Assessment: A Composer’s ‘Lear’ Freshens a Shakespeare Night

Yet Aucoin’s restraint in dealing with these large forces is likely one of the most notable issues about “Heath,” whose 4 sections, performed with out pause, exude a assured, brooding reserve. With tolling bells, grim chords and an uneasy melody, the opening instantly brings to thoughts Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” one other story of a king gone mad.

This first part, “The Divided Kingdom,” exhibits Aucoin’s expertise for creating orchestral textures which can be concurrently granitic and flickering, like fast-shifting storm clouds. Sharp snaps of snare drum punctuate a gradual improve in forcefulness to a bleak, expansive panorama of solemn brasses and a droning within the strings, which melts into an nearly Tchaikovskian Romantic sweep.

A barely sooner second part, named after Lear’s Fool, is pierced by the onerous, maniacal playfulness of flutes — hinting on the scores for Kurosawa’s filmed Shakespeare variations — earlier than a quick, spare interlude impressed by the blinded Gloucester’s uncooked remorse. The fourth half, “With a Dead March” (the play’s indication for the ultimate mass exit), builds in dense, regular waves earlier than abruptly receding to a delicate, discomfiting but elegant ending of rustling percussion.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, deserves credit score for constantly main this richly gifted composer’s works with each organizations over the previous few years. (Aucoin is presently engaged on an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” deliberate for the Met.)

Despite being clear and energetic on the rostrum, Nézet-Séguin couldn’t fairly whip up the crisp brilliance wanted to make the over-familiar Bernstein and Tchaikovsky items on this system newly memorable. Neither was gradual, precisely, however they however felt a bit drained and hectically blurred, with hiccups within the horns and trumpets on the finish of an extended season. The Tchaikovsky lacked the passionate opulence that’s this rating’s motive for being.