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Behold the Conductor’s Words New York
Merkin Concert Hall, Kaufman Music Center
10/07/2025 -
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Son and Stranger, Opus 89: Overture
Franz Schreker: Birthday of the Infanta (Suite)
Richard Strauss: Metamorphosen
Parlando, Ian Niederhoffer (Founder, Conductor)
I. Niederhoffer & Parlando (© Rebecca Kay)
“There are only two kinds of music: German music and bad music.”
H.L. Menken
“Mendelssohn’s contribution to landscape painting consisted in making the observer always the same man: Mendelssohn himself.”
Virgil Thomson
Loath to make the conductor the center of a music review, one has little choice but to make Parlando’s Ian Niederhoffer the star of last night’s concert. Yes, his conducting was fine enough, and his energy brought the chamber‑plus orchestra to top form. More to the point, Mr. Niederhoffer gave introductions to each work–and to German history in general–which were more than enlightening.
After all, who in the audience was familiar (or, after listening, needed to be) with Franz Schreker? Mr. Niederhoffer gave an explanation not only of Schreker’s one‑time popularity, but of how his Jewish origin may have led to his heart‑attack death. And did anyone know of Mendelssohn’s opera Son and Stranger? The work had its charm, but the introduction was about a Jewish family whose most famous heir was not Jewish at all.
The final Strauss Metamorphosen was at least a familiar work, so the conductor could describe the bipolar allegiance to Nazism, and this work as an homage to a dead society.
The young conductor was both delightful and knowledgeable. And while one may disagree with his part‑credo that music made us “better people”, one felt his love both of the orchestra and the music.
Parlando is not a hoary old ensemble. Founded by the conductor in 2019, it has enjoyed the singularity of playing rare music, with a thematic line, with verbal exegeses by its leader. The 45 players may not have the clarity or individual tones of other New York ensembles. But the two rare works here were played with fervor, and the Strauss was...well, we’ll describe that later.
The opening Mendelssohn overture could have been the opening movement of a Sixth Symphony. A moody opening, a four‑square first theme (Mr. Niederhoffer over‑compared it to Schubert) and all the Mendelssohn trademarks. The trumpet calls, the fairy‑light strings, the grand climaxes. We have so much terrific Mendelssohn that the Overture was hardly a revelation, but it showed an always colorful composer.
Franz Schreker (the name resembles the Aryan hissing of Madeleine Kahn in Young Frankenstein) was one of the most popular opera composers in pre‑Nazi Germany. His orchestral work included The Birthday of the Infanta, based on an Oscar Wilde tragic fairy tale.
The ten sections of the Suite are mainly dance movements, since the eponymous heroine is dancing on her birthday. She meets a dwarf, cheerfully gives him a rose, he falls in love...but one look in a mirror and he falls dead on the spot.
One never “saw” the dwarf-dance, one didn’t feel the death, yet some segments are quite lovely. A few castanets, a round‑dance, hints at Iberia. And alas, lots of bombast. Hints of Richard Strauss, moments of Ravel’s Mother Goose, a little ersatz Elgar.
Alas, Yahweh did not send down His beneficence. Dying in 1934, Schreker missed an exodus to Hollywood. His music and proficiency would have aligned him immediately with happy film composers Korngold, Steiner, Tiomkin, Waxman and Rózsa.
The second half was devoted (and that be the word) to Metamorphosen. Granted, the composer who wrote the final 20 minutes of Rosenkavalier didn’t have write anything else. But this work, dark, dense, themeless at first hearing, becomes far more satisfactory with each hearing.
Written for 23 separate strings, it would be a nightmare for cuing. But Mr. Niederhoffer didn’t need that with his string section. Nor did one need a luscious a Strauss melody. Those four repeated notes, the descending minor scale and the complex polyphony were enough. And the Beethoven Eroica quotes made this–even in 1945, the year of Webern’s death–a revolutionary and private and endlessly moving performance. Played by Parlando with both excitement and passion.
Harry Rolnick
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