Waiting on the recently upgraded terrace at Lincoln Center. I'm standing in front of Avery Fischer hall, enjoying a gelato, waiting for my friend Gordon Smith to arrive as my date on a birthday present I bought for myself: two tickets to an all-Varese concert by the NY Phil.
The excitement I felt in anticipation of the concert was far exceeded by the concert itself. Now, it's not like Varese is Stravinsky or Beethoven or something. In the grand scheme of music history, he's a minor figure. His output was such that his entire oeuvre could easily fit onto two back-to-back concerts. But whatever this early 20th C. composer lacks in historical importance, he more than makes up for with sheer audacity. He's probably most well-known for having been the first composer ever to introduce factory whistles and other machinery of the industrial age into his orchestral music. And he's a hero to percussionists all over the world for the first movement of his groundbreaking orchestral piece, Ionisation, because the entire movement features nothing but percussion. Wow!
For me and the 2500 other music nerds gathered Tuesday night, this was an event to remember. I had studied Ionisation as both an undergrad and again in grad school. Studying the piece meant pouring over the score while listening to twenty-year-old recordings from Deutsche Grammophon. But I had never heard any of this man's music live. And judging by the raucous reaction of the audience, I don't think I was alone in that. Varese is not often programmed.
For one thing, it's damned expensive. 13 percussionists? 9 french horns? 9 double basses? Hello! The orchestral costs are enormous. And since he's not the rock star that Stravinsky is, programming two back-to-back evenings of his entire body of work was somewhat of a risk. Bravo to Alan Gilbert for taking it though. Both nights seem to have sold out.
A gentleman sitting next to us told us that he had once heard Ionisation performed live before and it was also in Avery Fischer Hall. In 1962, under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, the piece was performed with the then-elderly Varese in attendance. Apparently, when the piece came to its loud and crashing end, the audience erupted in half-cheers and half-boos. As the gentleman seated beside us tells it, when Bernstein turned to acknowledge the aging composer for his bow, both the cheers and the boos increased exponentially.
On Tuesday night there were only cheers. But like the cacophonous crashing orchestral fire that preceded it, it was possibly loud enough to pierce through the ceiling and reach up into the heavens. The crowd would not stop applauding Tuesday night. Gilbert and his orchestra were forced to take six curtain calls. But there was no possibility of an encore. It was the end of a two-night program of the complete works of Varese. And they'd exhausted this crazy guy's output.
But what an output it was. I'm so glad to have been there.
[photo by: Gordon Smith]
