Julliard Orchestra & Thomas Adés at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 16 November 2017 15:46

Written by Jack Angstreich

The Juilliard Orchestra’s hitherto excellent new season continued impressively on the evening of Monday, November 13th, at the wonderful Alice Tully Hall at a Lincoln Center, with a terrific concert led by the celebrated composer, conductor and pianist, Thomas Adés—his most recent opera, The Exterminating Angel, after the classic film by Luis Buñuel, is having its New York premiere performances at the Metropolitan Opera this month.

The program opened with what appeared to be an impeccable account of…but all shall be well,the first work by Adés for a large orchestra, composed when he was only twenty-two. (The title is from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” from his Four Quartets, itself quoting from the medieval English mystic, Julian of Norwich.) I am not fully competent to judge music conceived in this mode but I admired the colorful orchestral writing. Edward Elgar’s superb Cello Concerto was then heard with a bravura performance by Rachel Siu as soloist—she received an enthusiastic ovation.

The second half of the evening was even more memorable, beginning with an extraordinary rendering of the magnificent Three Studies from Couperin—adapted from the latter’s Les Baricades mistérieuses—a work notable for its brilliant and eccentric orchestration. The concert closed thrillingly with a dazzling version of Igor Stravinsky’s marvelous, dynamic Symphony in Three Movements.

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