Above: Anita Rachvelishvili, the stellar soloist at Carnegie Hall tonight
~ Author: Oberon
Friday May 18th, 2018 - Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting The MET Orchestra with mezzo-soprano soloist Anita Rachvelishvili at Carnegie Hall. Works by Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky were on the bill.
Songs and Dances of Death, composed in the mid-1870s, is a set of four songs. In Lullabye, a mother cradles her sick child, who grows increasingly feverish. Death appears, disguised as a babysitter, and rocks the infant to eternal sleep. Here Ms. Rachvelishvili displayed a haunting use of almost straight-tone, employed as a means of lyrical expression. Her timbre is darkish, wine-coloured, with a haunting quality.
Serenade depicts the figure of Death waiting outside the window of a dying woman, serenading her like a wooing lover. Ms. Rachvelishvili was simply magnificent here, the lushness and house-filling strength of her voice making a vivid impression. The music rises to a passionate conclusion.
In Trepak, a drunken peasant stumbles outside into the snow and becomes caught in a blizzard. The figure of Death invites him to dance the Trepak with him. The drunken man freezes to death, dreaming of summer fields and doves. The song starts softly, then a rhythmic figuration springs up; the bass-clarinet is prominent. Ms. Rachvelishvili's vocal power, unleashed, was something to hear; and she brought forth some simply massive chest tones. For all the thrill of her voluminous, rich sound, she can also be extraordinarily subtle.
The Field Marshal is the final song, wherein the figure of Death is depicted as an officer summoning the dead troops of opposing armies after a horrific battle. As the ghostly soldiers parade before him, the Field Marshall speaks of them in remembrance. A bit of tension on some of the singer's upper notes was swept aside by the visceral impact of her singing; in a calmer interlude, the straight-tone was again brought forth to extraordinary effect.
Ms. Rachvelishvili received rapturous applause and was called back twice for additional bows. Someone handed flowers up to her, always nice to see. The crowd clearly wanted an encore, but perhaps the singer knew best; she left us with the echoes of the powerful Mussorgsky songs.
Following his catastrophic marriage to his former student, Antonina Miliukova, which lasted all of two months, Tchaikovsky began writing his fourth symphony. Struggling with his sexuality and battling depression, he produced a symphony which, he is quoted as saying, is about Fate: "the fatal power which prevents one from attaining the goal of happiness".
The 4th is vastly pleasing in so many respects, with its titanic fanfares, its plaintive oboe solo in the Andantino, its originality in a Scherzo full of plucking strings, and the rush and plush of the final Allegro con fuoco. What is doesn't do - for me, at any rate - is reach the depths of feeling that the composer so often evoked in other works.
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's extremely animated podium style became wearying to watch after a while. This orchestra plays so well on their own; the musicians hardly need a conductor at all. Constantly in motion, Ms. Gražinytė-Tyla rose on her toes, hopped up and down, waved her baton overhead, and energetically gave cues. I ended up closing my eyes, to avoid this visual distraction.
Though the 4th does not seem to me to be peak Tchaikovsky - though the composer himself thought highly of it, apparently - it did make me long to see EUGENE ONEGIN, SWAN LAKE, SLEEPING BEAUTY, and Balanchine's SERENADE.
There were empty seats around me, and the couple behind me remarked that the MET Orchestra series no longer seems to be the sell-out it has always been in seasons past. I wonder if the absence of James Levine has anything to do with it?
~ Oberon