Dai Fujikura & More Performed by New York Philharmonic

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 03 December 2024 16:30

Written by Jack Angstreich

 Photo by Brandon Patoc

At Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall on the night of Saturday, November 30th, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a superb concert—continuing a strong season—presented by the New York Philharmonic under the brilliant direction of Kazuki Yamada in his debut performances with this ensemble.

The event started very promisingly with an outstanding realization of Dai Fujikura’s striking and powerful, impressively scored Entwine, which received its New York premiere with these concerts. In a useful note on the program, Lara Pellegrini provides some background on the composition’s genesis:

Dai Fujikura's Entwine was born of a particular moment, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2020 the director of the WDR Symphony Orchestra reached out to the composer — who was living with his wife and daughter under lockdown in their tiny London flat — with an urgent request. Could Fujikura, in the midst of the ongoing crisis, compose a miniature that spoke to some part of our global experience? The catch: the work was to be premiered later that season, an unusually quick turnaround for an orchestral piece. 

“It was before the vaccine,” recalls Fujikura, winner of the 2017 Silver Lion Award for musical innovation from the Venice Biennale. “We didn't know anything. We didn't know when the pandemic would be over — or if it would be over.”

Fujikura explains:

While everyone else said, “We don't know what we are going to do; we don't know if our orchestra will even exist by the end of the year,” the countries of Europe had a different understanding. I am especially touched by this commission because, in this critical time, they had the capacity to think about creating something new. It is remarkable, and it is very brave.

He has commented further:

I was asked to write a five-minute orchestra work expressing the current world situation and to do it as soon as possible so that the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne could premiere it in 2021. 

I started thinking. I began to see that the topic of this orchestra work should be about touch: the physical touch we can no longer take for granted, and how we can feel socially awkward now by stepping out of the door and having to make sure we are standing far enough away from the other people in the street. 

I wanted to create an orchestral work where musical materials pass from one instrument to another, like one hand to another: sharing, gathering, even ending up in a crowd. Something we have all missed since the beginning of 2020, and something which we now realize is what all humans need to live from one day to the next. 

To do this musically, the orchestra is the perfect conduit. I am hoping the piece will express the dream which we are all missing right now, and whose importance we now truly realize.

An amazing soloist, Yunchan Lim, then entered the stage for a dazzling account of Frédéric Chopin’s extraordinary Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 21. Much of the initial, Maestoso movement—which finishes on a triumphant note—has a meditative—even moody—quality along with exquisite, lyrical passages, but there are more forceful and passionate moments. The ensuing Larghetto opens and closes softly and is even more inward and song-like; it has a brooding ethos but also episodes of great delicacy, while the Allegro vivace finale is effervescent and dynamic, although again with reflective interludes—it ends spiritedly. Enthusiastic applause elicited a terrific encore from the pianist: Variation 13 from Johann Sebastian Bach’s incomparable Goldberg Variations.

The second half of the evening was even more memorable: an enthralling rendition of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s magnificent Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27. The first movement’s Largo introduction is somewhat lugubrious in tone, its primary motif seemingly expressing a deep longing that pervades the movement; its main body has dramatic elements but also an intense emotionalism—after a stormy climax, it becomes more affirmative, finishing optimistically. The second movement is playful and propulsive with more plaintive measures; it becomes suspenseful and then largely more celebratory, closing very quietly. The Adagio that follows is hauntingly beautiful, dominated by a melody of unsurpassed loveliness—it concludes dreamily. The finale, which is exuberant at the outset, is sunnier in outlook on the whole, with a serene, pastoral interlude superseded by exciting music with a greater momentum; it ends vigorously. The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.

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