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~ Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin

Saturday March 29th, 2025 – Not one but two composers were present at David Geffen Hall tonight to receive enthusiastic ovations for their music performed by Leonard Slatkin and the New York Philharmonic. It was, in a sense, a family affair. The composer John Corigliano has been a friend of Slatkin’s and the Philharmonic for half a century, while the other composer, Cindy McTee, is Slatkin’s wife. While the third composer of the evening—Dmitri Shostakovich—was not on hand, this evening’s concert was a testament to the vitality of music of the present era.

Cindy McTee’s 2010 piece Double Play is a two-movement fantasia on Charles Ives’s 1908 composition The Unanswered Question. More than just an exercise in Ivesian orchestral writing, the piece is a sonic lava lamp of shifting ambiguities and cinematic episodes. A low drone in the double basses unifies the fragmentary material in the woodwinds while hushed string chords oscillate between gorgeous dissonance and consonance.

The second movement, entitled “Tempus Fugit”, begins with the ingenious tick-tocking of an ensemble of mallets, sounding like a cupboardful of disagreeing clocks and metronomes. The Ivesian writing of the first movement returns under this misaligned timekeeping, establishing an fascinating non-relationship between the disparate concepts of the two movements.

This juxtaposition is muddied in the second movement by the inclusion of passages of chase-scene-style music and Gershwin-like big-band flourishes (although played brilliantly crisply by the Philharmonic brass). McTee’s piece was intricately orchestrated and finely crafted but went on a bit longer than it needed to and wouldn’t have suffered from cuts in the second movement.

Above: Cindy McTee and Leonard Slatkin take a bow; photo by Chris Lee. 

For John Corigliano’s 2020 piece Triathlon the soloist Timothy McAllister brought three saxophones to the stage. In writing the piece, Corigliano asked himself “what would happen if I wrote a concerto for saxophonist and orchestra, not saxophone and orchestra.” McAllister, the preeminent classical saxophonist for whom the concerto was written, is, after all, a skilled player of the soprano, alto, and baritone saxophones. Corigliano exploits the unique qualities of all three in Triathlon.

The first movement, “Leaps” for soprano saxophone, bursts right out of the gate with slinking high and low figures, bustling orchestral sounds, and swaggering bravura material for the soloist. McAllister’s playing is assured and confident while maintaining a chamber music sensibility, which suits well the elaborate dialogues that Corigliano writes between the soloist and various voices in the woodwinds and brass. One notable section of this movement appears to quote Ravel’s children’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges with ravishingly mysterious textures in the woodwinds, providing a fluttering backdrop for lyrical solos in the soprano saxophone.

The second movement, entitled “Lines”, hews close to its name by eschewing rhythmic figuration in favor of “linear” melodic material. This movement for alto saxophone occupies a hybrid sound-world somewhere between the hazy atmosphere of Coltrane and the broad horizons of Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait.

Things get wilder in the third movement, which begins with a baritone saxophone cadenza of key clicks, slap tonguing, and other extended techniques up and down the range of the instrument. “Licks”, the title of this movement, has multiple meanings as the soloist seems to riff and improvise and produce very physical sounds from the tongue itself. The entire movement is a rollicking pseudo-improvisatory accompanied recitative. In a fun plot twist at the very end of the piece, McAllister picks up the soprano sax for one last picaresque lick.

Above: Timothy McAllster and Maestro Slatkin playing the Corigliano; photo by Chris Lee

In the second half of the program, Slatkin led the Philharmonic in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 of 1937. It’s a piece that is, as Slatkin writes, “a bit more familiar for both musicians and audience”. Indeed, it was an admirable if conventional performance, with thrilling—booming—climaxes, flawless details across the woodwinds, and propulsive treatment of dramatic transitions.

Throughout the concert, Slatkin (above, photo by Chris Lee) frequently put down his baton to conduct with his hands, only to pick the baton back up within the same movement. Slatkin holds the baton from the end of its long handle, rather than gripping it, which means that he relies on his left hand to communicate finer-grain detail to the players. His conducting was at its best when he put down the baton (as in the first movement of McTee’s piece and the sublime Largo of Shostakovich), allowing him to be expressively geometric—an impressively effective semaphore for the musicians. During the Shostakovich Largo, which he conducted from memory, I wondered where his baton had gone, since there was no music stand on the podium for him to rest it on. When the movement was over, he reached behind the folder on the first desk of the violas to retrieve his baton from where he had stashed it. Meant to be invisible, it was just one of the many clever details that added up to this superbly crafted concert.

~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin 

Performance photos by Chris Lee, courtesy of the New York Philharmonic