After a couple of weeks out of town, I was back at Carnegie Hall last night to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra play a sold out concert with their principal guest conductor, Marin Alsop. (Philly’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, was busy conducting the Orchestre Métropolitain, one of the other two groups he leads, up in Montreal.) Alsop, currently chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony’s Ravinia Festival, has an outsized presence at Carnegie this season as a Perspectives artist, leading a variety of ensembles including London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, the Juilliard Orchestra, and the youth orchestra she co-founded, the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic (6/17).
This concert jumped right out of the gate with a new work by John Adams: “The Rock You Stand On”, which he wrote last year for Marin, a longtime champion of his music. (“She is one of the very few conductors whom I can trust to do the right thing with what I’ve written,” Adams says. “She ‘gets it.’”) Obliquely inspired by Alsop’s perseverance as one of the first successful woman conductors, the music was compact, rhythmic and propulsive, staking its claim to a rightful place among John’s other high-flying openers, including “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” and “Lollapalooza.”
Last night’s sold-out house was largely thanks to the presence of Japanese pianist Hayato Sumino, making his Carnegie Hall orchestral debut. Sumino, a Tokyo native who now lives in New York, is a former Chopin competition semifinalist with more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers and a fashion-forward presence that warranted a profile earlier this week in GQ. Wearing the same double-breasted Saint-Laurent tuxedo he modeled in the magazine, Sumino fluidly played Gershwin’s jazzy Piano Concerto in F – including his own dazzling cadenzas – showing he has at least as much substance as style. After a standing ovation, Sumino responded with a wild, finger-flying encore of his own variation on Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” that had me thinking a certain pianist named Oscar had somehow snuck back into the building. (I learned during intermission that Sumino often plays jazz in his recitals.)
In the GQ interview, Sumino revealed how he was drawn to New York by its multiplicity of of genres and ideas, be it music, art, or street culture. Which, of course, will only improve whatever he does on the concert stage.
“New York is a place where tradition is not simply preserved, but constantly reimagined,” he said. “Even though I come from the world of classical music, I have always wanted to reshape it into something contemporary and alive.”
But, the real stunner last night was Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”, in a suite of Alsop’s own making. Conducting from memory with bristling energy and fierce conviction, Marin was in complete command. (And not just the musicians: when some audience members attempted to break out into applause between sections, Marin stuck out her hand, immediately quieting the interlopers.) With selections both familiar (“Montagues and Capulets”) and fresh (“Dance of the Antilles Girls”) the music was alternately shocking and transporting, romantic and modern. Having fought long and hard for herself and many other women conductors – a fight Alsop still wages through her Purple Baton initiative – watching the Philadelphia players follow her every move felt like a triumph, on so many levels.
After a couple of raucous curtain calls, Alsop whirled around and conducted the rollicking “General Dance of Enthusiasm and Apotheosis” from Shostakovich’s early ballet The Bolt, which felt like a none-too-subtle dig at the sycophancy currently rampant in Washington.
Last night’s concert was broadcast on WQXR, and will soon be available for streaming on their website. Marin returns with Philadelphia on May 29 in a program that pairs Beethoven’s 7th with the NY Premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ 5th symphony, with Marsalis leading the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra ahead of his departure next year as its founding artistic director.
And, if you want to hear more of Adams’ music, excerpts from his opera Nixon in China will be performed next Thursday (4/9) at Carnegie by the Boston Symphony with Thomas Hampson as Nixon and Renée Fleming as Pat. BSO music director Andris Nelsons will conduct, whose appearance here will hopefully be focused more on the music than on the explosive politics of his impending departure. Come to think of it: if Boston wants their next music director to better reflect the diversity of contemporary society without sacrificing musical quality or experience, they could hardly do better than the maestra who just stood atop that same Carnegie Hall podium. At 69, Marin may not want that kind of responsibility at this stage of her career. But, it’s worth the ask.
More pics over at Instagram.