The New York Philharmonic kicked off their season, Jaap van Zweden’s last as Music Director, with The Elements – a suite of new works commissioned by violinist Joshua Bell – and an orchestra favorite, Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony. The elements the suite is based on are the traditional quintet Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Space (taking the place of the archaic Ether). Bell commissioned five composers to supply a movement each: Kevin Puts composed Earth, Edgar Meyer Water, Jake Heggie Fire, Jennifer Higdon Air and Jessie Montgomery Space.
The five members of this all-star lineup have musical idioms that are at least within spitting distance of each other; if there’s a 21st-century version of common practice, they’re all working within it, moving freely from triadic harmonies to gnarly dissonances and from rhythmic groove to seemingly unmetered flotation, but never coming completely unmoored from tradition. So stylistically The Elements is far more coherent than one might fear from just the concept. But what really holds the suite together is Bell’s narrative viewpoint, the violin playing for all but a few passages. The soloist acts as a kind of tour guide, bringing the listener along on this exploration of whatever conceptual space these elements refer to for the listener. Bell somehow managed to be both affable and ferociously intense on this journey, whether playing simple folk-inspired melodies or fiendishly virtuosic passagework.
The composers’ approaches to their respective programmatic assignments varied considerably. Higdon’s Air was the most austere and symphonic, with angular melodies and counterpoint. The only attempt to conjure imagery might have been the recurring use of bowed vibraphone. Meyer’s Water took a more straighforward pictorial tack, beginning with rapid, liquid lines for Bell not unlike those that open Smetana’s Vltava, interspersed with high glints of reflected sunlight, shifting through multiple moods to an inconclusive ending. In Fire, Heggie seemed to be playing games of association. The opening passages were diabolically virtuosic for the violin, à la Paganini, and the orchestra followed with irregular, flame-like gestures; but somehow it also wound up including references to tango and Hungarian fiddle music, as well as passages whose orchestration I found distractingly reminiscent of Disney movies.
Montgomery’s Space and Puts’ Earth were programmatic in the sense of portraying dramatic action. In Earth, a gentle harp ostinato evokes a placidly rotating planet before and after it is engulfed by storms. Space suggests both the speed of an orbiting body and, in a breathtaking cadenza, both floating in space and a purposeful return to Earth (in this case, a reprise of Puts’ movement with a heroic ending).
Van Zweden kept the Philharmonic precise, colorful and energetic throughout. Beginning their second season in their newly renovated home, they are marvelously lucid. Even in the biggest brass- and percussion-led climaxes, you can still hear the strings, for instance, and even in contrapuntal passages there is both clarity and integration.
In Copland’s Third Symphony, all these virtues were on prominent display. As usual, I am ready to individually and collectively canonize the members of the Philharmonic’s irreproachable woodwind section. The violins had both a vitality and a coherence to their sound in Copland’s long lines that was mesmerizing. What was missing was any sense of a viewpoint comparable to Bell’s in The Elements. Van Zweden led the orchestra dutifully and more than competently through the varied terrain, but I never got a sense that any thought had been given to what any of it might mean. It may not be program music, but Copland's Third is a potent piece of Americana. Why perform it at this fraught juncture in American history if you’re not going to offer any insight?
