Pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, dabbler in the avant-garde, keenly aware of Mussorgsky and Debussy, Ottorino Respighi was the very model of an early 20 th-century orchestral composer, and his Pines of Rome remains a favorite for festive occasions. León, an influential behind-the-scenes presence at the Philharmonic and other New York institutions for decades, strode to center stage for a solo bow, and the hall’s big night became hers as well. An efflorescence of vibraphones, bongos and tubular bells ended the piece on an optimistic note. Anthony as her model in Stride, a piece marked by fierce flourishes of winds and brass in echo-like canons and a thumping tread emanating from the double basses.Īs the music went on, the persistent flourishes took on a blues coloration, suggesting the Afro-Cuban composer’s sympathy for another civil-rights struggle as well. Tania León, composing in 2019 for the Philharmonic’s feminist commissioning program Project 19, took the indomitable personality of Susan B. Like Balter and his soloists, composer Adams came onstage to acknowledge the audience’s warm applause. The mystic trumpet returned to introduce “The Mountain,” a reflection on the permanence and majesty of the peaks in the composer’s New England youth and California adulthood, shot through with high, pulsing strings and shafts of brassy light.Īn effective traffic cop in the cross-rhythms of “Concord,” in “The Lake” van Zweden seemed especially to revel in the nuances the new hall could convey in soft and softer dynamics. In “The Lake,” a plaintive oboe floated over a burble of clarinets, and at one point one could hear a distant piano playing in the dance hall Adams’s grandfather owned by Lake Winnipesaukee. The hall’s clarified acoustic enabled a listener to hear this scene in three dimensions. The 2003 work modeled on Ives’s Three Places in New England opened with an Ivesian lonely trumpet, evocatively played by Philharmonic principal Christopher Martin, and expanded into “Concord,” an equally Ivesian cacaphony of overlapping musical sensations from Adams’s boyhood in Concord, New Hampshire. Lorenzo at his soundboard created a track that merged in and out of the live percussion, stepping forward at the piece’s climax for a stark, resonant solo cadenza.įollowing Balter’s apocalyptic vision, Adams’s nostalgic reflection on nature, fatherhood and heritage came as comfort food. The work’s full title pegged it as a sort of double concerto lighting designer Nicholas Houfek and electronics artist Levy Lorenzo received soloist billing in the program and worked their magic from a discreetly lit perch in Row R of the darkened auditorium.Īs Balter’s electronics-enhanced score vividly depicted what the composer described as a cosmic scene of collapse and rebirth from African religion, Houfek used the hall’s mostly unadorned surfaces as his canvas, flashing bands of angry red and yellow or wrapping the space in soothing green, or occasionally flooding the room with white light. The tone of woodwind instruments in particular seemed to blossom, counterpoint became more transparent, and even super-pianissimo passages had fresh clarity and definition.īalter’s piece could use all the clarity it could get, as imagery of destruction swirled out of the large orchestra and well-endowed percussion section. (Debussy, Mozart and Bruckner are on the bill for coming weeks.)īut trading the box footprint for more of a boat shape, shortening the main seating area, and moving the stage out into the room definitely brought benefits when it came to hearing what the musicians were doing. With so much newness, there were few familiar benchmarks to assess how the classics sound in their new environs-the Wu Tsai Theater at David Geffen Hall, to give the room its full name. But on Wednesday, it was the shock of the new all the way, with Balter’s world premiere, John Adams’s autobiographical My Father Knew Charles Ives, and Tania León’s assertive, recently Pulitzered Stride. Surely Weber’s Oberon Overture and its ilk will be back to open future Philharmonic programs. Marcos Balter’s Oyá for light, electronics, and orchestra-an ecstatic vision of a world-destroying Yoruba deity-was just the ticket for Wednesday night’s opening subscription concert by Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic in their newly renovated home, David Geffen Hall. To celebrate the interior demolition and rebirth of a concert hall in the 2020s, you need a little more firepower than that. In 1798, Joseph Haydn began his oratorio The Creation with a “Representation of Chaos.” To modern ears, this movement may sound like a rather sedate affair, with a few strange modulations along the way. Jaap van Zweden conducted the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere of Marcos Balter’s Oyá, at the first subscription concert in the newly renovated David Geffen Hall Wednesday night.
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