Celebrating The New In NY

It's a whole new era at the New York Philharmonic, as the Phil's new 42-year-old music director (and native New Yorker) Alan Gilbert took up the reins last week, live on national television. It's always a lot of fun to watch one of the first concerts a professional orchestra plays under a new MD - not because they're likely to be the best concerts of the new MD's tenure, but because everyone on stage is so eager, so energetic, and so determined to show what they can do. We saw it here in Minneapolis when Osmo took over in 2003, they saw it in Dallas and Pittsburgh last season when Jaap van Zweden and Manfred Honeck took over the outstanding orchestras of those two cities, and now New York is enjoying its own honeymoon.

As I was watching the Phil's opening night performance on PBS's Live From Lincoln Center, I was struck by a couple of things. The first was that Gilbert has immediately changed the seating of the orchestra's string section to match the "antiphonal violin" arrangement that Osmo put in place at Orchestra Hall several years ago. Having played at Avery Fisher Hall myself, I'm guessing this change is a bit of a cold shock for the musicians - it can be very hard to hear across the stage in that hall, and when the musicians you've always been able to hear suddenly switch places with the ones you haven't heard in years, it takes time (and a lot of effort) to recalibrate. But according to the New York Times, the players at the Phil seem more than game.

The second striking thing about the performance was that Gilbert had chosen to open his tenure by commissioning a brand new work from the Phil's new resident composer, Magnus Lindberg. The piece was, in a word, breathless, and I actually rewound my DVR to the beginning to listen to it twice more after it was over. It was the kind of piece that people who still believe that all living composers are writing unlistenable music full of dissonance should hear - a ball of energy unleashed across the orchestra, filled with the unmistakable symbolism of the Phil's new beginning.

That having been said, the performance of the Lindberg sounded to me just ever so slightly muddy, as if it could have benefited from one or two more rehearsals. And this is always the problem with performances of new music - orchestras work so fast, and on so many different pieces of music simultaneously, that we count a lot on our muscle memory from whenever we last played what we're playing now. And when it's a world premiere (especially a difficult one, and the Lindberg sounded pretty tricky,) that muscle memory hasn't been created yet. So you do your level best, try to hear the really important cues that you can't afford to miss, and then, when you run out of rehearsal time, you just put your head down and play. And most of the time, with a really good orchestra, it works out fine, as it did in New York last week.

But I've always wondered why, given the limitations of what even a great orchestra can accomplish with a brand new work in 2 to 3 days of rehearsal time, we focus so much on world premieres, and so little on repeat performances of newer works. After all, I'm guessing that one of the reasons the audience at the infamous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring reacted so badly to it was that there's simply no way that the orchestra had a real handle on the piece yet. How could they? Stravinsky had written a ballet score unlike anything ever produced before it, and a piece that still challenges every professional musician every time it's performed! Now imagine if that world premiere had been simply chalked up as another notch on the chart that orchestras keep to prove they're committed to new music, and never performed again. Would we ever have recognized its greatness?

In the decade that I've been in Minnesota, we've played more world premieres than I can count, and as a big fan of new music, I'm thrilled with that fact. But I can think of at least five of those pieces just off the top of my head that I'd love the chance to play again. And again. And again, until that muscle memory kicks in, and we can nail a world-beating performance of that piece every bit as securely as we nail Beethoven's 7th. Think how we could change audience perceptions of living composers if they got the chance to hear them more than once, and at a level of performance comparable to the old warhorse symphony on the second half of the program!

I'm not saying every new piece deserves this treatment, of course. The thing about world premieres is that you're essentially paying for the act of creation, and you have no idea what the quality of the finished score will be until the first rehearsal. But when we get our hands on one of those truly rare gems that more composers than you'd think are turning out these days, I'd love to see those of us in the orchestra world seize the chance to make them a permanent part of our repertoire. And maybe the NY Phil could start with that Lindberg...