Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic; photo by Chris Lee

The New York Philharmonic last week wrapped up its first-ever Biennial. Leaving aside the semantic question of whether we can really call it a “biennial” before there’s been a second one, let’s reflect for a minute on what turned out to be a rich festival of ideas.

In the many Philharmonic concerts I heard this season, there often seemed to be a lackadaisical quality about the playing. The notes were all there, the ensemble was respectable, it was reasonably clean—but the musicians seemed to be going through the motions, with surprisingly little interest in or commitment to the act of live performance.

Not so during the Biennial. Alan Gilbert is always at his best when conducting contemporary music, his intelligent readings bringing clarity to work that isn’t always instantly accessible. The inspiration for the Phil’s seven-day festival of new music no doubt came from similar visual art institutions, such as the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial across town.

But what can we expect from a musical biennial? Gilbert explained his mission as to take a sort of “snapshot” of the state of contemporary music, and in that he certainly succeeded, though not every premiere will be remembered. The first Biennial concert I attended, a program imported from Salzburg and held in the lobby of MOMA, had a number of interesting elements, but gave the unfortunate and false impression that contemporary art music is dominated by one school and one aesthetic.

Another program, a lineup of new pieces for solo instruments at the Lower East Side’s quasi-cabaret SubCulture, was a mixed bag. Eric Nathan’s As Above, So Below for solo trombone was clumsy, a few haunting moments of soul-searching standing out in what was otherwise a mass of disorganized, unfocused blatting. Four pieces for solo piano by Ryan Brown were unconvincing, little works that “rocked the boat” by using pop-inspired sonorities and rhythms, but were content to leave it at that, merely empty frames of glossy, slowly changing chords. Paola Prestini’s Eight Takes for solo cello was intriguing, but Sumire Kudo sounded uncomfortable performing it.

Call me biased, but the piece I found most compelling was the one for solo violin, Michael Hersch's Of Sorrow Born. The cycle’s seven “elegies” were inspired by people close to Hersch who have died in the past fifteen years, identified only by initials. Even as he seeks a way to express it, his loss, he said before the performance, “remains quite private.” Fair enough—these pieces spoke for him. Each linked to an extract of poetry, they are all dark and probing, but span a range of energies from bleak desolation to consuming fury.

The one concert of the week that most stands out in my mind is the one I heard last Friday at Avery Fisher Hall, with Matthias Pintscher conducting. That night’s opener, Strobe by Andrew McManus, was one of six pieces that were selected for a reading just the Tuesday prior (two others had their premieres on Thursday and Saturday). The Philharmonic’s performance was remarkably polished given such scant rehearsal time, but more than that, the writing displayed firm command and curious exploration of orchestral texture. The composer’s program note about drawing his inspiration from a dark EDM (“Electronic Dance Music”) party was hard to connect to what we actually heard, but as long as one was willing to ignore the playbill, Strobe offered plenty of interesting material. There was indeed some thumping in the piano that might suggest a club beat, but it was much closer in sonority to the chiming bells that supported it. Gurgling woodwinds kept the piece constantly awhirl.

Elliot Carter’s Instances, the composer’s last completed work, got its New York premiere on Friday, and it opened with a prime example of Carter’s sense of humor. Small-scale doodling in the woodwinds lulled the listener into a feeling of security, only to be shocked awake by a deafening crack from a bass drum. Such contrasting gestures made up most of the piece, including a disorienting back-and-forth between a doleful trumpet solo and crashes of percussion, but in stretches these isolated ideas seemed to coalesce into whole threads.

Finally came Pintscher’s own Reflections on Narcissus, a cello concerto in five movements (debuted in 2005, but still a New York premiere). This really is an astonishing piece, and it got an astonishing performance from Alisa Weilerstein, who is in danger of becoming the world’s foremost cellist.

Reflections doesn’t really have a programmatic narrative as such, but the essence of the Narcissus myth is discernible throughout. Water is constantly audible, whether in ripples or in droplets, and the supporting cast is mostly placid, even if eerie at times. The cello part is searingly intense, scrabbling in places, silken in others, but always obsessively dark. At a few moments, when the orchestra’s calm is disturbed, the cello seems to be struggling for lyricism over the confusion.

Weilerstein has often said that she is committed to the expansion of the cello repertoire, and Reflections ferociously argues the point on her side. Every reach of the instrument’s voice is explored, from its ability to scream with rage to its innate velveteen serenity. Even if the festival as a whole had a few duds here and there, the introduction of gems like Reflections on Narcissus to New York’s audience validates the enterprise.

Since he took over from Lorin Maazel in 2009, Gilbert has made the promotion and cultivation of new music his raison d’être as the Philharmonic’s Music Director, and the Biennial may very well be his biggest success in that department thus far. Here’s hoping the Phil make good on their promise two years from now. I’ve already got the 2016 Biennial on my calendar.

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