Waltzing with the MET Orchestra

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 20 June 2022 13:56

Written by Jack Angstreich

Christine Goerke performs with the MET Orchestra. Photo by Chris Lee.

At Carnegie Hall, on Wednesday, June 15th, I was privileged to attend the first of two extraordinary concerts on consecutive evenings featuring the outstanding musicians of the MET Orchestra under the exhilarating direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, one of the most engaging conductors working today.

The program opened brilliantly with an exuberant rendition of Richard Strauss’s amazing Don Juan, inspired by a work by the great German Romantic poet, Nikolaus Lenau. The program note adds that the composer “refrained from providing a dramatic key to his tone poem, though he did preface the score with extracts from Lenau’s verse play.” There’s a satirical—and thereby comic—thrust to much of the score but as important is a sensuous lyricism as well as an evocation of nobility. The music becomes turbulent, dramatic, and suspenseful, ending on an enigmatic, if pessimistic, note.

Nézet-Séguin briefly addressed the audience, expressing his happiness about returning to public performance after the COVID disruption, before leading the musicians in a marvelous realization of contemporary composer Missy Mazzoli’s enjoyable, surprisingly accessible, and beautifully orchestrated Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) from 2014, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and which received its Carnegie Hall premiere with this performance. Intriguingly, the piece is additionally scored for piano, synthesizer, and harmonicas. The composer’s own description of the work is worth quoting—she said that Sinfoniais:

music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word ‘sinfonia’ refers to Baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.

Mazzoli entered the stage to receive the audience’s acclaim.

The second half of the evening was arguably the highlight of the concert, a magnificent account of the first act of Richard Wagner’s major opera, Die Walküre, with soprano Christine Goerke as Sieglinde, tenor Brandon Jovanovich as Siegmund, and bass-baritone Eric Owens as Hunding. The music began thrillingly and built to an overwhelming conclusion; the singers were all excellent while Goerke--one of the most gifted sopranos working today—was exceptional. The artists were rewarded with a standing ovation.

The following night’s performance—devoted to the music of Hector Berlioz—was equally enthralling, opening with an exquisite version of the Le corsaire Overture, which has a stirring beginning, succeeded by a slower, more introspective theme, and then quickens excitingly, eventually attaining a stunning climax. Joyce DiDonato—one of the finest contemporary mezzo-sopranos—then joined the musicians to fabulously sing two glorious arias—with theirreçitativeintroductions—from the towering opera, Les Troyens, after Virgil’s Aeneid: “Chers Tyriens” and "Adieu, fière cité.” In between the two arias, the orchestra played a gorgeous, at times tempestuous, instrumental interlude from the opera, "Chasse royale et orage,” about which Carnegie Hall’s program note informatively says:

Dido’s fateful dalliance with the Trojan hero Aeneas is depicted in the orchestral interlude “Chasse royale et orage” (“Royal Hunt and Storm”). In pantomimed action that Berlioz annotates in the score, the lovers seek refuge from a torrential squall in a woodland cave, where they consummate their passion wordlessly and unseen. (This erotic tableau was cut after the first performance at the Opéra-Comique, ostensibly because the elaborate set change took too long.)

DiDonato garnered a deservedly enthusiastic ovation.

The second part of the event was also stupendous: a magisterial interpretation of Berlioz’s early, pathbreaking masterpiece, the Symphonie Fantastique. A haunting introduction precedes the ebullient, sometimes agitated, Allegro, which unexpectedly contains some of the composer’s mostavant-gardemusic. After this, “A Ball,” is fittingly a splendid waltz movement which builds to a dynamic close. The next movement, “Scene in the Country,” opens quietly and is evocatively pastoral; it becomes more forceful and ends portentously. The ensuing “March to the Scaffold” is mesmerizing and astonishingly intense while the finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” is comprised of the most ominous and propulsive music yet—it is too an epitome of the grotesque—indeed, the most breathtaking of all. Rapturous applause drew DiDonato back to the stage for an incredible encore: an unutterably lovely performance of Strauss’s incomparablelied,“Morgen!”

I look forward to the return of these terrific musicians to Carnegie Hall next season.

June '22 Digital Week II

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 16 June 2022 20:09

Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater/Streaming Releases of the Week 

After Blue 

Watcher 

We Are the Thousand 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

The Clock 

Eraser—Reborn 

For Me and My Gal 

Nerone 

9 Bullets 

Vive L’amour 

Ziegfeld Girl 

CD Releases of the Week 

Jacques Offenbach—Le Voyage dans la Lune

"Forward Into Light": Songs of Freedom & Suffrage at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 15 June 2022 14:31

Written by Jack Angstreich

Hilary Hahn with the New York Philharmonic

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Friday, June 10th, I had the great pleasure to attend a terrific concert featuring the New York Philharmonic—playing at their near finest—under the unusually effective direction of Jaap van Zweden.

The program began promisingly with the remarkable, marvelously performed world premiere of a new commission by the ensemble, the beautifully orchestratedForward Into Lightby the American composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. To describe the work, I can do no better than to quote her note on it:

Forward Into Light is a meditation on perseverance, bravery, and alliance. The piece was inspired by the American women suffragists—Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, Zitkála-Šá, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, to name but a few—who devoted their lives to the belief that women were human beings and therefore entitled to equal rights and protections under the law of the United States of America.

I wrote the music thinking about what it means to believe in something so deeply that one is willing to endure harassment, deprivation, assault, incarceration, hunger, force-feedings, death threats, and life endangerment in order to fight for it.

Formally, the piece was inspired by the idea of synergistic interpersonal partnerships, which lay at the heart of the American women’s suffrage movement. The best-documented example of this was the alchemical relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them,” Stanton said of Anthony. “We did better work together than either could alone … and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of 30 long years; arguments that no man has answered.”

Forward Into Light opens with three motivic ideas: a pair of ascending sixth intervals in the violins, an undulating quintuplet figure in the harp, and a lyrical line in close canon led by the violas. The trio of ideas coax each other forward, tentatively at first, and then more urgently, as tremors of adversity intensify the stakes. New voices join the conversation, challenging and subverting the original ideas to explore new collaborative solutions, united in the search for a strength that only a defined, mutual purpose can yield.

Forward Into Light features a musical quote fromMarch of the Women, composed in 1910 by British composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth, with words by Cicely Hamilton. The anthem of the women’s suffrage movement,March of the Womenwas sung in homes and halls, on streets and farms, and on the steps of the United States Capitol. It’s briefly alluded to by the oboes in close canon following each of the narrative’s first two arcs, and then precedes the ending as a recorded sample, performed here by Werca’s Folk, a women’s choir based in Northumberland, England, under the direction of Sandra Kerr (used here with permission).

The title of the piece derives from a suffrage slogan made famous by the banner that suffragist Inez Milholland carried while riding a white horse to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade on March 3, 1913, in Washington, DC:

“Forward, out of error
Leave behind the night
Forward through the darkness
Forward into light!”

The very attractive Snider, who wore a striking black and emerald green dress, joined the musicians onstage to graciously receive the audience’s acclaim.

The splendid virtuoso Hilary Hahn then emerged as soloist for an impressive account of the fabulous Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber, one of the most exquisite examples of the genre. The composer said the following about the piece:

The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was completed in July 1940, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania, and is Mr. Barber’s most recent work for orchestra. It is lyric and rather intimate in character, and a moderate-sized orchestra is used: eight woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano, and strings.

The first movement—Allegro molto moderato—begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement—Andante sostenuto—is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetual motion, exploits the more brilliant and virtuoso characteristics of the violin.

The program note adds:

Barber contributed this comment to The Philadelphia Orchestra’s program for the premiere of his Violin Concerto. Written in the third person, it refers to tempo markings that Barber would later simplify.

The opening Allegro is gorgeously expressive, but at times dramatic, while the ensuing Andante is more inward, but also lovely, infused with a passionate Romanticism that pervades many of the composer’s works. The finale is lighter in tone—indeed often comic—and commensurately dazzling in its way. A standing ovation elicited an extraordinary encore: Johann Sebastian Bach’s sublime Sarabande from his Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004.

Even more rewarding was the second half of the concert: an utterly persuasive realization of Gustav Mahler’s magisterial Symphony No. 1. A mysterious, anticipatory introduction precedes the the truly enchanted main body of the first movement, which has a pastoral quality but acquires a more suspenseful and triumphant character, building to a joyous conclusion. The second movement, with the rhythms of a Ländler, is celebratory as well. The third movement—which opens uncannily with the primary melody played in a high register by the first double-bassist—is a brilliantly sardonic funeral march—based on Frère Jacques—not without genuine melancholy, periodically interrupted by a pastiche of popular Viennese band music—this epitomizes what may be described as the “dialectical” nature of the composer’s aesthetic sensibility. (A lyrical middle section is especially haunting.) The finale begins tumultuously, but rapidly moves to a thrilling, propulsive tempo arrested by slower, more introspective—indeed celestial—passages; the music increases in intensity, closing exuberantly. The artists received rousing applause, ending an unexpectedly memorable evening.