Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the Met Orchestra in a program at Carnegie Hall that included the final act of Verdi’s “Otello,” featuring the tenor Russell Thomas, left. Photo by Evan Zimmerman.
In Friday’s (6/23) New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes, “Tchaikovsky’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Fantasy Overture and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story’ dominated the program” by the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on June 22, “alongside a brisk account of the final act from Verdi’s ‘Otello.’ But the freshest part of the evening was the shortest: the new, 11-minute ‘Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches),’ by Matthew Aucoin…. Aucoin’s opera Eurydice,’ presented at the Met in 2021, musically overwhelmed a fragile text. With this bit of ‘Lear,’ on the other hand, he has found a subject grand enough to match his sensibility. Yet Aucoin’s restraint in handling these huge forces is one of the most notable things about ‘Heath,’ whose four sections, played without pause, exude a confident, brooding reserve…. This first section … shows Aucoin’s talent for creating orchestral textures that are simultaneously granitic and flickering, like fast-shifting storm clouds. Sharp snaps of snare drum punctuate a gradual increase in forcefulness to a bleak, expansive landscape of solemn brasses and a droning in the strings, which melts into an almost Tchaikovskian Romantic sweep…. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, deserves credit for consistently leading this richly gifted composer’s works with both organizations.”
