Avery Fisher
Hall at Lincoln Center. Orchestra Left
(Seat W5, $88.50).
Artists
Susanna
Phillips, soprano; Kelly O’Connor, mezzo-soprano; Dimitri Pittas, tenor; Morris
Robinson, bass.
Concert Chorale
of New York, James Bagwell, director.
Program
Polyptyque: Six
Images of the Passion of Christ (1973) by Frank Martin (1890-1974).
Chorales from
St. John Passion (1724) by Bach.
Requiem, K.626
(1791) by Mozart.
Tonight’s was
the last concert for this season’s M|M Festival. Anne is in Brazil, so she can’t go. CS also bought a ticket to the event, so we
went up together in his car. We had
dinner at the Hunan restaurant Legend on 72nd. I also had time to exchange some of the tickets for the upcoming opera season. (Out of the series of 7 operas, I may end up exchanging tickets for 6 of them; such are the perils of committing early. Today I did three.)
The program
certainly held a lot of promise. And it
has Langree’s fingerprints all over it.
The piece by Martin was commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to commemorate
the 25th anniversary of the UNESCO-founded International Music
Council. It is for the solo violin, with
a double string orchestra. A similar
arrangement (although it was with two “complete” orchestras) was used in Bach’s
St. Matthew Passion. Naturally the chorales
used for today are from Bach’s other passion: St. John’s. What Langree did was to put a “relevant”
chorale between pairs of Martin’s movements.
This results in the following structure for the first half of the
concert:
Image de Rameaux
*Chorale: O
grosse Lieb
Image de la
Chambre haute
*Chorale: Ach
grosser Koenig
Image de Judas
*Chorale: Wer
hat dich so geschlagen
Image de
Gethsemane
*Chorale: In
meines Herzens Grunde
Image du
Jugement
*Chorale: Durch
dein Gefangnis, Gottes Sohn
Image de la
Glorfication
Per Wikipedia,
Kopatchinskaja was born in Moldova in 1977.
The violin she plays – an 1834 Pressenda – makes a good but not
brilliant sound. Against a smallish
orchestra (actually two smallish orchestras) it worked quite well. The description in the Playbill (by David
Wright) was quite easy to follow, and the sentiments are consistent with the
titles of the movements. One exception
is Judas, instead of sinister (Wright describes it as “seethes with barely
contained malevolence”) it sounded comical.
I imagine I would have found the piece enjoyable if I had listened to it
as one integrated piece; I can’t imagine I would put it on the same level as
Bach’s Chaconne, as Menuhin apparently did after premiering it in 1973.
Unfortunately I
didn’t listen to the piece as a whole.
Instead it was interrupted again and again by the chorales from St. John’s
Passion. (Some would say Bach's chorales kept being interrupted by Martin.) The idea has some merit to it,
but in practice it didn’t work for me at all.
If Langree wanted to incorporate some chorales into the program, perhaps
he should have done them on a stand-alone basis. For me that would make the contrast more
apparent, instead of making both parts sound disjoint.
It is a pity that
these are the thoughts that stay with me after a day (I am writing this review
about 24 hours after the concert.)
When I wrote the
review on the Salzburg concert I went to last month, I remarked that it was my
first encounter with Mozart’s sacred music.
That was an erroneous statement: I had heard the Requiem before at a New
York Philharmonic open rehearsal, in November, 2013.
My reaction to
the New York Philharmonic rehearsal was very positive, with me conjecturing
that the actual concert would sound “great.”
Tonight’s was a good performance, for sure, but I must say it was
nowhere near “great.” Both the orchestra
and the chorale sounded somewhat stretched, the music probably challenged their
technical and musical ability: the high notes were a tad too high, the
precision in the instruments wasn’t quite there, and balance was somewhat
lacking.
The chorale
consists of about 45 members. I saw a
couple of women among the men, CS thought men and women seemed to be randomly
placed. If that is so, it must be a
great challenge for the conductor. The
four soloists all had good and strong voices, but they didn’t seem to work
together, leaving me with the impression they were trying to outdo one
another. Interestingly they were
situated between the orchestra and the chorale.
Mozart died with
much of the work unfinished. While a
version was soon published with the “blanks” filled in by Mozart’s pupils, with
Xaver Sussmayr doing the bulk of the work, performers often have felt free to
modify the work to suit their taste.
Langree did that. I don’t know if
it is because of that, or because of the way it was performed, the music didn’t
come across as particularly sacred, or requiemesque (if there is such a word.) Of course the text helped remind me what it
was.
The applause
afterwards was thunderous and prolonged, and many roses were presented to the
soloists, the orchestra members, and the conductor. I assume this is the audience showing
appreciation at the end of the Festival.
These guys put out 10 different programs over the course of 5 weeks, a challenging deed by any measure.
I managed to
attend four of the concerts, and am glad I went. This is a music festival, after all. New York Times published an online review a few hours ago; the reviewer couldn't quite bring himself around to say "it was a great concert" either. He provided one example of how Langree modified the Requiem.
Traffic home was
quite smooth also. I got home a bit
after 11 pm.
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