Paavo Järvi Directs the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 04 December 2024 15:04

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

At Lincoln Center’s wonderful David Geffen Hall on the night of Thursday, November 21st, I had the considerable pleasure to attend an exceptional concert presented by the New York Philharmonic under the superb direction of Paavo Järvi.

The event started splendidly with a sterling performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s extraordinary Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, featuring the celebrated Yefim Bronfman as soloist. In a useful note on the program, James M Keller comments that “the composition of this work ended up stretching over a good three and a half years, not counting preliminary sketches, which reached back to 1796 — plus a further year, counting the time it took him to actually write out the piano part, and yet another five beyond that till he wrote down the first-movement cadenza.” The initial, Allegro con brio movement—which finishes powerfully—has a quiet urgency at the outset, with the piano entering forcefully after the music intensifies; a general solemnity is maintained throughout and even the composer’s own cadenza has a somewhat brooding—at times even insistent—quality. The Mozartean Largo that follows is more reflective but also lyrical, while the Rondo finale, marked Allegro, is more dynamic and also dramatic—although there are lighter passages—but concludes affirmatively. Enthusiastic applause elicited an excellent encore from the pianist: the Andante second movement from Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 14, in A minor, D.784.

However, it was the second half of the evening that was the true highlight: an absolutely brilliant realization of Carl Nielsen’s marvelous, too seldom played Symphony No. 5, Op. 50. In an interview preceding the premiere of the work, the composer observed:

I've been told that my new symphony isn't like my earlier ones. I can't hear it myself. But perhaps it's true. I do know that it isn't all that easy to grasp, nor all that easy to play. We've had many rehearsals of it. Some people have even thought that now Arnold Schoenberg can pack his bags and take a walk with his dissonances. Mine were worse. I don't think so.

The somewhat hushed, Tempo giusto opening has a slightly cerebral quality but subsequently the music becomes march-like, even martial, before a more tentative and questioning episode; a complex development leads to a thrilling climax before this Adagio non troppo section ends softly. In a description to a pupil, Nielsen said:

A solo clarinet ends this large idyll- movement, an expression of vegetative (idle, thoughtless) Nature. The second movement is its counterpole: if the first movement was passivity, here it is action (or activity) which is conveyed. So it's something very primitive I wanted to express: the division of dark and light, the battle between good and evil.

The Allegro beginning of the final movement is turbulent and the music remains agitated until a slower, more subdued—if somewhat querulous—section with some dance-like rhythms; this eventually becomes fugue-like, but then placid, while the closing Allegro section is weightyand ultimately triumphant. The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.

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