New York Classical Review

The tangle and clash of cultures that made the New World new was the subtext of the Met Orchestra’s colorful program at Carnegie Hall Wednesday night. Music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a native of Montreal, was the enthusiastic guide on a musical tour that began in the night clubs of today’s Mexico City and ended on the plains and plantations of the 19^th-century U.S.A.

At first glance, the program might be described as “contemporary conventional,” with its generous helpings of lauded present-day composers (Gabriela Ortiz and Terence Blanchard), a nod to a recent classic (Leonard Bernstein) and finally retreating to an old symphonic standby (Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”).

But the lineup also offered a network of associations, each piece casting light on the others, that distinguished this concert in the mind while it was going on, and long after.

What if, for example, Aaron Copland’s dance-hall vignette El Salón México had been composed by an actual Mexican instead of the Brooklyn-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants?  Ortiz’s sensuous, timpani-driven Antrópolis (whose title means “city of caverns”) offered a provocative answer.

Bernstein, another son of Russian Jews, looked back at the Old World and its sins—specifically the Holocaust—in his Symphony No. 1, (“Jeremiah”) of 1942, finding in the biblical prophet both the agony of loss and a sprig of hope. And Broadway Lenny also managed to add a few dance-hall tunes of his own.

Sins closer to home—enslavement and Jim Crow for Africans in the New World–was the backdrop for Blanchard’s 2019 opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which traced a black boy’s rise through adversity to confident manhood. Blanchard’s sophisticated jazz-classical idiom, echoed (imperfectly) in the orchestral suite from the opera performed Wednesday, brought the black experience to the House of Puccini.

Which left one wondering, what if Dvořák’s pupil Harry T. Burleigh had composed the “New World” Symphony himself instead of just planting the seeds of it with the butcher’s son from Nelahozeves?  Well, that’s a 2025 question for an 1893 piece, whose sincerity and staying power are not in doubt.

Timpanist Parker Lee received solo billing in the Ortiz piece, which often sounded like a timpani concerto, beginning with a solo cadenza and then featuring Lee in passages ranging from molto espressivo to rolling thunder. No doubt the pounding beat of a 2019 dance hall is a different animal from the seductive Latin rhythms Copland heard on his 1930s club crawl, although Ortiz provided those too with tinkling riffs of xylophone, bells and pizzicato strings. Nézet-Séguin kept the rhythms sharp in every dynamic from pianissimo to a brassy, shouting mambo.

Composing in the heyday of William Schuman and Roy Harris, the 24-year-old Bernstein used taut, soaring strings and blunt brass-and-percussion chords to convey the prophet’s dire warnings to Jerusalem in American symphonic terms, even hinting at a Lutheran chorale at one point to convey the seriousness of the situation.

The frivolous Jerusalemites ignored him, of course, and went to their own version of the Mexican dance hall, with a 3-3-2 samba beat. This “Profanation,” so titled, had a bit of production-code Hollywood feel to it, with its genteel dissonances and tidy syncopation, hardly an orgy for the post-Rite of Spring era. This was not the fault of the Met musicians, whose handling of Bernstein’s perky music was if anything a bit heavy-footed.

Angel Blue, soprano soloist in the symphony’s closing “Lamentation,” stood above and behind the orchestra, as if surveying a scene of devastation. Her first soft, creamy-toned lines barely cleared the orchestral woodwinds, but balances adjusted to accommodate her expressive pianissimos in a mostly quiet movement, and at rare moments of fortissimo anguish she swelled with the tutti to a powerful climax.

The presence of Blue on this night reminded a listener of her dual role in the first Met production of Blanchard’s Fire, LINK as the allegorical characters Destiny and Loneliness. She of course did not perform in the composer’s orchestral suite from that opera, which regrettably also omitted the jazz rhythm section that so enlivened the opera and gave it its contemporary feel.

Still, the similarity of symphonic scoring invited comparisons between Bernstein’s Jeremiad and Blanchard’s up-from-poverty story. One had the feeling that, however lamentable his subject matter, Bernstein’s New World was a place of renewed hopes while Blanchard’s was the source of all misery, to be overcome by individual effort. One could hear it in Bernstein’s striving strings and jaunty rhythms, contrasted with Blanchard’s bluesy falling inflections and subversive humor.

Blanchard’s suite, performed continuously and without movement breaks, became a kind of tone poem, hinting at but not overtly depicting, the encounters of the opera’s hero Charles on his way to self-discovery. The opera’s few arias, mainly for Charles’s mother Billie, were rendered as oboe solos amid velvety horns and harp, or with woodwinds doubling a trumpet. Nézet-Séguin passed up no opportunity to pull out a broad, brawny sound from his large ensemble, liberated from the opera pit to the Carnegie stage.

One became even more aware of that stage during the Symphony “From the New World,” which made its bow to the world from that very spot 132 years ago, with the composer looking on. A man of the theater, Nézet-Séguin proved a great creator of moments, lovingly crafting every pianissimo and subito forte, somewhat at the expense of the symphony’s overall design. As a result, the work’s shattering closing bars, with their startling harmonic changes and dissonances, came off as just another loud passage in a long string of them.

But one could imagine Dvořák baffling his Carnegie audience with the obscure mutters and pauses of the symphony’s introduction, if conductor Anton Seidl rendered them anything like the way Nézet-Séguin did Wednesday. No doubt Seidl, an eminent Wagnerian, did full justice to the glowing brass sunrise that opens and closes the Largo, as Nézet-Séguin did. But one doubts the famous English horn solo, later adapted as the spiritual “Goin’ Home,” sounded as ephemeral then as it did Wednesday night.

Carnegie Hall presents the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Lahav Shani with violinist Pinchas Zukerman, in three concerts of works by Ben-Haim and Tchaikovsky, Sept. 15-18. carnegiehall.org