Earlier this month, the New York Philharmonic brought back two standards by Beethoven and Brahms after just a couple of years. And this week, under the conductor Rafael Payare, the orchestra did it again, playing Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony at David Geffen Hall not even two years after its last outing.
Programming like this may be driven by fear. With two seasons to fill before Gustavo Dudamel arrives as music director, the Philharmonic could be nervous about losing audiences and is juicing the programs with classics. It’s unfortunate: Even though these works are beloved for a reason, there is just too much great music that goes unheard to justify endless repetitions of a tiny core repertoire.
But there was also something new this week: the Philharmonic’s first performances of “Fairytale Poem” by Sofia Gubaidulina — just five months after the ensemble played this 93-year-old Soviet-born composer’s Viola Concerto. (That is the kind of repetition I can get behind.)
Gubaidulina’s music manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident, that it’s irresistible.
“Fairytale Poem” (1971) shows that this was true from her earliest works. The 14-minute piece was inspired by a Czech children’s story; the main character is a piece of chalk that wants to draw gardens and castles but is stuck doing dry work at the classroom blackboard until a boy takes it home and finally gives it free imaginative rein.
“The chalk is so happy,” Gubaidulina once wrote, “it does not even notice how it is dissolving in the drawing of this beautiful world.”
Whether this is a metaphor for the life of an artist — particularly under authoritarian rule — is left ambiguous. The ensemble is reduced to strings, flutes, clarinets, percussion, harp and piano for an atmosphere of mysterious vibration.
Gubaidulina conjures a world of whimsy and darkness, with the chalk’s fanciful dreams and humdrum reality suggested in passing notions that are erased almost as soon as they’re drawn: a brief, billowing duo of piano and harp; an insistent plucking that spreads through the orchestra; leaden plunks on the piano, with nervous interjections from other instruments filling the interstices; a vaporous ending.
Payare, the music director of the San Diego Symphony and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, took a moderate, even deliberate pace with the score, as he did throughout the concert. Mozart’s final completed work, the Clarinet Concerto in A, unfolded amiably, and Anthony McGill, the orchestra’s well-loved principal clarinet, was about as gentle and demure as a soloist could be, coiling around ensemble textures with a soft-grained sound that often merely whispered.
In the “Pathétique,” Payare’s fast tempos were on the slower side and his slow ones were fastish, bleeding the symphony of some vibrancy and variety. And he, in common with many conductors at Geffen Hall, wasn’t always able to balance the Philharmonic’s fortissimo brass blare with the rest of the orchestra.
This was efficient, effective, somewhat faceless Tchaikovsky. And it didn’t make a strong case for rushing the “Pathétique” back into the orchestra’s repertoire.
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