Since shifting again into David Geffen Hall this season, the New York Philharmonic has tried to make use of its newly renovated, technologically adept area to offer further multimedia glamour to some premieres.
Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill” opened the season in October, and dealt straight with the midcentury displacement of economically susceptible populations on the blocks that turned Lincoln Center. “The March to Liberation,” a program in March that includes the music of Black composers, was accompanied by video artwork.
On each events, I felt that the multimedia — nonetheless sensitively rendered — undercut my expertise of the music. During “San Juan Hill,” Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, could be constructing an actual rapport, and momentum, with Charles’s group Creole Soul; however then there could be a pause for a prolonged new interjection of video commentary. And a brand new work by Courtney Bryan throughout “The March to Liberation” was so transporting, I at times discovered myself closing my eyes to keep away from having my expertise filtered so strongly by means of the lens of one other artist.
I felt the necessity to shut my eyes once more on Thursday, when van Zweden led the Philharmonic in one other buzzy premiere that confirmed off the multimedia capabilities of Geffen Hall. It occurred in the course of the imaginative second motion of Julia Wolfe’s “unEarth” — the latest in her recent series of oratorio-like protest efforts, which served because the opening of two weeks of ecologically minded programming.
During that second motion, Wolfe — a Pulitzer Prize winner and a founding father of the influential Bang on a Can collective — amasses a robust mixture of sonorities: chattering, antiphonal choral music (typically heard uttering the phrase “tree” in several languages); percussion indebted to gamelan custom; punchy orchestral writing; intense electrical guitar strains that, as performed by her common collaborator Mark Stewart, had been biting however not too imitative of rock kinds.
After the solemn choral writing within the first motion — which drew on the mixed skills of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and male singers from the Crossing — this mixture of sounds was a welcome transition. The writing for Stewart’s guitar was a reminder of the muscular verve heard within the “Breaker Boys” motion from Wolfe’s “Anthracite Fields” (2014), for which she received that Pulitzer. And in shifting from dry orchestral ruffling to highly effective tutti riffing, this part of “unEarth” additionally recalled the “Factory” motion of her “Fire in my mouth” (2019), which the Philharmonic premiered and memorably recorded.
When the soprano Else Torp entered — with beaming, stratospheric straight-tone singing that quoted Emily Dickinson’s “Who robbed the woods” — this motion of Wolfe’s piece proved delightfully, persistently bizarre. But it was a weirdness in service of dramatically clear ends, since the entire thing labored as a sonic commentary on the wonders of biodiversity.
The piece was designed for each amplified and acoustic sounds, which van Zweden stored in stability. The animated projections that accompanied “unEarth,” nonetheless, had been far much less imaginative than the rating; the video performed as a substitute like a slideshow of every language’s phrase for “tree,” together with some native arboreal data on the margins. The music was an impassioned litany; the multimedia amounted to a listicle.
When a stage director (Anne Kauffman), projection designer (Lucy Mackinnon), two animators and 4 video technicians are listed in this system — whereas soloists like Stewart and the electrical bassist Gregg August usually are not — that’s one other signal that the multimedia urge has transgressed a bit a lot on the Philharmonic’s presentation of, , music.
This identical literalism of the video artwork held sway, in sound and picture, in the course of the third and last motion of “unEarth,” during which Wolfe units some texts contributed by the youthful singers to droning but anxious music. Here, the projections — portraits much like display screen assessments, that includes members of the Young People’s Chorus — had been of a chunk with the music: severe, however a bit too apparent to be shifting.
The total live performance was one thing of a muddle, right down to the random-seeming pairing of “unEarth” with Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, during which the solo half’s problem was typically audible within the account by Frank Huang, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster.
Next week’s program appears to be on firmer conceptual footing, although. The orchestra will current Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes From ‘Peter Grimes,’” Toru Takemitsu’s “I hear the water dreaming” and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s majestic “Become Desert.”
Most necessary: On these nights, the main target will likely be totally on the music.
New York Philharmonic
This program continues by means of Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com