Delirium Musicum brings fire and skill to eclectic NY debut
A record-setting July Fourth heat wave mercifully broke Tuesday night, but the string playing was hot at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, where a young ensemble from Los Angeles, Delirium Musicum, was making its New York debut, presented by Naumburg Orchestral Concerts.
The program, a cream-center assortment of brief musical selections from various countries and eras, showcased the virtuosity and versatility of the group’s dozen players, and particularly of its artistic director and violin soloist, Etienne Gara.
The violinist’s modest manner and dry wit introducing the pieces made an amusing contrast with the enthusiastic delivery of WQXR announcer Jeff Spurgeon, who was hosting a live radio broadcast of the concert.
Gara’s Hungarian and French ancestry got its due in the program’s first two items, the Intermezzo from Kodály’s Háry Janos Suite and Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre.
The Kodály was a bracing opener, barking out the dotted rhythm known as a “Scotch snap” but equally characteristic of Hungarian folk tunes. The players dug deep for robust tone in the piece’s outer sections, but lightened up delightfully for the dainty dance in the middle.
A different kind of dainty dance, of skeletons and wraiths doing the Danse Macabre, was rendered in exotic string sounds ranging from clacking col legno to slithery portamento. In the resourceful arrangement by Gianluca Bersanetti, these specters shook a leg bone and even managed an amorous moment or two.
Gara invited the arranger, whose work graced four of the program’s nine selections, to stand at his seat, garnering some well-earned applause from the audience.
Next was music from the ensemble’s home turf—purely a metaphor in this case, since the Desert Ecology that inspired Gabriella Smith’s 2023 piece by that name doesn’t feature much turf. Part of Treelogy, a multi-composer tribute to iconic trees of California, Smith’s piece was represented Tuesday by its fifth movement, “Cactus-Yucca Scrub,” in which that prickly flora was evoked at first by means of paper clips on the strings, but grew into a Joshua Tree forest vista of almost oceanic breadth.
Erik Satie’s piano piece Gnossienne No. 1 is a spare affair, its taciturn theme stepping along to a simple accompaniment. Bersanetti’s arrangement put that theme through a hall of mirrors, echoing through the sections, like an aural equivalent of “Nude Descending a Staircase.” The effect was mesmerizing.
Max Richter carried this idea of “recomposing” a good deal further in his version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, taking off on looped, fractured and rescored compositions using Vivaldi’s themes and moods. On Tuesday, the Richterized “Summer” began with languid two-note sighs interrupted by Cara’s furious violin solo that sparked a manic dance, tremolos slicing the air. In the second movement, high harmonics glided like cirrus clouds over a gentle riff in dotted rhythm, and violin and cello soloists took turns with a plaintive melody. Syncopation and changing meters set off another blazing violin solo over a locked-in ensemble playing with breathtaking speed and coordination.
Following intermission, Philip Glass’s Echorus sounded almost like another modernization of Vivaldi with its Baroque patterns of rising figures, gently disrupted by changing meters like a stream flowing over rocks. Two violins floated serenely overhead.
Literally overhead, briefly, was a helicopter. Normally the bane of outdoor concerts in Manhattan, the choppers were apparently grounded by lowering clouds Tuesday night, and this lone visitor was soon gone. Those clouds also moistened the audience with a light mist during the concert’s last half hour, but listeners’ enthusiasm for the performance appeared undampened.
In Schubert’s ultra-dramatic “Erlkönig,” arranger Bersanetti translated the pounding piano chords of the original song into razor-sharp chattering strings, while the voices of the desperate father, the terrified son, and seductive Death came through in vivid solos.
Jessie Montgomery’s 2014 piece Banner for string quartet and string ensemble sounded on Tuesday like a subtle commentary on this month’s national 250th anniversary celebrations, composed as it was from echoes of patriotic songs, including “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (sometimes called “the black national anthem”). This eventful score saw an expressive violin solo washed away by a rush of tremolo, low strings strutting to a tom-tom beat, and exuberant triplets swelling in crescendo and tumbling over syncopated rocks—an all-American spectacle for a month filled with them.
Since the spirit of Vivaldi was so often present in this program, both in the works and their execution, it seemed only right for the Red Priest himself to have the last word on Tuesday night. The “Winter” concerto from The Four Seasons shimmered with the ensemble’s most shiny, almost metallic tone, and Gara’s violin solo was as chilly and sparkling as snowflakes.
Primed by Spurgeon and Gara to beg for an encore, the audience cheered lustily at the brilliant end of Vivaldi’s first movement, and had to be settled down for the tender song of the Largo, sweetly delivered by YuEun Gemma Kim, an expressive second fiddle on several numbers (and also married to Gara). The start-and-stop finale, suggesting indoor activities of winter, closed with a fast and furious coda, prompting another ovation.
The promised encore was delivered, a sort of fantasy on the Middle Eastern tune “Misirlou”—pulled apart, hinted at, buried in counterpoint, and finally sung out in full. The arranger wasn’t identified, but one suspects the talented Mr. Bersanetti.
Naumburg Orchestral Concerts presents the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, conducted by Brad Lubman with mezzo-soprano Erin Wagner, in an all-Mozart program, 7:30 p.m. July 21 at the Naumburg Bandshell. Free admission. naumburgconcerts.org
