“It may be ironic that the biggest discovery in a concert dominated by new music was a work that is nearly 350 years old,” writes Janelle Gelfand in Sunday’s (9/26) Cincinnati Business Courier (OH). “Jean-Baptiste Lully’s music from [Molière’s comedy] ‘Le Bourgeois gentilhomme,’ performed by Louis Langrée and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, has never sounded so fresh as it did, played just before David Lang’s massive, percussive score of 2013, ‘man made.’ … On Saturday, Langrée and the Cincinnati Symphony continued MusicNOW, the festival exploring new music founded by Bryce Dessner. Besides Lang’s ‘man made’ … there was the orchestra’s first performance of Dessner’s [2014] ’Quilting.’ … Pianist Daniil Trifonov delivered his first-ever performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2…. Dessner’s ‘Quilting’ … called for the largest number of musicians that I’ve seen onstage since March 2020, when Covid-19 ended live concerts…. The work’s ending was the most successful, with slurring trombones and chorale-like writing for the brass…. Lang’s percussion concerto, ‘man made,’ [featured four Sō Percussion] soloists … breaking twigs in unison, tapping out melodies on tuned wine bottles and banging on garbage cans. Those events were then imitated or explored by the orchestra…. It was an intriguing exercise in ‘found’ sounds.”
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