After the musicians of the New York Philharmonic completed Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto on Thursday evening, they did one thing they don’t normally do: They applauded the soloist.
With a violinist on the order of Leonidas Kavakos, that response felt justified. He is a marvel. The music flowed out of him like a river — huge, glistening and unobstructed, but in addition tasteful in its frictionless subtleties.
Shostakovich, below the watch of Soviet authorities and dropped at heel at Stalin’s pleasure, accomplished the concerto in 1948 however, presumably fearing retribution for failing to glorify the nation and its folks, shelved it till after Stalin’s demise in 1953. The work is constructed as a collection of actions. It opens with a personality piece, a murkily coloured Nocturne that lives in the Upside Down of Chopin’s genre-defining works for piano, and reaches a climax in a Baroque-derived Passacaglia, without delay august and austere, that leads right into a fiendish five-minute cadenza for the soloist.
Playing from reminiscence, Kavakos cleared one hazard after one other in Shostakovich’s stupendously unique rating. He didn’t simply spin legato strains within the looking, conversational Nocturne; he expounded whole legato paragraphs in an eloquent, unbroken stream of consciousness. Shredding his manner by way of the Scherzo, his tone was poised, even lavish. Where some violinists convey a way of anguish in demanding passages — taking part in two melodies in duet or an limitless seesaw of double stops — he sounded easy. Even his harmonics had a juicy ping.
The orchestra, led by Gianandrea Noseda, pale into the background. The gamers did not envelop Kavakos within the Nocturne’s glimmering, unsettling darkness. The Scherzo had no abandon, and the Burlesque’s funhouse-mirror distortions of the concerto’s once-noble themes had no derision. Noseda fitfully ratcheted up the depth of the Passacaglia with its implacable 17-bar sample. As power slacked, shy deference reigned.
Without interaction from the orchestra, Kavakos discovered stress in his personal taking part in. In the cadenza, he may have been a caged animal reacquainting itself with its personal majesty. His encore, taken from Bach’s Partita No. 1, was spellbinding.
It was arduous to think about how something may comply with Kavakos’s efficiency, and maybe somebody on the Philharmonic felt the identical manner. After he left the stage, an announcement was made that the following piece, George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 1, could be pushed to after intermission.
During the break, I questioned if the clear, vivid acoustics of the Philharmonic’s new hall had been partly in charge for the orchestra’s exhibiting within the Shostakovich. Each instrumental part sounded crisp, soloistic and unblended.
The Walker, an imaginative train in disparate timbres, dispelled these suspicions. The orchestra, from the pointed brasses to the curling woodwinds, discovered its option to unanimity of utterance.
The last piece, Respighi’s “Roman Festivals,” gave the Philharmonic a chance to exhibit how far it has are available in calibrating its sound to the improved acoustics of its new auditorium. A composer of sunny bombast, Respighi supplied the stirring finale for the ensemble’s first subscription program of the season in October with “Pines of Rome,” the second piece in his Roman trilogy. At the time, colours virtually bounced off the partitions within the vigorous acoustic; climaxes, maybe overshot, took on a fuzzy quality.
On Thursday, the orchestra confirmed off the readability of fortissimo passages, layering percussion, brass and strings in good-looking tiers. Corrosive brasses and heated strings enlivened the Respighi’s first motion, and gray-toned woodwinds, clear violins, and luxuriant cellos and basses coloured the second.
In one thing of a redo of Shostakovich’s Burlesque, “Roman Festivals” closes with a portrait of the antic, circuslike crowds of Piazza Navona in Rome. The Philharmonic’s gamers got here alive within the coordinated chaos. It was the sound of revelers falling right into a shared rhythm — and of an orchestra relearning learn how to play with itself.
New York Philharmonic
This program repeats by way of Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
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