REVIEW: The Philadelphia Orchestra Ascends New Heights

Oct 16

Oct 16 REVIEW: The Philadelphia Orchestra Ascends New Heights

October 16, 2019

By Brian Taylor

Fresh from an insightful, energized Turandot at The Metropolitan Opera, the busiest man in classical music, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, bounded into Carnegie Hall with his other band, The Philadelphia Orchestra, for an evening of uplift.

Lifting up, ascending, rising above. These themes orbited Nézet-Séguin‘s first appearance as Carnegie Hall’s Perspectives Artist for the 2019-2020 season. MET audiences and Nézet-Séguin are still dipping their toes into their nascent relationship. Meanwhile, one of America’s top orchestras has flourished under his baton, both musically and culturally. This season in Philadelphia finds many female conductors on the podium, and features the orchestra’s (long overdue) first commission by an African-American woman.

The New York premiere of Valerie Coleman’s Umoja, Anthem for Unity, a splendid overture-like tone poem for orchestra based upon an earlier composition for women’s chorus, later arranged for Imani Winds, opened the concert. From the Swahili word for “unity,” this joyful work grabs the listener’s attention with imaginative instrumental colors and a visceral unfolding of emotional impact.

Coleman’s riveting score subtly folds African thematic roots and Western musical textures into a welcoming tapestry. The piece asks a question, then works through the various implications and tensions, emerging ecstatically, finishing in a redemptive, celebratory mood. The composer was greeted onstage gratefully by an invigorated New York audience.

In a brilliant turn of programming, French virtuoso and wildlife advocate Hélène Grimaud joined as soloist in Béla Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered in 1946. Composed at the end of Bartók’s life, the unusually sunny piece was intended as a gift to leave his pianist wife as he died of leukemia.

Grimaud can be an idiosyncratic pianist — boldly smearing pedaling, for example. But Nézet-Séguin, as always, clearly knows the work inside and out, and knows how to pitch its forward thrust. It was only in the hymn-like Adagio religioso — Bartók’s holy song of thanksgiving à la Beethoven’s Op. 132 Late Quartet — where the pianist’s habit of playing the right hand ahead of a trailing left (ba-dung, ka-chung) in passages marked legato took me out of the moment.

I doubt Coleman can imagine a better rendered performance of Umoja, between the soaring plush Philadelphia strings and expert woodwinds relishing her idiomatic effects. Likewise, conductor and soloist were in perfect step in Bartók’s effervescent, sweet-sour sojourn, and the orchestra danced. But, I bet brass section lips were trepidatious to only then begin the mountain climb that is Richard Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony).

Completed in 1915, the single-movement programmatic tone poem depicts in 22 sections (“Night,” Sunrise,” “The Ascent,” and so forth) a hike in the Alps employed as metaphor for man’s relationship to Nature. Requiring nearly 130 instruments — wind and thunder machines, Wagner tubas, cowbells, sixteen offstage brass — Strauss puts the orchestra through its paces in tone painting that would pair well with an Imax film of aerial landscapes. Also, in a demonstration of the sheer power of classical music’s logistical trappings, no where else can sheer decibel levels like those achieved at the climax of the “Thunderstorm” be so inviting to the ear, almost cleansing.

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