After my recent musical travels through Scandinavia, I was excited to hear that the NY Phil's latest CONTACT! new music concert would be made up entirely of music by composers from Nordic countries. This was no doubt a longtime wish of NY Phil music director Alan Gilbert, who says that he first encountered this music while he was music director of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic from 2000-2008.
The concert, held in the Met Museum's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, began with Per Nørgård’s Cello Concerto No. 2 (2009). Nørgård, who won the Phil's Marie-Josée Kravis New Music Prize last year, is considered to be Denmark's foremost living composer, 2nd only to Nielsen. The concerto unfolded over four movements, ranging from atmospheric tonality to spare serialism. Philharmonic cellist Eric Bartlett was impressive in the solo part, requiring him to execute extramusical techniques like quarter tones.
"I don't know how to describe his music," Alan Gilbert told us from the stage when speaking about Finnish composer Kalevi Aho's Chamber Symphony No. 2 for string orchestra. Gilbert said that it was so "incredibly difficult, we had to work on it a long time in rehearsal." Indeed, the Phil players seemed to be pushed to their limits: written in three movements, the music is intense, brooding, creepy and disturbing, requiring intense concentration and coordination. Eventually, the storm subsided into a series of grand sonorities that fall somewhere in between a lullaby and English string music.
After intermission, fellow Finn Kaija Saariaho – who now lives in NYC – was interviewed on stage by the Phil's new assistant conductor Courtney Lewis about her 2006 work Terra Memoria, originally written for string quartet and presented here in a new version for sting quartet. Saariaho said she wrote the deeply personal piece in memory of her mother, dedicated "for those departed." "I'm interested in what happens to memories over time," she said, in an understated voice. "And, how music is intertwined with our memories." The music was both sonorous and sad, dark and beautiful.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to hear the final work on the program, Serbian-Swedish composer Duro Zivkovic's The White Angel, which was inspired by a 13th-century fresco in the Mileseva monastery in Serbia. But, I had a good excuse.
More pics on the photo page.