The Orchestra of St Luke’s opened their 51st-anniversary season at Carnegie Hall with Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 in D minor. It was somehow my fourth Ninth this year alone – potential for the fatigue of familiarity, despite the music’s greatness. Yet I left feeling as though I’d just heard the great work for the first time. Guest conductor Raphaël Pichon energized the interpretation with fresh ideas and an inventive approach to structure that transformed the concert into a full-blown experience.
Pichon, an Early Music specialist and founder of the period ensemble Pygmalion, first appeared with OSL in January of this year. The results he achieved left no doubt why they re-engaged him so quickly. In addition to musical choices that seem unorthodox and surprising, he also tends to push the traditional composition of a classical program to its limits. The intermission-less evening put Beethoven’s valedictory work in conversation with several of the composer’s more obscure miniatures, as well as the spoken word of poets like Walt Whitman and Maya Angelou.
Freedom and self-actualization served as the overarching themes. As Pichon launched a delicate reading of the Geistlicher Marsch, Alex Rosen intoned lines from Whitman’s Song of Myself, the “barbaric yawp” of his imposing bass rising with deep character above the orchestra. Mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor gave a compelling voice to Angelou’s Caged Bird, its speaker longing for liberty, amid the haunting Melodrama from Leonore Prohaska, played on a glass harmonica stationed on the parterre level by Friedrich Kern. Also from the balcony, Liv Redpath deployed her pure-toned soprano in the Leonore Prohaska Romance, aided by Grace Paradise’s teardrop-studded harp.
If the Ninth stands as the apotheosis of the Enlightenment in music, these brief interludes proved thematically potent appetizers. Pichon also offered Friedrich Silcher’s Persischer Nachtgesang, which took inspiration from the Allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, in which the Clarion Choir lived up to their name.
Without pause, Pichon launched an unrelenting account of the Ninth, one that left the musicians and the audience on their toes for the length of the performance. The Allegro and Scherzo eschewed lyricism almost entirely, favoring instead a driving rhythm and brisk tempo that sometimes pushed players to the brink. Sections remained unblended, creating a sound world more confrontationally dissonant than conventionally harmonic. This vision made a certain dramatic sense: clashes within the orchestra represented the messy work of creating a distinct human identity. Pichon’s punishing approach to the first two movements also allowed a welcome calm when he turned down the dial for the lovely Adagio.
Rosen, no longer reciting, gave a forceful account of the “O Freunde” stanza in the finale, each word ringing out with clarity and focus in German so precise it could be transcribed. Redpath and Taylor made for a female pairing more commanding than usual. Laurence Kilsby brought a refreshingly old-fashioned, airy tone to “Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen”. The Clarion Choir proved not only mellifluous but theatrically potent, with some of its members stationed in the audience.
The OSL dedicated the performance to Sir Roger Norrington, its first music director, who died in July. Jolly Roger would surely approve of the fleet and snappy approach to this music. In the meantime, the self-governing orchestra has been without a principal conductor since Bernard Labadie concluded his tenure this past spring. Could Pichon be a contender for the job?
