Music
Call it an evening of big finishes. By the standards of the NSO and many of its subscribers, the marquee performance on last weekend’s program was Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, which builds to oscillating crescendos at or near the end of every movement. But for the minority who came out to hear the “new music” of Steve Mackey, the swarming of the symphony’s strings as they backed the centrifugal blasts of the PRISM sax quartet was the spirit that brought life to Jackson Hall.
Mackey was present for the orchestral premiere of his “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” a work first conceived and performed for contemporary chamber settings. He remarked afterward that the difficult ending of the final movement was carried off to near-perfection on Saturday. This urgent, even panicky finale should stand as one of the highlights of the NSO’s final season at TPAC. Not only might it have shaken up some of the stolid regulars in the audience, it pointed the way toward new prospects, a heightened cycle of dangerous but well-conducted energy that seemed to fill every open space in the cavernous auditorium.
Hard as it is to believe, Mackey’s inspiration for this piece was a ski trip full of perils, releases and moments of equilibrium. Rather than organizing his thoughts around a predictable journey motif, however, he filtered this journey through a theater of the mind. Multiple perspectives on imaginary ski runs compete with the excitable currents of breath that the high frailty of the soprano sax and the gravelly depths of the tenor produce. With the mimetic dimension of his original inspiration largely transfigured, the ruminative piece became, in Mackey’s words, “a public statement” in its symphonic adaptation.
The symphony’s army of strings seemed to be pushed out of their usually decorous ranks. If the final movement ended in something of a multi-frontal ambush, there were more than enough hints that it was coming, such as the swing feel of the final movement and the set of fluttering, swirling figures that enveloped the sax quartet. Mackey admits to not having anticipated all the fortuitous tonal parallels, some of which were slightly disjoined, between PRISM and the winds and horns that were shadowing them. But most refreshing of all was the oversized percussion section during the first half of the concert (which began with Peter Boyer’s “Titanic,” a somewhat forced, artsy-cinematic attempt to generate artificial sublimity, civilized elegance and elegiac nothingness all within 12 minutes).
Goofy vibe parts, well-punctuated crash cymbals, hand-drumming and much-appreciated backing for the percussive sax figures were yet other signs of life in the old hall. Far back on the stage, the percussion section was the pulse that connected the orchestra to PRISM, rather than limiting it as a supporting entity. Self-described “champions of new music,” PRISM may not exactly have mimicked the sounds that Mackey originally envisaged for this postmodern concerto: the “hee-haw of a jackass,” factory noises and bagpipes. But the loss of such de-centering touches seems like a small price to pay for the possibilities of new, broader connections—and provocative disjunctions—between the classically honed orchestra and the avant-gardist chamber group at the front.
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