Thursday March 12th, 2015 - Thomas Adès (above) in a dual role as composer and conductor for this New York Philharmonic concert which featured classic works of Beethoven and Berlioz and the US premiere of a recent Adès vocal work, Totentanz. The performance marked the composer's NY Philharmonic podium debut.
The Beethoven first symphony opened the evening. Here Maestro Adès, conducting without a score, immediately seized the imagination, both with his approach to the music and with the deft physicality of his conducting technique. The symphony - played with the Philharmonic's customary tonal sheen - sounded wonderfully fresh and vibrant, and watching Adès summon up the various voices with surety of purpose became quite mesmerizing. The music had a natural flow and - despite unwanted applause between movements - conductor and musicians gave it a vitality that was captivating.
Hector Berlioz's overture to Les Francs-juges (The Free Judges, or The Self-Appointed Judges) is all that remains of an opera the young composer wrote in 1826. When the mounting of a production of the music-drama became unfeasible, Berlioz discarded the opera's music or re-used it in other works. But the overture has survived as a concert piece, and the Philharmonic brought it superbly to life in Thomas Adès's brisk and dramatic reading. When listening to Berlioz, always expect the unexpected: a dense and powerful brass chorale suddenly looms up, and there's a scrappy passage of drum beats battling surges of strings. Later the violas saw feverishly away as the violins pluck in agitated accents. It's an exhilarating piece and tonight's performance was illuminating.
Totentanz ('Dance of Death') premiered in London in 2013; having been put off by Adès's opera The Tempest at The Met, I was admittedly wary of Totentanz and even considered sneaking out during the interval. But it proved an impressive work and one of the few pieces of 'new music' that I have heard in recent seasons that I wouldn't mind hearing again.
To begin with, the concept in highly imaginative - Death (baritone soloist) invites each of his victims to join him in a final dance, and they answer (mezzo-soprano soloist in multiple guises) with pride, defiance, or hopeless acceptance. The victims range from emperor and pope to innocent maiden and new-born child.
This ongoing dialogue, as Death visits one victim after another, is carried out against an unfurled tapestry of orchestral sound, from battering waves to delicate whispers. Percussion is a major player in the dance, and Adès shows a masterful touch in the orchestration of each victim's response.
Baritone Mark Stone as Death displayed strong, steady tone and ample reserves of power, plus a keen sense of both menace and enticement in his delivery of the text. His mezzo-soprano counter-part, Christine Stotijn, showed a somewhat weathered vocal quality but also a gift for expressiveness and a keen intensity of delivery that gave each portrait in her gallery of characterizations compelling individuality. She covered the wide range, from deep chest tones to sustained higher notes, with authority.
Having conducted the Beethoven and Berlioz from memory, the composer used a score for his own work, doubtless because of the vast number of cues he would have to give to his huge host of musicians.
The cumulative force of the work swept us along with a sense of the inevitability. In Death's meeting with his final victims - virgin and infant - the music took on a touching aspect. But for all his assumed gentleness in these moments, Death remained implacable.
In death we are all alike.