New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center Perform "Neharot"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 25 October 2024 14:35

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

At Lincoln Center’s excellent David Geffen Hall, on the afternoon of Sunday, October 13th, I had the pleasure of attending a memorable concert presented by the New York Philharmonic under the confident direction of the celebrated composer and conductor, Matthias Pintscher. 

The event began strongly with a powerful account of Pintscher’s own challenging, somewhat lugubrious, and impressively orchestrated neharot from 2020, a work which ends abruptly and which received its US premiere with these performances. The composer provided the following statement on the piece:

“neharot” means rivers in Hebrew, but also tears. It also describes the tears of lamentation. This music was written during the worst time of many daily deaths in spring 2020 and is a clear echo of the devastation and fear, but also of the hope for light, that so emotionally characterized this time of our lives. Since the music evokes the river as a sonic phenomenon, it is also inspired by the mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, where several rivers cross exactly under the place where Chartres was built (and rebuilt after it was burned down, totally destroyed by fate and resurrected ... thus a symbol for the emotional content of the music). I wanted to paint long arcs of sound with the music — whereby the two harps are used extensively as the source of the sound spectrum of the dark sound world of neharot. The piece is a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish — for all the people we have lost in this unprecedented time. 

The eminent soloist Gil Shaham then entered the stage for a sterling performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s brilliant Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64, from 1844. James M. Keller, in his notes on the program, provided some useful background on it:

In March 1845 [Ferdinand] David played the premiere of Mendelssohn’s enduringly popular E- minor Violin Concerto, which the composer had contemplated writing as early as 1838. “I’d like to do a violin concerto for you for next winter,” he wrote to David on July 30 of that year. “One in E minor is running through my head, and the opening of it will not leave me in peace.” Curiously, ensuing sketches reveal that it was a piano concerto, rather than a violin concerto, that started taking form, one that matched the eventual violin concerto in both key and structure. By the time Mendelssohn focused definitively on the composition in 1844, it had evolved with certainty into a violin concerto. He consulted closely with his soloist as he composed it, mostly about technical issues but in some cases concerning more general matters of structure and balance [ . . . . ] 

The initial movement, marked Allegro molto appassionato, begins Romantically, if not effusively, while the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven is discernible—Shaham played the composer’s own cadenza. The lyrical Andante that ensues—which has most of the loveliest music in the concerto—grows in intensity before reverting to a more meditative ethos. The opening of the finale has an almost pastoral character but the movement quickly acquires an ebullient momentum with march-like rhythms, projecting a triumphant sensibility. Enthusiastic applause elicited a rewarding encore from the soloist: the marvelous Gavotte en rondeau from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006.

The true highlight of the concert, however, was its second half: a forceful reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s striking, seldom played tone-poem, Pelleas and Melisande, Op. 5, a somewhat neo-Wagnerian work that also has affinities with the music of Gustav Mahler, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss. According to Keller, it evidently was Strauss that introduced Schoenberg to the eponymous Maurice Maeterlinck play that is the basis for the piece, “suggesting in 1902 that the emerging composer turn it into an opera.” He adds:

Maeterlinck, a Belgian, had emerged as a leading voice of symbolist aesthetics, and the premiere of his play Pelléas et Mélisande, in Paris in 1893, proved a watershed cultural moment. Claude Debussy quickly secured rights to set it as an opera, which he completed in 1902. Gabriel Fauré wrote incidental music for a production of the play in London in 1898, and Jean Sibelius did the same in 1905, when the play was given in Helsinki. 

In a 1950 article, Schoenberg wrote:

It was around 1900 when Maurice Maeterlinck fascinated composers, stimulating them to create music to his dramatic poems. What attracted all was his art of dramatizing eternal problems of humanity in the form of fairy tales, lending them timelessness without adhering to imitation of ancient styles.

I look forward to the remainder of what appears to be an exciting season for the ensemble.

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