For their final Carnegie Hall appearance of the season, Yannick-Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra offered a superbly integrated program bookending the New York debut of Valerie Coleman’s Concerto for Orchestra with seminal creations by Ravel and Debussy.
The concert opened with Maurice Ravel’s lighthearted and brilliant Piano Concerto in G major. Since presenting the New York premiere in 1932, Carnegie Hall and the Philadelphians have enjoyed a long and commendable history with the bustling showpiece. Dame Mitsuko Uchida joined a long line celebrated pianists – Daniel Barenboim, Alicia de Larrocha and Martha Argerich among them – who have played this universally loved opus with this orchestra on this stage. With superb support from Nézet-Séguin, Uchida delivered a sparkling rendition, lucid, exuberant and highly energetic. The playful and spry Allegramente first movement was distinguished by an extraordinary lightness of touch and masterful control of dynamics and phrasing. The opening of the gorgeously lyrical Adagio assai was tastefully understated, with eloquent contributions from the woodwinds, the whole movement superbly realized. The dazzling finale allowed Ravel’s wondrous, ruminative music to speak for itself.
Coleman’s Concerto for Orchestra is the latest composition in her five-year partnership with the Philadelphians. Subtitled “Renaissance”, this vigorous and impassioned piece pays homage to the Great Migration, the 1910-1970 movement of six million African Americans from the rural South to the more urban states of the Midwest and North, and the Harlem Renaissance, the intellectual and cultural revival of the 1920s and 30s that previously inspired her smaller-scaled musical portraits of poet Langston Hughes and singer-dancer Josephine Baker. Composed for a traditional symphony orchestra with an off-stage brass choir and an unusually large array of percussion – including bell plates, bongos, crotales (antique cymbals) and others – the work is cast in three movements, each with a distinct color palette. American Odyssey is replete with vibrant, bustling contrasts and broad, forward-moving string movements suggestive of important shifts in US society. Portraits interweaves elements of traditional Appalachian music and deep southern bluegrass. With brief soloistic bursts for nearly every section of the orchestra, the concluding Cotton Club Juba invokes sounds of the legendary Big Band era and expat musical luminaries of the early 20th century. With his fine sense of form and pace, Nézet-Séguin expertly propelled the spectacularly orchestrated score forward in a robust and totally engaging performance. As the composer stood up to acknowledge the ensuing applause, the conductor proffered a bow to her skill.
The evening ended with an uncommonly atmospheric account of Claude Debussy’s impressionist landmark, La Mer. Effectively displaying both the pulsating, symphonic spirit of the work and the splendid playing of the Philadelphians, Nézet-Séguin elicited a superbly paced reading, leaning toward the quiet side, except for the stormier (sometimes overly loud) passages of the first and third movements. The quick timbral changes in the opening From Dawn to Midday on the Sea effectively evoked the dual nature of the sea: continuously changing on the surface, static in its underlying depths. The scherzo-like Play of the Waves was appropriately playful, as the glimmering, dancing waters quite palpable as they repeatedly broke apart and came together. The final Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea provided the most colorful moments as it pulsated with power and energy, the flowing torrents of water constantly moving forward and finally washing over the listener in a spectacularly triumphant ending.
