Juilliard Orchestra Perform Varèse & More

• 

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 09 March 2026 15:52

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Paula Lobo, courtesy of Juilliard

At Carnegie Hall’s wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Wednesday, February 11th, I had the privilege to attend an excellent concert of modernist works presented by the precocious musicians of the splendid Juilliard Orchestra, under the distinguished direction of David Robertson.

The event started impressively, with a remarkable account of Edgard Varèse’s seldom played, arresting Amériques, from 1927, a work that defies easy description. The composer said that he aimed at the “liberation of sound—to throw open the whole world of sound to music.” In useful notes on the program, composer Elizabeth Younan, who is a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at Juilliard, said:

Varèse had witnessed the notorious premiere of The Rite of Spring in Paris and studied in Berlin with Ferruccio Busoni, absorbing the revolutionary ideas of early 20th-century music. At the same time, echoes of French Impressionism are present: The opening alto flute melody recalls Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a motif that continually appears throughout the opening of the work. 

The piece originally required 140 musicians; the expanded percussion section plays a central role.

The second half of the event was also remarkable, beginning with an admirable realization of the also challenging, but rewarding and engaging, Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, by Arnold Schoenberg, from 1909. Charles Rosen, in his absorbing monograph on the composer Arnold Schoenberg, writes on it illuminatingly:

In this work, Schoenberg's debt to Mahler is immediately apparent; like Mahler he calls only at moments for the entire force of the very large orchestra necessary for the work and generally uses small groups of solo instruments. This makes a kind of chamber-music sound in which the combinations of instruments are continually shifting [ . . . . ] Each phrase can be given an entirely new instrumental color, and is consequently characterized less by its harmonic content than by the instrumental combination that embodies it. 

This emancipation of tone color was as significant and as characteristic of the first decades of the twentieth century as the emancipation of dissonance. Tone color was released from its complete subordination to pitch in musical structure: until this point what note was played had been far more important than the instrumental color or the dynamics with which it was played. The principal element of music was conceived to be pitch. (This was at least the theoretical position, even if, in practice, other elements were to have had in reality greater weight at rare moments.) 

The third of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, called “Chord Colors,” was later retitled more fancifully “Summer Morning by a Lake.” It begins with a single soft chord triple pianissimo that changes instrumental color as its notes are transferred from one instrument to another, with the exits and entrances overlapping. The changes are directed to be played with great subtlety: we should not, in fact, be aware of the individual instruments as they enter but only of the gradual changes of sonority. The orchestration of the first chord changes imperceptibly from a grouping of flutes (low register), clarinets, bassoon, and viola solo to an entirely new color of English horn, bassoon, horns, trumpets (low register), and double-bass solo in a high register. The harmony changes, also slowly and imperceptibly, as the piece proceeds, and new, short motifs play themselves out against this slow-moving background. 

The initial movement, entitled Premonitions, is propulsive and concludes very abruptly, while the second, Yesteryears, is seemingly more inward in perspective, with some dreamy moments—it closes with some suddenness. The ensuing Colors is also meditative, and Peripetia, which follows, is more agitated. The last movement, The Obligatory Recitative, is expressive of anxiety possibly, or even pessimism.

The concert concluded exhilaratingly with a marvelous version of Igor Stravinsky’s magnificent ballet score, The Rite of Spring, from 1913. The Encyclopaedia Britannica provides some interesting commentary on it:

The piece was commissioned by the noted impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev, who earlier had produced the young composer’s The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). Stravinsky developed the story of The Rite of Spring, originally to be called The Great Sacrifice, with the aid of artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich, whose name appears with the composer’s on the title page of the earliest publications of the score. The production was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and its sets and costumes were designed by Roerich.

Like Stravinsky’s earlier works for the Ballet Russes, The Rite of Spring was inspired by Russian culture, but, unlike them, it challenged the audience with its chaotic percussive momentum.

The first part of the composition, The Adoration of the Earth, has an astonishing and unexpected climax, while the second, The Sacrifice, also ends thrillingly.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.