MET Orchestra Close Out Two Nights of Shows at Carnegie Hall

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 25 June 2026 13:57; Written by Jack Angstreich

The Met Orchestra with Yannick Nezet Seguin and Joyce DiDonato. Photo by Jennifer Taylor.

At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, June 18th, I had the immense pleasure of attending a magnificent concert—the second of two a week apart—presented by Carnegie Hall, featuring the marvelous MET Orchestra under the outstanding direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The event started very strongly with a sterling account of the late Kaija Saariaho’s powerful Lumière et pesanteur, from 2009. In a note on the piece, the composer has commented thus:

Lumière et pesanteur is a gift for Esa-Pekka Salonen, inspired by his performance of my La Passion de Simone in Los Angeles, January 2009. This piece is an arrangement based on the eighth station of the Passion, which I know that he especially likes.

About La Passion de Simone, annotator Noémie Chemali says that:

this multimedia oratorio, created in collaboration with Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf and stage director Peter Sellars, premiered in 2006 at the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna. Written in the passion play tradition, it makes a loose allusion to Baroque oratorio, which historically depicts the suffering of Jesus. This work, instead, explores the life and spiritual journey of the iconic French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43). Scored for orchestra, solo soprano, and electronics, it was subsequently performed by fellow Finn, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who inspired the orchestral arrangement known as Lumière et pesanteur.

In another program note, Nicholas Swett reported that “Saariaho came upon Weil's writings as a teenager.” The composer described how

the Finnish translation of her book Gravity and Grace was one of the few things I packed into my suitcase when I travelled to Germany in 1981 to continue my studies in composition. … The combination of Weil's severe asceticism and her passionate quest for truth has appealed to me ever since I first read her thoughts.

About Weil, in a 2021 interview Saariaho said:

I never totally understood what she is saying, but I am still trying. And I don't agree with her thoughts, but they force me to create my own opinions and they are very contemporary.

In Weil’s 1947 book, La pesanteur et la grâce, she wrote: “Two powers hold sway over the universe: light and gravity.”

The fabulous mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato then entered the stage for a superb—if maybe slightly underpowered—performance of Gustav Mahler’s extraordinary, five Rückert-Lieder, completed in 1902. About the now underrated poet, Friedrich Rückert, whose work provides the basis for them as well as the composer’s Kindertotenlieder and which was famously set by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, the composer told Anton Webern:

This is lyric poetry from the source. All else is lyric poetry of a derivative sort.

Annotator Harry Haskell explains that, “Unlike the Kindertotenlieder, the Rückert-Lieder were not conceived as an organic cycle.”

The second half of the evening’s program was at least equally memorable, consisting of an engrossing reading of Mahler’s incredibleSymphony No. 4 in G Major, which attained its final form in 1910. According to Haskell, “Mahler considered his new work ‘basically different’ from its three predecessors.” The composer wrote to his fiancée, Alma Schindler:

My Fourth will be very strange to you. It is all humorous, ‘naïve,’ etc.; it represents the part of my life that is still the hardest for you to accept and which in the future only extremely few will comprehend.

Haskell adds that Mahler “confided to a friend” that the symphony “depicted a cosmic gaiety emanating ‘from another sphere, and hence terrifying for humans: Only a child can understand and explain it, and a child does explain it in the end: a child who, if only at the chrysalis stage, already belongs to this superior world.’” The composer later commented “that humor of this type (as distinct from wit or good humor) is frequently not recognized even by the best of audiences.”

The initial movement opens charmingly—if maybe deceptively—and for much of it remains so, but it is punctuated by moments of almost aching lyricism and the music exhibits greater turbulence as it unfolds, although this eventually subsides before an abrupt, emphatic finish. The second movement is more playful with uncanny, almost sinister aspects and has an especially unconventional structure and considerable forward momentum for much of its length—it too ends suddenly, if relatively softly.

The ensuing, predominantly tranquil, slow movement—marked Poco adagio—has some of the celestial qualities of the celebrated Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony—which was famously employed by Luchino Visconti in his Death in Venice—but there are some dramatic, even portentous measures before it becomes quite cheerful and then recovers its serenity; it closes very quietly. (The composer stated that the movement signifies that “no harm was meant after all.”)

Mahler originally intended the last movement—a song set to the poem “Das himmlische Leben” from the influential 19th-century anthology, Des Knaben Wunderhorn—as the finale to his Third Symphony, and instructed that it “be sung with childlike, cheerful expression; entirely without parody.” It is buoyant, enchanting, often jubilant, with dynamic interludes, concluding irenically. (It was gloriously interpreted here by DiDonato.)

An enthusiastic ovation elicited an incredible encore from the mezzo-soprano and the ensemble: the "Urlicht" movement from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, the "Resurrection."