New York Classical Review

A Stravinsky night to remember with Kopatchinskaja‘s Philharmonic debut

Thu Apr 10, 2025 at 1:01 pm

By George Grella

Patricia Kopatchinskaja performed Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto with Jakub Hrůša and the New York Philharmonic Wednesday night at David Geffen Hall. Photo: Marco Borggreve

The main attraction at New York Philharmonic concerts in David Geffen Hall this week is newness. It comes in two parts; a world premiere composition and the Philharmonic debut of a world-class soloist. And for anyone wanting the comforts of the familiar, there’s a Brahms symphony.

Under Jakub Hrůša’s skillful baton Wednesday night, the string players delivered the first performance of Jessie Montgomery’s CHEMILUMINESCENCE; then the full orchestra backed violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja in Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. After intermission, it was the Brahms Symphony No. 1. If that felt like an afterthought, it’s because the first half was spectacular.

Montgomery’s piece is part of the Philharmonic’s Project 19 commissioning series, and for this work the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Bravo Vail Music Festival, and The Sphinx Organization, joined in. It’s heartening that these groups invested in Montgomery as she’s one of the cohort of black composers—with others such as Carlos Simon, Valerie Coleman, and Adolphus Hailstork—who are writing in the great American style of tonal modernism that descends from the mid-20th century. So much new music comes out of the academies that, though technically skillful, is mostly about other music, yet these composers write to communicate to the public.

To do that also takes skill, and CHEMILUMINESCENCE is a skillful, communicative work. Not that it isn’t about other music, but the bits that recall Leonard Bernstein, and a moment that could have been from Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, were appealing because they were about reaching people. The title comes from the process of chemical reactions producing light, but the music didn’t really model any kind of combustion. It was bright from the very start, and Hrůša got a big, rich, grainy sound out of the Philharmonic strings.

There was a series of chords, laid out at a moderate pace, gorgeous and with piquant bits of dissonance peaking through. A faster section had an eager, striving feeling, and also a slight but noticeable edge. In what overall seemed a fine performance, a stretch with multiple contrapuntal lines felt tangled up in the playing. That resolved into some proud, heart-on-the-sleeve feeling, then ambled to a conclusion with slow, almost bluesy, music.

All along, the music had something deeply appealing to say that was integral to the warm and sophisticated rhetoric. This is a terrific piece and one hopes that with multiple partners it will soon be in the repertoire. It was a fantastic way to open the concert.

And it set the stage for Kopatchinskaja’s jaw-dropping Stravinsky performance. It is still hard to grasp how this violinist, who is one of the great contemporary musicians across all genres, was only now standing in front of the Philharmonic. She is a fabulous instrumentalist, a violinist who plays like a fiddler, and even more a fabulous musical performer—she also does Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire as the vocalist.

Stravinsky’s tremendous Violin Concerto was the perfect vehicle to show her greatness. It demands some of the highest virtuosity of any concerto but is not about showing off technique but making extraordinary music that requires extraordinary playing. There are no long, flourishing scales and lines, no cadenzas, and also very little rest. Instead, there is a quadruple-stop that opens each of the four movements, lots of short, fast-switching bow strokes, difficult work for the left hand, and of course navigating the composer’s shifting rhythms at tempo. And if that wasn’t enough, the final Capriccio has a duet for the soloist and concertmaster that requires a mean player in the first chair.

Kopatchinskaja pretty much threw herself into this—that’s what she does. Each note not only had meaning but with her whole body behind it. This wasn’t superfluous, she puts a deep and charismatic personal stamp on everything, and she played it like it as the most important and necessary music in the world. Wednesday night.

Her playing was full of beauty, passion, and imagination—beyond fire into high-energy focus on digging out the idea of each line—and at times was mind-boggling. Her tone production and articulation were superb, and her command so great and agile that she could even tease at the music with well-chosen inflections.

In the second, gorgeous Aria, she produced five distinctive timbres, each fitting the quality of the line. one was a kind of blunt, wide sound one had never before heard from a violin, another completely defied description, it could have come from a science fiction sound effect from the old BBC Radio Workshop. In the sprinting Capriccio, she played the fast tenuto upward runs with her bow bouncing off the strings, which seemed impossible, but she nailed it. So did concertmaster Frank Huang, who was fantastic in the duet passage. Hrůša’s accompaniment was expert throughout, the textures and rhythms clear without any sharp accents, a great Stravinsky sound of wit and elegance, without exaggeration.

This performance was astonishing, less so for how Kopatchinskaja played the violin then how she played the music, with a complex balance of seriousness, empathy, and fun. Stravinsky would have been floored, and not just by that but by the second of her encores. Before the first, she asked the audience, “Do you like contemporary music?”

Then she played Crin, an amazing miniature composed by Jorge Sánchez-Chiong. An insane little piece that had her bowing and plucking fast, scrabbling passages simultaneously with both hands, while also whispering, chattering, whining, groaning, and screaming. This was not a joke piece, but a wild and immersive experiment in turning body and violin into a single, physical instrument that channels the fundamental urge to sound out into the universe.

For the second encore, she pointed out that Stravinsky didn’t write a cadenza for the concerto, so she arranged her own out of the music of the final two movements. It went from wrenching beauty to scintillating fun, again roping in Huang for the duet passage, which evolved into a quick improvisation. And it was altogether deeply, powerfully personal and almost unbelievable.

After that, the main interest in Brahms’ First was as a proving ground for the conductor. The sense of historical obligation, that Brahms felt he had to write this symphony, hangs over the work. Along with the turgid introduction to the first movement, and the middling imitation of the “Ode to Joy” in the last, there is often the sense of so much effort expanded for so little gain, only flashes of Brahms’ familiar depth and fluid drive. So how would it sound with Hrůša?

Quite fine, was the answer. Everything had the right amount of weight, just enough for effect but without lingering on music that can’t sustain too much emphasis. Even with the pounding timpani in the introduction, the music moved forward without seeming effort. The middle movements were lovely, again judged with just the right understanding of their form and reach, and even the ersatz Beethoven in the finale had a silkiness to it that was surprising. The orchestral sound as well was gorgeous throughout.

But there was no getting past the feeling that this night, Brahms was very much second fiddle.

This program repeats 7:30 p.m. Thursday and 11:00 a.m. Friday. nyphil.org