Carnegie’s WOW! festival off to strong start with NYO2, Barnes premiere
Just one day in, it’s not too soon to say it: WOW! really is a wow.
Carnegie Hall’s summer festival World Orchestra Week (WOW!) made its bow Thursday night with a concert that was anything but a bow-wow: a crack ensemble of 14-to-17-year-old musicians, hailing from all over the U.S.A., pouring their youthful energy into three orchestral standbys and one world premiere.
A summer-camp atmosphere suffused the hall as the usher corps traded their familiar red jackets for gray WOW! T-shirts, and the young musicians’ written well-wishes to the world were projected on the walls flanking the stage during breaks.
Exacting, enthusiastic and sneaker-clad, conductor Teddy Abrams led the group, styled as NYO2 (for National Youth Orchestra No. 2, a junior partner to the NYO-USA for college-age players), in potent performances of works by Bernstein, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky that challenged professional orchestras for technical prowess and surpassed many of them for imagination.
A friendly shock of the new was administered by KINSFOLKNEM, Jasmine Barnes’s celebration of black family gatherings for wind soloists and orchestra, which prayed, swayed, and rocked out in its exuberant premiere.
KINSFOLKNEM was a family affair in both concept and performance: the brothers McGill, flutist Demarre and clarinetist Anthony, shared soloist duty with oboist Titus Underwood and bassoonist Andrew Brady. Barnes’s score, commissioned for this occasion, spotlighted each of these accomplished African-American musicians individually, as if to show the young players what’s possible in terms of both musical mastery and career success (both McGills have held principal positions in world-class American orchestras).
The bluesy first movement, “The Sunday Dinner,” paused for some around-the-table chatter, led by flutist McGill in a fluttery solo cadenza that was picked up by the other soloists in turn. Then it set clarinetist McGill dancing to a wood-block Latin beat and bassoonist Brady shaping a long melody over a cushion of strings.
The gospel sound of “The Repast” featured oboist Underwood in a gently animated episode, with characteristic solos by the McGills—lyrical for the flute, biting and klezmer-like for the clarinet. The last movement, “The Reunion,” evoked, in the composer’s words, “the sound world of a Black cookout” in ragtime rhythm, as the soloists’ jubilant game of toppers was joined by players in the orchestra, including the tuba.
As an encore, the four soloists made melodious interplay of long phrases in “Total Praise” by Richard Smallwood, arranged for wind quartet by Barnes.
While one imagines that this accomplished group could handle pretty much any expressive challenge thrown at it, Shakespeare’s classic drama of star-crossed teenage lovers, which inspired two of the works on the program, seemed right in their wheelhouse.
Bernstein’s take on it in Symphonic Dances from West Side Story crackled with energy and aggression, evoked the wonder of awakening love, and closed on a wistful note of might-have-been. The imagery, musical and visual, was vivid: flutes dancing the tenderest cha-cha imaginable, players snapping their fingers and bounding to their feet to shout “Mambo!”
With Stravinsky waiting in the wings this Thursday night, Abrams and his players made the most of Bernstein’s Rite-like thudding dissonances in the Rumble scene and a funeral procession as gauzy as the lullaby in The Firebird.
Shakespeare’s lovers returned in Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. Whatever this summer ensemble may have lacked in Tchaikovskian plushness and depth of tone it made up for in vivid drama, both soft and loud. Conductor Abrams shaped the suspenseful opening bars, with their ominous pauses, then drove the fight scene fast, with the young string players firing off bar after bar of blazing sixteenth-notes.
The famous love theme began tenderly in the violas, grew more intense in flute, oboe, and horn iterations, and at last soared skyward in the violins before being swept away in a tide of violence. Powerful stuff–matched by another aching might-have-been coda and the terrible finality of that drum-roll finish. Accomplished musicians as they were, these were also teenagers, and they obviously knew the territory.
The Firebird, on the other hand, is pure fantasy, but even here there is drama, or at least mood contrast, to be conveyed. (The opulent 1919 Suite was performed Thursday.) Abrams kept the scene crepuscular in the opening, the better to dazzle with the title character’s wild, fluttering entrance. The flutists proved as skillful with a dainty bird dance as with a romantic cha-cha. The conductor made sure one heard a foretaste of The Rite of Spring in the pounding fury of the Infernal Dance and in the lullaby’s high, mournful bassoon.
Metric security and tonal balance were admirable all evening. The Firebird was especially distinguished by sound chemistry between the sections, especially the lullaby—all of it achieved, as Abrams noted in spoken remarks, in a week and a half of rehearsals.
The Louisville-based conductor responded to the audience’s ovation with an encore, “a little piece of Kentucky I wanted to bring with me.” “Unstrung” by Alex Berko was a sort of virtuoso barn dance with hot dialogue between the sections.
Since WOW! is a festival with a message, the musicians’ projected sentiments on the wall were supplemented with mercifully brief speeches, by two young players praising the program, by New York Senator Chuck Schumer recalling his youthful encounters with classical music and praising the festival’s fundraisers (and himself for shaking the Federal money tree), and by Teddy Abrams, noting music’s power to bring communities together.
All true, but on Thursday, very young musicians playing so superbly together was the real wow.
Carnegie Hall’s WOW! festival continues with the National Children’s Orchestra of Venezuela, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, performing works by John Adams, Estévez, Ginastera, and Shostakovich, 7 p.m. Friday. carnegiehall.org
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