John Williams waited until his tenth decade of life to try his hand at a piano concerto. In a program note, he cited the already overflowing canon of works that came before him as the cause of his hesitance – so he turned to his own early days as a jazz pianist, and to the artists he admired as a young man, for inspiration. The Williams Piano Concerto premiered at Tanglewood last summer, when the composer was 93, and made its New York debut this past weekend, three weeks after his 94th birthday. The composer didn’t make the trip east from his California home for the performances, but the work’s dedicatee, Emanuel Ax, was once again on stage with the New York Philharmonic, under the direction of guest conductor Mirga Gražynitė-Tyla.
The concerto follows a standard three-movement structure, with each designed to evoke (but not copy) a prominent jazz pianist from the 20th century. Despite his obvious reverence for the musicians who influenced him, Williams only intermittently captured the style and mood embodied by his forebears. In the inner movement, Ax channeled the refined quietude of Bill Evans with ideal measure, and a bebop-inspired cadenza near the end of the piece matched the rollicking style of Oscar Peterson. Too often, however, the composition seemed shorn of what makes jazz a unique and enduring art form: a sense of collaboration, the bite of humor and wit embedded in the music, and a feeling of collaboration among the musicians. A brief exchange between Ax and Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps briefly captured the latter, but orchestra and soloist largely felt in separate silos.
Ax injected a measure of tang into his unaccompanied passages – a welcome shift away from his customary elegance – but a more muscular sound may have served better throughout the concerto. It was sometimes hard to follow the piano line once the orchestra joined in – not because Gražynitė-Tyla pushed too hard, but because the forceful, cacophonous accompaniment often eclipsed the piano. Ax was at his best, perhaps unsurprisingly, in his encore: the Liszt transcription of Ständchen.
Williams clearly put butts in seats, but those who didn’t rush out at the interval benefited from the thoughtful nature of the surrounding program. Ralph Vaughan Willaims rose the curtain, with Gražynitė-Tyla leading one of her calling cards, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The Philharmonic’s string sound, with its decided lack of warmth and vibrato, suited the piece perfectly, crafting a sense of otherworldly suspension that evoked the eerie style of Renaissance church music. Gražynitė-Tyla gave the music room to breathe without turning it self-indulgent.
Mieczysław Weinberg’s Symphony no. 5 in F minor was new to me – and to the Philharmonic: these were the outfit’s first performances of the work. A lack of familiarity didn’t show. Gražynitė-Tyla’s grand sense of the symphony’s architecture kept listeners engaged even throughout the most discursive moments, and the orchestra played with gripping commitment, threading the needle between beauty and terror that flows throughout the piece. Like his contemporary, Shostakovich, Weinberg delivers his themes in short, alarming bursts that ultimately stitch together, passing among the orchestra before bursting forth with overwhelming power. Gražynitė-Tyla managed to achieve this not only through force but logic. There was beautiful individual playing throughout – especially from Robert Langevin (flute), Mindy Kaufman (piccolo) and Titus Underwood (oboe) – but it was the large-scale passages that fostered a sense of awe.
