Concert Review: Mannes Orchestra with Sandbox Percussion, Stefan Jackiw

Concert programmers often juxtapose new music with familiar classics. It’s a way to ease the introduction of unfamiliar and often quite challenging listening experiences. But today, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we have well over a hundred years’ worth of “modern” or “avant-garde” repertoire available, including much by composers of great stature. So what constitutes a classic? Must you play some Beethoven or Schubert to get people to also listen to a piece of atonal 20th-century modernism or a contemporary composition? Not if you’re the Mannes Orchestra under music director David Hayes, who has honed the ensemble into an instrument of impressive refinement.

At the April 11 concert at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall it was, atypically, the newest piece – Viet Cuong’s glowing Re(new)al – that offered the most comfortable and delightful listening experience. The piece is essentially a concerto for orchestra and percussion quartet, dedicated to Sandbox Percussion, ensemble-in-residence at the Mannes School of Music in New York City. Sandbox joined the talented students of the Mannes Orchestra in an excited and exciting performance of this inventive and crowd-pleasing work.

Its three continuous movements represent three forms of renewable energy: hydro power, wind, and solar. For hydro, Cuong gives the Sandbox percussionists water-filled wine goblets to clink together to open the piece. Other instruments join in, some with timbres that jibe with the glasses. The rhythmic pace increases as the full orchestra comes into play.

Also see our interview with Sandbox Percussion’s Ian Rosenbaum.

The soloists switch to kit drums for the “wind” movement. In one sequence, all four play a single snare drum while walking circles around it (a twister?). Stormy gusts blow in from the brass. Strong melodies with a pop sensibility emerge. Polyrhythms gather energy and help build a huge sound, the beats hard to follow at times, the energy seemingly untamed. A drum break features the soloists along with the orchestra’s own percussionists in a non-tonal cyclone of excited sound.

Glistening tones over a steady rhythm form the third movement, a depiction of a sunrise, with the soloists on tonal instruments. The movement coalesces into a slow, majestic march that proceeds to an emotional conclusion.

The whole concerto is a thrill, the more so with the student musicians’ enthusiasm.

John Zorn’s Fairy Tales

The program continued with music from the 20th century by John Zorn and Luciano Berio. Zorn’s 1999 Contes de Fées (Fairy Tales) is in a sense a fit bookend to the century. The marvelous Stefan Jackiw, who is no stranger to Zorn’s music, was the soloist in this violin concerto in the form of a kind of “fantasy.” To my ear it’s an impressionistic “everything everywhere all at once” piece of rigorous romantic modernism. Chaos that you know isn’t really chaos encircles some quieter, even lyrical passages. As if to nod forward to Cuong’s piece, the percussion section features hand-cranked spinning drums that produce a whirling, whistling sound. (A quick internet search didn’t enlighten me as to what these are called.)

At times the orchestra, especially the percussion, drowned out the soloist. That may be hard to avoid given the tricky violin part with its range and angular motion. (The acoustics at Alice Tully Hall are also not as good as at neighboring David Geffen Hall or Carnegie Hall.) Still it was a furiously engaging performance of an often difficult-to-absorb piece of experimentalism that still offers challenges to listeners today. While it’s considered one of Zorn’s signature achievements, I found it a tough listen. I was at all times able to appreciate the orchestra’s fine performance, however.

Volume-wise, it’s just as well that Zorn’s score doesn’t call for a full-sized orchestra. That’s what the Mannes team had on hand for the 1969 Sinfonia by Luciano Berio.

Luciano Berio and MLK

We had begun with a youthful contemporary composer engaging with popular music and the essential quest for sufficient clean energy. We had moved on to a still-vital iconoclastic musical figure who has spanned two centuries and incorporated multiple traditions. We had now arrived at a towering figure of European modernism, represented by a towering work for full orchestra and eight vocalists.

Like the Zorn, Berio’s Sinfonia is a challenging listen. The most “accessible” movement, the third, is built on a thread of the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, with references to other classic works sprinkled in the mix. But overall what sets the Sinfonia apart more than anything else is the presence of eight vocalists. They alternately stand out and meld with the orchestra, harmonizing, elucidating angsty melody, pontificating with spoken words.

The orchestra achieved a monstrously huge sound in parts of the first movement, punctuated by aggressive piano breaks as well as by the vocals. The slow second movement had a subterranean feel as the vocalists, like unearthly presences, outlined the syllables of the name “Martin Luther King,” the movement’s honoree.

Mahler aside, a brilliantly realized rendition of the third movement began with the Sinfonia‘s most traditional stretches of musicality. The performance reached great pitches of intensity, with insistent verbal exhortations, and grew more challenging to the ear as it progressed. The slow fourth movement embraced both ghostly vocal harmonies and what felt, beginning with the piano, like random cacophony. On a deep level I felt an appreciation for Berio’s ability to reach forward half a century and still twist a listener’s tolerance.

In the final movement he offers something of a balm by returning to the themes of the first, providing a degree of closure.

Still I left with a feeling of having been grabbed and alternately fascinated and throttled. This is a credit to Maestro Hayes and the Mannes Orchestra. Throughout the concert the young musicians showed a high level of collective polish and individual skill to go with their infectious enthusiasm. Their program of music from the 20th and 21st centuries showed that one need not follow the common practice of combining new work with classical standards to engage an audience.

For future performances by Mannes students and faculty, see the school’s website.