Spiritual music takes flight over water with Canellakis, Philharmonic
The ocean was a little dry Thursday night at David Geffen Hall, but heaven was open for business, as three modern masters took New York Philharmonic listeners on lofty spiritual journeys.
The Philharmonic under Karina Canellakis didn’t make many waves with Debussy’s La Mer, despite accurate and energetic playing. Whether because of the hall’s clinical acoustic or some other reason, the orchestra’s efforts rarely coalesced into the kind of elemental soundscape the composer was aiming for.
But that mild disappointment came at the end of a marvelous evening of intensely spiritual modern and post-modern music, lovingly shaped by the New York-born conductor, who was returning to the Philharmonic after a memorable debut last April.
Canellakis, who is chief conductor of the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest in The Netherlands, shared her Philharmonic deuxième on Thursday with a debutante, the German violinist Veronika Eberle, whose engaged, full-toned performance of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto marked her first appearance on a subscription program with the orchestra.
The unconventional program began conventionally enough with a short piece before the concerto. But just as Berg’s concerto is no flashy showpiece, Kaija Saariaho’s Lumière et Pesanteur (Light and Gravity) was no peppy overture. Transcribed from the central movement of the composer’s oratorio La passion de Simone, based on the writings of the ascetic philosopher Simone Weil, this six-minute piece set a contemplative tone on Thursday, as an expressive soprano melody from the oratorio became an Ivesian trumpet solo undergoing variations around the orchestra.
Oboe, violins, and celesta took their turns with the theme. The orchestral sound shimmered and undulated like the aurora borealis before floating upward to a pianissimo close, setting the stage for Berg’s meditation on youth and death.
When he interrupted work on his opera Lulu to pen this elegy for a young woman, Manon Gropius, who died on the threshold of life, Berg had no idea this would be the last piece he would complete before his own death of blood poisoning at age 50. There was a balance of light and gravity in this work too, which Thursday’s conductor and soloist struck assuredly.
Soloist Eberle began the work with exploratory arpeggios that blossomed into a full yet silvery tone, as conductor Canellakis sculpted an orchestral sound rich in woodwinds, horns and tuba. Youth’s defiance of gravity was evident in the dancing folk tune that closed the concerto’s first part.
This idyllic scene made the explosion of grief that opened the second part all the more shocking. The violinist responded with cadenza-like passages, slashing and marcato at first, later more tender and flecked with left-hand pizzicato.
Somewhat late in the process of composing this encounter between light and darkness, Berg was inspired to introduce a chorale set by Bach, “Es ist genug! Herr, wenn es Dir gefällt” (It is enough! Lord, when it pleases you), with its sadly prescient message of accepting death whenever it comes.
On Thursday, as the conductor kept the chorale flowing with sweeping gestures, Eberle duetted with a bassoon, sustained her sweet tone over orchestral swells and murmurs, and finally climbed high and pianissimo to the work’s tender conclusion.
Speaking of light-and-darkness contrasts, it would be hard to imagine a starker one than that of Olivier Messiaen’s Les Offrandes oubliées (The Forgotten Offerings), whose three brief movements swung between the serene gifts of Jesus and the mad frenzy of human life. Subtitled “Symphonic Meditation for Orchestra,” the work opened with a very slow melody for strings over a glow of woodwinds, “profoundly sad” as the composer described it, shaped by Canellakis with full-body gestures and no baton. The well-tuned unisons and octave doublings were typical of the high technical level the orchestra maintained all evening.
The conductor took up her baton to lead the organized chaos that followed, an explosion of pounding percussion, furious strings, brass exclamations, and rhythmic dislocations, representing a humanity too busy and conflict-ridden to accept the gifts Jesus offers. That was over in a flash, replaced by the image of Jesus blessing “the bread of Life and of Love” in a high, soft, sustained string line, as weightless and shapely as a cirrus cloud. Conductor Canellakis responded to the applause afterward by standing up the orchestra’s first violins for a well-deserved group bow.
According to a sidebar in the evening’s program, the critic Pierre Lalo, normally well disposed toward Debussy’s nature scenes, criticized La Mer at its premiere as “not…nature, but…a reproduction of nature, a wonderfully refined, ingenious, and carefully composed reproduction, but a reproduction nonetheless.” Perhaps that first performance resembled the Philharmonic’s on Thursday, in which the Berliozian transparency and separation of sections that so distinguished the Messiaen performance served Debussy’s seascape less well.
At least horns and harps led the way to a fine high-noon climax in the first movement, “From Dawn to Noon on the Sea,” and went on to ripple and surge with glockenspiel and triangle in the next movement, “The Play of the Waves.”
Encouraged by vigorous swaying and bobbing on the podium, the orchestra seemed better at playing loud than playing big. But in the last movement, “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea,” horn calls over string-crossing wavelets at last stirred up a forte climax of oceanic proportions, and the moaning wind theme had a setting to match its broad reach.
The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Tuesday. nyphil.org
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