The Brooklyn Philharmonic performed “The Planets” to the accompaniment of photographs from NASA on Saturday night.
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The Brooklyn Philharmonic’s programming team was thinking theatrically for the orchestra’s Saturday evening concert. Before Stefan Asbury conducted the opening work, Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis,” the lights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music were extinguished and a vocal quartet from the New York Virtuoso Singers walked to the front of the stage, bearing candles, to sing Tallis’s setting of Psalm 2, on which the Vaughan Williams work is based. Later the orchestra gave a performance of Holst’s “Planets” to the accompaniment of photographs provided by NASA.
But a new piece by Julia Wolfe, “My Beautiful Scream,” performed with no lighting effects or auxiliary video, proved the most vividly theatrical performance of all, precisely because the drama was concentrated in the music itself. Ms. Wolfe composed “My Beautiful Scream” as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks, but instead of writing a memorial work or a brooding philosophical piece, she went with pure gut instinct: her piece is an intensely stylized, intricately detailed, elongated slow- motion scream.
Ms. Wolfe composed the work for the Kronos Quartet, which played it here, and a handful of orchestras, including the Brooklyn Philharmonic. But it is not quite a quartet concerto: the quartet provides textural contrast rather than virtuosic opposition. In its opening gesture, the string players draw their bows against their instruments’ bridges to create the sound of a breath, from which emerges a shimmering, lightly dissonant chord, played pianissimo by the quartet.
As the quartet’s sound slowly broadens, the orchestra enters with a handful of chordal wallops, then falls silent for a moment before beginning a slow crescendo. Within the layered orchestral texture, steady but arresting rhythms, fragmentary string and woodwind melodies and manic bowing effects emerge, offset by those in the quartet.
The Kronos and the Brooklyn players rendered the 25-minute work with a patient intensity that brought out its searing, elemental pain, yet kept that pain at a distance, rendering it observable and affecting rather than oppressive.
Before Ms. Wolfe’s work, Mr. Asbury led a rich but not overly sentimental account of the Vaughan Williams, which benefited from the context provided by the choral preface. This work also sets a solo quartet against the full ensemble, but here the quartet lines were given graceful readings by the orchestra’s principals.
Evans Mirageas, the orchestra’s artistic adviser, interviewed Ms. Wolfe before her work was played and introduced each movement of “The Planets,” offering information about the planets and the NASA photographs about to be shown, and reciting poetry that touched on the gods for which the planets were named. It was a pleasant enough presentation, if talkier than strictly necessary. Almost lost amid all this was the solid, colorful rendering of Holst’s suite by the orchestra and, offstage, by Women of the Canticum Novum Singers.
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