Although he is very closely associated with his native Poland, composer Krzysztof Penderecki (born in 1933) has had a long association with Yale's School of Music; he was on the faculty there for much of the 1970s, and has on many occasions conducted the university's Philharmonia Orchestra. For the past three seasons, this famed (which is the only Ivy to have a school of music) has been presenting concerts of new and rarely heard repertoire at Carnegie Hall, under the rubric of Yale in New York. Given their histories, it made great sense to have Penderecki conduct an entire Philharmonia Orchestra concert of his own music on April 30th to close out the 2009-10 Yale in New York season.
Perhaps the Polish composer's most famous work is still his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima; it was the calling card to open the evening. Written in 1960, Threnody originally carried the abstract title 8'27'', and the composer couldn't get the Polish Composers' Union (part of the government machine) to print the piece; however, when Penderecki had a change of heart and retitled the piece in memory of the atomic bomb victims, Threnody was thrust into the spotlight as a piece of anti-American political theater. Whichever context the listener, or for that matter composer, chooses to frame this piece, its viscerally arresting--even agonizing--opening, with its screaming high strings, grabs the audience immediately and refuses to let go. And yet, the orchestra was oddly dispassionate in its performance: perhaps their coolness was at Penderecki's direction, but the string players were less than engaged.
The players warmed up considerably upon the arrival of soloist Syoko Aki, whose serene smile throughout her performance belied Penderecki's devilishly difficult Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra, from 1967. Despite the connotation of whimsy in the term "capriccio," this piece is anything but light: instead, the piece is defined by close clusters of strings, blocky percussion, and indignantly huffing brass below the soloist, who by turns bustles maniacally and indulges in long, singing lines reminiscent of the Berg Violin Concerto.
Super virtuosity for a soloist again reigned in the New York premiere of Penderecki's Concerto for Horn and Orchestra, "Winterreise." Written in 2008, this concerto points to the composer's aesthetic evolution: we hear less and less of the dodecaphonic avant-garde of Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, and more of an exploration of Romanticism. Despite its subtitle, this concerto evokes less Schubert than the colorations and textures of Mahler. Soloist William Purvis (who, like Syoko Aki, teaches at Yale) made bold use of his famously clean and well-articulated sound and made the extremely exposed solo sections sound downright easy, which is no small matter for a French horn player.
The work that concluded the program was Penderecki's Symphony No. 4 "Adagio." Though the work was premiered in Paris in 1989 (with Lorin Maazel conducting the Orchestre National de Paris), Penderecki reconceptualized the work as a single movement for publication, at which point it won the 1992 Grawemeyer Award. Though, like the horn concerto, it reasserts tonality, the "Adagio" Symphony shifts unsettling and quite modernly between melodic ideas, the most foremost of which is a trumpet fanfare that both opens and closes the piece. (There is, however, a gloriously sweet and sunny quartet of violins cutting through a cloud of uncertainty like a shaft of sunlight suddenly breaking through an overcast day.)
Disappointingly, the hall was severely undersold for this concert; audience members, who were gathered near the stage, couldn't help but see row after row of empty seats behind them. Yale is wonderful at producing superb musicians; the last quarter-century or so of alumni include composers Augusta Read Thomas and Michael Torke as well as the group So Percussion, while the current faculty includes such celebrated artists as Emanuel Ax, the Tokyo String Quartet, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Christopher Theofanidis. However, on the basis of the poor attendance for the Penderecki concert, it seems that the school could certainly use some Marketing 101 tutelage of its own.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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