Persson, Wolfe premiere provide the highlights with Rouvali, Philharmonic
Color and detail are at the forefront of this week’s New York Philharmonic subscription program, led by guest conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Thursday night’s opening concert in David Geffen Hall was a punchy, often excellent but not unblemished sequence of Julia Wolfe’s Fountain of Youth, the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss—sung by soprano Miah Persson—and after intermission the Sibelius Symphony No. 5.
This was the first Philharmonic performance of Wolfe’s score, but it sounded assured and completely sympathetic. The orchestra’s playing so for this season has been impressively flexible, skillful, and energetic, and this great piece backlit those qualities.
The title has less to do with myth than the commissioning orchestra, the New World Symphony, which premiered it with Michael Tilson Thomas in 2019. Wolfe wrote this for talented young musicians for whom the feel of popular rhythms and comfort with noise is second nature. It was exciting to hear the Philharmonic sound so natural in this new music.
In four continuous sections, the music has Wolfe’s typical rhythmic force and direct, unadorned sensibilities—few composers are as cliché-free. To this she adds some brilliant orchestration, especially an amazing sound from the strings to start, something like a distant swarm of millions of locusts caught between two giant sheets of sandpaper. Colorful winds emerge organically from this, the percussion section lays down a beat, and the gears start working.
This was dazzling and gripping. It’s the kind of piece where discrete ideas move in both opposition and apposition to each other and one is eager to hear what comes next. Wolfe is such a fine composer that even the simple structure of a long ramp up to a high point, a quick drop, then an exclamation mark to finish, felt both expected and unpredictable.
Persson is known as a leading performer of the Four Last Songs, and showed why Thursday night. In her own way, she is idiosyncratic in this score, but as it’s so well known this was a pleasure in itself. Her sound is not as rich as the typical dramatic soprano, but her voice is full of light, both in color and weight, while still substantial.
With that sound, this was very much a thinking performance. Persson has thought deeply about what the music and words meant to her and how to express that as clearly as possible to the listener without sounding calculated. Everything sounded free and easy, hinting at a kind of ad lib monologue of personal feelings.
This was marvelous to hear and full of feeling and fascinating details of articulation. At times in the upper register, Persson’s intonation got a little wobbly, but this was the kind of strictly technical flaw that emphasized the power and effect of what she was singing—meaning came first. With sensitive and delicate playing from the orchestra under Rouvali, this was a performance that refreshed and renewed something in danger of becoming too familiar.
There were hints of that same quality in the playing of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5, but also some distracting interventions from the podium. The warm glow from the horn section was absolutely beautiful in the opening bars, and the luminous wind colors promised a substantial interpretation. The forward flow of energy and pulse was ideal, and excitement built.
But Rouvali pulled back on the pulse during the haunting bassoon solo, and though that concentrated some structural drama, it toed the edge of mannerism. The playing recovered from this after the section, and the Andante movement was mostly superb, with a perfect tempo and gorgeous playing from the strings. The final bars were perfunctory though, and didn’t make the proper connection to the loping third movement.
The playing again recovered, the thrust and sweep of the music digging deep. But the last nine bars let this down. One could almost see Rouvali calculating how much rubato to add in the rests in between the enormous orchestral chords. The problem is that any rubato is too much—Sibelius was an expert in musical time and placed events exactly for maximum effect—and this coda felt mannered, dissipating the tension and thrill that’s the very point of the music. Call it an often-great performance but also an incomplete one.
This program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Tuesday in David Geffen Hall. nyphil.org
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