Avery Fisher
Hall at Lincoln Center. Tier 1 (Seat
CC7, $64.50).
Program
Symphony in B
minor, D.759, Unfinished (1822) by Schubert (1797-1828).
Senza sangue
(2014; rev. 2015) by Peter Eotvos (b. 1944).
We had tickets
for the performance on Saturday. Since
we were planning to be in Jersey City Friday afternoon, we wanted to exchange
the tickets to a day earlier. Turns out the
New York Philharmonic website was down for several days (first time in memory
this ever happened), so I had to call their customer service to make the
request. It worked out okay at the end.
Perhaps a
harbinger of summer traffic, it took us close to 1 ½ hours to go from Jersey
City to Lincoln Center. As I waited for
a parking space, Anne went ahead to order food from Europan. Alas, it is closed for a 2-month renovation! Let’s hope it will reopen as advertised. In its stead we had street-vendor food.
Despite all
that, it was still a lovely afternoon for a concert. In the Playbill Gilbert talked extensively
about the Senza sangue piece. It had its
world premiere in Cologne last week during the New York Philharmonic European
tour, and tonight was the US premiere.
The work was a result of Henri Dutilleux’s decision to share the
Marie-Josee Kravis Price for New Music with several younger composers. The work is based on the novella of the same
title (meaning “Without Blood”) written in Italian by Alessandro Baricco that
was published in 2002. The setting is
unknown; the story is simple. During a
civil war three men kill the family of a young girl. One of the men, Pedro Cantos, discovers a
young girl hiding out but decides to spare her life. The girl, Nina, spends many years tracking
and killing the men responsible for the murders. After 52 years she comes face to face with
Cantos, and the opera describes the encounter between the two. The surprise ending is the two fall in love
at the end and head towards a hotel together.
As a tribute to Henri
Dutilleux, who died in 2013, the opera begins with two calm notes B, D (which
are spelling H, D in Hungarian and German.)
The Program Notes contains quite a bit of background and description on
the composer and the music, and I will not repeat them here. The composer does
mention what he aims for here are sharp contrasts, and shades of black, grey,
and white. I may understand what he
meant if I had heard his previous 9 operas (where he strove for a “colorful
palette of sound,”) but I seriously doubt that.
The opera
actually was quite enjoyable, and at times moving, as the two exchange what
happened over 50 years ago. The ending
was a bit abrupt and absurd, an opinion shared by many others, if what I
overheard what people were saying after the concert was any indication.
Our seats in the
first tier gave us good acoustics for the orchestra, but the voices didn’t come
through. I have always maintained a full
orchestra on the same stage as singers don’t work as well when the orchestra is
in a pit. The libretto (English
translation) was projected onto the overhang above the stage, which helped
tremendously in my ability to follow the story.
Eotvos came on
stage at curtain call. “Younger” doesn’t
mean young; he was born in 1944.
On the top of
the program was Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.
It is delightful as usual. I
learned a few more things about the work.
For instance, it wasn’t “unfinished” because Schubert died in the midst
of composing it; he put it away six years before his death: a plausible
explanation is he found out he had syphilis that year, and the disease was
fatal at that time.
This article in
The Guardian talks about the program and describes Von Otter’s take on the
music. The New York Times has an extensive article on Eotvos and Senza Sangue.
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