Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, led new works by Joel Thompson and Tan Dun amid pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
Jaap van Zweden, left, and Joel Thompson, who composed one of the new works that the New York Philharmonic performed on Thursday.Credit...Chris Lee
Joseph Alessi, the Philharmonic’s principal trombone, performed Tan Dun’s “Three Muses in Video Game.”Credit...Chris Lee
By Zachary Woolfe
March 22, 2024
New York Philharmonic
When Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, led the orchestra at the beginning of the year, the program featured repertory hits: a Wagner prelude, a Beethoven piano concerto and a Brahms symphony. Last week he returned with more of the same: a Mendelssohn overture, a Mozart piano concerto and a Beethoven symphony.
This felt a little like “let Jaap be Jaap,” with van Zweden — whose short Philharmonic tenure ends in a few months — finally freed of the burden of presenting new works and past rarities, and able to focus wholly on the standards that have been at the center of his conducting career.
But on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, he — or at least the administrators who have encouraged more adventure in his choices — offered a reminder that his time in New York had not been entirely without variety. In fact, the concert offered something unusual in the orchestral field: In a mixed program that will be repeated on Saturday and Sunday, the two (two!) premieres on the first half together lasted longer than the Mendelssohn symphony (yes, more Mendelssohn) after intermission.
It was too bad that neither of those new pieces made a positive impression and that performing them together worked against both.
First came Joel Thompson’s “To See the Sky,” obscurely subtitled “an exegesis for orchestra.” Two years ago, the Philharmonic premiered Thompson’s sumptuously moody song cycle “The Places We Leave.” Now 35, he has largely specialized in vocal music, and the 20-minute “To See the Sky,” heard for the first time on Thursday, is his longest instrumental work; you got the sense of a young composer trying to figure out how to fill such a substantial span.
The titles of the piece’s three sections together form a quotation from the musician Cécile McLorin Salvant: “Sometimes/you have to gaze into a well/to see the sky.” From its beginning, with a series of soft rumbles that explode into violent bursts, much of the work alternates sections of loud and bumptious rhythms, like a parody of hip-hop beats, with periods of subdued lyricism. But these repetitive assertive-then-reticent cycles don’t accumulate interest or tension — though there are nice touches, like the sound of a trumpet flecked with harp.
The second part includes a mournful solo for muted trumpet, like street jazz heard from a high-up window. But this bluesy nocturne is — predictably, by this point — interrupted by noisy, vigorous rhythms in the full orchestra, which in turn recede for more quiet, spare material, and so on. Soaring, twinklingly triumphant music in the third section seems meant to conjure the expansive sky of the title; a coda starts out with handclaps, then accumulates Afro-Caribbean percussion, but those intriguing textures are eventually swamped by saccharine strings.
When it planned this lineup, the Philharmonic could not have known that Thompson’s piece would end up so similar to Tan Dun’s 2021 trombone concerto, “Three Muses in Video Game,” which had its New York premiere on Thursday with Joseph Alessi, the orchestra’s principal trombone, as soloist.
Thompson’s and Tan’s works are approximately the same length, and both are in three sections. (Tan’s “muses” are a trio of ancient Chinese instruments — the bili, xiqin and sheng — each distantly evoked in a part of the concerto.) Both relentlessly oscillate between shaded, noirish passages for strings and forceful sections for more of the orchestra.
Both lean on film-score tropes. A racing pulse out of Bernard Herrmann finds its way into the first section of “To See the Sky,” and “Three Muses in Video Game” aspires, in its middle, to John Williams-esque melodic sweep. But unlike Williams’s best, this stuff never took flight; Tan’s piece, for all its frenetic changeability, is plodding at its core.
Alessi brought a clear, smooth sound to the solo part’s droops and hoots. His slippery, jittery cadenza in the first section, over a thin frost of strings, is the most memorable moment in the score, though the eerie sliding of those strings is an effect that gets old fast. By the end of the concerto, with the trombone section acting as a kind of support team for the soloist, Asian and Western elements come together, both traditions rendered equally cloying.
Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony (“Scottish”) was more dependable, and its Adagio was lovely — the strings blending seamlessly with the oboe line and the movement building with persuasive authority before receding into a gentle glow. The first movement was clear and nimble, its dotted rhythms never too heavy. But van Zweden pushed the tempos of the second and fourth, as he sometimes does in fast music, in a way that felt less risky or exhilarating than hounded, leaving the players awkwardly scrambling.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, last week, fared better. The renovated Geffen Hall has more lucid acoustics than the space did in 2015, when van Zweden led this classic work as a candidate for the Philharmonic’s podium. Now, as then, the third movement was the highlight, its danciness somehow both menacing and celebratory.
It had a gracefully conducted predecessor on the program in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, with Conrad Tao a witty, exuberant soloist. Tao performed his own cadenzas, which glanced past Mozart’s time toward Sturm und Drang Romanticism and even hints of modernist fragmentation. And his playful ornaments in the Finale subtly enlivened this chestnut: truly a meeting of old music and fresh spirit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/arts ... weden.html