Well, we couldn't resist going back to Carnegie Hall for another concert because Yannick and his Phabulous Phillies were in town to play Bartok's opera "Bluebeard" in a concert version. It was a remarkable performance; I liked it far better than the staged performance we heard last year at the Met. In fact, I think "Bluebeard" is one of the operas where the orchestral part is so vivid and dramatic that any staging and scenery is superfluous. I can't imagine a better orchestral performance; the moment of the opening of the fifth door, when the orchestra on stage along with the three trumpets and three trombones in the balcony and the organ play with a fearsome fortissimo was awesome in the real sense. Throughout the piece, the orchestra created extraordinary sounds. The two singers, (including Vancouver's John Relyea) were excellent to my ears, though with the acoustics of Carnegie Hall, the singers project more clearly to the orchestral seats, and less so up to the balcony where we were. (The same is in general true of the strings.) I was OK with that, Vera not so much.
The concert began with excerpts from Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake". I am not a fan of Tchaikovsky, and even less so of "Swan Lake". (Not that I have ever seen the ballet or heard the music in concert before.) But I seem to know all the tunes. What the performance brought back to me was memories of watching late night movies on TV many, many years ago, when one of the staples of advertising was a company that offered LP's of something like "The World's Greatest Romantic Melodies". And you would inevitably hear snippets of Tchaikovsky, because he wrote a lot of them. And hearing Swan Lake performed made me realize what so many of contemporary classical music audiences want to hear is their favorite tunes, untrammeled by any musical complications. Tchaikovsky does do some musically interesting things at times, but I don't really see the point of doing this work in a concert performance. Let the ballet people have it. The orchestra's performance was spirited and lively without any particular precision or detail.
Two nights later, it was Geffen Hall (no climbing to the balcony!) and American music's turn when we went to hear an all John Adams concert in honor of his 70th birthday, with Alan Gilbert and the NY Philharmonic. There were two pieces on the program, "Harmonielehre" and "Absolute Jest". Adams, who was there, said that both pieces were "atypical" for him. "Absolute Jest" was absolutely confounding to my ears. Which is a good thing, I think. It is written for string quartet and large orchestra, and based on some fragments from Beethoven's string quartets. Adams actually had the quartet play the Beethoven originals in his introduction. The piece uses more than just these fragments, though; there are many other references to other Beethoven works. The reason I say that the work is confounding is that it moves between Beethoven's musical language and Adam's musical language, sometimes doing both at the same time. It's not a collage or pastiche. Nothing is really "in quotes". It is, to my ears, a sincere attempt to write in the style of both Beethoven and Adams at the same time. So you really don't know what to make of what you are hearing. It's kind of like hearing hearing someone speak in two different languages at the same time. My sense is that once you get used to it, the piece would probably make a lot of sense. Adams has said that he was very interested in counterpoint when he was writing this piece, and that he worked extremely hard on it. There was initially a lot of unfavorable critical, but it seems to be better received now. I would happily hear it again.
Harmonielehre is a different story. It was written in the 1980's and was Adam's big breakthrough in freeing himself from the influence of Schoenberg and the postwar avant-garde. It's also kind of a mashup, in this case between minimalism and heavy-duty late 19th century romanticism. A kind of exorcism, if you will. I liked parts of the piece, but the middle movement is very slow, with long and beautifully shaped melodic lines, some interesting harmonic touches, but not much else. I like the fast parts, though. The audience was enthusiastic, and the performance was excellent.
I will certainly miss Alan Gilbert when he leaves the NY Philharmonic at the end of this season. He has done some wonderful and adventurous things while being director, though I have a sense that the Philharmonic is struggling with audiences, with the eternal dilemma of trying to please their aging subscribers who want their Tchaikovsky and their soloist superstars while also at the same time trying to attract new audiences for new music. It's a very difficult thing to pull off, and I am not sure that Gilbert had the ability to make it happen.
