NEW YORK — “It’s the Dudamel Effect.”
That was the explanation floating around among the new-music community: How else to explain New York’s sudden enthusiasm for contemporary repertoire?
It would have been one thing if the New York Philharmonic concert March 12 alone had been a hot ticket. Sure, the meat of the program was a new set of arrangements of a late 20th-century piece by Frederic Rzewski, but the opener was Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica, a classical warhorse if ever there was one. Then why is the Phil’s forthcoming David Lang premiere, an evening-length oratorio about economics, doing so well at the box office?
Lang and Rzewski are exciting, fascinating, often crowd-pleasing composers, but the cultish aura of Gustavo Dudamel clearly has preceded his imminent tenure as music director of the Philharmonic. On this occasion, he was greeted by whoops and cheers from the audience the moment he set foot onstage.
The question of why this concert met with such fervent enthusiasm, however — whether it was Dudamel’s reputation, his famous charisma, or whatever — was rendered moot by the program that followed those cheers. The hype was well deserved.
The programming itself was more than clever. The Eroica Symphony was composed as a political statement — originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte, who, before he crowned himself Emperor, made people think he personified the composer’s democratic ideals. Beethoven was also a virtuoso pianist and improviser drawn to theme-and-variations as a form, including a set of keyboard variations exploring his own Eroica theme.
Rzewski, meanwhile, surely had Beethoven in mind when he composed his own variations on a highly political theme, the Chilean leftist anthem “El Pueblo unido jamás será vincido” (The People United Will Never Be Defeated!). Composed for pianist Ursula Oppens on the occasion of the American bicentennial, this spectacular and exhausting showpiece draws on the composer-pianist’s intimacy with the keyboard, exploiting idiomatic virtuosity, extended playing techniques, and even improvisation.
For this concert, almost exactly 50 years after that premiere, the Philharmonic commissioned new orchestrations of the theme and 36 variations by a team of composers: Kati Agócs, Marcos Balter, Enrico Chapela, Anthony Cheung, Suzanne Farrin, Brittany J. Green, Felipe Lara, Tania León, Andrew Norman, Arturo Márquez, Maria Schneider, Nina Shekhar, Roberto Sierra, Conrad Tao, Jerod Impichcha̱achaaha’ Tate, Joel Thompson, Wang Lu, and Nina C. Young.
The commission cannily ties both Rzewski and Beethoven to our own moment. Rzewski’s variations are an obvious rebuke to America’s installation of Chile’s fascist dictator Pinochet. For a South American-born conductor, with ties to socialist figures in his native Venezuela, to return to the piece when America is openly returning to violent policies towards Latin Americans in their own countries and repression of Latin American residents here in the U.S., sends an equally clear message. And at a time when federal government is censoring projects deemed excessively “diverse,” it is notable that this one commissioning project featured a large number of female and nonwhite composers.
And it sounded fantastic. Dudamel’s Beethoven was quick, punchy, and tight. The orchestra’s playing was clean, but spirited, light where it needed to be, with the counterpoint and other dialogues between instruments lucid and balanced.
Especially pleasing was the balance between the even-toned strings and the many-colored winds, as in the opening bars of the Marcia funebre: Beethoven opens the funereal movement with somber strings, and the violins climbed their low strings to generate a melancholic timbre without falling into molto vibrato bathos. When the bright, sweet sound of Juliana Koch’s solo oboe entered, the contrast was exquisite. In the Scherzo, when the French horns imitated a hunting call, it was impossible not to thrill at the zest and precision of their playing.
Compared to the Beethoven’s extraordinary consistency of craft, the new Rzewski variations were a bit of a mess — but even this was in keeping with the spirit of the original work. Rzewski was in many respects a populist composer, drawn to lucid forms like the theme-and-variations that can be immediately understood by the lay listener. But compared to peers like Terry Riley, whose formal explorations along similar lines take a kind of zen approach to disorder, much of his music seethes with a dark and destructive energy. While he may have been a populist and an idealist, his music makes clear that he was not a panderer nor, despite the title of The People United…!, a wide-eyed optimist.
His variations veer from the folk melody by Sergio Ortega Alvarado to Romantic pianism, crashing modernism, jazz, and every style in between, in a delirious and sometimes frightening chaos. There have been plenty of orchestrations of, say, the Goldberg Variations, or Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and even more than those, this orchestration of a set of variations conceived so very idiomatically for the keyboard would have seemed redundant — if it weren’t for the clash of different voices executing each successive section. The Babel of different compositional languages underscored both the anarchic tendencies of Rzewski’s aesthetics and the socialist tendencies of his politics.
Unfortunately, it rapidly became difficult for anyone not intimately acquainted with Rzewski’s original work to keep track of whose variation, exactly, was whose, as one flowed into the next. Most were highly polished — some brilliantly inventive, some with a Hollywood-style gloss — and only a few seemed muddy or dull. The Philharmonic committed fully to all of them, allowing the musicians (and their next music director) to show off a broad range of their capabilities, from pointillist exhibitions of extended techniques to Latin-inspired percussion to old-fashioned orchestral bombast. A duet between clarinet and saxophone that drew on blues and gospel idioms was appropriately smoky and soulful.
After the piece‘s rousing conclusion, the crowd roared their approval, bringing the line of composers back for curtain call after curtain call — not something that tends to follow new music on a subscriber concert. How much of the crowd’s excitement was owed to this strange and exciting new orchestration, how much of it was owed to the Philharmonic’s crackerjack performance, and how much of it was simply the Dudamel Effect?
Perhaps the three cannot be fully distinguished: The canniness of this genuinely hip, crowd-pleasing commission, the brilliant sound of the orchestra, and the hype around the conductor all blur into both Dudamel’s artistry and his cultural cool factor. Whatever the reason the New York Philharmonic has for the first time in years managed to generate this much excitement, it portends great things for the orchestra’s new era.
