Järvi, Bronfman deliver classic Beethoven, incandescent Nielsen with Philharmonic
“It is a fact,” wrote the 25-year-old Carl Nielsen in 1890, “that he who brandishes the hardest fist will be remembered longest. Beethoven, Michelangelo, Bach, Berlioz, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Goethe, Henrik Ibsen and the like have all given their time a black eye.”
The Danish composer shared the bill with his hero Beethoven Wednesday night as Paavo Järvi led the New York Philharmonic in the latter’s groundbreaking Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor and Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5, a work one contemporary critic described, indeed, as “a bloody, clenched fist in the face of an unsuspecting snob audience.”
Beethoven’s own hero, at least when it came to the Piano Concerto, was Mozart, about whose C minor Concerto he exclaimed to another composer, “We shall never be able to do anything like that!” But he did something “like that” and more in his own Third Concerto, inspired by the turbulent connotations of C minor (the key of such revolutionary works as the “Pathétique” Sonata and the Fifth Symphony). Conveniently located in the middle of the series of five piano concertos, No. 3 is often viewed as the bridge between Beethoven’s vassalage to Mozart and the world-embracing composer in his maturity.
In Wednesday’s performance, the fluency and fine shadings of soloist Yefim Bronfman leaned toward the piece’s Mozartean side, while Järvi led the orchestra in vigorous, even startling tutti passages that were full-on C minor Beethoven. But the first movement’s most memorable moments were the chamber-music-style exchanges between the wind players and the soloist, who matched the winds’ well-tuned chords with his own subtle voicings.
A Mozartean, “Elvira Madigan” idyll unfolded in the Largo, beginning with Bronfman’s glowing pianissimo solo and florid vocal lines, swelling with expressive strings, and rippling under woodwind solos. After this lovefest, the performance’s split character returned in the finale, with Bronfman’s strutting or playful piano contending with Järvi’s loud, bumptious orchestra, until their personalities merged in a fast, flashy coda, to the audience’s delight.
During the bows, Bronfman made a point of acknowledging the orchestra’s wind players, prompting the conductor to get the section up for a well-deserved bow of its own.
The pianist responded to the prolonged applause with a gently fantastic encore, the Andante from Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, D. 784.
Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5, unlike most of his others, lacks a descriptive title (e.g., No. 4, “The Inextinguishable”)–although in the post-Beethoven era “Fifth Symphony” is enough of a title to conjure with. Still, its uncategorizable mix of Straussian large orchestra with biting modern dissonance, and Beethovenian aspirations with whiplash mood shifts, left listeners puzzled—at least until a 1962 recording by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic brought the piece international recognition.
Nielsen’s Fifth came home to the Philharmonic in noisy style Wednesday, Järvi giving full expression to the first movement’s many conflicts and interruptions while preserving the composer’s spare yet telling orchestration. Anthony McGill’s rich-toned clarinet epitomized the music’s idyllic side, while Christopher Lamb’s renegade snare drum drove and harassed the rest of the orchestra in a brilliant solo turn that was (per the composer’s instructions) partly improvised.
Nielsen once compared the symphony’s two movements to rolling a boulder up a hill, then kicking it and watching it roll down. The energy stored in the first movement was released in the second with a rush of activity that settled into a swinging, even swashbuckling tempo. Järvi led a taut, exciting performance, flashing with shrill winds and whooping horns, through a fast fugue in 6/8 jig time and a slow, near-atonal fugue for strings, before closing with an incandescent affirmation of E-flat major—not coincidentally, Beethoven’s “Eroica” key, the opposite pole from C minor in that composer’s three-flats world.
The audience acknowledged the orchestra’s virtuosity with enthusiastic applause, as McGill, Lamb, and the various sections took bows for their vivid contributions to the evening’s performance.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday. nyphil.org
One Response to “Järvi, Bronfman deliver classic Beethoven, incandescent Nielsen with Philharmonic”
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Posted Nov 22, 2024 at 8:03 am by DorothyT
Attended the (donor) rehearsal for this concert Wednesday AM. Incredible. Not one word of exaggeration in this review.
It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.