Beethoven and Berlioz skilfully woven in this latest Manhattan transfer
New York Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic always likes to bring a surprise on its biennial visits to the Barbican. Last time it was a ballet for children complete with puppets. This time it was a magical mystery tour around the late quartets of Beethoven. Fragments from them were performed by the orchestra’s principal string players, with accompanying commentary from the orchestra’s music director, Alan Gilbert. “That’s so cool!” he enthused, after they played the rumbustious scherzo from Beethoven’s last quartet.
All this was by way of introduction to John Adams’s Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra, in which the composer took these fragments plus numerous others from Beethoven and wove them into a scintillating score of his own. It’s a risky enterprise, but as Adams said in his slightly defensive programme note, many composers, above all Stravinsky, have tried to inhabit the music of earlier composers.
Adams certainly displayed great technical skill in his piece, which he has revised extensively since its premiere in 2012. Bits of Beethoven’s fourth symphony and Spring violin sonata as well as the quartet fragments all flashed by, sometimes almost invisible in the hectic onrush of Adams’s own music, sometimes standing out in bold relief.
Unfortunately, Adams’s skill was not matched by his tact. To seize hold of Beethoven’s witty “wrong note” in the Scherzo of his final quartet and give it an extra twist is fine – in fact, the piece almost seems to invite it. But to mess with the sublime fugue of his C sharp minor quartet, as Adams did, was bound to be a disaster. Stravinsky would never have committed such a solecism. Overall the piece felt strangely uncertain in tone: brilliant and witty in some parts, too determined to strive for transcendence in others.
The other piece, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, was by contrast blazingly sure of itself, and seemed especially so in this fine performance. The work is renowned for the sulphurous diabolism of its final two movements, flung off by the NYPO with the controlled delirium that makes an audience cheer. But it was in the delicate earlier movements that this performance really shone. The most eloquent moments came in the “Scene in the Fields”, with the plaintive dialogue of oboist Liang Wang and cor anglais player Grace Shryock, and also at the very start, when Gilbert placed each tender violin phrase with perfect precision.