Györgi Ligeti is best known for the unique ultra-modernist works he created starting in the 1960s, many of which were featured in films by Stanley Kubrick and others. The New York Philharmonic began their observation of his centenary by programming two early pieces, composed before he broke free of the Iron Curtain.
Mifiso la sodo, heard here in its US premiere, is a cheerful, exuberant little piece that sounds as though someone had taken a “Music of the Classical Era” jigsaw puzzle, spilled all the pieces on the ground and jammed them back together in a perverse alternate arrangement. I found it delightful; along with the sudden stops and starts, odd juxtapositions, key changes and phrase lengths, there were deftly handled builds and some lovely orchestrational touches.
The Concert Românesc is a more substantial piece in four short, continuous movements. Imagine Aaron Copland in Romania rather than America to get an idea of the musical language. The first movement features the same kind of yearning, unresolved folk-influenced melodies, while the second and fourth have a dancelike energy that (geographically unsurprisingly) recalls the more upbeat sections of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. The third features a pair of horn solos with certain notes of the overtone series deliberately left untuned to evoke the sound of the Alpenhorn. One of them is supposed to be placed offstage to sound like an echo, which did not seem to have been the case here.
David Robertson conducted the Philharmonic in crisp and lovingly detailed performances. Phrasing, articulation and dynamic changes were precise and clear; whatever logic or illogic drove the juxtapositions and sudden changes of direction was perfectly audible.
Elena Firsova’s Piano Concerto – composed for Yefim Bronfman, who played it here in its New York premiere – recalls late Beethoven quartets, not in vocabulary but in the sense of an aging, powerful personality wrestling with questions of life and death. Firsova’s musical language is harmonically spiky and gestural, but also audibly motivically driven and structurally easy to follow.
Bronfman made Firsova’s ghostly arpeggios and thundering octaves part of a compelling personal narrative, with the orchestra seeming to illuminate and expand on the piano’s inner life. I liked the piece a great deal. Bronfman, a bit surprisingly, was not playing from memory and at one point had to wrestle a stubborn fold-out page into submission during an extended, heartfelt solo passage.
It would be doing the music world a great service if someone were to somehow find all existent copies of Brahms’ youthful Serenade no. 1 and cut a few hundred measures out of the third movement (and perhaps excise the utterly gratuitous fourth entirely). I had high hopes for this piece after hearing Robertson’s approach to the two Ligeti works. And indeed, the exquisitely sculpted and articulated phrases were a joy in the first two movements. The horns cut through the strings without overwhelming them. The cellos were startlingly rich in sound, and even some of the more prosaic passages in the violins were not plain vanilla.
But by halfway through the interminable Adagio non troppo even Robertson was unable to sustain this level of attentiveness. The music turned soggy. Empires crumbled, monuments turned to dust and the stars wheeled overhead as we waited for it to end. After a mercifully brief purgatory in the Menuetto, Robertson tore into the second Scherzo with as much gusto as remained in the building, and managed to regain something of the admirable spirit of the rest of the evening. But by that time the damage had been done.
