New York Classical Review

America: A Prophecy was the title of just one of the four works in Thursday’s concert by the New York Philharmonic, but given the times we’re living in, it could have stood for the whole, darkly expressive program.

Philharmonic repertoire is planned at least a year and a half in advance, and artists such as conductor Thomas Adès and pianist Yuja Wang are booked further ahead than that, so one could hardly have anticipated how these pieces by Charles Ives, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Kaija Saariaho and Adès would interact with the tumultuous world of 2025 and 2026.

But events have a way of illuminating our artistic efforts after the fact. Thursday’s program included two works from the Philharmonic’s historic “Messages for the Millennium” concert of November 11, 1999, which premiered five pieces commissioned by then music director Kurt Masur. The former citizen of communist East Germany saw hope for the 2000s in worldwide economic progress and the end of the Cold War, and looked to express it in music.

That hope suffered a shocking setback on September 11, 2001. The dire scene of New Yorkers streaming northward from that catastrophe had a historical precedent in the scene Ives depicted in the last movement of his Orchestral Set No. 2, “From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose,” which recalled spontaneous public singing in response to the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania, with over a thousand lives lost, by a German submarine in 1915.

A far lesser shock, but a shock nonetheless, was the fact that Thursday marked the first performance ever by the Philharmonic of this essential work by America’s greatest composer. Better late than never, Adès led the orchestra with broad beats, encouraging a long line as Stephen Foster-like fragments of melody gathered in the dreamy “An Elegy to Our Forefathers.”

A different kind of American nostalgia burst forth in “The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting,” recalling the raucous camp meetings of the composer’s youth, with a little bit of preaching and lots of dancing. Ragtime tunes tumbled over each other, many of them pounded out by Philharmonic pianist Eric Huebner in what the composer described as “almost a piano concerto.”

Adès stood silent for a full minute on the podium before beginning “From Hanover Square North…” with a choir (the Detroit-based EXIGENCE ensemble) singing a Te Deum in a barely audible pianissimo, spiritually framing the scene of New York commuters gradually breaking into the old hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By.”  Ives (and Adès) masterfully evoked the turbulence of their emotions and the dissonance of their untrained voices before the train pulled away, leaving only the rustle of New York traffic.

Next the program turned from an almost-concerto to a kind of über-concerto, Rautaavara’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Composing in 1969, the high noon of musical serialism, the Finnish composer rejected that school’s brainy asceticism in favor of the swashbuckling tradition of Liszt and Rachmaninoff. And how better to convey this modernist take on the old masters than with the sweeping, vivid pianism of Yuja Wang?

To emphasize the point, Rautaavara labeled the concerto’s first movement “Con grandezza,” and Wang delivered grandly with waves of left-hand arpeggios and a right-hand melody in smashed-out cluster chords, while remaining alert to opportunities to make the piano sing, glitter or orate. Adès on the podium brought out the orchestra’s American-style blend of bold brass and swooping strings, more Gershwin than Ives.

In the thoughtful Andante, and especially in the solo cadenza connecting it to the finale, Wang expertly exploited the contrast between fiercely attacked chords and passages of ectoplasmic leggiero. In the even more Gershwinesque last movement, with its swinging 3+2+3 rhythm, pianist and orchestra touched on familiar triadic harmonies while never settling on a cadence, building instead to a breathtaking, sudden cutoff.

Wang’s dynamic performance was rewarded with tumultuous applause, to which she responded with two brief, lyrical encores, a barcarolle by Erkki Melartin and Sibelius’s Etude, Op. 76, no. 2. 

Composer Saariaho’s “prophecy” for the coming millennium took the form of a sea voyage in Oltra Mar (Across the Sea): Seven Preludes for the New Millennium. Adès and the Philharmonic were joined again by EXIGENCE and the University of Michigan Chamber Choir, ably prepared by the director of both groups, Eugene Rogers.

Alternating orchestral movements with settings of texts from ancient and modern Arabic poets and African village culture, Saariaho sketched “Départ (Departure),” a seascape of spraying percussion and wordless choral “wind”; “Amour (Love),” a meditation both philosophical and sensual over a harp ostinato; “Vagues (Waves),” choir and vibraphone blending over repeating string figures; “Temps (Time),” the clash of an objective tick-tock figure with passionate thumps and rumbles in timpani; “Souvenir de vagues (Memory of Waves),” a dreamlike flashback; “Mort (Death) (in memory of Gérard Grisey),” remembering the influential “spectralist” composer with a simple yet profound African funeral chant over a complex dissonant chord; and “Arrivée (Arrival),” an inconclusive conclusion with the spectral chord floating and fading like a spectre.

At its 1999 premiere, Adès’s America: A Prophecy was similarly inconclusive, its two movements ending in the ashes of an American civilization—not the United States, but the Mayan culture of Central America, destroyed by Spanish conquest in the 1500s. In 2024, the composer extended the work with a third movement, which he has called “a summary, and a moral, and a looking-forward”—in short, a closing of the life cycle of destruction and renewal.

Only time will tell if his prognostication for America, if that’s what it is, was prescient for 1999 or 2024 or both. It was certainly a thought-provoking work to hear in 2026, as soprano Anna Dennis (in her Philharmonic debut) sounded the prophecy (“O my nation/Prepare”) in penetrating tones, non vibrato, to begin the first movement, which bristled with the dark energy of the advancing invaders. Clashing harmonies and rhythms seemed almost to mock the calls to arms by the combined Michigan and EXIGENCE choristers, singing 16^th-century texts. Flute and oboe intertwined with the soprano’s straight tone, as if enfolding her in the orchestral scene, a Cassandra amid the flames.

“We shall turn to ash…/Ash feels no pain” was how the piece concluded in 1999, in a brief, somber second movement. But two years ago, advanced compositional  skills and a maturing vision enabled Adès to depict, in the Mayan text, “the eternal turning/towards our end” in a sublime choral setting, mostly pianissimo (with one crescendo, truly con grandezza), that brought the piece full circle.

Adès’s clear, forceful conducting was exemplary throughout, and especially in this last movement the chorus gave a master class in superbly supported and tuned choral voice production—exactly what was needed to round off an exceptionally rich evening of musical and historical connections.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. nyphil.org