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On recent performances at David Geffen Hall, Carnegie Hall & the Metropolitan Opera.
Stravinsky wrote a ballet about a firebird. Katherine Balch has written a piece about fireflies. It is a piece for orchestra, which she calls musica pyralis. What we know as the common "firefly" is called, technically, Photinus pyralis. Ms. Balch is an American, born in 1991, who teaches at Yale. She has explained,
Most of my music tries to filter the sights and sounds of my surrounding environment through the instruments I'm writing for, kind of like a musical sieve. In musica pyralis, the orchestra sings the summer soundscape of my new home in rural Connecticut.
It sings, in particular, the soundscape of the night-when fireflies shine, or blink.
Ms. Balch says that she wrote a "concert opener"-specifically. I find this interesting. For years, I have used the term "OOMP" which stands for "obligatory opening modern piece." Many an orchestral program has an oomp. In recent years, lots of composers have written pieces specifically as openers. But maybe they aspire to write closers as well?
In any event, a concert of the New York Philharmonic opened with musica gralis. Right from the beginning, you hear fireflies. But wait a minute: do you hear them because you have been prepared by what you have read to hear them? Maybe. Lots of contemporary pieces include "tinklies," as I call them. And if you can't have tinklies in a piece about fireflies, you can't have tinklies ever. Ms. Balch's piece bears other contemporary hallmarks as well: spooky sounds; little sirens; shakes and rattles (if not rolls). The music is sometimes dense, sometimes more transparent, or sheen-like. As I recall, I heard interesting blurts from a muted tuba, and a lovely repeated solo from the viola. The piece has a surprising ending-fast. A good and effective ending.
When I was a kid, a teacher told me, about performances, 'Audiences tend to remember the beginning and the end." Maybe that is true of compositions as well? Balch's musica pyralis has a good beginning and a good ending. It is, altogether, a skillful piece.
It was followed on this Sunday afternoon by Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. The soloist was Beatrice Rana, the young Italian, and the...