No amount of technology can replace this.

I’m usually a glass-half-empty kind of guy, but after the artistic hellscape of the past 18 months, seeing the Kennedy Center Concert Hall half full for Thursday’s National Symphony Orchestra concert was heart-warming -- indeed, life-affirming. The audience had to put up with a lot; the (mandatory) masks fog up our glasses, we had to read program notes on our phones after accessing them with a QR scanner, it’s harder to read expressions from those onstage, and the evening’s principal offering – Ravel’s luminous Daphnis et Chloé – was degraded by the absence of a chorus (scratched almost certainly due to covid concerns). And yet, the evening was a success. The NSO is not yet back in tip-top shape, and guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier was something of a disappointment, but hearing live symphonic music yanks us back to what it means to be civilized humans together, putting our cares aside for a couple of hours to seek something universal and ineffable. No amount of technology can replace this.

The program opened with a selection of numbers from Bizet’s incidental music for the melodrama L’Arlésienne. This charming music is not taxing for a high-quality orchestra, and the NSO and Tortelier (whose solid, respectable, world-wide career and large discography is largely based on his affinity for French music) should have been having fun with it.  But it clearly got short shrift in rehearsal, and there was a walking-through quality, with loudness standing in for color.   

Next came the premiere of En otra noche, en otro mundo by Angélica Negrón, an NSO co-commission with the Dallas Symphony (and apparently heard there first, though program notes were unclear). Negrón, Puerto Rican-born and trained in New York (at N.Y.U. and C.U.N.Y.), is more of a “sound artist” than what we normally think of as a composer. Her tone-poem (the title means “On another night, in another world”) is a shifting dreamscape of sounds. They are rarely unpleasant; this isn’t a cerebral, ugly, pick-a-note exercise as we had from so many modern composers for so many decades. But the sonorities and the moods they seek to invoke seem to be all there is. Other than a descending scale passage, heard at varying speeds near the beginning and end of the piece, no melodic or harmonic ideas revealed themselves, or at least not long enough to make any impression. And Negrón’s training in academia rather than a conservatory was starkly revealed in her clumsy treatment of the orchestra, with endless tremolos and other pointlessly repetitive passages in the strings. I know nothing about her creative process, but En otra noche, en otro mundo gave strong indication of being worked out on a computer before setting it for live musicians. The art form absolutely needs new voices, the more diverse the better, but the new voices have to say something. Something more than a succession of moods and atmospheres. 

As for the main work, the complete Daphnis et Chloé ballet, while a masterpiece of orchestration, is actually not all that effective in concert (though the final section, known as “Suite No. 2,” is perfect all by itself). Ravel’s description of it as a "choreographic symphony in three movements" is inapposite. Since all its themes are jumbled together throughout, there is no way for the listener to tell when one “movement” ends and another begins; the whole thing is just very episodic, as ballets are. And so when the famous "Lever du jour" that we all know and love from Suite No. 2 finally arrives, the material has begun to wear out its welcome.  

The performance itself was underwhelming as well.  I always thought of Tortelier as a Ravel specialist, since he’s recorded most or all of his symphonic works, and created an astonishingly idiomatic arrangement for orchestra of the Piano Trio, something I would’ve thought impossible. But his Daphnis was a somewhat drab. I’ve inveighed regularly here about poor balances at NSO concerts, but I have to say Tortelier was one of the most careless conductors I’ve ever heard in this regard. The magical translucence of Ravel’s sound world turns to mud if sustained notes in the winds and brass are allowed to cover the strings. And that happened throughout the piece. I’m still unclear what the meaning of the brief blackout just before the Deuxième Partie was all about (the hall went completely dark, with only stand lights for the few musicians who were playing at that point). The heroine is captured by pirates, but so what? This was just head-scratching.  

The NSO musicians played as well on the whole (though the brass and harp were out of tune in the opening), and flutist Aaron Goldman turned in a terrific solo in the Syrinx episode. But there is so much more sensuality in this piece than Tortelier asked for. The many glissandos in the strings, which can be so heady and expressive sounded perfunctory, uninteresting; and this from someone who was once a very fine violinist himself. The final Bacchanale was little more than an artillery assault by the brass and percussion.  

These quibbles aren’t minor, but the fervent applause at the end showed that the power of Ravel’s score, and the near-euphoria of being able to resume live symphonic music for live audiences, carried all before it.