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The Future of Symphonic Music Los Angeles
Walt Disney Concert Hall
11/14/2008 -
Rouget de Lisle/Berlioz: Hymne des Marseillais
Berlioz: Royal Hunt and Storm from “Les Troyens” – Overture to Les Francs-Juges”
Adès: America: A Prophecy – Tevot
Mary Nessinger (mezzo-soprano)
Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon (music director), Los Angeles Philharmonic, Thomas Adès (conductor)
Thomas Adès (© Los Angeles Philharmonic Association)
This concert achieved a complex greatness. The evening is challenging to characterize but was significant both for Berlioz and the LA Philharmonic, and even more so for 21st century music. Seemingly disparate pieces by Berlioz and Adès added up to an important night in the arts. These rarely performed martial, even bloodthirsty Berlioz excerpts formed a wildly bombastic and fascinating context. Adès own brilliant and profound modern bombast was illuminated in the startling light of an exotic musical and historic tradition: romantic 19th century French nationalism. The result was a momentous evening, revealing what will prove to be a critical nexus of music making for the coming generation.
Thomas Adès has become a veteran with the LA Philharmonic; they have developed a vital relationship and they play extremely well for him. Esa Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic grew together over these past decades into one of worlds’ great orchestral ensembles, in one of the greatest modern concert halls. Gustavo Dudamel has been heralded (as a conductor) as the new young Leonard Bernstein. But if Thomas Adès continues his yearly residencies here in Los Angeles, the future history of music will take place in Disney Hall to an even greater degree.
As the Berlioz setting of the La Marseillaise began, the raw power and highly trained talent of the Los Angeles Master Chorale leapt across the hall in rich, complex tones. From my seat in the Orchestra East, the mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger was a little overwhelmed by the orchestra and chorus. For a singer and orchestra, seats directly in front of the stage would be preferable. Adès conducting was direct and expressive, a naturalistic style that makes an interesting contrast to Esa Pekka Salonen. Often using broad gestures that were also subtle and poetic, he communicated exactly what he wanted and the orchestra responded with no ambiguity.
In the “Royal Hunt and Storm”, an interlude from the opera Les Troyens, the French horns were outstanding, both in vociferous calls and later more softly. The trombones, both in chorus and in solos, were also excellent. Toward the end of the piece, the Master Chorale against the full orchestra was both overpowering and appealing in this imperiously romantic music. In both of these Berlioz excerpts, the historic context of war, the great migrations of peoples and civilizations, and an audacious musical idiom to express these issues set the stage for Adès’ own ambitious goals.
America: a Prophecy was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as one of the pieces to commemorate the year 2000 millennium. Adès’ inspiration was his idea that the most important event of the second millennium was the discovery and foundation of America. The music’s darkness and dire prophecy must have been a shock to the audience. But in the light of subsequent history, the music is even more shocking. Like the Trojan Cassandra, the prophet of this piece sang of doom that came to pass beyond any possibility of rational prediction or understanding. The lyrics were taken from ancient Mayan texts. Some of the rhythms and melodic material recalled the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. There was a moment of glory in the horns, strings and percussion that seemed to come from Berlioz, but overall the music was colored by anxious tension, dread and darkness.
The prophet, with words taken directly from the Mayans, sang: “Weak from fuck and drink…O my nation prepare: they will come from the East”. “Your cities will fall. Our earth we shall burn. Ash feels no pain”. The music was a subterranean thunderstorm growing up through the earth by the vibration of kettledrums. A strange uneasy vibrato overtook the trumpets and trombones; the double basses sounded the lowest notes of a massive organ. The piece closed in a stygian dusk. What a thing to write in celebration of the millennium…
The second part of the evening began with Berlioz’ overture to the unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges. Adès guided this dramatic narrative piece with intimate, intricate detail, seeming to know the music from the inside out. From the slow opening apprehension to the blasting brass to the manic triumphant festival of the strings, he led with vigorous precision. In music that is challenging to do well, the performance was compelling.
Tevot, a symphony in one movement, was commissioned for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2007. This contemporary tour de force was the culmination of the evening. All of the questions, crises and history of the previous pieces prepared the listener for the deep quiet journey of this music. Tevot, the Hebrew word for ark of Noah, suggests a people carried through storm and flood ultimately to the safety of home. The music seemed an attempt to address in humanistic terms the issues of war, invasion, migration, conflict and division that assault mankind in our time. In Modern Hebrew, the word Tevot also refers to a bar of music, as Adès commented in his opening remarks, “a vessel of notes for the music of chaos”. Both elegiac and celebratory, the piece is about the ark of our planet that must carry us safely through space past our nations at war and our own attempt to destroy the environment.
The opening bars of the symphony, with shifting rhythms of mist and flood in an ocean of wiry strings, felt a little like the mysterious opening of Mahler’s First, the Titan. Then bullets of subtly pitched percussion interrupt, followed by snatches of melody in the trumpets. The Philharmonic was at its best, with a singing marimba out of Stravinsky in a glorious, cacophonous storm of crescendo. Then back into the mist and up again to a tutti forte that seemed out of Mahler’s Resurrection. The reedy metallic strings gave way to the sound of piccolos that led to flutes like flashes of light coming up through deep water. Trumpet calls carried forward to deep stirrings of melody in the strings and horns. Adès gestured with his left hand, calling for more and more tension, for drumbeats and brass. Then quiet. Flashes of triumph rang out repeatedly over the whirring of strident strings then finally the ring of a gong slowly fading into the beauty of silence.
As the composer Steven Stucky said in his pre-concert introduction, this evening was Adès at his most exhilarating and unsettling. Although within the confines of a short 22 minutes, Tevot effectively aspires toward the gravitas of a Brahms German Requiem. These compositions are unquestionably difficult, but many other orchestras must play this music.
Thomas Aujero Small
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