Concert Review: The Uplift War

The Czech Philharmonic celebrates a centennial at Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Zip it. Semyon Bychkov in action at the Proms in 2013.
Photo by Chris Christodoulou from SemyonBychkov.com.

The relationship between an orchestra and its music director is like a marriage under the trial period of a business contract.. For Semyon Bychkov and the Prague-based Czech Philharmonic, the honeymoons continuing into the ensemble's current North American tour.. Conductor and orchestra have released new recordings of Tchaikovsky and Dvořák. Their current jaunt is in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Czech independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is currently stopped at Carnegie Hall.

Concert Review: Settling Their Differences

The New York Philharmonic opens their 175th season.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Alan Gilbert is starting his last year as music director of the New York Philharmonic.
Photo by Chris Lee © 2016 The New York Philharmonic.

The New York Philharmonic opened its 175th season on Wednesday night with a concert built around Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, better known as the New World Symphony. The concert at David Geffen Hall marked the beginning of the orchestra's final season under the hand of music director Alan Gilbert, whose contract expires in June of next year. The concert was attended by music press, donors and glitterati, with the whole affair broadcast live on Facebook, another Philharmonic first.

Concert Review: Are You Ready For the Summer?

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center wraps its spring season.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Next to big companies like the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet and New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center sometimes gets overlooked. Each year, this gathering of top-flight musicians assembles a series of concert programs devoted to little more than celebrating the beauties of works written for smaller groups of musicians, usually ranging from duo to octet. On Tuesday night, the CMS musicians gathered for the last concert of the spring 2016 season, a program of Richard Strauss, Brahms and Dvorak that explored very different periods of each composer's career.

Concert Review: Beginning at the Beginning

The American Symphony Orchestra plays early works by major Romantics.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor and college president Leon Botstein.
Photo © American Symphony Orchestra/Bard College.

The annual concert series by the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall continued last Thursday with Opus Posthumous, a concert curated by music director (and Bard College president) Leon Botstein and featuring rarities unearthed from the early catalogues of Schubert, Bruckner and Dvořák. Although the works on this program (particularly the Symphony No. 00 by Bruckner and the Symphony No. 1 by Dvořák) have been recorded and are part of each composer's catalogue of work, performances of these pieces are a rare occasion indeed.

Concert Review: The Sweltering Sky

The New York Philharmonic plays Central Park.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Fireworks over Central Park. From nyphil.tumblr.com.

The annual New York Philharmonic Concerts in the Park series is one of the orchestra's best marketing tools, a chance for New Yorkers to hear the city's oldest orchestra in a very public setting. This year, Alan Gilbert led the band in five such concerts, spreading the gospel of serious music to each of the five boroughs.

On Monday night, the Great Lawn of Central Park was covered with blankets, although this reporter was allowed in the up-close seats and experience the music directly from the stage. This program featured Dvorak's Cello Concerto with Philharmonic principal cellist Carter Brey and Tchaikovsky's muscular Fifth Symphony, an audience favorite. The weather was sweltering heat, an oppressive muggy pall that made water bottles and flapping programs a necessary evil for the assembled crowd. Mr. Gilbert conducted in shirt sleeves.

Concert Review: No Turkeys At All

Andrey Boreyko conducts the New York Philharmonic.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Thanksgiving guest: conductor Andrey Boreyko.
Photo by Susanne Diesner © 2012 Tonhalle Orchester Zurich.

The New York Philharmonic adjusted their concert schedule for Thanksgiving week, allowing the players to enjoy time with their families (and not having to rehearse a new piece for the weekend concerts. As a result, last night's concert was a rarity: a new program premiered on a Tuesday. (The program will repeat Nov. 23, 24 and 27, with a Saturday matinee also featuring the New World Symphony.)

The concert, conducted by Andrey Boreyko opened with a rarity from Mendelssohn's vast (and underplayed) catalogue. Specifically, this was the charming, witty Overture to Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde ("Son and Stranger") one of the light operas Mendelssohn wrote to be played by his friends and family.

Mr. Boreyko's interpretation ull of the melodic life and joy one associates with this composer. A slow introduction was followed by a brisk middle section, with the introduction coming back as a brief, quizzical reprise at the very end.

The orchestra was then joined by Frank Peter Zimmermann for a performance of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto. From the keening, mournful melodic line of the slow first movement, which bends and unwinds itself at a leisurely pace, this was playing of the highest level from last year's Artist-in-Residence.

Concert Review: Going Out with a Bang

The CSO concludes its three-night Carnegie Hall stand.

Conductor Riccardo Muti.
Photo © Chicago Symphony Orchestra

by Paul J. Pelkonen
Last night was the final concert for Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's at Carnegie Hall this season. It offered New Yorkers a chance to hear a program that was successful in Chicago: an unconventional triptych of works by Dvorak, Respighi and the lesser-known pianist-composer Giuseppe Martucci.

The concert opened with Dvořák's Fifth Symphony, the work that marks the start of the composer's mature period. (Prior to the publication of a new edition of the Czech composer's symphonies in the 1950s, this piece was widely known as Symphony No. 1.) It remains a marvelous, if under-performed example of the composer's style.

Mr. Muti led a bold, robust account of the score, with the rich cellos and potent horns of the CSO to the fore. The conductor leapt (literally) into the rollocking main theme, drawing precise, almost Bach-like harmonies underneath the swaggering main subject. The bold, brassy performance drew unexpected early applause from a few concert-goers, who were either overcome by the piece or simply didn't know better.

Concert Review: The Hero and the Prince

Bartók and Dvořák at Symphony Hall.

Hero with a cello: the astonishing Yo-Yo Ma.
Photo not taken in Symphony Hall. © 2011 Sony Classics.

The orchestra roster printed in this year's Boston Symphony Orchestra concert programs still has a blank space by the words "Music Director." But Tuesday night's concert (the fourth of this program with guest cellist Yo-Yo Ma) proved that the BSO is moving on from the departure of James Levine.

Mr. Ma was at Symphony Hall to play Antonín Dvořák's Cello Concerto in b minor, an inspired product of the Czech composer's three years spent teaching music in America. Mr. Ma once described this concerto as "a hero's journey." He lived up to his description, playing the vivid solo part with fire, emotion, and total involvement with the music.

Dvořák wrote passages of great lyric beauty for both orchestra and soloist, with treacherous cadenzas for the latter. The formidable double-stops and trills up on the neck of the instrument can push any cellist's capabilities. Mr. Ma's responded with playing that seemed to get better with each movement. Playing with head thrown back and fingers flying, his cello wept in the slow section of the finale, before bringing the work to a triumphant close.

Juanjo Mena, who first conducted the BSO at Tanglewood in 2010, made his Symphony Hall debut with these concerts. Mr. Mena proved a skilled accompanist, helped by strong playing from the BSO. The horns deserve praise for the noble reading of the second subject of the Allegro, and the mystic, almost Wagnerian chorale heard in the finale. The subscription audience were enthusiastic, and adoring of Mr. Ma.

They were less happy about the second half of the program. The Wooden Prince is an early work by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, and a work that was new to the orchestra. Mr. Mena displayed an unerring grasp of Bartók's tricky time changes. The Spanish conductor navigated the oversized orchestra (extra percussionists, celesta and saxophones) through the score's hairpin curves. 

Instead of sonic overkill, Bartók produces a wide palette of tonal colors, from the lurching percussive rhythm of the Prince himself to a long lyric pas de deux for the lead dancers. The work includesme lodies inspired by Hungarian folk-tunes, as well as the wry humor evident in his later, more popular ballet score The Miraculous Mandarin.

Mr. Mena's own podium performance was fascinating to watch, combining traditional time-beating with the herky-jerky movements of the ballet's title character. But at 50 minutes, and in 12 sections with no pauses, The Wooden Prince is a heavy meal for the first-time listener to digest. It was greeted with polite applause. Work, composer, and orchestra deserved better.

Concert Review: Ten Years After Tragedy

John Corigliano's One Sweet Morning premieres at the Philharmonic.

Alan Gilbert leads the New York Philharmonic.
Photo by Chris Lee. © 2011 New York Philharmonic.

On Friday night, the New York Philharmonic unveiled composer John Corigliano's One Sweet Morning, a moving song cycle commissioned to mark the dark decade since the World Trade Center fell on September 11, 2001.

Now 73, Mr. Corigliano has a long history with this orchestra. His father, John Corigliano Sr., was the concert-master of the orchestra for 23 year. The ensemble has a history of championing his brand of American post-Romanticism. But when he was commissioned to compose music on the subject of September 11th, he intially refused, not wanting to provide a soundtrack to the images of that horrific day.

Instead, he turned to poetry, creating a song cycle, One Sweet Morning. (The title comes from the final poem, written by Yip Harburg, the librettist for The Wizard of Oz.) Mr. Corigliano chose four poems. A Song for the End of the World by Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz depicts the dreaded, anticipatory hush before apocalyptic events. The heat of battle itself  is portrayed with a setting of a bloody passage from Homer's Iliad. The traumatic effect of war on a loved one is shown in War South of the Great Wall, a poem by Li Po. The work ends with a new orchestration of Yip Harburg's poem "One Sweet Morning" which paints an idyllic dream of peace.

Stephanie Blythe's rich, dark mezzo plunged to astonishing depths of the contralto range in the first poem. The Homer passage mixed sung narrative and sprechstimme, the long list of fallen Trojan heroes standing for everyone killed on both sides of the U.S.'s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Li Po poem was accompanied with exotic percussion, including an authentic Chinese war drum creating dread-filled, throbbing rhythms.


Suddenly, after a tremendous, atonal crescendo, the smoke and dust swirled away and Ms. Blythe began to sing the long lyric lines of One Sweet Morning. Mr. Harburg's lyrics express the idea of rebirth and peace after conflict. The rose imagery and solemn chords create an almost Mahlerian mood, but the sound is distinct. As the melody spun forth, the song rose on the final repetitions of the word "morning", bringing balm to the listener even as it questioned the events of the past decade.

The new work was preceded by Samuel Barber's Essay No. 1, an orchestral tone poem in two sections. This work, a direct cousing of the famous Adagio for Strings, served as an effective curtain-raiser for the evening. Strong brass playing and lush strings were effectively lead by music director Alan Gilbert.

The second half of the concert featured the Seventh Symphony of 19th century romantic Antonín Dvořák . This is one of the Czech composer's more serious works, and one of the staples of the orchestral repertory. It's not the orchestra or the conductor's fault that the Seventh seemed a little lightweight after the emotional searing of Mr. Corigliano's piece. That said, the Seventh featured a spectacular slow movement, never taken too slowly, and gorgeous contributions from the Philharmonic horns and woodwinds.