NEW YORK — Kwamé Ryan led the New York Philharmonic on April 8 at David Geffen Hall in a program that contrasted two faces of American music — experimental and lyrical. Featured were the world premiere of George Lewis’ …ohne festen Wohnsitz and the Philharmonic debut of South African soprano Golda Schultz.
Charles Ives (1874-1954) and Lewis (born 1952) might not seem to have much in common, but their music shares a penchant for innovation and a certain restlessness. Ives was born to an old and progressive-leaning Connecticut family; his father was a band leader and encouraged his musical preferences. After barely graduating from Yale, Charles became an innovative and successful insurance executive. Although committed to his day job, for about 20 years he wrote some of the most daring and original music created in America. Free from commercial constraints, he composed to please himself, experimenting with forms and musical language far from the work of contemporaries like Strauss, Berg, and Stravinsky. Seldom performed in his lifetime, his iconoclastic music only gradually gained recognition long after he had stopped composing in 1927.
Lewis has forged a different career path entirely in the music world. Born just two years before Ives died, Lewis took up trombone as a teenager and became steeped in jazz, which his parents enjoyed. During time off from Yale, where he earned a BA in philosophy, he became involved playing in the Chicago jazz scene. Extroverted and curious, he added experimental contemporary music and computer music to his explorations after he returned to the east coast. At Tanglewood in 2019, Lewis told an interviewer, “I’m interested in…nonlinearity, ruptures, instabilities — things that keep people on their toes.” Amid a rich and accomplished career, he became Professor of American Music at Columbia University in 2004 and is also artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Ives’ The Unanswered Question (1908) is scored for strings, trumpet solo, and four flutes; the composer described these units as representing the “Silence of the Druids,” the “Perennial Question of Existence,” and the “Invisible Answer.” Strings open with a soft chorale, like a delicate cloud of sound, over which the trumpet timidly repeats a tonally ambiguous four-note theme, answered by the flutes in increasingly vehement bursts of chaotic dissonance. The approximately seven minutes are primarily serene but interrupted with uncertainty. In Ryan’s hands, the piece exuded watchful calm.
In contrast, Lewis’ …ohne festen Wohnsitz (without fixed dwelling) made the Ives seem polite and stable. This is his second composition inspired by the 18th-century Ghana-born philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo. A co-commission by the Philharmonic and Philharmonie Luxembourg, the 24-minute work is essentially a concerto grosso for orchestra and the new-music piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire (Russell Greenberg, Dustin Donahue, percussion; Laura Barger, Julia Den Boer, pianos).
The large orchestra calls for 18 percussion instruments, and Yarn/Wire adds 17 more in addition to two pianos, melodica, harmonium, celesta, and harpsichord. Unsurprisingly, it’s a colorful and often noisy piece. It opens with an almost-unison tutti on one pitch, giving the impression that the players can’t quite find the pitch. Episodic, it places different instrumental sections with or against each other, with the chamber ensemble front and center, exercising theatrical as well as musical skills. Balancing the sense of strife and instability is a sense of playfulness, something I find endemic to percussion ensembles. It’s a challenging piece, but one I’d like to hear again.
After a scant hour of experimental music, the second part of the program offered mid-century Americana by Samuel Barber, with an excursion into neoclassical Stravinsky. Schultz was unfortunately recovering from bronchitis and suffering from spring allergies, so the originally scheduled aria from Carlisle Floyd’s Susanna was omitted from the program. But her technique, musicality, and personality carried her through the roughly 20 minutes of music.
Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947, rev. 1950) is a setting of James Agee’s nostalgic prose poem about a summer evening seen through the eyes of a young boy. The music is amiably tonal and even cinematic. It’s a tender piece, written about a moment just before the world went mad. If Schultz’s voice was a bit muffled, her sincere manner and clear diction put across the warmth of the memories evoked.
“No word from Tom,” from the opera The Rake’s Progress (1951), pairs middle Stravinsky’s angular musical language and W. H. Auden’s unique poetry with the forms of 18th-century opera. Anne Truelove, who loves the faithless Tom Rakewell, sings of her despair and hopes for his return (Schultz has sung the role at the Metropolitan Opera). The four sections — recitative, slow cavatina, recitative, cabaletta — follow the framework of a Mozart concert aria, with similar vocal challenges. Schultz delivered the mannered text with naturalness, giving the cavatina mournful weight while sailing easily through the coloratura demands.
Barber’s Second Essay for Orchestra, Op. 17 (1942), clocking in at around 11 minutes, is one of his less familiar works, but it’s a good one, and it fit neatly into the program. The single movement has three sections, beginning with a quiet beginning with winds trading a disjunct bit of melody that grows into a restless tutti, with Janáček-flavored timpani. A lively, anxious fugue follows, and the piece ends with a full and stately finale. It could easily be the overture for a war epic; its solemn finale seemed apt for our current moment, fraught with uncertainties not unlike the time in which the Essay was written.
