Given a lineup of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Charles Ives, and Mozart, it is not hard to pick the odd man out. And indeed, at this past weekend’s New York Philharmonic performances at the Park Avenue Armory, the excerpted scene from “Don Giovanni” stood out as the ill-considered, overproduced addendum to an otherwise intriguing and even occasionally captivating evening. The wedging in of the popular Classical giant amid three (comparatively speaking) rarely-heard modernist masters shows at best a miscalculation and carries the whiff of pandering.
Yet music director Alan Gilbert deserves credit for conceiving the program, a rare opportunity to explore spatial music — music, that is, that conveys some sense of sound’s existence as a specific phenomenon moving about in physical space. Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” was the obvious impetus and anchor for the evening. Written to be played by three distinct orchestras simultaneously, the piece determined the arrangement in the Armory’s cavernous Drill Hall of three stages alternating with three areas of stadium seats in a ring surrounding a circle of audience members lounging on the floor. And “Gruppen” predictably proved the most successful work.
Especially rich in percussion and horn sections, the three ensembles of roughly 30 members were a match for the vast volume of interior space they were tasked with animating. Chords and short runs of notes — they could not rightly be called melody lines — gained in intensity as they were repeated with new members joining in. And moments of real beauty were achieved as fading tones on the nearby stage were brought back to life in a distant space. It seemed that sound almost became visible when a clang shot around the hall from one orchestra to the next.
But Stockhausen came after the intermission. The evening opened with a fanfare, with players in at least seven locations around the room, including the catwalks in the rafters. Here the instruments signaled as voices calling out to each other across space, and the range of interactions built as if to illustrate the possibilities afforded by the room. The first work on the official program, Boulez’s “Ritual in memoriam Bruno Maderna” was arranged by the composer for eight parts, each containing “melody instruments” and percussion. As before these were spread about, above, and behind, near and far from the dispersed audience so that listeners in different sections experienced different high points and lows. Because the 1974-75 work is arranged so that the conductor can control the pace, the sense of a conversation among the various ensembles emerged, as did the feeling that we were being taught what spatial music could do. The engagement was of a cerebral sort.
Then came the Finale to Act I of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” selected by Gilbert ostensibly because the composer set the scene to be played by three groups of instruments roughly corresponding to a set of overlapping storylines. In standard performance the construction is witty and inventive, but played in the round, voices faded in and out as the singers turned, and the voices and the dispersed musicians could not be kept in sync, despite the assistant conductors spread around the room.
Ultimately, the opportunity to hear “Gruppen” and Ives’s sublime “Unanswered Question” at the evening’s close made up for the mangling of Mozart. In the future Gilbert should trust his audience to turn out for a program of relatively new music without watering it down with the familiar.
Beginning Friday July 6, a video recording of the New York Philharmonic performance can be viewed at medici.tv.
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