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Concerts Everywhere by
Shirley Fleming New Yorkers, who tend to think of Esa-Pekka Salonen primarily as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, saw--or heard--a different side of him at Weill Hall on December 17, when he conducted a concert, mainly of his own music, with the Ensemble Sospeso. The new impression of Salonen as composer won't fade quickly. The program opened with the premiere of a chipper two-minute fanfare piece by Steven Stucky (Ai due amici) and proceeded to Chain I (1983) by Lutoslawski, a composer whom Salonen, in comments from the stage, says he greatly admires. And then to the main business of the evening. The first of three Salonen works was Five Images after Sappho (1999), a stunningly effective 25-minute setting in translation of that celebrated Greek's poems--or poetic fragments. As a whole, the piece demonstrated the clarity, the cohesiveness, and above all the brilliant sense of color that mark Salonen's musical thinking. Taken in parts, it proved a small, multi-faceted drama that reflected the words beautifully and, as it progressed, opened one delicate or dramatic vista after another. The solo soprano part, sung with elegant purity by Laura Claycomb, was often submerged into the instrumental texture, but even this seemed appropriate enough, adding another thread of color to the entire fabric. Sappho seems to have had a pleasantly everyday sense life, although Salonen remarks in his program note that it was "the tremendous energy of suffocated sexuality and the vibrant eroticism in Sappho that got my imagination going". But her take on love is--until the fifth Image--almost lighthearted ("Mother dear, I can't finish my weaving. You may blame Aphrodite, she has almost killed me with love for that boy.") Salonen's score (for five strings plus winds, brass, and moderate percussion) moves from a high, shimmering opening through a beautiful evocation of the whirlwind of love that shakes the singer's heart, to the restless, distraught (but never tragic) confession of the inability to stick to that loom. The fourth section, paean to the evening star, glitters and twinkles like crystal; the final, and longest, Image, a celebration of the approaching nuptials and wedding night, is the most heated and intense. But no matter how much excitement the music generates, one is always aware of the interaction of coherent vocal and instrumental lines. It is the kind of piece that, at the end of its 25 minutes, you would happily hear over again… Mania, for solo cello and ensemble, in its US premiere, was the densest and busiest work of the evening, and pitted a furiously active cello part against individual ensemble instruments--or the whole gang together. Soloist Anssi Karttunen carried the day, from the lovely forest murmurs at the beginning through sections of blunt aggressiveness, to a mad finish that was manic indeed. If there were times when the cello appeared to scramble to the point of diminishing returns, nobody seemed to mind, and the full house gave soloist and composer a rousing response. All three works were the result of Salonen's year-long sabbatical from the Los Angeles podium. He put the time to good use. |