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Reviews
Juilliard Orchestra Perform Varèse & More
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- 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.
Thus Spoke the Juilliard Orchestra & Gustav Mahler at Carnegie Hall
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 09 March 2026 15:22
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Rachel Papo, courtesy of Juilliard
At Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, on the night of Monday, April 14th, 2025 I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a superb performance of Gustav Mahler’s titanic Symphony No. 3 in D Minor from 1896, played by the impressive Juilliard Orchestra—admirably conducted by the accomplished David Robertson—assisted by the excellent Juilliard Community Chorus and the Juilliard Preparatory Division Chorus, under the direction of Adrian O. Rodríguez.
In instructive notes on the program by Thomas May—credited as “the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival,” a writer “about the arts for a wide variety of publications,” and the author of books including Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader—he provides some useful background on the piece:
The longest of Gustav Mahler's symphonies, the Third takes an all-encompassing perspective that, in the composer's words, “goes to the very heart of existence, where one must feel every tremor of the world and of God.” It culminates in a suprahuman vision of love as the driving force of “a Universe where everything lives and must and will live.”
Composition stretched over two summers (1895–1896), but the complete work was not premiered until June 1902, under the composer's baton, at a festival in Krefeld, Germany. In the interim, Mahler vacillated over titles proposed for each of the six movements, eventually settling on an outline comprising two parts: Part I, “Pan Awakes/Summer Marches In (Procession of Bacchus),” the monumental first movement (over one-third of the entire symphony's duration); and Part II, consisting of five movements: “What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me,” “What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me,” “What Humanity Tells Me,” “What the Angels Tell Me,” and “What Love Tells Me.” Several movements were initially presented independently or in smaller groupings, but for the 1902 premiere, Mahler rejected programmatic titles altogether.
The initial movement starts with a stirring, forceful, recurring fanfare—Mahler referred to this as “the wakeup call”—that is followed by a slow, somewhat lugubrious section that has an inchoate quality; music of a contrastingly more sprightly, sometimes pastoral, character soon emerges alongside a protracted funeral march—the jostling of these two primary strands constitutes the main body of the movement. Some passages are indeed celestial and it reaches a spirited finish. The annotator astutely comments that “Mahler anticipates the ambivalent creative force of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, in which the promise of renewed fertility is inseparable from barbaric, destructive impulses,” adding that “Remarkably, Mahler composed this music after he had written Part II.”
The next movement—a graceful and enchanting minuet—is a vehicle for a more familiar Romanticism; it ends abruptly but happily and peacefully. About the third movement, May records that “Mahler based its first part on an orchestral transcription of an earlier song setting of a text from the folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn” that inspired the composer’s first four symphonies. The movement begins cheerfully, even joyfully, and then intensifies; with the sounding of an offstage horn, a moment of serenity is briefly achieved but more dynamic music displaces this at the close.
The haunting fourth movement is an orchestral lyric that was beautifully sung by the wonderful mezzo-soprano, Samantha Hankey, a Juilliard graduate. The annotator explains:
Here, Mahler sets an excerpt from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra— the “Midnight Song” or “Drunken Song”—representing the moment when Zarathustra has his epiphany of the Eternal Return. Nietzsche's idea—that one must affirm all of existence, knowing it will recur infinitely— acknowledges the suffering coursing through the first movement, without the illusion of an afterlife to explain it.
The ringing of bells inaugurates the enchanting, largely celebratory, choral, fifth movement; about it, May remarks that “Another Wunderhorn text introduces another vision of paradise: a welcoming place open even to sinners, so long as they love God.” In the last movement, the music once again ascends to an æthereal, more purely spiritual register, although there are urgent and even disquieting moments; the annotator adverts to the brass chorale that “echoes the fanfare that opened the symphony, ushering in a proclamation of heavenly assurance that brings the Third to its blissful conclusion.”
The artists, justly, were enthusiastically applauded.
March '26 Digital Week I
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- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 05 March 2026 01:37
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Orchestra of St. Luke’s Present Haydn at Carnegie Hall
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Monday, 02 March 2026 14:37
- Written by Jack Angstreich
Photo by Chris Lee
At the wonderful Stern Auditorium, on the night of Thursday, February 12th, I had the privilege to attend a superb concert—presented by Carnegie Hall—featuring the excellent Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the accomplished direction of Andrew Manze.
The event started auspiciously with a sterling account of Franz Joseph Haydn’s marvelous Symphony No. 47 in G Major, “The Palindrome,” from 1772. The initial Allegro is charming and elegant, with more urgent moments, while the ensuing slow movement, marked Un poco adagio cantabile, is more subdued with a greater solemnity and an increasing intensity—its intricate contrapuntal writing is especially impressive and it finishes quietly.
The succeeding Menuetto e Trio provides the work with its familiar name since it is structured to “mirror itself backward and forward,” as explained by Ryan M. Prendergast, the program annotator; it is brief and more spirited, with a slower and statelier Trio section. The ebullient Finale, with a tempo of Presto assai, is the liveliest of all the movements and it concludes happily. The first half of the evening closed splendidly with an admirable rendition of the engaging Fearful Symmetries by John Adams from 1988, which was commissioned by this orchestra.
The second part of the program was equally strong, consisting of an extraordinary realization of Ludwig van Beethoven’s terrific Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 68, which was completed around 1806 and was here played by the exemplary virtuoso, Paul Lewis. The opening Allegro moderato begins with a brief, solo piano introduction echoed by the ensemble; the movement quickly builds in excitement but there are many less extroverted passages, even of sheer lyricism—after a dazzling cadenza, it ends with an enchanting coda. The Andante con moto that follows starts with pronounced gravity but the soloist’s part has a contrasting gentleness on the whole. The finale, marked Rondo vivace, is dance-like and exhilarating with some very passionate measures but with some very beautiful pianism sometimes in a more reflective, even song-like, register; it concludes exultantly.
The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.
