It finally happened. Last Friday night, a full of confidence (and obviously pregnant) Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla climbed for the first time onto the conductor’s podium in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium. One of the foremost orchestral leaders of her generation, the Lithuanian is currently Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, succeeding a roster of other exceptional conductors: Sir Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo and Andris Nelsons. Considering the renown surrounding these names in today’s musical world, there is little doubt that the CBSO musicians have an extraordinary gift for spotting conductors of great potential early in their careers. Gražinytė-Tyla’s performances in Birmingham and her guest conducting appearances around the world have done nothing but cement this claim even further.
Leading the first of the three concerts that the Met Orchestra traditionally offers at Carnegie Hall, after the end of the opera season, Gražinytė-Tyla proposed a program of late 19th-century, mostly Russian works. Even Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprés midi d’un faune has its own Russian connections. The conductor brought a wonderful intensity to a score that has the exact number of bars – 110 – as the number of lines in Mallarmé’s poem that was its source of inspiration. With assured, not necessarily elegant, but precise and eloquent gestures, Gražinytė-Tyla dictated a musical pace that was more fleeting than we are used to, carefully bringing forward Debussy’s experiments with irregular rhythmic patterns and vague tonality so similar to Mallarmé’s abandonment of classical meters in his poetry. She “sculpted” the sound with wide-ranging gestures emphasizing the trading of various motifs between members of the orchestra. Even if it wasn’t the subtlest of performances, it succeeded in keeping a fine balance between evoking nature and reverie.
Clarity was also the main focus during the rendition of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. Shostakovich’s orchestration preserves all the bitterness and grimness of the original score without trying to “tame” Mussorgsky’s peculiar melodies and harmonies into more conventional sounding ones. It’s true though that listeners can also sense the ironical whiff, typical for any music that the 20th-century master touched. Gražinytė-Tyla started her career as a choral conductor; as proven here, her ability to master all the intricacies of an orchestra supporting but not overwhelming a voice is outstanding. The soloist was the fabulous Georgian mezzo Anita Rachvelishvili. For most of the performance, she had to rein her tremendously powerful voice, letting only occasionally everyone know that it was still there, undiminished. Rachvelishvili portrayed well the many facets of Death – comforting, provocative, insinuating, belligerent – embedded in these songs, making somehow the stories clear even for those that didn’t understand a word from Arseny Golenishcev-Kutuzov’s texts.