Saluting a Great Orchestra From a Country Under Siege

The Vienna Philharmonic have been revered as one of the world’s finest orchestras for over a century. One of their more recent traditions has been an outdoor Summer Night Concert. They’ve released their 2021 performance, with Daniel Harding on the podium and pianist Igor Levit, streaming at Spotify. The ensemble are obviously jumping out of their shoes with the joy of being allowed to play again. At this point in history, there’s no doubt that this magnificent concert represents the people of Austria far more than the sinister apartheid state being erected with echoes of another historical development just over the German border a little more than ninety years ago.

They open with a spacious, unhurried, utterly suspenseful performance of the Overture from Verdi’s Les Vêpres Siciliennes. The brass/string harmonies are lusciously lustrous; the sudden leap into a gallop as the music picks up with a start is unselfconsciously breathtaking.

The piece de resistance should be Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and the balance of energy and pillowy Romanticism that Harding draws out of it is visceral. It’s on the fast side, especially in the beginning, but who can argue with the shivers of the fleeting eighth movement, or the furtive bustle of the ninth, especially in context? And Levit builds expectant triumph into the famous andante cantabile love theme. What’s annoying is that like many other recent recordings of the suite, these intervals – many of them under a minute long – are broken up into individual tracks. You have to build your own playlist to fully enjoy this without having to constantly click on the next one.

Levit gets the stage to himself for a spare, somber take of Beethoven’s Fur Elise: as he sees it, what a sad, serious girl she must have been! Next on the bill are four of Leonard Bernstein’s Dances from West Side Story. The group launch into a dynamically swinging Prologue, complete with fingersnaps, then an aptly starry, summery Somewhere, a lilting Scherzo and a positively feral Mambo.

There’s not a lot an orchestra can do with Elgar’s schmaltzy Salut D’amour, but the Intermezzo from Sibelius’ Karelia Suite gives Harding and the ensemble a chance to bring up the lights slowly and memorably, with meticulously swirling strings and understated brass: this is a peace march, not a warlord’s pageant.

Plaintive woodwinds and a hypnotic lushness permeate Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, arguably the most vivid piece on the bill. The orchestra wind up the concert on a jaunty, bubbly note with Jupiter, from Holst’s The Planets. Who knew how fast all this optimism and good cheer would evaporate in the months after this concert. The challenge will be to get it back: it only takes one generation for a totalitarian regime to annihilate the memory of any beautiful past.

Advertisement

A Dreamy, Hypnotic Holiday Celebration with Roomful of Teeth and Tigue at the Guggenheim

Last night Roomful of Teeth sang a cocooning, dynamically pulsing, brilliantly conceived site-specific program, beneath and sometimes on the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum. Conductor Brad Wells marveled at the space’s natural reverb, whose benefits were bolstered by the presence of percussion trio Tigue on several numbers.

The night’s most striking and hauntingly memorable song was Sarah Riskind‘s 2016 Hanerot Halalu, based on a stark melody in the chromatic Jewish freygish mode. Tynan Davis introduced that one from the second level of the balcony, the rest of the octet gathered on the ground-floor stage, Esteli Gomez eventually tossing the melody back up to her with similar elegance. Counterintuitively, the choir reconvened and followed with Gustav Holst’s wistful, folksy 1906 song In the Bleak Midwinter.

To open the evening, Tigue held the ground floor with their subtle, snowy accents while the choir, gathered four flights up on the balcony, delivered an emphatic, minimalistic new arrangement of Praetorius’ 1609 motet Lo, How a Rose. Caroline Shaw, who seems to have become the ringleader of this merry band, explained that the night’s bill was “A mix of the familiar and the unknown, by design,” works selected to rise up and ripple around the space. The two ensembles would come full circle at the end with more stately, reverent Praetorius, Tigue up on the balcony this time with handbells to add delicate tingle to the mix.

The night’s most dramatic, dynamically charged piece was Caleb Burhans‘ 2010 partita Beneath, ascending and falling with catchy, simple riffs punctuating slowly crescendoing, tectonic layers. Shaw described the world premiere of On Snow, which the Guggenheim’s Works and Process series (of which this concert was a part) had commissioned from her, as being “Music of the 17th century melting bit by bit.” The ensemble couldn’t conceal the fun they were having with the music’s coy, loopy, swoopy motives, bolstered by an elegant, slow crescendo by Tigue, from a ripple to a rumble.

Jeremy Faust’s Jubilo came across as a purposeful blend of minimalism and Renaissance polyphony. The choir followed the dreamy counterpoint of the 16th century Coventry Carol with the steady wave motion of Wells’ 2014 composition Render. Then Tigue built a matter-of-fact yet playful thicket of polyrhythms, the choir eventually interpolating airy swells and gentle gusts.

After the rhythmically pulsing variations of Judah Adashi‘s 2014 Bjork-inspired piece My Heart Comes Undone, the whole crew – also including baritone Jason Awbrey, bass Cameron Beauchamp, tenor Eric Dudley, baritone Jeffrey Gavett, sopranos Abigail Lennox  and Sarah Brailey – seemed to relish the wryly dipping, undulating quasi-mordents of Shaw’s Sarabande, from her Pulitzer Prizewinning 2011 suite.

This was the final concert at the Guggenheim this year. The museum’s events series continues next year with plenty of dance, opera and theatre as well.

A Riveting, Revealing, Defamiliarizing Kickoff to One of New York’s Best Choir’s 2016 Season

This October 28 at 7 PM one of the most esteemed choral ensembles in this country, the Choir of St. Ignatius Loyola celebrate their parish’s 150th anniverary with a program of rare works from the Jesuit tradition by 17th century composers Domenico Zipoli and his contemporaries: Jan Josef Ignac Brentner, Bartolomé Massa and Martin Schmid. The roughly fifty-voice group, conducted by the fearlessly ambitious K. Scott Warren, is bolstered by soprano Sarah Griffiths, mezzo-soprano Kristin Gornstein and tenor Douglas Purcell along with a period instrument chamber ensemble. This might be your only opportunity to hear material that’s never before been performed in North America, and if this ensemble doesn’t do it, might never be performed again here.

There was a buzz at the reception after the choir’s first performance of the 2016 season. They’d just stunned a sold-out crowd with an exhaustive, era-spanning and genre-hopping performance that ranged from the pre-baroque to the present day. The theme was the ancient Greek elements: earth, air, fire and water. For the record, there was no Earth, Wind and Fire song on the bill – maybe next time they can transfix the crowd with a fifty-voice take of Boogie Wonderland. The controversy this time out concerned the merits of interspersing the four Vvialdi-inspired movements of Frank Ferko‘s The Seasons – a richly dynamic, rapturously ambitious string quartet with choir – along with selections from Gustav Holst’s Choral Hymns From the Big Veeda suite, amid the other works on the bill, rather than playing each suite all the way through without interruption.

Warren opted for defamiliarizing everyone, making a strikingly seamless shift between the 21st century American avant garde, late Romanticism drawing heavily on Indian influences, rapt minimalism, knotty earlier 20th century works and the occasional friendly, familiar departure into lustrous Renaissance polyphony. The younger contingent in the crowd heartily endorsed Warren’s ambition; an older crowd voiced a mixed response. Whatever your taste, if you think that keeping up was hard on the audience, imagine being among the choir gathered onstage. Singers are routinely expected to deliver material in unfamiliar genres and languages without a hitch, but this was a real workout for everyone concerned.

What concertgoers might forget is that this world-class choir – although frequently augmented with the prowess of internationally known professionals – it remains at its heart a local church ensemble, albeit a magnet for Manhattan’s best voices. If that isn’t testament to the resilence of New York under the luxury condo blitzkrieg, nothing is. They made the shifts between genres look easy. On the minimalist side, two pieces from Julia Adolphe‘s immersively coloristic Sea Drean Elegies were arguably the most rapturous points of the concert. On the other hand, that could easily have been said about the crescendoing eclecticism of Stephen Paulus’ Songs from the Japanese, or the concert’s ambitious concluding number, composer John Kennedy’s Someday. As for the Ferko, arguably the most memorable of all the works on the bill, its bristling, trickily rhythmic second movement almost seemed to make more sense when, amid several detours, its hypnotically swaying Summer gave way to the kind of ambered, prayerful lustre his work is known for, in the final two movements. You can experience the same kind of rapture on the Upper East Side on the 28th.