PHILADELPHIA -- This was more like it. After a gala opening that landed somewhere between OK and quite all right, the second of three subscription performances of Verdi's Requiem was much more the real deal, a tapestry of sound and substance that left no doubt of the multiple powers of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the capacity Yannick N?zet-S?guin to marshal them.
The Requiem is, of course, a largely vocal undertaking, and thus perhaps a curious startup choice for the incoming music director of an ensemble famous for its string-based sonority. But one sensed always on Saturday night that the orchestra constituted the infrastructure on which all the solo supplications and choral outbursts were built.
Which is a fancy way of saying that the Philadelphians sounded great. The bangs were big, as they always are in this grandiose work, but for my money the warmth of the quiet playing at the conclusion of the Offertorio was equally impressive, as was the fiercely precise full-orchestra chromatic scale near the end of the Sanctus.
N?zet-S?guin was spiritually into it, which for him means physically into it, cuing the whispers with suspended fingers and the hitting the fortimssimo home runs with a baton gripped by two hands. The podium display and the musical content were one.
Widely known as a singer's conductor, the maestro assembled some good ones, all imports. Supposedly beset by allergies, the Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya was vocally penetrating and entirely believable as an upward-gazing sinner seeking delivery in the Libera me. Heavens, she crossed herself before the Offertorio, presumably in the Orthodox manner.
Christine Rice of the U.K. was a hearty mezzo-soprano and the Mexican Rolando Villaz?n projected his lyric tenor boldly without straining it. The Russian bass Mikhail Petrenko was perhaps not much more than sturdy on the bottom, but sturdy was good enough.
There was a huge burst of applause for the young and young-sounding Westminster Symphonic Choir as prepared by Joe Miller. Chorus and orchestra were carefully balanced to create a wide range of colour and feeling. If the trumpets announcing the Last Judgment sounded less than scary from the sides of Verizon Hall, we should remember that Artec Consultants did not design this cello-shaped room with such interventions in mind.
In a post-concert chat with the extroverted Philadelphia Orchestra president Allison Vulgamore, N?zet-S?guin said he chose the Verdi Requiem - also his entry item in 2000 with the Orchestre M?tropolitain - as "a way of getting human" with the orchestra. Given the rapt silence with which the crowd heard this performance, the strategy might have worked on an even broader scale than he bargained for.
YNS takes the Requiem to New York on Tuesday for his debut appearance in Carnegie Hall. Montrealers lacking passports can look forward to an OM performance on March 24, 2013.
Guest list: VIPs at the opening gala of Thursday included many Philadelphia philanthropists and dignitaries, as one might suppose. There were also two Montrealers: patroness of the arts Jacqueline Desmarais and the art-collecting senator Serge Joyal. Plus one former Montrealer, Dorian Gray, I mean Zarin Mehta, who must have a portrait in the attic, looking as he does scarcely two years older than he did as managing director of the OSM in 1990.
akaptainis@sympatico.ca
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