The summer time live shows that the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra packages at Carnegie Corridor after the common opera season ends are all the time refreshing and reveal the flexibility of the musicians in normal (and never so normal) classical live performance repertoire. The orchestra musicians appear to be in a vacation temper and might discover musical roads not taken of their operatic careers. This system:
JESSIE MONTGOMERY “Hymn for Everybody”
MOZART “Vado, ma dove?,” Okay. 583 ( Lisette Oropesa, soprano soloist)
MOZART “A Berenice … Sol nascente,” Okay. 70 (Lisette Oropesa, soprano soloist)
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1
My response to this program was, do these items have something to do with one another?
Nicely, upon listening to the live performance, I felt they every shared an identical emotional arc – working by means of uncertainty, angst, and adversity to seek out religious restoration and wholeness with a glimmer of hope (nonetheless unsure) on the horizon.
Jessie Montgomery is a 43 year-old composer-violinist whose compositions have been gaining traction in live performance halls all through the nation. Her Hymn for Everybody (composed 2021), an roughly 12-minute orchestral poem, was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and premiered in April 2022 underneath the baton of Maestro Riccardo Muti.
Montgomery describes herself as a “hunter gatherer” musical creator – she takes and synthesizes conventional tonal classicism with improvisatory jazz, conventional African-American people music or widespread music et al. to create a novel musical palette. This temporary work is totally tonal and in a classical American idiom harking back to Samuel Barber or Aaron Copland. Hymn for Everybody works solidly and expressively in that custom moderately than presenting some kind of intelligent pastiche or self-conscious homage. Montgomery is fluent within the idiom and makes use of it with each technical surety and expressive honesty.
Hymn for Everybody was composed because the world was rising from the COVID-19 pandemic – the looking out and tensive string writing within the first half suggests somebody stumbling into the road after being confined indoors not sure of the world round them, their eyes blinking on the solar. Ultimately, there’s a sense of turning into extra relaxed on the earth and discovering one’s footing.
On the time Montgomery was composing the piece, she was coping with turning 40 and shedding her beloved mom in Might 2021. She discovered herself in search of “a little bit of catharsis” and expanded her new composition from a collection of orchestral miniatures right into a hymn not only for herself however for everybody rising from shadows into mild.
There may be a number of texture and selection within the piece together with a central brass chorale. Montgomery shouldn’t be afraid of melody or tonal magnificence. It was performed superbly by the Met Orchestra and Nézet-Séguin. Montgomery herself, who grew up in Manhattan on the Decrease East Facet, was within the viewers and was invited up onstage by the maestro to take a bow earlier than an appreciative viewers.
From then on it was diva time: Lisette Oropesa emerged radiant and smiling in a fitted canary yellow night robe with black cloth appliqué decorations sporting a diamond clip in her ebony hair, welcoming the enthusiastic applause. For a singer who’s a product of the Met’s personal Lindemann program, coloratura Oropesa just lately has not been a frequent presence with the corporate – her final appearances had been in December 2022 in a revival of Bartlett Sher’s muddled manufacturing of Rigoletto. I don’t see her identify on the roster for subsequent season.
Right here she carried out, too briefly, two Mozart live performance arias from totally different components of his profession. The late profession “Vado, ma dove” (1789) and a celebratory piece composed when Mozart was 13 years-old, “A Berenice … Sol nascente” (1769). Each items solely added as much as about quarter-hour of music however displayed many sides of her radiant and glowing vocal arsenal.
“Vado, ma dove” is an insert aria for the Martin y Soler opera Il Burbero di buon core composed for the unique Dorabella, Louise Villeneuve. Within the aria a spendthrift spouse, Lucilla, repents her profligate, careless methods realizing she has put her residence and marriage in danger. At first, Lucilla pleads to heaven for consolation and help after which invokes like to information her method. Mozart begins with stressed melodic traces reminiscent Fiordiligi’s extra agitated music however the music turns serene and hopeful with broader lyric phrases within the remaining part. Oropesa was sure-footed and the plaintive purity of her crystalline tone suited the temper superbly.
“A Berenice … Sol nascente,” was a celebratory occasional piece composed by the adolescent Mozart in 1769 to honor his employer, the Archbishop Sigismond von Schrattenberg, on the event of his birthday in Salzburg. This celebratory ode is over 10 minutes lengthy and has an extended introductory recitative that turns right into a florid ode to the sensible and modest ruler whose regal advantage is in comparison with the rising solar. The stilted classical formality of the textual content is contrasted with Mozart’s sprightly and creative music which culminates in tripping cadenzas and vaulting staccati for the vocal soloist.
Oropesa right here had room to indicate off her virtuoso coloratura facet with glowing excessive notes dancing up the dimensions and agency trills embedded within the advanced vocal line. On her social media, Oropesa has complained of a lingering higher respiratory an infection that has been audible in some latest performances which have suffered from hints of pressure and uninteresting tone. Right here, aside from one floated excessive be aware that barely faltered, every part was silvery and poised and her spirit was beneficiant and enthusiastic.
The diva was rewarded with a rapturous ovation, adoring embraces from the maestro and a floral tribute from our very personal Grimoaldo, the best Oropesa fan ever (so I used to be knowledgeable right here). Alas, there was no encore although everybody needed one…
After intermission, we had been jolted into late nineteenth century German Excessive Romanticism with b and his long-gestating Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 (1876). Right here we had one other journey from darkish uncertainty into joyful mild. Brahms traces a course from an ominous C-minor opening to a jubilant C-major coda of the finale which has been in comparison with Beethoven’s “Ode to Pleasure” in his 9th Symphony.
I bear in mind some wit, probably Sir Thomas Beecham, opining that there are two sorts of conductors – too sluggish and too quick. There isn’t a third… Yannick Nézet-Séguin undoubtedly falls into the latter class.
His fleet and ahead transferring, low calorie, lighter textured method to 19th century German music (together with his Wagner on the Met) is both refreshing and salutary or off-putting and alien sounding to listeners relying on one’s style and choice.
On this event, I discovered that the interior selection, clear delineation of orchestral layers, pinpoint dynamics and buoyant power of his studying had an exhilarating impact and the Met Orchestra was on level and on hearth. Brahms’s menacing introduction and moody first motion had been maybe not as darkish and weighty as one would get from a unique maestro however had been by no means slowed down and had been formed persuasively with element. He discovered a chamber orchestra – or a number of – inside an enormous symphony orchestra. Within the advanced main key finale, Nézet-Séguin relished and luxuriated in every melodic theme that emerged with countless selection whereas whipping the orchestra right into a dashing whirlwind of pleasure and ecstasy. It could not have been echt, nevertheless it was enjoyable!
I believe all of us have handled some darkish episodes recently and this journey into hope and peace that the Met Orchestra and Maestro Nézet-Séguin took us on was welcome as we emerged right into a cool and clear June evening.
