movement is also tumultuous while much of the ambitious, eccentricScherzothat succeeds it is enchanting and playful, if at times suspenseful, ending abruptly. The glorious, celestialAdagietto,some of the greatest music ever composed—famously employed by the immortal Luchino Visconti for his landmark 1971 film,Death in Venice—was another pinnacle of the concert, attaining an astonishing intensity. The almost pastoralfinale,has a contrasting levity, a joyous quality that recalls that of Mahler’s settings of the celebrated collection of German folk songs,Des Knaben Wunderhorn,such as the first and final movements of his magisterial Symphony No. 4; it builds to a thrilling conclusion, which prompted a standing ovation.

The MET Orchestra will return to Carnegie Hall on June 11th and 14th.

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