Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (in the composer’s 1919 orchestral arrangement) fluttered and twirled like Disney butterflies on the Zankel Hall stage at Carnegie Hall. The orchestration that made The Knights – with some 30 players on stage – sound strangely small, at least at first; the four movements ramped up by the end with a spritely oboe played by Gustav Highstein. That music so disarmingly pleasant can strike as fanciful just shows what a pox post-modernism has been on contemporary ears. In fact, the suite was composed in memory of friends and family who died in World War 1. Maybe contemporary ears just want to be inconsolable, preferring irony to bald sincerity.
It was the prelude to an evening on the outskirts of war but with spirit and revelry, as a part of Carnegie Hall’s “Dancing on the Precipice” festival of music from the Weimar Republic. The first half closed with the high point of the night, the premiere of Du Yun’s Ears of the Book. The work is conceived as a series of ten snapshots of home life and street scenes. While the link to the festival theme may have been tenuous, the composer stressed in her introduction her love for the music of Ravel as well as Kurt Weill, who would be heard in the second half. The piece was essentially a virtuosic pipa concerto with Wu Man as soloist, and a masterfully assembled one. Du Yun’s orchestration was like sonic alchemy. The large string section sustained notes from the pipa, at times even sounding like faint feedback. Metallic percussion, plucked cellos, monumental trills, fanfares and string swells moved quickly in a rigidly controlled cacophony of gentle dissonance and heroic themes through an unbroken 20 minutes.
Weill’s Symphony no. 1 followed the interval in broad strokes and deep, Mahlerian currents. It’s an impatient work that allowed the orchestra to display some bombast. It’s also not the most coherent of symphonies, but what it lacks in arc, it makes up for with emotion, almost manically so, making for a strong showcase for The Knights. As a composer, Weill was a bit schizoid himself, working between concert music, cabaret art songs and Hollywood scores. The songs with playwright Bertolt Brecht are his legacy, and one of those was in store on this night, but not before a bit of Bob Dylan. His When the Ship Comes in, from the 1964 album The Times They Are a-Changin', was by some accounts inspired by Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”. The Knights rendition was arranged and sung by Christina Courtin. Trying to build from a plaintive melody, her orchestration grew overly busy.
Two more songs closed the evening. Geni e o Zepelim, from Chico Buarque’s 1978 Ópera do Malandro, concerns a prostitute living under military dictatorship, themes Brecht and Weill would find familiar. Wu Man’s pipa stood in for guitar in the populist song and the remarkable, Mexican-born singer Magos Herrera filled the room with a warm delivery. The arrangement, again, seemed busy, but this time was convincing; Herrera could sell hay to a scarecrow. Courtin returned to sing Brecht and Weill’s biggest hit, Alabama Song, in a vocal duet with Knights flutist Alex Sopp, Wu Man now simulating banjo but with her own, brilliant intervals and intonation. In a song so beloved and infectious, it’s hard to go wrong, and indeed they closed the concert with the rousing It’s Time to Say Goodnight.
