“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern,” Oscar Wilde once quipped: “one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly.” The Polish composer, Krzysztof Pendercki has deliberately embraced and then retreated from the avant-garde in the course of his career, a play of allegiances that has kept his audiences guessing and his music very much alive over six decades. He self-consciously describes his own trajectory of musical composition in Homeric terms, involving both an Iliad and an Odyssey – a youthful rebellion and period of aberration followed by a mature homecoming, a return to tradition. But the tradition rediscovered is neither populist cliché nor rehashed unthinking conservatism. The impulses – creative imperatives indeed – to both old and new are profoundly acknowledged in his 2001 work, Concerto Grosso for 3 Cellos, given its first NSO performance tonight.
Loosely referencing Baroque form (featuring a small solo group with ripieno orchestra) and a classical sinfonia concertante, this work is nonetheless one of a kind, with no formal break between its six interwoven sections. NSO cellists Steven Honigberg, James Lee and David Teie formed the trio of soloists, doing double duty tonight by slipping back into the ranks of the orchestra after intermission, a slyly pointed riposte to our all too easily-assumed dichotomy between ‘headline’ soloists and ‘mere’ orchestra members.
There is something of the night about this work. Although the middle section alone bears the label Notturno, the ambience pervades the whole: it veers swiftly, brutally even, from subdued foreboding to anguished agitato, from barely incipient to fully-realized nightmares. In short, there is nothing pretty at all about this work, written at the cusp of the new century, and thankfully, we did not get pretty. Honigberg, consummate musician that he is, made the voice of the cello sound unutterably lonely at times, like a human cry for help, and then again, feral as a wild creature, as he frontally attacked the instrument with raw ferocity. He was joined by Teie’s more elegiac cello voice and the softer voice of Lee, the latter sometimes a little too safe, too much in the background, it must be confessed, for such an expressionist work.
Percussive forces came into their own in its course. The full use of their effects – for Penderecki calls upon bell tree, celesta, glockenspiel, marimba, suspended cymbal, tam tam, tambourine, triangle tree and tubular bells, as well as the usual drums and harp – lashed us out of complacency, and gave this work a strikingly individual character. To sustain all these dark emotions in music and to do so over a lengthy period (the work runs to 35 minutes) to a mostly unfamiliar audience –a chirpily conservative Saturday night crowd who’d come principally, one suspects, for the Beethoven – is an art in itself and was triumphantly achieved here. The coda, an unexpected resolution of sorts, very faint and faraway, has the first cello (Honigberg’s) reach its highest register, transcending itself, so that if one closed one’s eyes, one could almost hear, instead, a violin.