Muhly’s brilliant violin concerto premieres at Philharmonic as old masters look on
Nico Muhly’s new Violin Concerto won enthusiastic applause at its world premiere Thursday night, with Marin Alsop conducting the New York Philharmonic and Renaud Capuçon as the bold and expressive soloist.
The new piece proved a particularly shiny bauble, with predominantly high sonorities and post-minimalist tintinnabulation. Violinist Capuçon played almost continuously through the concerto’s three connected movements, easily holding his own amid a robust orchestra and percussion section.
The concerto led off with a movement titled “Close Second,” a sly reference to the musical meaning of the word “second,” which denotes the distance in pitch between two adjacent notes in a scale. When two notes a “second” apart are sounded together, it produces a pinching dissonance that begs to be resolved into a more pleasing sound, such as a “third.”
In the first movement, the soloist and two orchestral oboes began by blending their tones in chains of ear-buzzing seconds, so that the sound became not so much a dissonance as a piquant tone color for Muhly to paint with throughout the movement, and indeed the whole concerto.
Capuçon’s robust tone projected easily through the hall as his instrument sang swooning phrases, danced, spun out figurations, and reached heavenward. In a concerto that was not about showing off, there still was no mistaking his abundant technique and musicianship.
Minimalism left its mark on the later movements in chugging repeated chords, the fast and slow lines playing simultaneously (in the movement titled “Of Two Minds”), and the glittering finale (“Message Discipline”) for sky-high violin and percussion. Notable moments included a brief but expressive solo cadenza and a quasi-duet for the soloist and a bowed cymbal.
Conductor Alsop partnered with Capuçon to create a unified sound world whose effects depended more on collaboration than competition between soloist and orchestra.
The concerto’s surrounding pieces were so familiar that they seemed to come off one of those music-appreciation LPs of long ago: For Beethoven, there was the Leonore Overture No. 3; for Brahms, Variations on a Theme of Haydn; for the “moderns,” Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. And so the rest of Thursday’s program felt, unavoidably, a little like a conservatory jury: Could Alsop make the old and familiar sound new?
Her commitment to these classics, in every detail, was evident. One thing she shares with her onetime mentor, Leonard Bernstein, is clarity of intent on the podium. Whether it’s meticulous rhythm in a light passage or a great smear of string sound, everyone in the hall knows what she wants.
The question is, does she get it from the players? On Thursday, the answer was: sometimes.
The ancient tradition of orchestras opening a program with an overture played once over lightly was unfortunately alive and well Thursday night. The gripping drama of Leonore 3 was a dubious choice for a curtain-raiser to begin with; Beethoven himself set it aside and wrote something lighter to begin his opera Fidelio.
The orchestra responded tentatively to Alsop’s beat in the overture’s slow opening section, and the subsequent allegro sounded rather helter-skelter, with balances out of whack. Ultimately however, as in the opera, the cavalry rode to the rescue, and the orchestra pulled together for the exuberant closing pages.
Brahms’s Haydn Variations isn’t the easiest piece to make sound in concert. It was originally composed for two pianos, and despite Brahms’s ingenuity in scoring, it still has that feeling of a collection of piano character pieces arranged for orchestra. Alsop’s efforts to convey the character of each variation were rewarded most of the time, after a shaky beginning.
Introducing the crisp little march theme—attributed, probably inaccurately, to Haydn—the woodwinds spoke late, behind the beat of the pizzicato double basses, spoiling the effect of Variation 1, in which the neat, narrow Classical sound suddenly goes widescreen and Romantic with swirling strings.
Subsequently, however, Alsop asked for and got vivid characterizations, such as the moaning oboe of the minor-key Variation 4, the dancing flutes of Variation 5, the hearty ho-ho of the horns in Variation 6, and the tender flute pastorale of Variation 7. The passacaglia-style coda threw out additional variations by the handful, exhilaratingly.
Stravinsky also fared well in the concise 1919 version of the Firebird music. Alsop kept a steady beat in the suite’s murky opening, in the Dance of the Enchanted Princesses, and later in the Lullaby, with its mournful bassoon and satin strings. The Philharmonic reveled in the wallop and clatter of the Infernal Dance, and of course in the ecstatic final apotheosis. Of the many fine wind solos, mention must be made of Mindy Kaufman’s brilliant piccolo in infernal lightning flashes and the elegantly phrased dance of the Firebird herself.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. nyphil.org
Leave a Comment
