Near the end of the 20th century, the New York Philharmonic presented a concert entirely of world premieres: five works that it called Messages for the Millennium. A bit hokey, with a mandate to offer “a universal message of hope to the people of the world,” it was tempered by a rebellious response from an iconoclastic young composer named Thomas Adès.
Instead of hope he gave the audience a warning. His contribution, “America: A Prophecy,” drew on Mayan and Spanish poetry for a portrait of fragility and a vision of apocalypse, with a chillingly desolate ending that left you in a dense cloud of ash and despair.
Now Adès has returned to the piece, revising and expanding it to include a coda with a wiser, longer view of history. It resonates even more than it did in the heady days of 1999, when a computer glitch seemed to be as bad as things could get.
The new version of “America: A Prophecy” had its local premiere on Thursday, conducted by Adès in an extraordinarily programmed Philharmonic concert that included another Messages for the Millennium commission, Kaija Saariaho’s “Oltra Mar,” as well as Charles Ives’s dreamily American work Orchestral Set No. 2 and Einojuhani Rautavaara’s virtuosically combative First Piano Concerto.
On paper the Rautavaara, while a rarity, had the look of a main attraction with Yuja Wang at the keyboard. And it was certainly the most spectacular performance of the night, opening with a piano solo in which the right hand pounds clusters like claps of thunder while the left seems to scurry in fright.
Wang has always been thrilling to watch, and in the past several years she has been a meaningful force behind the Philharmonic’s programming, exploring neglected corners of the repertoire from even well-known composers like Stravinsky and Janacek. You can love or hate what she plays (I haven’t loved everything), but she always makes a strong case for it.
Rautavaara’s concerto, which premiered in 1970, had never been performed by the Philharmonic, which feels like an oversight given Wang’s jaw-dropping account of it. Her fingerwork muscular and assured, she had a pummeling might that the orchestra met with almost stubbornly similar power. Because of its size, though, it sometimes drowned her out.
Part of that issue is baked into the score, with its adversarial dynamic between the soloist and larger group. But throughout the night, Adès had a penchant for grandeur that flattened each piece, burying nuance in cacophony.
That was especially the case in the Saariaho, which opens with a big, fortissimo chord that builds from the bottom up but gives way to a much wider range of sound than Adès’s conducting would suggest. The sixth section of “Oltra Mar,” subtitled “Death: In Memory of Gérard Grisey,” is mostly vertical in the score; you can trace elaborate harmony across notes that line up throughout the ensemble, in an elegant homage to the rich color of Grisey’s music. On Thursday, though, it was more desaturated, a respectful nod rather than a heartfelt eulogy.
Adès’s conducting style was a better fit for the Ives, which, together with “America: A Prophecy,” served as a start to the Philharmonic’s observation of this country’s 250th anniversary. The orchestra was still dense, even unbalanced, but that evoked a kind of plaque caked onto memories of old tunes by Stephen Foster and hymns from church.
The United States of Orchestral Set No. 2, composed during World War I, looks to the past; Ives writes nostalgically, though the halcyon melodies of camp revival meetings are layered with the chaos of modernity. And there’s a transience to his Americana, a sense of coming and going, which isn’t so different in meaning from Adès’s expanded “America: A Prophecy.”
Adès’s original version laid out a scene of annihilation, recounted by a breathless soloist (the soprano Anna Dennis, affectingly austere) with responses by a large chorus (members of the University of Michigan Chamber Choir and Exigence Vocal Ensemble). The score’s sharply rhythmic opening gives way to a grotesque, ironic fanfare of European pride and dominance, befitting a British composer like Adès, who came of age after the decline of colonialism and empire.
But his new ending lends the piece more heft and consolation. Where the earlier score painted a picture of the America to come, this one takes a cosmic view of a place that can seem in upheaval today.
Over elliptical phrases in the orchestra, the singers, behaving like a Greek chorus, comment on the world’s “eternal turning” and endless cycles of creation and destruction. If Ives’s America was something remembered, then Adès’s may be something forgotten and ultimately insignificant in the scheme of things.
These, though, are merely two perspectives on America. There will be many more to come and think about, at the Philharmonic and throughout every branch of culture, as the commemorative year continues. Adès, as he did at the turn of the century, is just here to make sure we don’t celebrate too much.
New York Philharmonic
This program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
Joshua Barone is an editor for The Times covering classical music and dance. He also writes criticism about classical music and opera.
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