When a great orchestra comes to town, audiences traditionally expect a big statement – a mighty symphony, or a great-composer focus. The New York Philharmonic’s residency at the Barbican this month is simultaneously less grandiose and more ambitious. Its organising idea is the connective programming that its music director, Alan Gilbert, explored in his Royal Philharmonic Society lecture last week. And there’s not a symphony in sight.
There was New York glamour in the series’ opening concert, nevertheless. It could not be otherwise with Joyce DiDonato. The mezzo-soprano artfully combined both musical intelligence and vocal control to capture the decadence – it’s the only word for songs that at one point get off on the decapitation of innocent victims – of Ravel’s 1903 Shéhérazade song cycle. But she did it more by exquisite restraint than by show, emphasising the self-regard of the Tristan Klingsor texts, rather than milking Ravel’s orientalism. Ever the trooper, DiDonato gave Richard Strauss’s Morgen as a lusciously indulgent encore.
The New Yorkers’ accompaniments were notable more for skill of execution (the dynamics exceptionally well-calibrated by Gilbert), than for much sense of warmth. Something of the same objectivity and distance marked Gilbert’s performances of Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales of 1911-12 and, more surprisingly, of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier Suite. In both cases, one was impressed rather than delighted.
Gilbert began the evening with real conviction, however, with the overdue UK premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx. This is an eclectic, almost postmodern piece for a very large orchestra, full of stylistic allusion and dynamic twists, which somehow retains a unifying character and direction. The confidence with which it moves from quirky little slurs in the low strings to a full-on Latin percussion fest in a few bars is merely one striking example of the way Salonen’s score deftly reinvents itself in vivid ways. It underlined the vigour and clarity Gilbert brings to contemporary repertoire and why his approach to music is so notable.
