United States Chabrier, Adès, Mahler: Susanna Phillips (soprano), Michelle DeYoung (mezzo-soprano), Ben Bliss (tenor), The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble / Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor). Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, 28.4.2025. (ES-S)
Chabrier – ‘L’invitation au voyage’
Adès – Alchymia
Mahler – Das Lied von der Erde (arr. Arnold Schoenberg/ Rainer Riehn)
Stepping away from the sweeping grandeur of the Metropolitan Opera House, members of its orchestra continue to explore the more intimate dimensions of chamber music in the welcoming space of Weill Recital Hall. Their latest venture offered an eclectic and engaging program, bringing together the orchestra’s outstanding instrumentalists and a group of vocalists with whom they collaborate regularly.
The program began with a true curiosity: young Emmanuel Chabrier’s ‘L’invitation au voyage’, composed in 1870 for voice and piano with an optional bassoon part. The work sets Baudelaire’s celebrated poem in a language of lyrical lightness and directness, far from the darker sensuality of Henri Duparc’s better-known, contemporary setting. It favors fluidity and tenderness while occasionally exploring more daring harmonies. The musical equivalent of the recurring refrain – ‘Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté’ (whose words also found visual expression in Henri Matisse’s famous 1904 painting) – is particularly poignant in its dreamlike allure.
Accompanied by the Met’s principal bassoon, William Short, and pianist Bryan Wagorn, soprano Susanna Phillips aimed to convey the luminous, floating quality of the mélodie’s vocal line with refinement and care. However, her somewhat unsettled instrument struggled to sustain the suppleness and gentle allure the setting demands.
Thomas Adès’s Alchymia, a quintet for basset clarinet and strings composed in 2021, explores transformation not as a theme but as a living process: the dissolution and recombination of sounds, styles and traditions. Drawing on Elizabethan mysticism, Renaissance song and Shakespearean imagery – echoes of which he had earlier woven into his opera The Tempest – Adès subjects musical fragments to a continuous metamorphosis where melodies flicker, textures fracture and forms evaporate and reassemble. In ‘The Woods So Wild’, an old English tune briefly emerges before dissolving; in ‘Lachrymae’, fragmented strains evoke the delicate polyphony of an Elizabethan viol consort.
Principal clarinet Anton Rist, joined by string players in leadership roles within the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, navigated the music’s mercurial shifts with a conjurer’s grace, guiding textures in constant flux. Beneath the surface shimmer, Alchymia revealed an imagination forever reshaping the musical past into elusive, luminous new forms. More broadly, it offered a metaphor for Adès’s oeuvre itself: a restless transformation and reimagining of sources – including his own earlier compositions – in search of a musical equivalent to the philosopher’s stone.
The high point of the evening was, undoubtedly, the second half, when the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, took to the podium to conduct Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the Schoenberg/Riehn arrangement.
Arnold Schoenberg began his chamber arrangement of Das Lied von der Erde in 1921 for the Society for Private Musical Performances, which he founded in post–First World War Vienna to present new music for smaller ensembles under the harsh economic conditions of the time. Schoenberg never completed the work. It was only in the 1980s that German composer Rainer Riehn finalized the score, drawing on Schoenberg’s partial manuscript and notes, thus allowing Mahler’s Lied to be performed in full in this more intimate form.
Although originally scored for large orchestra, Das Lied von der Erde reveals a tendency toward transparency and restraint, with much of its expressive power emerging from subtle instrumental detail rather than sheer mass. In this chamber incarnation, Mahler’s vast meditation on life and mortality is distilled even further, yielding a soundworld of exposed textures and heightened emotional poignancy. The result is not a diminished Lied, but one that sharpens the listener’s focus on the music’s fragility, its inwardness and its aching sense of farewell.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin approached Das Lied von der Erde with a vision rooted in transparency and suppleness. His pacing was finely judged: flexible enough to preserve the music’s organic ebb and flow yet anchored by a clear underlying structure. He largely resisted any temptation to inflate the ensemble’s sound toward symphonic breadth in the relatively small hall, instead maintaining a delicate balance between momentum and fragility. Throughout, there was a remarkable sensitivity to the interplay between voices and instruments, with phrasing and dynamics carefully calibrated to sustain the music’s tension between vulnerability and transcendence – thus allowing instrumental details, such as a soft pizzicato or veiled horn call, to carry a poignancy as intense as any full orchestral gesture.
The two soloists, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and tenor Ben Bliss, approached the exposed challenges of the chamber arrangement with differing sensibilities – Bliss balancing lyricism with an unexpected heroic edge, DeYoung anchoring the performance with her darker timbres and long-breathed phrasing.
Bliss’s contribution set the tone from the outset, with a ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’ that balanced lyrical finesse with an unexpected surge of heroic power. His voice, while retaining its native flexibility and brightness, took on a surprising heft and brilliance at climactic moments, suggesting heldentenor strength without sacrificing focus or musicality. If the most strenuous outbursts occasionally strained the chamber balance, they nonetheless conveyed the frantic exuberance and underlying desperation at the heart of Mahler’s vision. In his later songs, particularly ‘Von der Jugend’, Bliss’s innate clarity and poised phrasing reasserted themselves, offering a lighter, more mercurial contrast that suited the chamber textures exquisitely.
If Bliss opened the work with urgency and brilliance, DeYoung, an experienced Mahlerian, gradually drew the focus inward, culminating in a deeply introspective account of ‘Der Abschied’. Her earlier songs, particularly ‘Von der Schönheit’, showcased the breadth of her vocal resources – from a dusky lower register to a vibrant, almost steel-edged top – though at both extremes there were passing signs of a voice no longer in its first bloom. Yet her phrasing remained grounded in long, patient arcs, shaped with an instinctive sense of line. In ‘Der Abschied’, she traced a haunting path between stoic reserve and lyrical vulnerability, giving as much emotional weight to the music’s silences as to the sung lines themselves. Her final phrases, tinged with a fragile radiance, floated above the ensemble’s spare textures before fading into a silence at once weightless and unresolved. If the vocal line carried the farewell, it was the range of timbral detail beneath it that sustained its emotional resonance.
The chamber ensemble, drawn from the Met Orchestra, responded with remarkable sensitivity to the score’s demands for coloristic refinement and structural clarity. From John Upton’s plaintive oboe solos and Seth Morris’s luminous flute lines to David Chan’s delicately etched violin phrases and Rafael Figueroa’s cello playing full of presence, the ensemble maintained a finely calibrated balance between individual expression and collective restraint. Under Nézet-Séguin’s careful sculpting of every detail, the musicians shaped a sonic landscape that mirrored the vocal lines in their tension between sound and silence.
Across all six movements, Mahler’s setting of texts inspired by Chinese poetry emerged not as an immutable monument but as a living act of transformation: verse transfigured into music, and music transfigured, at last, into silence.
Edward Sava-Segal