Gilbert conducts Philadelphia Orchestra (1st revie

With a young orchestra,
who needs old chestnuts?

DAN COREN

Just a little while ago I was complaining about the Philadelphia Orchestra’s unimaginative programming and bemoaning the vast expanses of empty seats at Verizon Hall. I wouldn’t have predicted that a concert featuring the premiere of a work by a little-known Swedish composer, an obscure work by Bela Bartok, and a symphony by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen would be played before a large, enthusiastic, diversely-aged audience. But that was indeed the case on February 9, when Alan Gilbert, the New York Philharmonic’s young director-in-waiting, conducted Anders Hillborg’s Exquisite Corpse, Bartok’s own orchestral arrangement of his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (featuring pianists Emanuel Ax and his wife Yoko Nozaki), and Nielsen’s Second Symphony.

The title of Hillborg’s work refers to a parlor game devised by the early 20th-Century Surrealists (this was news to me, by the way) and is supposedly a pastiche of quotations from other 20th-Century works. Perhaps it is; it certainly echoed with many evocations of Sibelius, John Adams and, especially, Gyorgy Ligeti. But what Exquisite Corpse sounded like to me more than anything else was the work of somebody with a strong musical imagination of his own.

Lately I’ve grown increasingly impatient with gentle, inoffensive contemporary music, especially recent American music— music that seems so eager to apologize for the sins of the late avant-garde. So it was wonderful to hear this lushly orchestrated adventurous blast of a piece, 14 minutes celebrating the best of the 20th Century with hardly a nod to traditional tonality.

I wish I could say I enjoyed the rest of the concert as much.

Bartok the wimp

I had heard the Bartok in its original form a few times and, hearing it again, was reminded how frustrating a piece it is. You’d think Bartok— the composer of Music for Percussion, Strings, and Celeste and the orgiastically energetic Third and Fourth String Quartets, a composer who allegedly was inspired by Stravinsky’s Les Noces with its four pianos and battery of percussion— would use this medium to knock our socks off. But even in its original form, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is simply a wimpy piece. And why Bartok bothered orchestrating it is a mystery to me. In Saturday’s arrangement, it was in fact a Sonata for Two Pianos, Two Percussionists who spend a lot of the time looking like they’re about to do something, and many spectators holding musical instruments who, every once in a while, actually play them.

Ax and Nozaki were superb, as you’d expect.

A much younger Orchestra

The Nielsen offers many virtues: It is lucid, full of interesting ideas, passionate and at times witty– but it’s the kind of music that makes me think: “No musicians were harmed in the composing of this music.” My apologies to the many people who feel the same passion for Nielsen that I do for Stockhausen.

But the big story here is not what I think; it’s what seems to have happened to the Philadelphia Orchestra and its audience. The Orchestra has become a much younger group since Christoph Eschenbach’s arrival, and they play as if they’re having a ball. Needless to say, they sound as peerless as ever. And, at least on this occasion, they proved that you don’t need to play any old chestnuts at all to attract a knowledgeable and engaged audience.



To read another review by Beeri Moalem, click here.
To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.