Julian Wachner, the impressive director of music and the arts at Trinity Wall Street, didn’t seem the slightest bit nervous in his first performance as a conductor at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night. He affably welcomed the audience, thanking everyone for braving not just the winter weather but the program he had planned. The concert paired Ives’s Fourth Symphony, generally considered one of the most complex and challenging 20th-century symphonic works, and a rare performance of an intense 60-minute oratorio, “Turbae ad Passionem Gregorianam,” by the Argentine-born composer Alberto Ginastera, first performed in 1975.
For these works, Mr. Wachner, who is also a composer, assembled some 300 performers: the excellent Choir of Trinity Wall Street; the Trinity Youth Chorus; the Washington Chorus, an award-winning ensemble that Mr. Wachner also directs; the Boy and Girl Choristers of Washington National Cathedral Choir; and Novus NY, the Trinity Wall Street’s contemporary music orchestra, its ranks fortified for this demanding concert with extra players.
Mr. Wachner prepared the audience by first sitting at a piano onstage and leading everyone in some hymn singing. The score, typical for Ives, is laced with hymn tunes, sometimes fairly direct, sometimes veiled. Ives assumed that any audience in his day would recognize the hymns when hearing his symphony. So to help the listeners at Carnegie do so, Mr. Wachner, asked everyone to sing along, following a sheet of printed music inserted into the programs, including the choir members who, for the Ives, were sitting in the first balcony.
Ives’s Fourth Symphony crams formidable difficulties into a 33-minute time span. The performance was confident and exciting. The first movement, as Ives commented, poses transcendentalist questions of “what” and why.” Fraught rumblings from the orchestra, prodded by restless bursts from a solo piano (the accomplished Timothy Andres) are contrasted with shimmering string choirs and, before long, the actual choristers, singing a hymn. The second movement is a kind of satire. The orchestra shifts between pummeling evocations of a celestial train promising to take a man directly to the heavenly city — a promise that proves a scam — and evocations of the hymn-singing pilgrims who beat a path to heaven the old-fashioned way. The third movement is a sturdy but elusive fugue on a hymn tune; the final movement, the most cosmic and cacophonous, is at once ecstatic and terrifying.
For sheer terror in music, however, not much matches the most intense moments of Ginastera’s passion, which put all the evening’s performers onstage. Like the Bach passions, this one has a solo Evangelist who tells the story, not in recitative, as Bach does, but in Gregorian chant. (Thomas McCargar sang the Evangelist here, along with Geoffrey Silver as Pilate and Judas, and Scott Allen Jarrett as Jesus.)
Those who know Ginastera, who died in 1983 at 67, only from his earlier South American nationalist style work may be stunned to hear this passion, essentially a 12-tone score of gnashing dissonance and multilayered complexity. Yet much of the harmonic language sounds lushly chromatic, in an Expressionist vein. The piece’s most audacious element is its shrieking cinematic realism. Sometimes the choirs speak and sputter the lines; sometimes the music breaks into free-for-all bouts of hysteria.
Mr. Wachner led a viscerally dramatic performance. With this concert he signaled that next year, the centennial of Ginastera, Trinity Wall Street will present an extensive survey of the composer’s works. Adventure and ambition go hand in hand at Trinity Wall Street.
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