by Caleb Easterly
photo courtesy of nyphil.org
On Tuesday night, the New York Philharmonic gave a concert of music centered around a theme of change: the New York premiere of Polaris: Voyage for Orchestra by British composer Thomas Adès, and a moving interpretation of Mahler's 9th symphony.
Polaris literally conjures the North Star through a technique that he calls a "magnetic series," in which all twelve tones of the chromatic scale are gradually presented before returning to a "pole." The piece begins with gently pulsing piano and violins and ends, after complicated canons, with a forceful chord centered on the note "A". Antiphonal brass, playing notes in a slow harmonic rhythm, were stationed in the balconies and mezzanine, giving the music a vast sense of space. The orchestra, perhaps hampered by the complex rhythms, was somewhat stiff despite Alan Gilbert's direct, straightforward conducting, using only simple beats to keep the orchestra and distant brass together.
Mahler's 9th symphony has been interpreted as a farewell to those that he loved, and even to his own life; the score is marked repeatedly with the words ersterbend (dying) and morendo (fading away). The symphony features an unusual construction: two ironic dance movements are book-ended by a pair of deeply affecting slow movements. In this performance, Gilbert and the orchestra seemed more comfortable with the tumultuous rise and fall of the first and fourth movements than with the purposefully insolent, coarse middle movements.
As has been widely reported, during the 4th movement Gilbert abruptly stopped the orchestra in order to make an audience member silence their phone, which had been ringing nonstop for almost 10 minutes. He then addressed the audience from the podium, "I apologize. Usually, when there's a disturbance like this, it is best to ignore it, because addressing it is sometimes worse than the disturbance itself. But this was so egregious that I could not allow it. Let's try again." After a spirited ovation, he returned to the score.
As the last strains of the fourth movement decayed, the words of Leonard Bernstein on this symphony came to mind: "It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate … in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything."