Have you ever been to a concert where the opening band, who you’d never heard of and who no one in the crowd was there to see, somehow blew the headliner way the hell off the stage?
Me neither, but I’ve heard it happens. And in any case something very much like it was the scenario at Marian Anderson Hall the week before thanksgiving, when Curtis Symphony Orchestra took the stage with conducting fellow Benoit Gauthier at the helm. Within moments, perhaps before the music even started, it was clear from his poise and confidence that Gauthier was no mere supporting act, there to moisten up the crowd for our esteemed, beloved Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The young conducting fellow—and Yannick’s fellow Québécois—had his own plans.
The six-note see-saw riff on which Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A minor is built is not unlike the one Keith Richards devised for “Satisfaction”—so seemingly obvious that it somehow had never occurred to any previous songwriter to try it. (It barely even occurred to Richards.) The piece clearly has symphonic ambitions; Coleridge-Taylor wrote it on a commission that had been passed on by Sir Edward Elgar (who was still regular Edward Elgar at that point, since he wasn’t knighted until 1904). It was an opportunity for the young composer to put some steam behind his reputation, and as such the Ballade was written to impress, to make an immediate impact.
Gauthier summoned what must have been the spirit of that first 1898 performance of the Ballade. It was Coleridge-Taylor himself at the podium that day, and I imagine he felt tremendous pressure to deliver something memorable. I imagine he wanted his music to come down like a cannonball on the crowd at the Three Choirs Festival. (A cannonball might be the only force that could enliven something called the “Three Choirs Festival” 
) With his future on his shoulders, I’m willing to bet the 23-year-old SCT squared up and took it to the house.
It was clear from the opening bars that Gauthier had a firm grip on Coleridge-Taylor’s score. It would be easy to treat that opening six-note riff as a novelty, something light and bouncy. But Gauthier sees both the rhythmic immediacy and the melodic opportunity available in this music. He keeps this opening theme propulsive, and his descent into the yearning, Tchaikovskyesque second theme is smooth, granting tenderness where before he wielded a heavy hand.
That isn’t to say that Gauthier’s performance was “heavy-handed,” in the sense of being [consults nearest Webster’s] clumsy, oppressive or harsh. I mean to say that Gauthier clearly had a sense of the weight of the material, and had the requisite authority to guide the Curtis orchestra into carrying that weight. The sense of conductor and orchestra performing together, rather than one laying track for the other to guide the handcar over, was strong.
That sense dulled a bit after Gauthier yielded the stage to our boy YNS for Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1 and, after an intermission, Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8. It’s not that Yannick can’t wrangle the Curtis kids, and it’s not as if the talented Curtis Orchestra can’t handle this material. It’s more that both of these pieces felt, to me, like softballs for all involved—orchestra, conductor, and audience.
Things started off promisingly enough: YNS delivered the mighty and confident opening movement of Price.1 with that great gusto of his, earning some between-movements applause. The one thing that’s never missing or ambiguous with Yannick is his love of the music, and sometimes that energy of his alone, that gusto, is enough to push an already-superior piece into the rare territory of bliss.
Other times, though …
The first issue here is that both the Price and the Dvorak symphonies suffer from Second Movement Syndrome (SMS), the symptomscape of which starts out like this: after a rousing, promising first movement, we’re hit with a long, slow, discursive second movement that, unless both conductor and orchestra are hitting every activator up the Aggro Crag, can feel like a bit of a slog.
But long, slow, discursive second movements aren’t the problem on their own. In order for the conditions of SMS to be met, the following movements must be both significantly better and significantly shorter than the 2nd.
Regarding Price for instance: even in the Grammy-winning YNS/PhilOrch recording, her 2nd movement is nearly twice the length of the 3rd & 4th movements combined. And while her slow movement has some lovely moments, the later movements are significantly more lively and engaging, at least in the hands of YNS/Curtis. The effect is that of a long (slow, discursive) buildup with a payoff that is both delayed and abbreviated. Ergo: SMS
But even without my highly medical diagnosis, I have to question the thought process behind this entire program. The Coleridge-Taylor piece was the only item on the agenda that seemed to exist in the same world as the audience hearing it. Neither Price’s boisterous dances nor Dvorak’s sun-soaked pleasantries are suited to this gray, grim year of our loaf ward 2024.
This isn’t to say that joyous art can’t or oughtn’t exist in times of imminent political collapse. I’m in full favor of joy as an act of resistance and defiance. But that’s not what went on at Marian Anderson Hall, and I doubt there was any such feeling when Yannick & Curtis took this show to Lincoln Center two days later. It was more like witnessing the well-trod ignorance-to-bliss pipeline in action.
The question asked of any publicly-consumed art must now be: yes, but how well does it complement a rapidly collapsing world?
Take, for instance, the Dvorak. The concert program book compares Dvorak’s second movement adagio to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major—the Pastorale, an ode to the natural world from a time when nature still more or less ran the show.
Two hundred and change later, we’ve stripped this planet raw and are about to be boiled alive for our sins.
This conflict between our professed love for nature and our reckless destruction of it was explored in 2022 by Les Adieux—a collaborative staging of the Pastorale by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. In Les Adieux, Beethoven’s paean to flora and fauna is interrupted repeatedly by news reports documenting infamous ecological disasters, like when all those birds fell out of the sky in Mexico a few years back. The closing movements are replaced by the funeral march from Ludwig’s Eroica. The message is unambiguous: in a post–climate change world, the Pastorale is, in Kopatchinskaja’s own words, “a lie.”
I listened to the Pastorale while writing this review. I listened through my headphones while sitting on my balcony on a chilly but not unpleasant December’s eve. Underneath the swooning strings and bird calls I heard the sounds of traffic, planes, distant jackhammers, the PATCO train, Amazon trucks backing up, dogs barking, car doors slamming and people shouting into their phones—all the racket and ruckus of the not-so-natural world.
You could see this cacophony of beige noise as an aberration, an obstruction. Yannick certainly does—this is the “enough with the phones” guy, after all. For all his progressive veneer, there’s a traditionalist strain in YNS that’s made it difficult for him (and PhilOrch, and now Curtis) to cope with the evolving soundscape of 21st century life.
But that’s what this is: the 21st century. It’s noisy. It’s metallic and piercing and ceaselessly disruptive. It’s terrifying and enraging. It’s bleak. Not jaunty or joyous or bright. Fucking bleak. And none of Yannick’s efforts to excite the rightfully bored Curtis orchestra gave a clue that the maestro is here with us in the 21st century, or even knows it’s happening.
Benoit Gauthier is here with us. The young conducting fellow brought no false smiles or forced jollity to the podium. I hope to see more of him, and I hope his youthful energy rubs off on our dear YNS. Because in a time when the only source of widespread joy among the proletariat is the occasional dead billionaire, this old, rich person’s art is as out-of-touch as ever.