Concert Review: Let the Games Begin

Stephane Denève debuts with the Philharmonic.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The conductor Stéphane Denève made his long-awaited New York Philharmonic debut.
Photo by Stu Rosner © 2015 The Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Under ordinary circumstances, the podium debut of a promising international conductor with the New York Philharmonic would be a pleasurable, if minor note in the course of a long orchestra season. However, with the sudden announcement last Friday that Alan Gilbert would step down as the orchestra's music director (effective 2017) the first concert program under Stéphane Denève felt like the beginning of a long series of auditions for Mr. Gilbert's job.

Concert Review: A New Conductor for a New Year

Manfred Honeck debuts with the New York Philharmonic.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Manfred Honeck made his New York Philharmonic
debut on Thursday night with Braunfels, Beethoven and Grieg.
Image framegrabbed from a Medici.tv webcast. 

The New York Philharmonic got 2013 off to a brisk start with a Jan. 3 concert led by Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music director Manfred Honeck. This marked the Austrian conductor's debut with the orchestra. He came armed with a work the Philharmonic had never played before: his Suite from Walter Braunfels' Fantastic Apparitions on a Theme by Hector Berlioz. The program also featured two well-traveled favorites: Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto (with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet) and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.

Walter Braunfels (1882-1954) was an underrated German composer whose large body of work has been virtually ignored since he fell out of favor with the Nazi regime. He wrote a number of operas and orchestral works, the best known being the comic Aristophanes-inspired Die Vogel. This composition, finished in 1917)  is built on Mephistopheles' "Song of the Flea" from Berlioz' La damnation de Faust. The whole work is roughly fifty minutes. Mr. Honeck's version includes the Introduction and three variations and lasts just ten.

Braunfels' work re-imagines the Devil's aria as a series of increasingly complex orchestral variations. The original Berlioz melody played on the cornet before yielding way to a languorous tone poem for the whole orchestra, overlaid on a lush carpet of strings that would make Richard Strauss proud. (That composer's influence is also audible in the harmonies, which echo some of the more sensual pages of Der Rosenkavalier.) The final variation brings back the original theme, charging forward with vigor and renewed purpose. This movement recalled Berlioz' own anarchic spirit, and made one curious to hear the entire piece.