Some years ago, I expended a couple months sitting down in on a conducting seminar at Juilliard. It was a hyperelite type of pedagogy: an orchestra of 40 pupils executing the bidding of four trainee maestros, below the supervision of the New York Philharmonic’s audio director at the time, Alan Gilbert. The standout in that very small club was Karina Canellakis, a New Yorker who by now had a couple of a long time actively playing violin in the Berlin Philharmonic beneath her belt and who amazed me with her precision and musicality and a do the job ethic that would have performed John Henry proud. She’s now an set up star in Europe (main conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic), but it’s hardly ever as well late to be a rookie. Her hometown debut with the New York Philharmonic was belated, then postponed, because of to her pregnancy, and ultimately rattled by the aftermath of a minimal earthquake.
All through the live performance, a chorus of piercing alerts established off hundreds of telephones in Geffen Corridor, helpfully informing the general public that a tremor experienced taken position an hour ahead of. Then arrived a series of soon after-alerts, scattered bleeps that stored ricocheting unstoppably from pocket to pocket for virtually two hrs, inserting themselves into the spare textures of Webern, altering the ending of a Richard Strauss tone poem, and ripping by a silent Satie piano solo. It was like heading to a museum when a gang of activists rushes by means of the galleries aggressively hurling soup at all the paintings. Barely a passage went untouched. (Possibly viewers users genuinely dislike to convert their equipment off, or they in no way acquired how to eliminate their watches.) Kudos, then, to Canellakis, the pianist Alice Sara Ott, and the orchestra for soldiering via the din and turning out a concert that was by turns delicate, stirring, fascinating, and joyous.
The system brimmed with elation in a array of disparate variations, from Webern’s delight in brushstrokes of tone shade to the wonderful tolling, hollering finale of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. Webern’s “Six Parts for Orchestra, Op. 6” skitter from tranquil pinpricks to controlled explosions in a couple transient and concentrated webpages. Canellakis conducted it with a mixture of precision and fluidity, permitting each and every droplet of audio have its minute of iridescence and, at the exact same time, channeling them all into a powerfully coherent stream. If only that remaining, wonderful tintinnabulation of harp and celesta hadn’t been riven by an digital bleat.
The tone poem Dying and Transfiguration chronicles a desperate deathbed wrestle, but Strauss was only 25 when he finished it, and the score is shot through with optimism about the afterlife. That ringing, surging, elastic vigor fueled Canellakis’s interpretation, packed with foreknowledge of the hurtling cataclysmic method of Elektra and Salome, but also the a lot more lilting, perfumed melancholy of Rosenkavalier. I would love to listen to her conduct them all.
There was a further main debut on the program, that of the pianist Alice Sara Ott, who romped by Ravel’s “G Big Piano Concerto” with clear glee. It’s the sort of piece that encourages romping: fleet, cocky, vibrant, and urbane, a Frenchman’s exhibit-offy remodeling of Gershwin. The excitement about Ott these days keeps coming back to her analysis of MS and her candor about it in public, but she confirmed herself no mercy, enjoying with needlelike lightness and wit.
Orchestras do not generally seem to be to be acquiring as great a time as they did in this concert. Offstage, the classical-new music environment is perpetually weighty with foreboding that this fragile artwork just can’t survive for lengthy amid all the competitiveness for focus and funds. And yet, for a pair of hrs in Geffen Hall, those people anxieties seemed distant, blotted out by a sunniness that not even the crisis system’s automatic hysteria could cloud. The previous youthful conductor I reviewed, Klaus Mäkelä, was appointed to guide the Chicago Symphony Orchestra a couple of weeks later. Two far more big American orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, are continue to browsing for new music administrators. Canellakis, anyone?
