The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra has been the backbone of New York City’s estival season for decades. Starting next year, the ensemble will bear a new name – tentatively, Lincoln Center Summer Orchestra – and a new Music Director, namely Jonathon Heyward, replacing Louis Langrée who has served with distinction in the position since 2003. On Friday night, as an insight into what’s on the horizon, Heyward helmed the ensemble in a varied programme, juxtaposing a recent composition with well-known examples of 20th century and Romantic era works.
Premièred by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in 2016, Jessie Montgomery’s Records from a Vanishing City is an evocation of the now lost mélange of sounds and cultural backgrounds marking the life of the Lower East Side, the Manhattan area where the composer grew up. Occasional references to Bartók's rhythmic patterns and to Britten’s The Turn of the Screw alternate with reminiscences of Miles Davis’ trumpet and John Coltrane’s saxophone playing. The score is underpinned by a recurring auditory image of a what the author identifies as a call-and-response Angolan lullaby. Heyward and his musicians succeeded in bringing forward the composer’s special talent for seamlessly weaving together moments of thematic development with others where improvisation is taking the main role. It's great to see contemporary works, like Montgomery’s, not merely treated as tokens for fulfilling quotas for new works, but really finding their way in the overall repertoire.
The mostly contemplative and pensive character of the introductory work seemed to be prolonged in the Allegro of Barber’s Violin Concerto, in the exquisite rendition of Simone Lamsma. With her beautiful tone and attention given to even minor variations in rhythmic patterns, she transformed the apparent lack of dramatism of the concerto’s first two movements into a quality. The way Lamsma and Heyward approached the Andante was especially remarkable, infusing the music with additional intensity in order to build a connection between the first movement’s lyrical character and the full-of-energy Presto. Starting with a beautiful, oboe-intoned motif, the Andante evolved into a series of waves, each more harmonically tensioned than the one before. The devilish, perpetuum-mobile finale, with its occasional dissonances and rhythmic irregularities, felt both as a culmination and as a relief. Lamsma played it without any hint of distress. Regrettabily, she didn’t grace the audience with an encore.
After a successful first half of the evening and the conductor’s fond reference to Schumann as one of his favorite composers in his preamble, there were high hopes for the ensuing version of the mighty Rhenish Symphony. Unfortunately, the performance ultimately fell short of fully living up to those expectations. Especially in the first movement, there was a pervasive air of tentativeness, with string articulations somewhat uncoordinated and phrases not fully brought to their conclusion. While the first theme of the Scherzo was beautifully enunciated by the lower strings and the bassoons, the Trio sounded somewhat muddy. The solemn fourth movement, with its proto-Brahmsian chorale, marked the high point of the rendition. However, even here, the subtleties in dynamic variations were insufficiently acknowledged. The sense of unease returned in the Finale which lacked the desired level of Schwung, thus cutting down the music’s emotional impact. If the root cause of an unconvincing performance of the symphony was the limited time the conductor and the ensemble had to rehearse together, their assured collaboration in the years to come will undoubtedly bring improvements and memorable performances.
