NEW YORK — What started out as one of the New York Philharmonic’s most stimulating and ambitious concerts of the season ended Jan. 22 with a quickly departing audience and the possibility that composer-conductor Thomas Adès might not have lunch in this town for a while. The problem: His insistent commitment to performing his America: A Prophecy. never one of his strongest pieces made more lugubrious in its newly expanded version, and whose lecturing text is more gauche than ever.
Up until that piece, the Adès-conducted program of Charles Ives, Kaija Saariaho, and Einojuhani Rautavaara with pianist Yuja Wang was well prepared and performed in what could be welcomely described as end-of-the-millennium impressionism. One common thread was the practicality-defying use of chorus, requiring Exigence Vocal Ensemble and the University of Michigan Chamber Choir for backstage and onstage effects.
The Ives Orchestral Set No. 2, completed in 1919, was one of the composer’s triptychs in which pre-existing tunes float in half-quoted form amid ether-like washes of sound. The final section had a mood-casting backstage chorus as a multi-layered memorial to the tragic sinking of the Lusitania. Here, Ives’ sharp-focused Americana imagery is replaced by ambiguous, blurred lines and, overall, a less-than-assumed sense of national identity at a time when the country was entering a war not yet fully understood.
Kaija Saariaho’s Oltra Mar (Across the Sea) intriguingly turned the usual use of voices upside down: Chorus accompanied the orchestra, not the other way around. Commissioned by the Philharmonic and premiered in 1999, the 10-movement work is a companion piece to her breakthrough opera L’Amour de loin, whose arresting Act III prelude has music in common with this earlier marvel. One senses that the then-48-year-old composer was wrestling with monstrous sonorities (sometimes a bit clumsily) created with vocal/instrumental forces blended with electronically generated sound as a point of reference. She had evolved through years at IRCAM in Paris, and one heard those roots especially in a movement written in memory of Gérard Grisey (1946-1998), that influential sound pioneer in the Spectralist Movement that Saariaho was soon to transcend.
Rautavaara’s 1969 Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 45, featuring the unstoppable Wang, seemed not to be by the same composer who gained international fame with more refined, gauzy works in the 1990s. This piece feels like a reaction against impressionists in its modernist vs. tonality tug-o-war with ill-fitting sound collages, possibly descended from Ives. If the older, more familiar Rautavaara often had his head in the stars, the composer of this piano concerto was creating landscapes of Nordic Ice-Age boulders.
No problem for Wang, who played the similarly dense Magnus Lindberg Piano Concerto No. 3 a few years ago. Her use of elbows on the keyboard enabled the sense of elemental hugeness demanded by the concerto. She also maintained an overall structural grasp of the piece. The second movement’s well-spaced, unadorned chords shimmered like a hymn from ancient times. The final movement is pure musical muscularity softened by the orchestra’s references to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.
Almost everything about Adès own America: A Prophecy added up to self defeat. Premiered by the Philharmonic in 1999 (like Saariaho’s piece), it was perceived in some quarters as getting a raw deal in New York, its Mayan-derived text about the fall of empires being too much for American listeners. Though Adès is a great composer of instrumental music (his Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, for one), his text choices in vocal pieces have been iffy and his vocal writing worse.
Predictions of doom aren’t news (don’t all empires fall at some point?). The high soprano writing left the words unintelligible, though the surtitle screen kept one up to date. (Anna Dennis was the hapless soprano.) The instrumental accompaniment hammered away in overdrive with super-obvious word painting and without revelation. No audience likes being talked down to. And considering how Ades’ message is musically elongated, taking up much more time than it needs, New York audiences especially resent having their time wasted.
Worst of all, one of the texts, “Burn, burn, burn, On earth we shall burn, we shall turn to ash” landed with cruelty in the wake of the tragic Los Angeles fires. By bringing back this piece now, Adès is saying, “I told ya so!” In effect, he drove himself off a cliff.
