{"id":1675,"date":"2026-09-19T06:27:49","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T13:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1675"},"modified":"2026-09-19T06:27:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T13:27:49","slug":"tragedy-and-celebration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/tragedy-and-celebration\/","title":{"rendered":"Tragedy and Celebration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I am at least as big a Gustavo Dudamel fan as the next person, as my years of positive reviews <\/a>demonstrate. But enough is enough. The New York Philharmonic<\/a> is now turning him into the poster boy for music\u2014literally so in the case of the September program cover, which is dominated by a garishly colored portrait of Dudamel in the heroic style of L.A. street murals. It’s one thing to support populist musical outreach as a means of bringing new people into the concert halls; it’s quite another to replace the music with the frontman. At Friday night’s concert in David Geffen Hall, the screaming applause that greeted the maestro’s entrance, before he had even lifted his baton, vastly outweighed anything garnered by the musicians, including the two living composers who each in turn came to the stage. Something is wrong with this picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let me turn for a moment to the music itself. For this early fall concert\u2014his official reunion with the symphony he has now taken over\u2014Dudamel put together three pieces that in different ways embodied our need for life-affirming moments amid tragic surroundings. The first was John Adams’s 2002 choral work “On the Transmigration of Souls,” written in response to a commission after 9\/11. The second was “Invisible House,” a world-premiere by the young (or at any rate youngish: she is still in her very early forties) Ukrainian composer Zosha Di Castri. And the third was Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, written in 1944, when Russia was in the depths of the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Adams piece was the one that most explicitly addressed the tragedy at its heart. It began with recorded sounds: first indeterminate city sounds (including street traffic and sirens), then human voices, some of which spoke the names of the dead and others with messages about their loss. Into these words and sounds crept a kind of soft but jagged music, at once chromatic and disjunctive: nothing like Adams’s usual style, but something keyed to the moment and its complicated feelings. The choral passages, rendered by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, were almost anti-melodic, anti-operatic in their brevity and harshness; at one point they amounted to a sort of collective scream. I wanted to resist the piety\u2014I am by nature suspicious of anything involving the words “transmigration” and “souls”\u2014but the music took over, plunging me into a memory of how terrible that moment in our history was: how devastating the images on the screens, how sickening the sounds of the bodies falling to earth. I recognized the composer’s gesture toward some kind of soothing release (“My desire in writing this piece,” Adams has said, “is to achieve in musical terms the same sort of feeling one gets upon entering one of those old, majestic cathedrals in France or Italy”), but rather than elevating me, the music only made me sad. That is no small thing, I suppose, for a non-narrative work to achieve, and I am glad to have had the experience. But even as I had it, I couldn’t help wondering how a family member of one of the lost 3,000 would have felt in response to this work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zosha Di Castri’s “Invisible House,” just completed this year, wears its Ukrainian roots on its sleeve. The music itself derives in part from Ukrainian folk melodies, and in the scarier, louder, more emphatic passages\u2014particularly in the use of percussion, including percussive sound from non-percussive instruments\u2014one can’t help hearing the ongoing war in Ukraine. But mingled in with these darker elements was a sense of joy, or delight, or exuberance. One could feel the young composer’s thrill at having a whole huge orchestra to play with, a widely varied set of instruments at her command. One could even sense her sly sense of humor, especially at the moment when she made a couple of the percussionists clap their hands instead of using their drumsticks and drums. For her, perhaps, this was a piece about memory and a return to origins, but for us in the audience it was a much more immediate experience. I would have to hear it again to know how good it is, as a piece of music, but for the fifteen minutes I was in its presence, I actively enjoyed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither of these two preliminaries, however, could begin to compete with the final piece on the program, Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. It was the first symphony he composed after returning to Russia from an eighteen-year self-imposed exile, and he wrote it in relative comfort, cossetted in an arts colony as bombs fell on Moscow and citizens starved in Leningrad. Yet something of that outside despair enters the picture, even at its jolliest. The slow first and third movements, while melodic and entrancing, are weighted down with a tinge of anxiety. The final Allegro giacoso<\/em> movement may promise us pure playfulness, but instead it offers excitement, novelty, and a powerful sense of an ending. Even the marvelous second movement, with its Allegro marcato<\/em> pacing and its thrillingly chipper theme (one of my favorite passages, I think, in all of Prokofiev’s work), takes on a range of different colors as it moves from mirth to severity and back again. Dudamel was at his best in conducting this piece, which he did without a score and with enormous vigor and enthusiasm. It seemed he and his musicians were inside the symphony itself, for its whole compelling three quarters of an hour, and I felt ensconced in there with them. My only regret was that Prokofiev\u2014unlike Adams, unlike Di Castri\u2014was unable to take a celebratory bow from the stage. He died on March 3, 1953, the same day as Stalin, so almost no one (outside of Shostakovich and a few other devoted friends) attended his funeral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am at least as big a Gustavo Dudamel fan as the next person, as my years of positive reviews demonstrate. But enough is enough. The New York Philharmonic is now turning him into the poster boy for music\u2014literally so … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[939,323,942,247,61,941,571,940],"class_list":["post-1675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-geffen-hall","tag-gustavo-dudamel","tag-invisible-house","tag-john-adams","tag-new-york-philharmonic","tag-on-the-transmigration-of-souls","tag-prokofiev","tag-zosha-di-castri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1676,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions\/1676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}