New York Philharmonic – Gianandrea Noseda, conductor; Frank Huang, violin. November 26, 2017.

David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Orchestra 3. (Seat HH114, $56).

Program

Suite from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (190304, arr. 1908?) by Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), arr. M. Steinberg

Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor, Op. 61 (1880) by Saint-Saens (1835-1921).

Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44 (1935-36, rev. 1938) by Rachmaninoff (1873-1943).

We got tickets to the concert because of scheduling problems.  New York Philharmonic will now only give you back the value you paid if you swap concerts. In this case they were offering $59 tickets for Orchestra 2 tickets, but wanted to charge full price if swapped ticket value was used.  Hence these tickets towards the back of the orchestra.

They were actually not bad seats acoustics wise, even though they were a bit far from the stage.

For me the main draw was the Saint-Saens concerto, which I listened to a lot during my younger days, and also attempted a few passages.  In my opinion Huang did a much better job with this than he did with the Franck concerto.  The piece contains many challenges for the violinist, one is the long passage of harmonics at the end of the slow movement.  To do good harmonics required a precise spread of the fingers and bowing close to the bridge, if memory serves.  Easy enough if it is one note, not so easy with multiple measures. Huang dispatched them with ease. I did think the whole piece started a bit slow, but things got on track soon afterwards.

Curtain call after performance of the Saint-Saen's Violin Concerto.

The Legend of the Invisible City is an opera written by Rimsky-Korsakov during 1903-04, and the composer’s son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg extract the suite from it a few years later.  The opera has of course a story associated with it, and the markings for the suite are (i) Prelude – Hymn to Nature; (ii) Fevroniya’s Wedding Procession – Invasion of the Tatars; (iii) The Battle of Kerzhenets; and (iv) Fevroniya’s Glorious End – The Ascension to the Invisible City.  Some of the movements were evidently played without break, so I couldn’t quite track the music with the outline.  The opera may be worth seeing, although it is not staged that much outside of Russian, the suite definitely is not.  It was performed twice in New York Philharmonic history, in February 1994.

I was quite sure I had heard Rachmaninoff’s third symphony before, but couldn’t find any entry in this blog.  (The last NY Phil performance was in 2003.) It did sound familiar, and the Dies Irae of the third movement was barely discernable.  The three movements are (i) Lento – Allegro moderato – Allegro; (ii) Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro vivace – Tempo come prima; and (iii) Allegro – Allegro vivace – Allegro.

So the concert consisted a popular violin concerto sandwiched between two rather obscure pieces.  I nonetheless enjoyed it.

I was surprised to see a stool placed on the podium.  While Noseda sat on it on occasion, his conducting continued to be quite energetic.

The New York Times review is very positive, even though it started with a tongue-in-check description that the programming was a “mild adventure.”  He explained that Noseda had back surgery recently.

Drive into and out of New York City was quite straightforward.  We again opted for takeout food, this time from the Chinese place on Amsterdam.