Times critics preview the ny phil biennial nytimes

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Times Critics Preview the NY Phil Biennial - NYTimes.com

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MUSIC

What’s New? Ask the Philharmonic Times Critics Preview the NY Phil Biennial

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

MAY 22, 2014

The music world has long looked with envy at the art world for the way it succeeds in drawing people to embrace, or at least check out, contemporary works.

So next week, the New York Philharmonic will follow the lead of art curators in Venice and, closer to home, the Whitney Museum of American Art, by starting the first NY Phil Biennial, an 11­day festival opening on Wednesday at Lincoln Center and elsewhere in the city to give audiences “a snapshot of today’s music.”

“It’s a little bit cheeky, I realize, to call something a ‘biennial’ the first time around,” Alan Gilbert, the Philharmonic’s music director, said in a recent interview. “But the idea was, in a short period of time, to let people in New York, or people who come to New York, see a wide range in some of the new music threads that we consider exciting and important.”

So the orchestra — which gave the premieres of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony and Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” — and its Biennial partners will play works by Christopher Rouse, George Benjamin, Pierre Boulez, Matthias Pintscher, Toshio Hosokawa, HK Gruber and more. (A pass to all 21 performances, space permitting, is $95; information: nyphil.org.)

Here, the classical music critics of The New York Times offer a selective guide to the Biennial’s offerings. MICHAEL COOPER

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It says a lot about the breadth of the inaugural NY Phil Biennial that this ambitious festival of contemporary music opens with two unconventional opera productions. First up is the Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of “The Raven,” a monodrama by the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, in its American premiere. (It opens on Wednesday at John Jay College.) Based on the haunting tale by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” features the mezzo­soprano Fredrika Brillembourg and the ballerina Alessandra Ferri. Neal Goren conducts the production, directed, choreographed and designed by Luca Veggetti. The opera is paired with another work based on Poe, André Caplet’s “Conte fantastique” for harp and string quartet.

The next night, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alan Gilbert teams up with Giants Are Small, the theatrical company of the director­ designer Doug Fitch, to present HK Gruber’s “Gloria — A Pig Tale.” In this work from the early 1990s, Mr. Gruber, a brilliantly eclectic Austrian composer, tells of a mountain­dwelling pig ostracized for her beauty. This production is a collaboration among the Philharmonic, the Juilliard School and the museum. The staged operas that Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Fitch have presented with the Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall have been highlights of the Gilbert years. ANTHONY TOMMASINI The music of Liszt might seem a strange inclusion for a festival dedicated to contemporary music, but his pioneering scores foreshadowed many future developments, which will be illustrated in Marino Formenti’s solo piano recital at the Kaplan Penthouse on June 4. Mr. Formenti will pair Liszt’s Hungarian Folk Song No. 5, “Bagatelle without tonality” and “Funérailles” (among others) with selections by an eclectic array of living and 20th­century composers, including Friedrich Cerha, Gyorgy Kurtag, Gyorgy Ligeti, Wolfgang Rihm, Morton Feldman, Galina Ustvolskaya and John Adams.

As part of its contemporary offerings, the Biennial is presenting an oratorio by Julia Wolfe. The coal­mining legacy of central Pennsylvania inspired Ms. Wolfe’s “Anthracite Fields,” whose energetic, colorful scores

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blend folk, classical and rock elements. She used oral histories, interviews with miners’ descendants, speeches, local rhymes and coal advertisements for her work for eight­part chorus and instrumental ensemble. The story is relayed from different viewpoints, including the labor movement and the “breaker boys,” who worked above ground.

The Bang on a Can All­Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, conducted by Julian Wachner, will perform the coal cantata on Friday and Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall. That work is featured on a double bill with Steven Mackey’s oratorio “Dreamhouse.” VIVIEN SCHWEITZER Pablo Heras­Casado, the music director of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, cut his teeth on thorny contemporary music. And he has become associated enough with Pierre Boulez that he replaced that eminent composer and conductor at the podium of the Lucerne Festival last year when Mr. Boulez suffered a shoulder injury.

So naturally, Mr. Boulez is a figure Mr. Heras­Casado and St. Luke’s will explore for the Biennial, in the first of two “Circles of Influence” concerts at the Rose Theater. Nearly every work on both evenings is an American or New York premiere.

On Saturday, Mr. Boulez’s “Mémoriale (...explosante­fixe ...

Originel)” and “une page d'éphéméride,” an almost Debussy­like piano solo, are on the program alongside works by Bruno Mantovani, Heinz Holliger, Philippe Manoury and Marc­André Dalbavie. Then a miniature British invasion arrives June 1, when works by Ryan Wigglesworth, Colin Matthews and Helen Grime join George Benjamin’s intricately textured Octet and the incantatory “Upon Silence,” with the mezzo­soprano Abigail Fischer, in an evening focused on Mr. Benjamin. It is an ideal primer on his work and context before the New York premiere, next year, of his acclaimed 2012 opera, “Written on Skin.” ZACHARY WOOLFE I can’t tell you what the pieces in “Beyond Recall” — the Philharmonic’s Contact! performance in the Museum of Modern Art’s garden lobby on Thursday — sound like, because none of them have been performed in the United States before. But I have an idea of what they look

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like.

“Beyond Recall” is being conducted by the German composer Matthias Pintscher, whose own works are heavily influenced by the visual arts. Here, he conducts Philharmonic musicians in nine pieces, by nine composers, that are influenced by sculptures commissioned by the Salzburg Foundation in Mozart’s hometown. Though the sculptures themselves did not travel to New York, you can “hear” them: The metal chairs of Marina Abramovic’s “Spirit of Mozart” become Bruno Mantovani’s “Spirit of Alberti”; the squiggly “Connection” by Manfred Wakolbinger is translated into Vito Zuraj’s “Insideout”; and the enigmatic Madonna­like figure of Stefan Balkenhol’s “Frau im Fels” is reincarnated in Dai Fujikura’s “silence seeking solace.”

Mr. Pintscher returns on June 6 to lead two premieres at Avery Fisher Hall. Expect his trademark iridescent colors in his own “Reflections on Narcissus,” a work for solo cellist here performed by the searing Alisa Weilerstein. Also on that program is Carter’s last finished work, “Instances,” and a new work to be selected by EarShot, an emerging­voices program of the American Composers Orchestra. CORINNA da FONSECA­ WOLLHEIM For most denizens of the New York classical music world, the season is quietly waning. But Christopher Rouse, the composer in residence of the New York Philharmonic, is making a noisy exit to a sort of dark triumphal march.

To anyone in such a position, the premiere of his latest symphony — in this case Mr. Rouse’s Fourth, commissioned by the Philharmonic and to be conducted by Alan Gilbert at Avery Fisher Hall on June 5 and 7 as a sort of capstone to the orchestra’s Biennial — might be deemed honor enough.

But at a time when second performances are almost rarer than premieres, Mr. Rouse is also just coming off a revival of his outsize Requiem of 2007 a few weeks ago, with Mr. Gilbert leading the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall as part of the final Spring for Music festival.

Requiem or no — and despite the composer’s caveat that the

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symphony’s message “may not be a happy one” — it has to be a gratifying time for Mr. Rouse, free to spread gloom to his heart’s delight.

The program is filled out by the New York premiere of Peter Eotvos’s “DoReMi,” a violin concerto written for the virtuoso Midori, who performs it here, and by two premieres of works selected through the American Composers Orchestra’s EarShot new­music program. JAMES R. OESTREICH A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014, on page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s New? Ask the Philharmonic.

© 2014 The New York Times Company

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