by James Rosenfield
Lost in between romanticism's last gasps and modernism's birth cries, Alexander Zemlinsky is one of those near-great composers whose work is virtually unknown today, despite the fact that he was part of the same Viennese circle as Mahler and Schoenberg. Moreover, Zemlinsky had a significant influence on American pop culture via his star pupil, Erich Korngold, who ended up virtually inventing movie music.
On Friday morning, Andrey Boreyko led the
New York Philharmonic in a supple, luminous reading of Zemlinsky's
Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid), a three-movement quasi-symphonic lament of his unrequited love for Alma Mahler. It is so ripe with late romanticism that you almost see the fruit dropping off the trees, sprouting into modernism. It reminds you of Schoenberg's
Verklärte Nacht or the first part of
Gurrelieder, but really speaks its own
fin-de-siecle language.
Die Seejungfrau—based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale about a mermaid who falls in love with a prince, to no good end (Andersen later appended a happy ending to the story)—is threaded together by a short love motif in the first violin, which expands into a number of variations. The spirit of The Flying Dutchman could be heard in Part Two, which begins with turbulent water music, then subsides, and Part Three sees with the love motif slightly transformed, played on solo viola before being transformed in a bombastic brass iteration.
The Philharmonic was at the top of its game, seemingly stimulated by this challenging, richly orchestrated work which they had only played once before, in 1998. Boreyko was equally impressive, displaying a Gergiev-like command over the work; even the oft-cranky matinee audience seemed to appreciate it.
Zemlinsky's Wagnerian echoes were nowhere to be heard in Stravinsky's symphonic poem Chant du Rossignol (Song of the Nightingale), which opened Friday's program. Although written after The Rite of Spring, Chant du Rossignol generally lives in the sound world of The Firebird with a bit of Petrushka mixed in; how Stravinsky managed to write a work where flutes have star turns as birds without somehow invoking Wagner's Siegfried is a mystery. The performance was exceptional.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Philharmonic Principal Bassoonist Judith LeClair was the soloist in Mozart's early bassoon concerto, written when the composer was only 18. LeClair played her own cadenza in the first movement—a lengthy and somewhat unidiomatic affair that, while splendidly executed, distorted the movement a bit. And, while the Philharmonic's vibrato wasn't as minimal as it could have been, the balances were impeccable, with young Mozart's unique way of blending and contrasting strings and winds already in bloom.