A New York Philharmonic program devoted to evocations of our changing climate seemed ominously apropos on a day when New York City’s air had been turned orange-tinged and unhealthy by the smoke from Canadian wildfires. This weekend of concerts featured water-themed pieces by Benjamin Britten and Toru Takemitsu, but was centered around the New York premiere of Become Desert, a co-commissioned piece by John Luther Adams.
The Britten, Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, was quite satisfying. Except during the loudest, most frantic passages of the fourth Interlude, Storm, the clarity of texture was always outstanding. The high violin passages that begin the suite were crystalline and incisive; the answering brass choir had both warmth and bite, as did the winds in the second movement. I was bemused by Jaap van Zweden’s choice to emphasize the flute and percussion interjections in the third section, rather than the strings’ ongoing narrative. But the climaxes and their aftermaths in both that Interlude and the last were substantial and rewarding.
Principal flutist Robert Langevin was the soloist for Takemitsu’s I hear the water dreaming, based on a painting by an Aboriginal Australian. The piece is notably Debussy-like in its dreaminess of sound and construction; the principal melodic material is even based on a whole-tone scale. Langevin played it expressively, with just a hint of Romantic wistfulness in the phrasing. Aside from a briefly dark turn towards the end, when shakuhachi-like pitch bends from the flute conversed with menacing low pizzicatos, the piece evaporated as it ended, much like the dream it evoked.
Adams’ Become Desert, conversely, made a major impression. Clocking in at around 40 minutes, it separates the musical forces into five choirs and places them in specific locations in the auditorium: woodwinds upstage; strings, two sets of timpani, two bass drums, and four harps downstage; horns in a 2nd-tier box near the stage; trumpets and trombones across the hall from them; and a four-part chorus in the rear of the 2nd-tier balcony. Each choir also has metal percussion (bells, crotales, chimes and handbells).
You’ve heard ambient music consisting of drones and bells at a massage therapist’s office? Become Desert is what that music would be if the Blue Fairy waved her magic wand and turned it into a Real Boy. The architecture of the piece is stunning. The drones begin with impossibly soft, high violins, and lower notes are gradually added, in overlapping waves coming from different directions. Bells chime persistently in unpredictable yet logical sequences. The constantly changing sonic mass accumulates more weight, in shifting pandiatonic harmonies, until after about twenty minutes obtrusive rolls from the dueling timpanists herald an arrival, which turns out to be a breathtaking major chord from the brass. And over the remainder of the piece, the process reverses, so that the piece ends with a single bell as a high string note finally releases.
I was not entirely sold on the execution of the spatial component of the piece; at times the soprano and alto choristers were overbearing, and the woodwind choir was audible sufficiently rarely that I suspect their contribution was being buried. That said, van Zweden gets credit for turning what must have been a monstrously difficult concentration exercise for the orchestra into a moving, memorable experience. Adams’ note for the piece says that it is “a celebration of the deserts we are given and a lamentation of the deserts we create.” I would venture to say that it’s just as much an entryway into whatever deserts we carry within us.
