The Philadelphia Orchestra’s all-American program took a necessary detour to Germany on 4th February. The concert as scheduled featured soprano Angel Blue performing Samuel Barber’s touchstone setting of Knoxville: Summer of 1915, along with the world premiere of This Is Not a Small Voice, a commissioned piece for voice and orchestra from composer Valerie Coleman. But as the performance was set to begin, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin announced that Blue had taken ill and was unable to sing. In a subsequent email, an orchestra spokesperson said the cancellation happened moments before curtain, and that a replacement was being sought for the weekend’s subsequent performances.
With the vocal component of the afternoon scuttled, Nézet-Séguin looked within his ranks for a suitable replacement. He found two. Concertmaster David Kim and associate concertmaster Juliette Kang gamely stepped into the spotlight with Bach’s Double Concerto for 2 violins in D minor, BWV1043. Kim and Kang deserve plaudits simply for their save-the-day attitude, to say nothing of how well they played on presumably no rehearsal. The assumption also showed off the subtle but distinct differences in their instrumental sound – Kang’s warmer and richer in color, Kim’s thinner but supremely elegant, with flawless intonation. Still, this is the kind of work that thrives in the setting of historically informed performance practices, and the attempt to bring a big-orchestra mindset ended up seeming a little too polite.
The rest of the concert went off without a hitch. Nézet-Séguin recently conducted the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, after Sarah Ruhl’s play of the same name, and here premiered a suite of music from the opera. The 15-minute piece distills the mythological journey of the title heroine and her hapless husband through the underworld, presenting the disorientation of death through jarring percussion and the pangs of grief in a wailing clarinet, played by principal Ricardo Morales. Choong-Jin Chang’s doleful viola line seemed to represent Eurydice’s uncertainty as she and Orpheus set out of their doomed quest back to the light of the world. The ultimate feelings of loss manifested themselves in the final movement, as the music came crashing into itself, full of chords that never quite resolve. Aucoin’s music is as quirky as Ruhl’s slightly twee take on the legend, and Nézet-Séguin handled it with necessary flair, collapsing the trademark richness of the Philadelphia sound into the suite’s jittering, angular lines.
The Philadelphians’ investment in Florence Price continues to pay dividends. After recording her Symphony no. 1 in E minor for Deutsche Grammophon – which Nézet-Séguin confidently declared will win a Grammy at the upcoming ceremony – and including it in a 2020 streaming concert, the orchestra closed the concert with its subscription debut. Complex yet instantly approachable, this is the kind of 20th-century symphonic music that pleases specialists and leaves the casual listener whistling and humming his way out of the concert hall. Nézet-Séguin brought a more mellow texture to the expansive strings of the first movement, and the second had an almost Brucknerian sense of moment-to-moment invention within Price’s brass chorales. The Juba dance that catapults the brief third movement, a Price specialty, was exuberant yet refined. What wasn’t entirely successful in the Bach – a slimming down of the orchestral sound while retaining a sense of majesty – came through ideally in the Presto finale. This concert may have visited foreign lands, but it found its way home in the end.
