Concert Review: In Search of Space, Still Orbiting

The Orchestra Now plays Adams, Penderecki and Holst.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor JoAnn Falletta led The Orchestra Now on Saturday night at Alice Tully Hall.
Photo by Cheryl Gorsky © 2017 The Buffalo Philharmonic.

The Orchestra Now is still a new presence on the classical music scene in New York but it is, on the surface, a pretty good idea. Conceived by Bard College president Leon Botstein, TŌN (as they style themselves) is the renamed, re-packaged, re-marketed top-level student orchestra of that august educational institution. On Thursday night, the Bard students visited Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall to play an ambitious program under the baton of JoAnn Falletta. Ms. Falletta is the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, one of this great state's more underrated ensembles. On the program, three ambitious 20th century works that would have been a tall order even for a professional orchestra.

Recordings Review: The Best of Both Worlds

Marek Janowski's new Tannhäuser splits the difference. 
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Venus (center) and Tannhäuser in Lawrence Koe's 1896 painting Venus and Tännhäuser.
Image © 1896 Lawrence Koe.

Like its protagonist, Tannhäuser, the fifth opera by Richard Wagner (and the second to be considered "mature") is cursed with a double existence. Conductors can choose between the composer's original intentions ("Dresden") or the luscious orchestrations and rich "mature" Wagner of the "Paris" version created for a disastrous "second premiere" at the Paris Opéra in 1861. It is a difficult choice, as the later revisions give the story a very different tone and inflection.

Concert Review: Space Walk

The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra explores The Planets.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Astronaut Ed White making the first "space walk" on the Gemini 4 mission, June 3, 1965.
Photo by James McDivitt © 1965  NASA.

The late Michael Tippett ranks as one of the most important British composers of the latter half of the 20th century. Tippett (1905-1998) is remembered for his World War II pacifism (which resulted in a prison term) a series of excellent (if underperformed) operas and the 1941 oratorio A Child of Our Time. Self-taught, his unconventional, thoroughly tonal style looks back to the 18th century and forward to the 21st.

On Friday night, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra did much to resurrect Tippett's reputation as an orchestral composer with a performance of his Fourth Symphony. The Fourth was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1974 and written for the strengths of that famous ensemble. NJSO music director Jacques Lapointe paired the Fourth with Holst's The Planets, (1917) another massive British work that has remained an audience favorite for almost a century.

This was the first concert that this writer had attended at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in well over a decade. The performance was prefaced with a short statement from Mr. Lapointe, who explained the personal significance of this work, a 30-minute single-movement essay on the meaning of life from cradle to grave. The musicians, he explained would be accompanied by taped samples of real human breath, slow, steady and amplified.