The wave of joy and relief that broke over Broadway theaters this week surged up the avenue to Alice Tully Hall Friday night, as the New York Philharmonic opened its 2021-22 season, performing for an audience indoors for the first time in eighteen months.
But instead of Broadway razzmatazz, the orchestra offered a mostly reflective program that checked so many boxes in the present-day psyche that one is still trying to count them all.
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The orchestra’s not-soon-to-be-departed music director Jaap van Zweden—who announced on Wednesday that he would leave his post in 2024—led alert and sensitive performances of every work on the program, in which music of Anna Clyne, Aaron Copland, and George Walker displayed the orchestra’s versatility while setting the table for the concerto finale.
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George Walker, the sage of Montclair, New Jersey, had seen a lot in one African-American lifetime when he died in 2018, at age 96. But his Antifonys for chamber orchestra was very much of the turbulent year in which he composed it, 1968.
Although the title suggests ancient traditions of choirs singing to each other, this spiky, almost inchoate music stressed the “Anti“ aspect—as in anti-war, anti-racism, anti-Establishment. Friday’s smartly-executed performance captured the desultory fury of an angry crowd in rushing strings and shouting winds, studded with percussion.
It was as if Walker was doing for the 1960s what Copland’s patriotic vistas had done for the 1940s. On this occasion, the work’s significance in the era of George Floyd was also not to be missed.
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