We get conditioned to how music is supposed to go based on the recordings we hear, and the performances we attend. In the case of Edgard Varèse, I got to know his music through Pierre Boulez’s recordings with the New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They both have a fierce edge to them, all gleaming angles and tightly controlled gestures. When Boulez conducts this music, what comes through most strongly is Varèse’s indebtedness to Debussy, who he admired, but there’s also a heavy dose of rhythmic drive reminiscent of early Stravinsky, where you can hear the musicians exploding the music from the seams. It sounds as if the gods conspired to create a hybrid Debussy-Stravinsky Superman, with the Strength of Twelve Men. Debussinsky! Strabussy! Varèse!
All of that is background to say that the sound Alan Gilbert got from his New York Philharmonic last Tuesday, in the second and final concert of the Lincoln Center Festival’s Varèse festival, wasn’t like that at all. The approach from conductor and players alike was pure America, with sparks flying out in all directions, and for all the clarity Gilbert and Co. created, there wasn’t any Boulezian silkiness in it. Their survey also had a few pieces in it Boulez hasn’t conducted (as far as I know): Tuning Up and Nocturnal, the latter featuring (again) Kent Tritle’s Musica Sacra and soprano Anu Komsi.
The percussion showpiece Ionisation started the program, and the ovation the players and Gilbert got at the beginning was one of the biggest I’d heard at that spot in the program. They proceeded to earn it, with a lithe and fluid performance that still had the requisite fire when called for. One surprise came near the end when the music is going near full tilt: At the back left corner behind the piano could be seen a flash of red hair, which turned out to belong to the excellent pianist Eric Huebner.
Octandre was up next, featuring a small group of winds and brass players. Perhaps thinking they had something to prove against their Varèse-savvy percussion colleagues, and certainly sounding like it, they laid down a tight performance of this. It’s easy to think of this music as the domain of new-music specialists, but they each sounded at home in this one, especially flutist Mindy Kaufman, oboist Liang Wang, trumpeter Philip Smith and trombonist Joseph Alessi.
Tuning Up was next and provided the evening’s biggest surprise, as a sort of ungainly piece of incidental music meant to evoke the of an orchestra, yes, tuning up. According to James M. Keller’s program notes, the piece was intended for a late-forties motion picture called Carnegie Hall, and to go in the space when the orchestra was warming up. (Critics take note what I just did there: I didn’t know anything about the piece, but the program-note writer did, and I gave him credit. You should, too.) It was supposed to be funny, but Varèse ended up writing a crazed pastiche with quotes of his own pieces thrown about, with the orchestra frequently coming to rest on the pitch A, or in chords that have an A in them, or just in relatively consonant sonorities, before flying off in other bizarre directions. A more schizophrenic, unpredictable piece is difficult to imagine, as if Monet planted neon water lilies inside a pointillist Seurat portrait, with Seurat himself using Day-Glo selections from Home Depot.
Alan Gilbert and his thrilling Philharmonic
It was the two main orchestral works where Gilbert’s influence on the Philharmonic seemed the most easily heard. The responsive, incisive, bright gleaming sound they brought to Arcana and Amériques was awesome to behold, as was their total authority. Each craggy sonority of Varèse’s teeming mind came across with shattering power, and the moment that sticks in my mind a week later is the final, concert-ending crescendo of Amériques, in which Gilbert held his baton right at his solar plexus, then led the soon-to-be deafening chord from that deep-seated place. He didn’t wave his hands above his head; he didn’t need to: This music came straight from the gut.
