Andrés Orozco-Estrada Debuts with New York Philharmonic

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 11 December 2023 15:22

Written by Jack Angstreich

Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducts the New York Philharmonic. Photo by Brandon Patoc.

At Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall on the night of Wednesday, December 6th, I had the considerable privilege of attending a superb concert presented by the New York Philharmonic—here under the exemplary direction of Andrés Orozco-Estrada in his debut with this ensemble—in what has been thus far a strong season of orchestral music.

The evening began splendidly with a stirring account of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s beautiful, enormously popular Romeo and Juliet, Overture-Fantasy. In an excellent note on the program, author James M. Keller provides much interesting background, commenting that Tchaikovsky had dedicated the piece to Mily Balakirev, “to whom the composer had dedicated his symphonic poem Fatum (Fate),which he characterized as ‘the best thing I’ve written so far,’” adding that Balakirev “showed his appreciation with a scathing appraisal of the work,” which led Tchaikovsky to destroy it, and “A few months later Balakirev suggested that the 29-year-old Tchaikovsky write a concert overture based on Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, and he sent a long letter detailing how the project should be realized.” They corresponded as Tchaikovsky proceeded and he wrote to Balakirev to assure him:

The layout is yours. The introduction portraying the friar, the fight — Allegro, and love — the second subject; and, secondly, the modulations are yours: also the introduction in E, the Allegro in B-flat minor and the second subject in D-flat. . . . You can tear it to pieces ... all you want! I will take note of what you say and will try to do better in my next work.

The annotator outlines the music’s evolution as follows:

The work was not a success when [Nikolai] Rubinstein conducted its premiere, in Moscow in March 1870, and that summer Tchaikovsky undertook extensive revisions. That gave rise to the opening music of the overture-fantasy as audiences now know it, and then in the summer of 1880 Tchaikovsky again put the piece through a severe rewrite. After fully a decade’s work, Romeo and Juliet (now enriched by a dire, unforgiving coda) reached masterpiece status, an achievement that was recognized in 1884, when it won the 500-ruble Glinka Award, the first of many prizes that would come Tchaikovsky’s way in his remaining years.

And further:

Tchaikovsky wrote of the premiere ofRomeo and Julietin Moscow in 1870, “My overture had no success here at all, and was wholly ignored.” He spent the following summer effecting substantial revisions to the piece. The beginning ofRomeo and Julietas it is now known dates from this period, with the original E-major pseudo-liturgical chant being replaced by F-sharp-minor music that maintains an antique sound thanks to the wide-open intervals of the clarinets and bassoons. Balakirev had objected to the original opening, complaining that it reminded him more of a Haydn string quartet than anything suggesting a Catholic friar. Tchaikovsky also deleted a fugue that had seemed out of place in the original version, where it was meant to depict the conflict between the Montagues and the Capulets.

A remarkable soloist, Edgar Moreau—also in his Philharmonic debut—then took the stage for an enchanting performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s wonderful Cello Concerto in C major, one of a handful of the composer’s concertos that endure in the repertory. The piece as a whole is very nearly a late Baroque concerto in form and style and the openingModeratomovement is sparkling—although leisurely in tempo—but not without depths of feeling. The ensuing Adagio is incomparably graceful, achieving a surprising intensity, and features a powerful cadenza, while the finale, marked Allegro molto, is ebullient, dazzling and propulsive, but also unexpectedly emotional in tenor.

The second half of the event was comparable in effect, beginning with what was probably the highlight of the evening, an exhilarating realization of Béla Bartók’s extraordinary Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin. Keller reports that the “scenario was the work of Menyhért (Melchior) Lengyel (1880–1974), a Hungarian playwright and film writer of the Naturalist school”—his famously is the author of the source material for Ernst Lubitsch’s celebrated 1939 film with Greta Garbo, co-scripted by Billy Wilder, Ninotchka. The plot for the pantomime was recounted by Bartók thus:

Three [thugs] force a beautiful girl to lure men into their den so they can rob them. ... The third [visitor] is a wealthy Chinese man. He is a good catch, and the girl entertains him by dancing. The Mandarin’s desire is aroused, he is inflamed by passion, but the girl shrinks from him in horror. The [thugs] attack him, rob him, smother him in a quilt, and stab him with a sword, but their violence is of no avail. They cannot kill the Mandarin, who continues to look at the girl with love and longing in his eyes. Finally feminine instinct helps: the girl satisfies the Mandarin’s desire, and only then does he collapse and die.

The annotator explains:

Lengyel’s story was first published in the January 1, 1917, edition of the magazine Nyugat, of which Bartók was a dedicated subscriber, and the composer busied himself with the score from 1918 until July 1919. The piece would not be staged for another seven-plus years, and even then, on November 27, 1926, it was presented in Cologne rather than in the creators’ native Hungary. The premiere provoked an audience uproar. Church officials were so offended by its content that the production was suspended after a single performance, and in the following 20 years it enjoyed only one further production — in Prague. Conservative Hungary remained Mandarin-resistant throughout the composer’s lifetime; attempts to mount the piece in Budapest in 1931 and 1941 failed.

In 1919, before The Miraculous Mandarinhad ever been produced, Bartók arranged segments of his half-hour score into a concert suite, cutting two sections from the middle of the stage work, creating a 14-measure concert ending for the frenzied dance in which the Mandarin pursues the girl, and eliminating the piece’s final music (which required a wordless chorus).

The concert concluded pleasurably with an exuberant rendition of George Enescu’s enjoyable Romanian Rhapsody in A major, Op. 11, No. 1, which the composer modestly described as “just a few tunes thrown together without thinking about it.” In a useful note on the program, Mark Burford, Professor of Music at Reed College, says about the piece:

The Rhapsody No. 1 can be heard in two large-scale sections, the first of which is a parade of melodies. Both halves are anchored by a style of traditional Romanian music known aslăutărească. Enescu’s first violin teacher was alăutar(a professionallăutăreascămusician) who could not read music [ . . . . ]

He adds that one of the melodies this teacher taught the composer “was the well-knownAm un leu şi vreau să-l beau (I Want To Spend My Money on Drink),which opens the Rhapsody.”

The artists deservedly received an enthusiastic ovation for a memorable evening.