A few years ago, I spent several months at a conducting workshop at Juilliard. It was a hyper-elite form of pedagogy: an orchestra of 40 students following the orders of four trainee maestros, under the direction of the music director of the New York Philharmonic at the time, Alan Gilbert. The standout in this small club was Karina Kanelakis, a New Yorker who already had several years of violin playing with the Berlin Philharmonic under her belt and who impressed me with her precision and musicianship and a work ethic that John Henry would be proud of. Now she’s an established star in Europe (Principal Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic), but it’s never too late to be a rookie. Her hometown debut with the New York Philharmonic was delayed, then postponed due to her pregnancy, and finally rocked by the effects of a mild earthquake.
During the concert, a chorus of shrill beeps set off hundreds of phones in Geffen Hall, helpfully informing the public that a tremor had struck an hour earlier. Then came a series of after-signals, scattered beeps that continued to ricochet irresistibly from pocket to pocket for nearly two hours, slipping into Webern’s loose textures, changing the ending of a Richard Strauss poem, and tearing apart a quiet Satie piano solo . It was like going to a museum as a gang of activists ran through the galleries, aggressively slurping soup everything the paintings. Almost no passage has been left untouched. (Either audience members really hate turning off their devices, or they never learned how to kill their watches.) Well done, then, to Kanelakis, pianist Alice Sarah Ott, and the orchestra for fighting through the din and putting on a concert that was by turns delicate, thrilling, exhilarating and joyous.
The program was exhilarating in a range of different styles, from Webern’s delight in color-toned strokes to Scriabin’s grand, flamboyant finale The poem of ecstasy. Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6” slide from quiet pinpricks to controlled explosions in a few short and focused pages. Kanelakis conducts it with a mixture of precision and fluidity, letting each droplet of sound have its moment of overflow and at the same time channeling them all into a powerful coherent flow. If only that last, lovely harp and celesta noise hadn’t been torn apart by electronic bleating.
The tone poem Death and Transfiguration describes a desperate deathbed struggle, but Strauss was only 25 when he completed it, and the result is imbued with optimism for the afterlife. This ringing, heaving, elastic force fueled Kanelakis’s interpretation, full of foreboding of the swift cataclysm of Electra and Salomebut also the sparer, perfumed melancholy of Rosenkavalier. I would love to hear her conduct them all.
There was another big debut on the program, that of pianist Alice Sarah Ott, who performed Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major with obvious glee. It’s the kind of piece that encourages insanity: fast-paced, cocky, colorful and urbane, a flamboyant reworking of Gershwin by a Frenchman. The buzz around From these days keeps coming back to her MS diagnosis and her openness about it in public, but she showed no mercy, playing with pin-point ease and wit.
Orchestras don’t always seem to have as much fun as they did at this concert. Offstage, the world of classical music is constantly gripped by a premonition that this fragile art cannot survive for long amid all the competition for attention and money. Yet for a few hours in Geffen Hall, those worries seemed distant, blotted out by sunlight that not even the automated hysteria of the emergency system could dim. The last young conductor I reviewed, Klaus Mekela, was appointed to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra a few weeks later. Two other major American orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, are still looking for music directors. Kanelakis, anyone?
