Photo by Jennifer Taylor.

At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, on the nights of Tuesday and Friday, June 11th and 14th, I had the immense privilege to attend two superb concerts presented by the sterling MET Orchestra, brilliantly led by its extraordinary Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The first program began auspiciously with a laudable realization of Jessie Montgomery’s engaging, beautifully scored Hymn for Everyone from 2021. She has commented that it “is based on a hymn that I wrote in the spring of 2021 that was a reflection on personal and collective challenges happening at the time. I had resisted composing ‘response pieces’ to the pandemic and social-political upheaval and had been experiencing an intense writer’s block. But one day, after a long hike, this hymn just came to me—a rare occurrence.” She added:

I also found that my mom had written a poem called ‘Poem for Everyone.’ I didn’t know she had written it. When I made that discovery, I thought I had to lean into this a little bit more. I’d expand the hymn and make it into sort of a musical tribute. It was a bit of catharsis for me.

And further:

The melody traverses through different orchestral ‘choirs’ and is accompanied by the rest of the ensemble. It is a kind of meditation for orchestra, exploring various washes of color and timbre through each repetition of the melody.

The outstanding soprano Lisette Oropesa then entered the stage to wonderfully perform two excellent works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 

The first was the gorgeous “Vado, ma dove?,” K. 583, a substitute aria written for the 1789 revival of the opera Il burbero di buon cuore written by Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler and set to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. About the second piece, “A Berenice … Sol nascente,” K. 70., annotator Harry Haskell explains:

Mozart was just 13 years old when he composed this charming and highly accomplished recitative and aria for the birthday of his well-liked employer, Archbishop Sigismund von Schrattenbach, in Salzburg. (The celebratory music may have been encored in 1772 at the installation of the archbishop’s successor, Hieronymus Colloredo, with whom Mozart would have a more problematic relationship.) “Sol nascente” is what is known as a “licenza,” a laudatory aria appended as a postscript to an existing work—in this case Vologeso, a long-forgotten opera seria by Giuseppe Sarti. 

The second half of the event was possibly even more remarkable, consisting of an exceptionally strong reading of Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68, notably described upon its premiere by the eminent critic Eduard Hanslick as “one of the most individual and magnificent works of the symphonic literature.” 

The initial movement has a fraught introduction—marked Un poco sostenuto—in which the influence of Ludwig Van Beethoven is unmistakable, while its more dynamic, main body—an Allegro—has a greater intensity although with some more subdued, less agonized passages and concludes quietly. The succeeding Andante sostenuto is gentler in spirit, almost Mozartean at times, contains some of the piece’s loveliest music, and closes softly. The third movement—with a tempo of Un poco allegretto e grazioso—is sunnier in outlook for much of its length, but is not without some urgency, and has a dance-like quality at moments. The finale has another solemn introduction; it leads to an exultant, almost celestial section—alluding to the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9–that builds to a somewhat turbulent and rousing ending.

The second evening was even more extraordinary, beginning with an exhilarating account of Richard Wagner’s glorious Overture to his first important opera, The Flying Dutchman. In a useful note for the program, Jay Goodwin provides some background:

When Wagner began work on Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)—the first of his operas to show significant signs of the genius to come—in Paris in 1840, his circumstances left much to be desired. Having fled Riga to escape his many creditors, Wagner and his wife took illegal passage on a ship to London. Storms blew the ship off course, and it temporarily took refuge in the Norwegian fjords. When they finally reached London, the Wagners hastily moved on to Paris, where Richard hoped to arrange a production of his previous opera, Rienzi. The Opéra declined the piece, however, and Wagner scraped by on charity and occasional employment as a copyist and music critic.

Inspired by his tempestuous journey at sea and determined to have an opera produced, Wagner started in on Der fliegende Holländer, based on the legend of a captain doomed to sail the seas for eternity, coming ashore only once every seven years, as punishment for blasphemy. In Wagner’s version, the captain can win redemption only through obtaining the selfless and faithful love of a woman. Though the Opéra also wanted nothing to do with this new work, Wagner was eventually able to have both Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer performed in Dresden. The earlier opera was quite well received, but Holländer garnered little acclaim. Today, however, it is considered markedly superior to Rienzi and is generally thought to represent the beginning of Wagner’s mature oeuvre.

Equally impressive was a marvelous performance of Erich Leinsdorf’s admirable arrangement of a Suite of amazing music from Claude Debussy’s only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, adapted from a famous play by the Symbolist dramatist, Maurice Maeterlinck, described by the outstanding literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith as “one of the most oppressive plays ever written.” About the opera, the composer said, “I do not pretend to have discovered everything in Pelléas, but I have tried to trace a path that others may follow, broadening it with individual discoveries which will, perhaps, free dramatic music from the heavy yoke under which it has existed for so long.”

The concert finished astonishingly with a stellar rendition of Béla Bartók’s powerful opera, Bluebeard’s Castle—which has affinities with the music of Debussy and Igor Stravinsky—set to a striking libretto by Béla Balázs—a significant Hungarian intellectual most celebrated today as a major film theorist—and featuring the fine bass-baritone, Christian Van Horn, and the incredible mezzo-soprano, Elina Garanča, who was clothed in a fabulous gown. 

The artists were deservedly applauded enthusiastically on both nights.