LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Orion - Vivier
Symphony No. 9 - Bruckner
Manfred Honeck - Conductor

Below is the review from the New York Times.

MUSIC|MUSIC REVIEW

Mystical and Searching, and Very Last-Minute

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

MARCH 28, 2014

        

Manfred Honeck Mr. Honeck conducted the New York Philharmonic Thursday night at Avery Fisher Hall.

Recently, Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, brought that orchestra to Avery Fisher Hall for two sold-out concerts. He was scheduled to conduct three performances at the hall of a program with the New York Philharmonic starting Thursday night. But last weekend Mr. Dudamel, the charismatic young Venezuelan maestro, came down with severe flu symptoms, which forced him to withdraw.

The intriguing program he had chosen paired “Orion,” a mystical 1979 score by the Canadian composer Claude Vivier, with Bruckner’s searching Ninth Symphony. On short notice, Manfred Honeck, the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where he has been thriving since 2008, agreed not only to take over for Mr. Dudamel but to conduct the same program. Mr. Honeck, who made his debut with the Philharmonic last year, drew assured and exciting performances of both works from the players, who looked and sounded inspired.

Vivier, born in Montreal in 1948, moved to Paris in 1982. He was stabbed to death the next year in his apartment, a month before he turned 35, by a 19-year-old man. “Orion” shows what a loss his untimely death was to 20th-century music.

The young Vivier was drawn to the circle of composers then experimenting with atmospheric sounds and electroacoustic techniques, especially Stockhausen, with whom he studied in Cologne. This 15-minute score, which takes its name from the constellation Orion, begins with subdued string tremolos and what seems a tentative hunting call for trumpet. Is the mood pensive or rousing? The ambiguity ends as bursts of brass, spiky chords and jittering rhythmic figures send the music into dizzying spirals. This was the Philharmonic’s first performance of the piece, and the playing was impressively vibrant and colorful.

Bruckner completed the first three movements of his Symphony No. 9 in D minor, leaving only sketches for what was to be a formidable finale. As it is, the incomplete work lasts about an hour.

The first movement opens with a tremulous, subdued hum from which melodic fragments emerge. The similarity in character to the opening of the Beethoven Ninth, also in D minor, has long been noted. On this night the more intriguing resemblance was to the opening of Vivier’s “Orion,” something Mr. Dudamel had surely wanted us to hear.

Revealing the structure of the mysterious 25-minute first movement is a conducting challenge. Bruckner alternates moments of Schubertian grace with stretches of Wagnerian frenzy. Often, in making transitions, he simply has the music stop whatever it is doing, take a breath and move on.

The overall design and narrative flow came through in the compelling performance led by Mr. Honeck, who, like Bruckner, was born in Austria. He kept things reined in just enough to reveal the music’s breadth and shape. He brought ferocity to the pummeling chords of the defiant main theme of the Scherzo and offered a luminous, rich-textured account of the mystical Adagio. During Mr. Honeck’s first curtain call, the Philharmonic players remained in their seats and applauded him along with the audience.

CLAUDE VIVIER (1948-1983)Orion (1979)When Claude Vivier was fatally stabbed in his apartment on the night of March 8, 1983, an unfinished manuscript for a choral work lay on his worktable: Crois-tu en l'immortalité de l'âme? (Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?), which, according to The Guardian, is a dramatized monologue in which the composer describes a journey on the metro during which he becomes attracted to a young man. The music breaks off abruptly after the line: “Then he removed a dagger from his jacket and stabbed me through the heart.” It’s as though he had predicted his own death. He was 34. Born in Montreal, Canada, he grew up in an orphanage and later attended a school for boys destined for the priesthood. But his time was limited there—he was expelled for “inappropriate behavior.” He subsequently went to Europe, acquainting himself with the likes of Stockhausen and the “spectrum analyzers” but then went his own way. In his music he was preoccupied with the themes of childhood, death, love, and immortality. In 1976 Vivier traveled from Asia to the Middle East, soaking up the sounds of those cultures. The approximately 15 minutes-long work Orionevokes those sounds. The Montreal Gazette referred to Orion’s “otherworldly sonorities and exuberant rhythms…the spirit of joyous melody…wildly spontaneous yet true to itself.” The Ruhr Trienale program book summed up the man and the artist: “Claude Vivier remains one of the most enigmatic composers of the twentieth century. [He] left behind a singular and extensive body of work. In its individuality and spirituality, it is like a lone star in an empty sky. Ultimately, Vivier threw himself into this dark night, ending his life in what can be regarded as a final, definitive dramatic performance. … A man encapsulates his life in music, and in doing so increasingly blurs the line between life and art and ends his work by fusing both.”


ANTON BRUCKNER (1824-1896)Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (1887-1896)Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 is his final symphonic masterpiece. Due to his physical weakness and pleurisy, he finished only three movements, and he would spend most of his last two years working on the third movement Adagio. After his death well-meaning people tinkered with his works—including this symphony—and there has been much debate about what Bruckner intended, what is original material, and what to do with the sketches the composer left for a fourth movement. Most orchestras present only the three that Bruckner completed, which are magnificent on their own. Among the hallmarks of his symphonies is the frequent use of long rests. As Neal Gittleman (music director, Dayton Philharmonic) has pointed out, being an accomplished organist, Bruckner was familiar with the grand interiors of churches in his native Austria and with the interaction of organs with these resonant spaces (i.e., when a chord releases, the room continues to echo with that chord). Bruckner may have wanted to create that effect in his orchestral works. Says Gittleman, “The reverberation is actually an integral part of the composition. [One] could say that Bruckner tries to turn the orchestra into a massive pipe organ.” Words like “epic,” “monumental,” and “timeless” are usually applied to Bruckner symphonies. They belong to a world of their own—a time conception of their own. Once listeners allow themselves to get in synch with Bruckner’s pulse, their patience is rewarded. There is no denying that the Ninth inspires awe, as its massive, sweeping score unfolds and rises sublimely—like spires of a grand cathedral—to God. As the composer’s dedication of the Ninth Symphony reads: “To the Lord of Lords, to my dear God, my last work, and hope that He will grant me enough time to complete it and will generously accept my gift.”