The composer Olga Neuwirth doesn’t tend to call her works anything as straightforward as symphonies or concertos.
Instead, over the years, Neuwirth, 55, has classified pieces in fanciful categories: an “amphigory” for violin and ensemble, a “ballet mécanomorphe,” a “distorting mirror” for orchestra, a “footnote” for soprano.
And now, “musical calligrams.” That is the subtitle of “Keyframes for a Hippogriff,” the sprawling, chaotic explosion of postmodernism that the New York Philharmonic played on Saturday evening at David Geffen Hall, conducted by Thomas Sondergard.
“Hippogriff” was to have had its world premiere with the Philharmonic as part of its Project 19 series of new works by female composers. But the pandemic intervened, and the piece came to New York after being performed by the Berlin Philharmonic and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, two of the other commissioners.
It is good news for those of us who keep pressuring orchestras to commission music larger in scale than the 10- or 15-minute length of the standard concert opener. That position has become something of a prison for contemporary works, offering audiences a little taste of the new that can be quickly forgotten over the next hour or two of standard repertory.
Thirty minutes long, and scored for a big orchestra, countertenor soloist, children’s choir, broad battery of percussion, electric guitar and pair of synthesizers, “Hippogriff” is not so easily dismissed. Grand and in-your-face, it keeps surging from hushed, tensely vibrating simmers to piercing instrumental and vocal roars.
The text is a rambling collage of fragments that Neuwirth has drawn from sources as varied as Walt Whitman, Edward Lear, Emily Dickinson and street graffiti. The gist is that things are not going great (“I am in a cramped cell in this world”), but that something better is possible (“Let’s make our dream for real again”). “Freedom” and “hope” are the key words.
Neuwirth takes her place in a long line of composers who have used a children’s choir — here, the never harsh Brooklyn Youth Chorus — as a symbol of innocence, or as what she is quoted in the program as calling a “voice of resistance against a ruinous public order that is being damaged by the self-interest of government and industry.”
The countertenor Andrew Watts — his tone sweet, if easily covered by the orchestra in aggressive moments — leads the choir along this road to resistance. The Pied Piper-style musical relationship is reminiscent of the one between Oberon, another countertenor, and his children’s-choir fairies in Britten’s opera “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Beyond this reminder of Britten, Neuwirth folds in nods to other styles and works — crisp, courtly echoes of Baroque music; touches of louche, dirty blues; the solemn bells of Wagner’s “Parsifal” — in the eclectic manner of Berio’s 1968 “Sinfonia” or Mahler’s symphonies, to give a sense of the weight of history on modernity, sometimes oppressive and sometimes inspiring.
It struck me that the main structural challenge of “Hippogriff” is that, with the voices representing activism and virtue, Neuwirth looks to her orchestra to provide evocations of both the world’s repressive forces and the fertile, creative wildness out of which resistance might emerge.
The result, perhaps necessarily, is muddled — particularly over half an hour of quite repetitive musical and thematic material. The Berlin Philharmonic’s performance, archived on its Digital Concert Hall platform, offers, as a recording can, a more transparent capture of this dense work, and the sound of the boys in the Tölzer Knabenchor is more distinctive than the Brooklyn Youth Chorus’s girls.
Played after a fresh, vibrant version of Lili Boulanger’s dewy “D’un Matin de Printemps,” “Hippogriff” made a nice pairing with another crashingly grand piece in which triumph is touched with darkness: Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, given a comfortably warm performance under Sondergard, the new music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, who made an impressive Philharmonic debut with this program. (Saturday was the last of three concerts.)
Both works contain subtle but crucial references to the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — Neuwirth in a brief passage of quiet, stalwart marching in the low winds (as well as in as her brotherhood-celebrating text), and Prokofiev in the bit of hymn in the low strings that sets off his Fifth’s stirring conclusion.
Throughout the symphony, Sondergard kept the balances clear between the orchestra’s sections, never losing the winds in the strings or the strings in the brasses. And the Philharmonic played vividly but without exaggeration, the climaxes blazing without blaring.
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