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The secret to the New York Repertory Orchestra is right there in their name. Classical music institutions build a quasi-artificial canon out of the works they repeatedly choose from history, but repertory is what any group decides to play. And under music director David Leibowitz, the NYRO shows that its priority is presenting good—and not necessarily famous—music.
That emphasis produces concerts like the fine one at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin Saturday night. This was a program of under-appreciated and obscure but superb compositions from David Diamond, Vitezslava Kaprálová, and Paul Hindemith.
The evening opened with Diamond’s narrative tone poem, The Enormous Room. Diamond is one of the group of mid-20th century American composers that produced some of the most attractive and substantial body of orchestral music of the era—and who are essentially ignored by American orchestras.
It was a rare treat merely to experience this rich, elegant, skillful work. Schoenberg called the composer “an American Bruckner,” and his music is driven by a balance between harmony and melody and with a modern earthiness and energy.
The Enormous Room is American art doubled—it seeks to capture the experience of e.e. cummings’ anti-authority novel of the same title. The music doesn’t describe events but captures a complex mood that is sonically deep and dark-shaded, communicating both warmth and a kind of rueful wisdom. The playing was terrific, with precision and polish and a marvelous, forward flowing line. Leibowitz took a relaxed pace but the motion and energy were constant. The strings were both clear and luscious and there was a fine balance and blend among orchestral sections, especially the winds and horns.
That was important in St. Mary the Virgin, which is one of the more resonant concert spaces in New York. It was a little too much so for Kaprálová’s Rustic Suite—or perhaps the score was a little too much for the space.
This is a superb work from a composer all but lost to history. This is likely due to her death from illness at the young age of 25, in France in 1940, after studying under both Bohuslav Martinů and Charles Munch.
Kaprálová’s Rustic Suite showed how much talent was destroyed. There were the details of craft, like her rhythmic sensibility, and a simple clarinet melody in the first of the three movements, made stunning and gorgeous by how expertly and subtly she fit it with the harmonic structure. The music had a fantastic expressive artistry, with a mix of neoclassicism and romanticism that was wonderful to hear unfold and also managed to evoke images of rolling Czech hills, golden sun, pleasant breezes.
The amount of internal detail and activity at times overwhelmed the church’s acoustic, the resonance of one event swamping ones that followed. This was also not as fine a performance as The Enormous Room; there was some mis-coordination in the orchestra, and often a sense that the musicians didn’t have the confidence in the notes to fully express the score’s meaning. Still, it was rewarding to hear such a great piece.
Hindemith’s Der Schwanendreher—a viola concerto in all but name—came after intermission. The work is fairly well known but, like Hindemith in general, rarely played. One could not ask for a better soloist than Masumi Per Rostad, former violist of the Pacifica Quartet. His intonation is so secure that it gives extra heft and timbre to his tone, and his sense of phrasing is deeply musical. That’s a key to this piece, which Hindemith built out of folk materials.
Rostad played with a narrative feeling, like he was spinning tales, and the orchestral accompaniment was alert and sensitive. The piece is scored for a chamber group with cellos, basses, winds, horns, and trumpet. There is also a key harp part, especially prominent in the second movement which begins and ends with a viola/harp duet. Lucia Stavros played this, and her fine technique, and the expressive communication between her and Rostad, were exceptional, moving for how musical the playing was, and provided the high point of an enjoyable evening.
The New York Repertory Orchestra, with violinist Tosca Opdam, presents Frank Martin’s Violin Concerto and Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, 8 p.m, Saturday, April 5. nyro.org
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