SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

 

New York Philharmonic

Anu Komsi, soprano

The Oratorio Society of New York

Kent Tritle, music director and chorus master

Alan Gilbert, conductor

 

Ionisation (1929-31)

Octandre (1923)

Tuning Up (1947; completed by Chou Wen-chung, 1998)

Arcana (1925-27; rev. 1960)

Nocturnal (1961; completed by Chou Wen-chung, 1969)

Amériques (1918-21; rev. 1929)

 

In its concert the previous night, the International Contemporary Ensemble set a dauntingly high bar with some astonishingly played performances of some of Edgard Varèse’s works for chamber ensemble. But on night two of Lincoln Center’s Varèse: (R)evolution, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic blew the roof off of Avery Fisher Hall with equally polished, smashingly played readings of the composer’s orchestral output.

 

Ionisation was a watershed when it premiered, hoisting percussion into its rightful place as worthy of performing without any other instruments (except piano, exploited here for its percussive effects). With 14 musicians sprayed across the back of the stage, commandeering what looked to be hundreds of implements, Gilbert led a meticulous, clattering procession almost assaultive in its aggressiveness. Octandre, on the other hand, calls for no percussion among its eight musicians, three of whom had star turns anchoring the work’s brief movements: Liang Wang’s supple oboe, Mindy Kaufman’s delicious piccolo, and Eugene Levinson’s growling double bass.

 

I first heard Tuning Up some ten years ago with Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, on a fascinating program that included Ligeti and Mahler. It is an odd duck, originally intended to accompany a film scene of an orchestra warming up before a performance, but Varèse’s take caused an uproar and the composer never even saw it rehearsed. Mr. Chou again came to the rescue in 1998 to create a performing version from the existing drafts. It is an amusing synthesis of bits and pieces from other Varèse works, all repeatedly returning to the linear “A” which threads through the score. Some may find it irascibly gimmicky; to me it shows glimmers of the composer’s humor, sometimes buried beneath the orchestral madness.

 

The other oddity was Nocturnal, the composer’s last piece, also completed by Mr. Chou, for orchestra, soprano soloist and men’s chorus, with texts a hybrid of Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest and Varese’s own nonsense syllables. Here the luminous Anu Komsi returned, counterbalanced by the weighty chant-like tones of the men of The Oratorio Society of New York, led by Kent Tritle. Like some of his other works, Nocturnal seems to have a mysterious, unseen agenda—a fragmented window into some ritual from the past, only recently unearthed.

 

Anticipation has to be high when one enters a hall and finds the stage extended some 30 feet, to accommodate the massive orchestra required later in the evening. To conclude the second half (separated by Nocturnal), Gilbert and some 125 musicians had the space bursting its sonic seams for Arcana and Amériques—interestingly, premiered in two successive years by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. I can’t imagine what an audience in the mid-1920s would have thought of either of these pieces, which exploit an orchestra for maximum volume and power, and each with a spine of percussion unheard of at the time. Anyone coming to the Philharmonic tonight could not have been disappointed with Gilbert, who quietly, meticulously urged the gigantic cadre of musicians into a shivering, spine-tingling roar.

 

Bruce Hodges