Music Chronicle

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Clark, Robert S

Music Chronicle

LORIN MAAZEL, HEARING THE END OF HIS THIRD YEAR as music director of the New York Philharmonic, has clearly put his stamp on the orchestra. He is a conductor of bold gestures, not averse to sacrificing spontaneity for micromanagement of detail. But the New York musicians are reported to approve of his leadership, and audiences seem to agree. As for the critics, they have wondered in print about his commitment to contemporary orchestral scores (Maazel is a composer himself, and audiences will hear a program of his works in March to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday). Shortly after his appointment, at a press conference, Maazel evaded a direct answer: "Conductors should perform music by composers they believe in." But if pressed he can now point to the fact that in his first two seasons he has led four world premiere performances of New York Philharmonic commissions, and the current season has a flock of New York premieres of contemporary music.

Early in the current season, Maazel added another commission: Augusta Read Thomas' Gathering Paradise: Emily Dickinson Settings for Soprano and Orchestra. Thomas' credentials are impressive: she has received commissions from the National Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and other noteworthy ensembles, and since 1997 she has been composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony, which has premiered two of her orchestral works led by Pierre Boulez, with whom she has been closely associated. She will continue in that post until 2006.

Gathering Paradise links seven of Dickinson's idiosyncratic poems, wrapping them in a rich post-harmonic orchestral garb. The vocal lines, tailored to the soprano voice of Heidi Grant Murphy, are characterized by wide pitch fluctuations, melismas, and extrapolated sounds. Thomas' skill at orchestration is apparent, but it cannot rescue the score from a creeping monotony, arguably attributable more to the poet than to the composer or performers. Though the poems, all associated with light in Thomas' view, include among Dickinson's most coherent ("I dwell in Possibility" and "How still the Bells in Steeples stand") and evocative ("Images of Light, Adieu" closes the cycle), the others are too elliptical to support the expressive burden the composer asks them to carry. To be sure, Murphy sang with secure tone and great agility, but Thomas' orchestral fabric supplied most of the piece's interest.

Before Gathering Paradise, Maazel and the orchestra played the Prelude to Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, as orchestrated by RimskyKorsakov, and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, with the twenty-oneyear-old Chinese pianist Lang Lang as soloist. As surely the entire musical community knows by now, Lang's reputation as one of the most formidable pianists of the day grows with every appearance, and he showed why in a performance that coupled mastery of the keyboard with a natural way with phrase and line and a fitting appreciation of the concerto's slam-bang bravura moments. The orchestra matched him with solid concerted passages that nonetheless left room for affecting solo instrumental contributions. The result was a performance everyone could love.

Late 2004 saw another New York premiere of a work by a female composer, this time in the person of Kaija Saariaho. A Finn now in her early fifties, she has written in a wide variety of modes; the influence of her years spent working at IRCAM, Boulez's Parisian center for the intersection of music and technology, can be heard in her scores for more traditional ensembles. She sprang to international prominence when her opera L'Amour de loin was presented to general acclaim at Salzburg's summer festival in 2000.

Quatre Instanis for soprano and orchestra got its impetus from the desire of the extraordinary Finnish singer Karita Mattila to have a new work for recitals she was scheduled to sing in the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and the Barbican Center in London in 2003. Saariaho asked the Lebanese poet Amin Maalouf, like her a resident of Paris and the librettist for L'Amour de loin, to supply texts suggesting the states of mind of a woman before, during, and after an amorous encounter: longing, anticipation, ecstatic surrender, remorse, and recollection. Maalouf's verses create a trancelike web as they repeat themselves, contradict and circle back on one another, until in the end, after the woman's lover departs, the auditor is left unsure whether he was there at all or merely a creature of her fevered imagination. After Mattila's concerts, the composer orchestrated the work for presentation at a summer festival in Finland in 2003.

For once the hyperbole is fully justified: Karita Mattila occupies an unchallenged berth among the world's most accomplished and versatile artists. The breadth of expressive means she brought to bear on this assignment was rare indeed and fit Saariaho's diaphanous sound world like a glove. Some reports of her recent performances have warned that her untiring exploration of the margins of the repertoire-and she has not neglected the mainstream either-has taken its toll on her vocal production, but there was no evidence of such on this evening: she negotiated everything, from forte to piano, with sensuous tone and admirable security, producing a couple of ravishing mezzopianos at the top of her range. But what sticks in the mind, as with other Mattila performances, was the inflection and coloring of the text's haunting lines. The orchestra, led by yet another Finn, Sakari Oramo, responded as if bewitched by Mattila-and, after the last note had died away, so did the audience.