Finland’s top exports may be machinery and fuel, but in classical music it is also one of the world’s leading producer of conductors.
Over the past century, Finland has nurtured a culture of musical education that has brought about generations of brilliance at the podium. It has given us some of the finest conductors working today, like Esa-Pekka Salonen, as well as some of our buzziest, like Klaus Mäkelä, who picked up storied jobs in Amsterdam and Chicago before the age of 30.
As if in a testament to the saturation of Finnish conductors, the New York Philharmonic booked two back-to-back: Santtu-Matias Rouvali, for a program that continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, and Susanna Mälkki last week.
The similarities between the two conductors’ programs don’t end with their nationality. Both opened with a contemporary work making its Philharmonic premiere; both featured late pieces by Richard Strauss; and both ended with music written during, and in the shadow of, World War I.
Yet these two weeks at the Philharmonic felt satisfyingly distinct. There may be many Finnish conductors, but there is not a Finnish style of conducting. Mälkki and Rouvali both have an intelligent, even wise sense of shape, but are excellent in their own ways; she is a master of color, he of surprise. And the music they programmed, while superficially similar, differed in sound and scale.
The biggest difference was between the two contemporary works. Rouvali’s concert, on Thursday, opened with Julia Wolfe’s “Fountain of Youth” (2019), a nine-minute exclamation that starts percussively, with scratch tones in the strings and scraped washboards. Then the score gradually expands to include the whole orchestra: fluttering, sustained notes in the winds and wailing, animalistic cries in the trombones, as well as stylistic interjections like blues, folk fiddle and rock.
Rouvali, a veteran rock percussionist, maintained clarity and groove and, when the cacophony began to risk overstatement, made a broad wiping gesture to quickly pull back the sound. The music was quieter but no less tense, with the deceptive stillness of water vibrating in a drinking glass.
Luca Francesconi’s violin concerto “Duende: The Dark Notes,” which opened Mälkki’s program, was not only longer, at nearly a half-hour, but also more virtuosic and complex. It is dedicated to Mälkki and the violinist Leila Josefowicz, a contemporary music specialist who has never seemed daunted by difficulty; they premiered it in 2014 and reunited for the Philharmonic performance.
The title of “Duende” comes from Federico García Lorca’s description of the mysterious force and soul of Andalusian culture. (Lorca’s famous lecture on the subject includes a quote from the flamenco singer Manuel Torre: “All that has dark sounds has duende.”) Francesconi’s score is inspired by flamenco, but by way of high modernism; he is less interested in flamenco’s sound world than its intensity.
Francesconi makes superhuman demands on the violin: stratospheric arpeggios, bow-bursting weight against the strings, overtones and ornaments that make the instrument seem supernaturally larger. Josefowicz, stunningly, made it all look so doable, even when the music suggests anything but. There hasn’t been a better contemporary music outing at the Philharmonic so far this season.
Mälkki’s conducting revealed the architecture behind the breathless series of episodes, while never sacrificing musicality. Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” for 23 strings, poses related challenges, and she gave it a strong spine at the core of its constant change and irresolution. She also proved again how well attuned she is to the dry acoustics of the renovated Geffen Hall, with a gift for balance that teased out the individual voices in this score’s mournful chorus.
Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” is a work of similar weight, though less so in the Philharmonic’s performance on Thursday. Rouvali had Mälkki’s sense of clarity, with the textures of high violins, for example, rendered with the silvery luster of “Der Rosenkavalier.” (There were also touchingly warm solos from the horn player Geoffrey Pilkington and the concertmaster, Frank Huang.) But the soprano soloist, Miah Persson, has a thinly direct sound that, while ideal in Mozart and Monteverdi, pales next to the lushness of Strauss’s orchestration.
On Thursday, the Philharmonic sounded stronger on its own in the 1919 version of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. This work can feel as if it were made of nothing but introductions, always starting but rarely developing. Rouvali, though, conducted as though he always knew where he was going, even when he let out small shocks of timbre and rhythm. He held the orchestra in reserve, tending a soft radiance that, as a result, allowed the finale’s famous swanlike theme to take flight with awe rather than affected sentimentality.
Mälkki, too, knows how to shape a score with a payoff in mind, which she deployed to chilling effect in Ravel’s “La Valse,” from 1920. The piece’s darkness was planted at the start, with rumbling low voices, but most of the performance that followed was pleasant, at times even quaint.
The seductively waltzing melody repeated, persisting through creeping instability, warping, under Mälkki’s baton, into something deranged only in the final measures: joyously willful entropy, carefree as it welcomes the chaos.
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