New York Philharmonic’s Olga Neuwirth premiere — a restless, fascinating new piece

The New York Philharmonic’s Project 19 is an initiative to commission new music from women composers to honour the centennial of the 1920 passage of the 19th amendment to the US constitution, giving women suffrage. The first of the 19 works premiered in February 2020, the project continuing with the reopening of David Geffen Hall and with three premieres this spring, including the Thursday night performance of Olga Neuwirth’s Keyframes for a Hippogriff — Musical Calligrams in memoriam Hester Diamond.

This is an ambitious work for orchestra with countertenor (Andrew Watts in his Philharmonic debut), and on Thursday the excellent Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3, the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, this was the US premiere, and also the debut Philharmonic performance from conductor Thomas Søndergård, music director of the Royal Scottish National and Minnesota Orchestras. He sandwiched Neuwirth with Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps and Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5.

Boulanger’s succinct, elegant, colourful impressionistic work opened like a sunrise. Written in the last years of her all-too-brief life (she died at just 24), it has fragments of Debussy, but the melodic shape and cheerfulness are Boulanger’s own. The Philharmonic’s balances were exquisite, shining a light on every detail of phrasing and instrumental timbre. It was delightful.

There was anticipation for Neuwirth’s piece, not least because of, as the programme eloquently put it, her “uncompromising nonconformity”. A tribute to her late friend, art collector Hester Diamond, Keyframes is based around text Neuwirth assembled from snippets of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ariosto (inventor of the mythical hippogriff creature) and others.

With Watts’s luscious, uncannily pan-gender countertenor leading the way, the music was as phantasmagorical as the words. Opening with spiky, threatening chords, it leapt through riffs on everything from prog rock to Weimar expressionism. Two hundred years of musical history collided, jettisoning shards that grew into an extended section of warm harmonies, the children’s voices adding sweetness.

At 20 minutes, the duration was ideal for what Neuwirth had to say. This was restless and fascinating music, too much to take in at one sitting but full of beautiful moments and ending on the word “hope”. Awed and charmed, the audience rewarded Neuwirth with an ovation which grew as the experience sank in.

The Prokofiev was quite fine, close to something exceptional, but held back by key details. Coming from 1944 when the Allies’ victory in the second world war was inevitable — though not close — it’s triumphant but also filled with complex feelings of endurance and relief, and with Prokofiev’s sardonic edge.

Søndergård managed a fluid flow and had a clear sense of the form of movements and of the whole symphony. But the opening andante was two ticks quick, hinting at great emotional resonance but without enough time to realise it. The second movement was spry but a little too bright, as was the third — there’s a bite of loss in there. The final movement, though, had ideal pace for the music’s expression. Light on its feet throughout, a bit more emotional weight would have made a satisfying performance unforgettable.

★★★★☆

lincolncenter.org/home