Once, talking about a Strauss waltz, Leonard Bernstein recalled how the great German composer’s music left us “hypnotized by the elastic charm of his phrasing, the provocative tone of his rhythm, those small hesitations and pauses, those fainting rhythms and the irresistible impulse of his pulse.”
They were, something unusual, two classics that coexisted in different places around the world. But when Richard Strauss first visited the United States and conducted the New York Philarmonic, in 1904, there were still 14 years before Bernstein was born. When Bernstein took over the direction of the Philharmonic in 1958, Strauss had died nine years ago of pneumonia in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
They were not composers with much in common, at least stylistically speaking. It has been talked about, however, about how both opted for the richness of the orchestration, the harmonic complexity of their pieces and the use of an almost identity-based chromaticism. But a recent New York Philharmonic program also explored a musical connection that went far beyond what has so far been written about: musical readings of philosophical works that, in one way or another, have left a mark on composers.
The program that included Serenade based on Plato’s “Symptom” (Bernstein) and An Alpine Symphony (by Strauss, and based on The Antichrist, by Nietzsche) established a dialogue between two composers who, in one way or another, marked destiny of music in the 20th century.
The show, which was repeated on February 8, 10, 11 and 13 at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, was also the space for the return to the podium of the Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali (38) and the debut on this stage of the American violinist Esther Yoo (29). Rouvali, as he has done on other occasions, once again exploited to the maximum the incredible potential of the New York Philharmonic, especially in the Strauss piece, which knew how to create moments of incredible impact and recreate on instruments the devastating and sublime potential of nature , of the contemplation of the beauty and the mysteries and the sensations that human beings can find in the spaces they inhabit or discover.
Yoo, although he failed to dazzle, played the violin in Bernstein’s Serenade with correctness and restrained impetus. Although at times she seemed too tense, she managed to free herself and play more naturally the encore, for which she performed Souvenirs d’Amérique, by Henri Vieuxtemps. In Serenade, the moment of greatest brilliance, for both the violinist and the orchestra, was at the end, mainly “Socrates: Alcibiades,” in which a duet between Yoo and principal cellist Carter Brey gave a dramatic, colorful and tonal accent .
However, it was Strauss’s alpine journey, which begins at dawn and ends after sunset, storm in between, the most accomplished moment of last Sunday’s concert. Strauss’s unusual use of instruments (from a wind machine to a Heckel, an instrument of the oboe family, but larger and with a heavier and more penetrating sound) allowed us not only to remember Strauss’s genius, but also the infinite possibilities of music. In that sense, less brilliant was the use of an electric organ, which at times seemed a somewhat artificial sound in the atmosphere that the orchestra had managed to create.
2024-02-15 03:33:45
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