“Ein Heldenleben” (“A Hero’s Life”), Richard Strauss’s grandiose paean to himself, which makes huge demands on a symphony orchestra, does not leap to mind as grist for a student performance. Yet there it was last week, twice, performed by students of the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music. The Juilliard Orchestra played it on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, led by the veteran maestro David Zinman, and the M.S.M. Symphony performed it on Thursday at the Manhattan School, conducted by George Manahan, the school’s director of orchestral activities.
The duplication was said to have been purely accidental, with no view on either side toward comparison or competition. When I raised the matter with Ara Guzelimian, the provost and dean of the Juilliard School, just before the performance on Tuesday, he said that this was the first he had heard of the Manhattan program. And when I caught up with Mr. Manahan by telephone on Saturday, he said that he had been told of the Juilliard “Heldenleben” just before his own performance, by Manhattan students.
“We do repertory the students need to experience,” Mr. Manahan said, “and ‘Heldenleben,’ with its enormous orchestra, contains so many excerpts that turn up in auditions.”
Mr. Guzelimian, who oversees the Juilliard Orchestra’s programming, spoke in similar terms in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “The first constituency we’re serving is inevitably the students,” he said.
Like Mr. Manahan, Mr. Guzelimian said, he feels almost no concern for how a work might fit into the fabric of the New York concert season. But he did acknowledge “an awareness of what’s immediately next door,” referring to the New York Philharmonic in Avery Fisher Hall.
Mr. Manahan, at a school located almost 60 blocks farther up Broadway, evidently feels no such compunctions. The other big work in his program on Thursday was Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, which has popped up on the New York concert calendar at least twice this year.
For this listener, the Manhattan School’s brave and excellent young soloist, Xiao Wang, had to vie with fresh memories of a stunning performance of the concerto by Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall two weeks earlier. In addition, on that same Thursday evening, the New York Philharmonic was beginning a series of subscription concerts featuring the Sibelius concerto with Frank Peter Zimmermann as soloist.
Again, Mr. Manahan was unaware of the coincidence but would probably not have been deterred in any case. The Manhattan orchestra, he said, has to accommodate eight competition winners every year in concertos, and the Sibelius seemed to him an appropriate partner for the Strauss work.
Since no sense of competition was intended, detailed comparisons of the two orchestras in “Heldenleben” would be beside the point. More salient is simple recognition of the remarkably high level of performance achieved by both.
It must be said, though, that the Juilliard Orchestra showed greater stamina, the Manhattan performance having fallen into slight disarray in the central battle episode, “The Hero’s Deeds of War,” and never quite recovered. The Sibelius concerto, also demanding for the orchestra, and the other preceding work, Ravel’s “Rapsodie Espagnole,” had obviously taken a toll.
The Juilliard Orchestra opened with a work by Steven Stucky to recognize his newfound status as faculty member. Mr. Stucky’s “Dreamwaltzes,” from 1986, cleverly incorporates — merely hints at, actually — music of Brahms’s and Strauss’s, but Mr. Stucky, writing in his own voice, posed many useful difficulties for the young players. Then the Juilliard ensemble performed Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, with James Kim as soloist.
The young Mr. Kim played with admirable purity of tone and accuracy, and if the music could have used more bite at times, Mr. Kim has plenty of time to learn about Shostakovich’s sardonicism. Mr. Wang, the violinist, was also wonderfully clean in the Manhattan’s School’s Sibelius, and he made the most of its expressive opportunities.
Scarcely less impressive than the soloists were the orchestras’ concertmasters, each entrusted with those extended, amorous solos that weave in and out of Strauss’s “The Hero’s Companion.” The Manhattan’s concertmaster, Matous Michal, was terrific throughout the program.
And Wyatt Underhill of Juilliard presided and played as if he, like Mr. Guzelimian, were glancing next door at the Philharmonic, aware of its vacancy in the position of concertmaster. With a few more years and a little more experience, he could be thinking such thoughts.
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