At orchestral concerts, it is uncommon for conductors to appear before the players have even had a chance to tune their instruments. But at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, Leon Botstein took a moment to thank the audience.
“Practically no one knows these pieces,” he said—referring to the 1930s program of rarities performed that night by The Orchestra Now, his ensemble of conservatory-all-stars—“and the fact that on a beautiful May day someone came out is a miracle.”
A miracle, yes, but a modest one.
That evening, the New York Philharmonic had “limited availability” for its extremely standard fare concert—Mozart’s “Turkish” Violin Concerto, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. And across Carnegie’s stage door, the line squirmed for a star-studded, sold-out run of “Into the Woods” hundreds of feet from the entrance to New York’s city center.
At Carnegie, however, there was a lot of red in the cream-and-gold hall: patches and rows of empty seats. Botstein has made a career of excavating the neglected treasures of classical music – a noble, essential effort. But Thursday’s concert was a disheartening reminder of just how difficult that job really is; programming only so far brings you into a culture where Mozart and Beethoven, in all weathers, continue to have the upper hand.
Of course, not everything Botstein selects can align with well-known classics. Some are more curiosity than masterpiece, but either way, he and The Orchestra Now give them high-level readings – as good a case for them as you can imagine. And on Thursday he presented four works that will not soon become a permanent fixture in the repertoire, but which are nevertheless worth performing.
They were all written in the second half of the 1930s, a period that gave us music as varied as Berg’s Violin Concerto and ‘Lulu’, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Varèse’ Density 21.5 and Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’. Botstein’s programming was equally broad, with the first half sampling composers from the Americas – William Grant Still and Carlos Chávez – and the second shifting to Europe, featuring Witold Lutoslawski and Karl Amadeus Hartmann.
Still prolific, but remains best known for his ‘Afro-American Symphony’ from 1931. Here he was represented by the later, smaller ‘Dismal Swamp’, a tone poem for piano and orchestra based on text by Verna Arvey (his wife and collaborator, including in the opera “Highway 1, USA”). A portrait of an escape from slavery to freedom, it is atmospheric yet sleek; in the beginning, both static and dramatic.
Frank Corliss, as the soloist, was skillfully cautious, evoking the tension of the scene with calm, trudging phrases, at one point amid an eerie mist of overtones in the surrounding strings. Anachronistic blues passages—in wind solos and muted brass—felt like glimpses of a future that seemed within reach at the end, a luscious climax that finds beauty and some sort of joyous promise in an otherwise bleak landscape.
The revelation of the evening may have been Chávez’s Piano Concerto, a three-movement work that functions more like a two-movement: a long first of mercury episodes, and another that grows from next to nothing into a finale of brassy, massive sound. Excitingly unpredictable – in its development, but also in its rhythms and sonorities – it provided restless training for soloist Gilles Vonsattel, who was cold-bloodedly capable, also as a sensitive partner during a lengthy duet with harpist Taylor Ann Fleshman in the second movement.
After the break came Lutoslawski’s early ‘Symphonic Variations’, which are started by a short, simple theme pronounced by a flute on pizzicato strings. Between dizzying runs in the wind and obtrusive dark textures in the cellos and basses, it can be hard to tell where one variation ends and another begins – so hard, there’s no consensus on how many there are. Easier to follow and more fun to absorb is the work’s brief journey from neoclassical austerity to unruly grandeur.
However, the joy did not last long. To conclude the program, Botstein offered Hartmann’s First Symphony, ‘Versuch eines Requiems’ (translated in the program as ‘Essay for a Requiem’, although more powerful could be something like ‘Attempt at a Requiem’). A collection of five movements from Walt Whitman settings—sung by the mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel between performances in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”—it’s a painful indictment of war whose 1948 premiere was long delayed by Hartmann’s status as a degenerate artist in Nazi Germany.
Starting with martial percussion and dissonance, the symphony’s baseline is horror. Operating from a low tessiture, Nansteel was often a rich but chilling presence, barely melodic and, towards the finale, delivered Whitman’s “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing” with heightened, haunting speech. That move ends with a crescendo that calls for gunfire, but stops abruptly, leaving a floating chord like tinnitus.
Conceived on the eve of an oppressive regime invading its neighbor, and now played as a similar act of war unfolds, Hartmann’s symphony is a cry against conflict, a warning from the past — but on Thursday one that only the few who were there could reach. to hear it.
The Orchestra Now
Performed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.
