Greg Stepanich

Review: New World does Feldman, Mackey, Wuorinen

Next February, the New World Symphony will mark the 20th anniversary of its very first concert.

And it was in its performance of a 20-year-old American cello concerto Saturday night that it was clear that the Miami Beach orchestral academy has in that short time become a musical institution that matters.

In its stunning, incandescent rendering of Five: Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra by Charles Wuorinen, the New World also demonstrated that its young people can play just about anything, and play it surpassingly well. I left at the end of the performance feeling certain that here is a group that will do right by American classical music, and do so for a long time to come.

The Wuorinen was the final work on a three-piece program of contemporary American music that included Morton Feldman’s Piano and Orchestra (with soloist Jeremy Denk) and Turn the Key, a short overture by Steven Mackey that the Princeton University-based composer wrote for last year’s Knight Concert Hall consecration of the house. This was a widely varied program, from Feldman’s placid stasis to Mackey’s catchy populism, to Wuorinen’s aggressive kineticism.

It was a demanding program to play and listen to, but the large audience at the Lincoln Theatre in Miami Beach was responsive and respectful, not only to the music but to the pre-piece talks by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and composers Mackey and Wuorinen, who were on hand to introduce their works.

Tilson Thomas is a national treasure, an inspiring musician and leader who as a teacher represents Leonard Bernstein’s only true heir. For the Feldman work, which opened the concert, he patiently explained the late composer’s aesthetic (he's pictured above), gave a funny impression of Feldman’s distinctive New York accent, and urged the audience to get comfortable so they could approach the music in the proper spirit.

His description of Feldman’s style as inhabiting a world somewhere between Anton Webern and Duke Ellington is a good one, and beautifully apt. Piano and Orchestra, which dates from 1975, inclines more to the cerebral jazz language of the 1950s than it does to complex atonality, and that helps give the music its special quality of loneliness. This is a music that barely moves at all, a music in which the listener focuses on the quality of each individual sound and its color instead of on melodic lines or harmonic progressions.

The pianist is not called on to do much in the way of virtuoso display; the piece treats the soloist more as a partner with the orchestra in sonic exploration. Denk played his single notes, big chords, and rare flourishes with clarity and sensitivity, which is all Feldman is asking for.

The orchestra, too, offered precision and vivid colors: oboes and clarinets at the top of their register at one moment, the cellos intoning a motif that climbed over angular distances into the rarified air of top of the A-string.

The Mackey overture (conducted by Steven Jarvi, a New World conducting fellow) that followed was a very different piece of work altogether: brash, tuneful, and at the end, cadencing in a progression that recalls the rock guitar playing of the composer’s youth. Turn the Key is an extroverted piece that makes canny use of the various orchestra sections and shows that Mackey is a writer who can score with inventiveness and resource.

It’s fun to hear, and must be as much fun to play. At times it reminded me of nothing so much as the Russian composer Alexander Mosolov’s once-popular 1920s barn-burner, Iron Foundry, which has the same sort of cheeky, rhythm-centered spirit. But Mackey’s piece is pure easy-on-the-ears American Eclectic, and the audience loved it.

Wuorinen’s Five, which closed the program, was written in 1987 for the New York City Ballet and for cellist Fred Sherry, who played it again Saturday night (Wuorinen said Five was a concerto and ballet score in one, and referenced the early Saturday Night Live parody ad about the product that was both effective floor cleaner and a scrumptious dessert topping). This is a monstrously difficult work for soloist and orchestra, and demands absolute rhythmic precision in order to come off well.

For his part, Sherry was magnificent, a player with complete command of his instrument who could handle the athletic leaps and growls of the solo writing with dash and fire, and then give full-throated voice to the more reflective writing in the middle movements of this five-part work. It was clear also that the work requires the soloist to be on top of his game at all times; Sherry could be seen counting the beats before one of his entrances, and he attacked his part with an edge-of-the-seat kind of energy that comes from having to be very sure where you are at all times.

And the orchestra was nothing short of astonishing. In the second movement, a hyperactive scherzo influenced by big-band swing, the brass snapped off their offbeats to manic perfection, seizing the ears and adding more high-grade octane to the mix. The explosive, breakneck finale was every bit as thrilling, with great, buzzing section work in the violins and Sherry flying all over his fingerboard.

One slightly melancholy fact is worth noting here: It’s impossible to understand and appreciate what Wuorinen has written in Five without a first-rate group of musicians to bring it off. But doubtless for many listeners Saturday night, it was the first time they could hear for themselves just what this composer is all about, and for that, we have the marvelous artistry of the New World Symphony to thank.