Above: violinist Alena Baeva, photo by Andrej Grilc
Author: Ben Weaver
Friday November 17th, 2023 - Maestro Paavo Järvi returned to the New York Philharmonic’s David Geffen Hall for concerts featuring less familiar works by two of 20th Century’s greatest composers: Benjamin Britten and Sergei Prokofiev.
Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, Op. 15 - the only work he composed in that genre - was written in 1938-39, soon after Britten heard the world premiere performance of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto in 1936. Indeed, the soloist who premiered Berg’s work, Antonio Brosa, would premiere Britten’s Concerto in 1940 conducted by Sir John Barbirolli, and do so with the New York Philharmonic in NYC. (In another bit of trivia, Britten composed some of the concerto while staying with Aaron Copland.) Britten revised the composition as late as 1965 (when he heard that Jascha Heifetz was considering performing it, though Heifetz would supposedly go on to declare the work “unplayable”), and it was this final edition that violinist Alena Baeva performed in these concerts. (It's playable after all.)
Opening with a series of timpani strokes can only evoke Beethoven’s Violin Concerto from more than a century earlier. The violin enters with a lament in the instrument’s highest registers - something Britten does often in the concerto. The second half of the first movement is taken over by a sort of a march, a persistent distant thumping, which reminded me of the villagers hunting Peter Grimes in Britten’s opera, composed a few years later.
Ms. Baeva, in her New York Philharmonic debut, makes a rather small and tinny sound that struggled to make an impression in the concerto’s dramatic moments. To Maestro Järvi’s credit, he kept the orchestra under control, so as not to cover the soloist altogether. But in the more intimate parts, Ms. Baeva was a deeply moving narrator, which makes me want to hear her in a chamber music setting. In the extended cadenza that concludes the second movement, Ms. Baeva was mesmerizing and dazzling. The final movement is a series of variations in the form of a passacaglia, and it concludes with a lament (movement is marked Andante lento), and here Ms. Baeva’s lyrical side was wonderfully moving.
Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor, Op. 111 lives - unfairly - in the shadow of his more famous Fifth. Composed in 1945-47, and premiered later that year by Evgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic, it is a magnificent work that never drags despite its roughly 45-minute run time.
The Sixth’s fortunes changed over the years. Despite an acclaimed premiere in 1947, it was soon condemned by all the usual Stalinist suspects and disappeared from Soviet concert halls until the 1960s. (It was more popular in the West; Leopold Stokowski first conducted it with the NY Philharmonic in 1949). One of the complaints against the work was that it was not cheerful enough to inspire the Soviet people. Which is perhaps fair enough, but Prokofiev was not trying to cheer anyone up with this particular symphony. It opens darkly in the low strings before moving on to more lyrical themes. The second movement is the most emotional part of the symphony, woodwinds shrieking in agony. And the third movement is the most cheerful of the three, but not cheerful enough to appease Stalin.
The Sixth sounds to me like the most mature of Prokofiev’s work. It never disintegrates into circus music, which - no matter how ironically - can on occasion be tiresome. Paavo Järvi certainly has this music in his bones and the NY Philharmonic delivered a stupendous performance. I ended up taking almost no notes as the music played because I was so hypnotized by what we heard. This is the sort of music the New York Philharmonic plays as well as anyone, and better than most.
Also included on the program was an unknown to most of us Overture No. 2 by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis. Composed in 1958-59 it is a thrilling, expertly crafted work. Its highly dramatic, driven, almost cinematic opening (it would fit many movie chases beautifully), gives way to a lovely, if brief, cello solo (Patric Jee as the principal cellist in this performance). The middle section of the overture is reduced to a wonderful chamber-scale (just three violins at one point) before the breathless opening section returns. The work ends with three chords, long pauses between each one. Frequently, an audience will applaud prematurely, and certainly with an unfamiliar composition such as this, the risks were high. And yet - the silence held, Paavo Järvi controlling not just the orchestra, but, however briefly, the audience as well.
Which brings me to a brief point about audience behavior and etiquette; we all know that both have degraded seriously over the years. At this performance, sitting just an empty seat away myself and my companion, a young woman played Candy Crush on her phone the entire evening. She was there with two friends, who seemed more interested in the music than she was...but they did not ask her to stop. I am reminded how, some years ago, the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn got in trouble at a Carnegie Hall concert for yelling at another audience member for behaving badly. Perhaps we should have been celebrating Mr. Shawn instead.
~ Ben Weaver