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Hi everyone,
Yesterday I got to have a night out for a New York Philharmonic concert. It was my favorite in a long time—perhaps not as transcendent as returning to live orchestral music after long pandemic isolation to hear them perform Mahler in Carnegie Hall last spring, but this program was stimulating, comfortable, meditative, moving.
The poem I’m enclosing was written a couple weeks ago, but feels like a good pairing with how I felt after getting home from that concert. I’ll also enclose some thoughts about the music I heard below.
May your weekend be filled with music,
Rachel
— —
word cloud
love
scolding
backs
first song
miss those days
alphabet
later
yes still
the same
you changed
my life
(written while listening to “Language or the Kiss” by the Indigo Girls)
— —
Thoughts on the Concert
I’d never seen esperanza spalding, Claire Chase, or conductor Susanna Mälkki live, nor had I heard anything by Felipe Lara. The double concerto he wrote for them was really interesting. Besides incorporating improvisation, the program notes explained that the string section had been split into two separate string orchestras that were tuned a quarter tone apart from each other. Throughout the piece, I found myself simultaneously lost in meditation and very present. By the end, I was desperately rummaging around in my bag (only when the music was loud enough of course) to find a pen so I could write while listening.
Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” was the perfect opening for the concert and, although short, it was the piece I was most looking forward to hearing as it is a favorite. I first heard it live at a NY Phil spatial concert at the Park Avenue Armory with Alan Gilbert. The spatial aspect last night was not as immersive, since I wasn’t seated in the middle of a room with three stages. But the flutes and the trumpet were still distributed among the audience, and the haunting effect created by their spacing made me appreciate the more intimate acoustics of the renovated hall.
The second half was the concert version of Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.” Zachary Woolfe’s New York Times review sums up how well this went with what came before:
“Petrushka” here seemed both to echo and to have generated the Lara concerto’s off-kilter abruptness, fearless colors and wry enigmas.
Overall, it was the tightest we’ve heard the NY Phil sound since the opening of the new hall. My impression is that the crispness we heard was a result of both the artistry of Mälkki’s conducting and the musicians starting to settle into the acoustics of their new space.
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