New York Classical Review: Clarion Choir soars in spiritual rarity to open Rachmaninoff 150 year

New York Classical Review
By David Wright

It seems likely that, when the Sergei Rachmaninoff sesquicentennial year of 2023 has run its course, we will find that (with apologies to Joni Mitchell), we looked at Rachmaninoff from both sides now, and we really didn’t know Rachmaninoff at all.

Clarion Choir, jumping the gun by a few hours on New Year’s Eve, introduced a Rachmaninoff relatively few people know with an uplifting performance of his work for unaccompanied chorus, Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, in the visually splendid sanctuary of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral on East 74th Street. (A repeat performance New Year’s Day will usher in the celebratory year.)

Was the composer of these static, endlessly-circling choral harmonies really the same person who set the standard for rugged athleticism at the piano?  Could the composer who inspired a thousand Hollywood love scenes also liberate one’s spirit from corporeal existence?

Read more here.

New York Classical Review: Namoradze Explores the Shadows, Deep and Dark, in Impressive New York Debut

New York Classical Review
David Wright

Nicolas Namoradze is a pianist with a lot to say. And he likes to say it softly.

The top-prize winner of the 2018 Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary, Alberta, made an impressive New York recital debut Sunday night at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall with an unconventional program of (in this order) Scriabin, Bach, Schumann, and his own compositions.

Like all recital programs, this one offered plenty of opportunities to play loud, and the 26-year-old native of the Republic of Georgia rose to them handsomely, without ever losing his cool demeanor on the piano bench.

But the moments that linger long in the memory are the pianissimos. Long stretches of pianissimo, layered, multicolored, deep in thought or swirling like a spring breeze. Pianissimos dense with possibility, and pianissimos that just are.

Read more of the review here.

New York Classical Review: Schwarz, Juilliard Orchestra deliver stellar advocacy for neglected American composers

New York Classical Review
George Grella

Gerard Schwarz conducted the Juilliard Orchestra in works by David Diamond, William Schuman and Jacob Druckman Thursday night.

In the middle of the last century, there was a group of American composers who wrote symphonies. Their collected body of work carved out a specific, national sound—skyscrapers and sleek, powerful automobiles, urban sophistication expressed in clear and straightforward language—and did more than the work of John Cage or Steve Reich to make the 20th century an American one for classical music.

Charles Ives and Aaron Copland were specifically not part of this cohort. William Schuman, David Diamond, Walter Piston, Peter Mennin, and others eschewed the self-conscious “American” sound of Ives and Copland, they were modernists working within the classical tradition but without ideology, whether populist or academic—they assumed the worth of the classical tradition and the open-minded intelligence of their audience. Their music reflects New York City in an era when everything seemed possible.

Yet without conductors like Gerard Schwarz this music would remain even more lost, as it incomprehensibly has been for almost sixty years, with the rare exceptions amounting to little more than dutiful condescension.

Thursday night in Alice Tully Hall, Schwarz led the Juilliard Orchestra in Schuman’s Symphony No. 6, David Diamond’s Symphony No. 4, and the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra from Jacob Druckman. And for 90 minutes it again felt like all things were possible.

The last time the New York Philharmonic played these two symphonies was 1958. Their most recent Schuman performance was Andre Previn leading Symphony No. 3—his most prominent work—in 1997. Based on the parochialism of prestige in this city’s culture, that is beyond bizarre.

Nothing could be more fitting than Juilliard musicians bringing life to his substantial Sixth Symphony. Schuman—a native New Yorker who switched from business to start composing at age 20,managed to tear his attention away from baseball to compose around 70 pieces. He was president of Juilliard from 1945 to 1962, during which time he turned it into the modern institution it remains today.

He was also the first president of Lincoln Center and served until 1969. One would expect monuments to him. At least there was this energetic, passionate performance that completed the concert.

Schuman’s Symphony No. 6 is from 1948. Like most of the symphonies of his peers, it’s not about anything in particular except the art of making music. Yet his voice is immediately identifiable. Neoclassical in general, these pieces expressed the virtues of counterpoint, development, and formal structure. To this Schuman added a poly-harmonic language, stacking related triads on top of each other to produce a sound that is tonal but floats free of the usual expectations of harmonic motion.

The Juilliard Orchestra made a big, meaty sound with this, although there were times when the density of the writing turned muddy. There is a coiled physical and psychological energy in this symphony that the players expressed with a real poignancy. It is easy to hear the national exhaustion after WWII in the music, and Thursday night it was also easy to hear a fraught outlook toward the future.

Schoenberg told Diamond that the latter should avoid learning serial technique because he was “a new Bruckner.” That’s not too far off–his symphonies express, in the composer’s words, “strong melodic contours [and] good rhythmic variety and counterpoint.”

He called the Fourth, from 1945, “my smallest large symphony,” and it is indeed a compact, succinct three movements while still having Diamond’s sense of bigness; big, rich sound and a big expressive embrace.

The opening dozen bars, with their polyphony and cascading harmonies, are some of the most beautiful in all the symphonic literature. Opening the concert with the Fourth, Schwarz– a more dedicated advocate of these composers than even Bernstein–maintained smooth, loping tempos throughout, and the musicians produced a gorgeous sound. They didn’t have the professional level of blend, but the music unfolded in phrases that captured Diamond’s art, and the interplay between sections was excellent.

Jordan Bak performed Jacob Druckman’s Viola Concerto Thursday night.

Jordan Bak was the soloist in Druckman’s Viola Concerto, from 1978. Another important New York composer, Druckman was the Philharmonic’s composer in residence from 1982 to 1986 (has son Daniel is a percussionist in the orchestra) and taught at Juilliard and Brooklyn College.

The concerto had a more abstract form than the symphonies, and included an identifiable 12-note row, but as in the others the language was clear and intelligent without being academic or solipsistic. The form is antiphonal, an agon, and Bak was dazzling. A graduate student at Juilliard, he played with a full-bodied sound and exacting intonation and articulation. He overshadowed the composition in that his playing was so constantly involving and impressive that one was drawn to each note and phrase, and often lost the forest for the tree. But what a tree.

This music and these composers, especially Schuman and Diamond, are crying out for performances from professional orchestras. One hopes that last night, someone across the street in David Geffen Hall was listening.

New York Classical Review: Long Yu Leads New York Philharmonic in Chinese New Year Program

Photo: Chris Lee

New York Classical Review
By Eric C. Simpson

The New York Philharmonic’s fifth annual Chinese New Year celebration on Tuesday night was something of a riddle. On the one hand, there was a ninety-minute program with a sought-after violinist, a stage address from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and no intermission suggested an emphasis on providing entertainment for the gala patrons whose tables were being set on the promenade outside the hall.

On the other, the most substantial item on the program by far was the New York premiere of a forty-minute piece from the last decade that proved as artistically and intellectually stimulating as anything the Philharmonic might present on a regular subscription concert.

The first music of the evening was certainly more in the former spirit, like any good concert overture: Li Huanzhi’s Spring Festival Overture, composed in 1955-56, is a peculiar product of the early years of Western-style composing in China. Li’s darting melodies and galloping energy, combined with a Romantic idiom, almost conjure reminiscences of something between the American West and a Parisian Can-can. Under the direction of guest conductor Long Yu, the music was dignified, but not humorless.

More substantial, though opaque in its own way, was the famous The Butterfly Lovers, a violin concerto written jointly by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao just a few years after the Spring Festival Overture. The soloist on this occasion was Maxim Vengerov, who a decade ago was at the top of an intensely competitive field before an injury forced his career into hiatus. Technical problems, such as murky passagework and wandering intonation, linger, but the most attractive elements of Vengerov’s playing are the ones that always stood out: the effortless warmth of his tone and keen expression of his interpretation.

The Butterfly Lovers offered the violinist ample opportunity to demonstrate these two qualities. The concerto has its stretches of showy virtuosity, but at its core it is an innocently lyrical piece, lightly orchestrated and unassuming, its solo part taking inspiration from traditional Chinese instruments rather than Romantic violinistic flair. Vengerov’s interpretation was poignant, finding moments of intense passion in the gleaming lines without ever hurrying them

Less successful was Vengerov’s performance of the Kreisler chestnut Tambourin Chinois, a fleeting bonbon that served essentially as a programmed encore. A master of pastiche, Kreisler in this brief showpiece combines Chinese musical idiom with violinistic fireworks of considerable difficulty—too much difficulty, apparently, for Vengerov, who rushed through the piece and failed to convey much its charm.

After the relative pleasantness of the first forty minutes, hearing Tan Dun’s The Secret Voices of Women was like stepping into an ice bath. Though the composer calls the piece a “Symphony for 13 Microfilms, Harp, and Orchestra,” there are no microfilm readers called for in the score; rather, “microfilm” is his name for a series of short films he has captured and edited of women in rural China singing traditional Nu Shu songs, cataloguing folk melodies in danger of being lost. Around these, Tan Dun constructs what is essentially a harp concerto, drawing inspiration from the songs and echoing them in his writing for orchestra and soloist.

At times, the writing takes the form of a simple and comfortably harmonious accompaniment, whether in the form of light pizzicato and percussion or burnished strings. At others, the echoed vocal melody becomes a maddening refrain, dissolving into interludes of shivering ice or harrowing fury.

The video scenes themselves are emotionally affecting, portraying mostly elderly women in a variety of activities, projected in three different frames above the stage. One in particular shows a song of ritual mourning, accompanied by frantic worrying in the solo harp. The songs are presented without any English text, a choice that avoids distracting from either the images or the music. One feels that Tan Dun made the correct decision here, though undoubtedly many audience members missed a layer of the work as a result.

The Philharmonic played brilliantly, sounding secure and powerful under Long Yu’s baton, and the performance of the solo part by the Philharmonic’s principal harpist, Nancy Allen, was exquisite. Tan Dun’s writing for harp is extremely demanding, not just in degree of difficulty, but in its length and relative continuity. More than equal to the technical challenges, Allen brought a strong voice to the varied solo line. Would that every gala concert left so strong an impression.