In Saturday’s (5/14) New York Times, Allan Kozinn writes, “It is hard to believe that the Oregon Symphony had never performed in Carnegie Hall until Thursday evening, when it played a vivid, often wrenching program, ‘Music for a Time of War,’ as part of the Spring for Music festival. … In his introductory comments Mr. Kalmar acknowledged that his opener, Ives’s ‘Unanswered Question’ (1906), had no real connection to wartime. Its concerns are existential, but Mr. Kalmar proposed that for the evening, Ives’s question could be ‘Why do we go to war?’ He justified that leap with a thoughtful performance in which the pianissimo strings were so exquisitely hushed that for a moment you could hear a pin drop. … The three works on the first half of the program were played without pause (or applause), and the Ives proved an ideal prelude to ‘The Wound-Dresser,’ John Adams’s 1989 setting of verses from a Civil War poem by Walt Whitman. … Mr. Kalmar closed the first half with Britten’s ‘Sinfonia da Requiem,’ a 1940 work commissioned by the government of Japan to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of its empire.” The concert closed with Vaughan-Williams’s Fourth Symphony, composed on the eve of WWII, which “the orchestra played it with a furious, incendiary energy that made it the perfect ending for this pained, thought-provoking program.”
Posted May 16, 2011
