REVIEW: Canellakis Balances Elements and Emotion with NY Phil
Above photo by Chris Lee.
February 13, 2025
New York City native Karina Canellakis, Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, returned to her hometown’s Philharmonic to helm a relentlessly sensuous, yet intriguingly balanced, program of music by twentieth century composers.
The evening served as a listener’s guide through the progression of musical modernism through the last century, beginning with the most recent, and traveling backwards through time. The concert began with a brief tone poem dedicated to the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2009 by fellow Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho called Lumière et Pesanteur (Light and Gravity). Saariho, who died in 2023, was inspired in part by the writings of Simone Weil, French philosopher and mystic, to compose La Passion de Simone, and this piece is essentially an orchestral transcription of the Passion’s soprano aria — solo trumpet functioning as the soprano, with luxuriant suppleness.
Canellakis immediately demonstrates cool confidence, and a graceful, relaxed command of the dense orchestration. Saariaho’s music is slippery and ephemeral. Nothing seems to be going on in the music, and yet, it seems to be amplifying something that is always there. The Philharmonic musicians keyed into the conductor’s no-nonsense approach; it appeared that every section of the orchestra was listening to the other, each layer of the texture contributing just enough.
Saariaho’s music is exemplar of the “post-modern,” embodying an age in which tonality is freely added without shame, but into recipes drawing from a pantry of the twentieth century’s eclectic experimental ingredients. Canellakis’s program soon looked back to a moment from the height of that experimental development, Alban Berg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.
Veronika Eberle made her NY Phil debut as soloist in this somber, expressionistic concerto composed in 1935 for Louis Krasner, and dedicated “to the memory of an angel,” in response to the death of Alma Mahler’s daughter (from her second marriage) at eighteen from the effects of polio. Eberle’s strong bow arm supplied Berg’s salt-of-the-earth singing line plenty of follow-through, and her intonation — including in the work’s many treacherous triple-stops — was pinpoint.
Photo by Chris Lee.
Berg, a student of Arnold Schoenberg, found clever ways to follow his teacher’s trademark twelve-tone rules, without altogether eschewing familiar harmonies. But, his canvas is swathed in thick brushstrokes — the woodwinds and brass melded into one, glued together by liberal use of the alto saxophone — and Canellakis knew that she was not mere accompanist — this was a macabre dance between soloist and conductor. The score’s contrapuntal texture moved forward with emotional impetus, and the hard won final cadence wrenched with a yearning to be tonal. It was the story of Pinocchio, or Frankenstein, desperate to be alive.
Meanwhile, in a French cathedral, Olivier Messiaen was devout to the religion of tonality, but we hear the beginnings of wildly dissonant innovations in ecstasy in 1930’s Les Offrandes oubliées: Méditation symphonique pour orchestre. Three movements, slower - fast - slowest, share with much of the composer’s later output a programmatic connection to Catholicism. The Philharmonic’s string section was in fine form, notably in the solemn first movement, which reflects upon Christ’s sacrifice, with gentle articulation and delicate diminuendos.
The middle movement (“We had been descending into sin as into a tomb,” Messiaen wrote) finally gave the Philharmonic something brassy and rhythmic to dig their teeth into, and the final movement (“You love us, sweet Jesus: we had been forgetting that”) was dreamy and prayerful, and recalled, or rather, foreshadowed Saariaho’s Lumière et Pesanteur, pondering very existence itself.
Claude Debussy’s La Mer, premiered 1905, was our destination and wellspring. The turn-of-the-century French trailblazer’s symphonic triptych, which the Philharmonic played gloriously, sounded fully contemporary. Its modal harmonies would be perfectly at home in today’s pop music; its cinematic expanse anticipates the age of multimedia.
Canellakis led a sharply rhythmic and energetic account, and the orchestra played crisply and with exceptional control. The crests of waves — such as the climax of the first movement, From Dawn till Noon on the Sea — were plush and never harsh.
The diaphanous pigments in the middle movement, The Play of the Waves, were surgically applied. The conductor elicited delicate, detailed playing from the woodwind section and the two harps, and the horn section conjured a tempting siren in the distance. The finale, Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, was sheer drama, with bracing, windswept crescendos that melted into forlorn sighs, a Turner seascape.
Photo by Chris Lee.
