Before the New York Philharmonic’s concert on Thursday night at Avery Fisher Hall, Alan Gilbert, speaking on behalf of the musicians, dedicated the program to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. As it happened, the scheduled works were movingly appropriate.
Alan Gilbert conducting the baritone Thomas Hampson with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall.
The concert opened with Haydn’s pensive Symphony No. 49 in F minor (“La Passione”), followed by Schubert’s solemnly beautiful “Unfinished” Symphony. Berg’s wrenching Three Orchestral Pieces (Op. 6) ended the evening.
The central work was John Adams’s baritone setting of “The Wound-Dresser,” from 1988. The piece uses a fragment from the Walt Whitman poem of that title, which recounts Whitman’s work caring for maimed Union soldiers during the Civil War. Thomas Hampson, artist in residence with the Philharmonic, gave a lucid and poignant performance of what came across as a 20-minute monologue.
In an astute description of the poem in a program note, Mr. Adams calls it the most intimate, graphic and profoundly affecting evocation of the act of nursing he knows of, a text “astonishingly free of any kind of hyperbole or amplified emotion,” yet filled with imagery “of a precision that could only be attained by one who had been there.”
Personal associations enhanced Mr. Adams’s emotional reaction to the text: memories of friends in San Francisco who were dying of AIDS in the late 1980s, and of his father’s slow decline from Alzheimer’s disease, attended to by his mother.
As the work opens, hazy, piercing string chords hover over sustained bass tones. Soon the chords fall into an inexorably steady pattern, as the baritone intones the opening lines.
“Bearing the bandages, water, and sponge,/Straight and swift to my wounded I go,” he sings. As the description of the scene becomes rawer, the music shifts from meditative restraint through restless agitation to controlled intensity with surging, fitful strings. Now and then you hear a consoling battlefield trumpet.
The music is driven by Whitman’s words, set with a deft blend of aching lyricism and conversational naturalness. Mr. Hampson brought myriad colorings to his singing — an almost spectral tone to convey the image of the blood that “reddens the grass the ground,” and the plaintive beauty touched with longing when the poet describes the “burning flame” he feels as he tends to soldier amputees who dare not look at their stumps.
Mr. Hampson was so intent on maintaining subdued dignity that his singing was sometimes underpowered. Mr. Gilbert, who drew shimmering sonorities from the Philharmonic, could have worked harder to keep the orchestra in check. And it would have been better for Mr. Hampson to sing the work, if possible, from memory. He sometimes seemed score-bound. Still, this was a strong account of a remarkable piece. Mr. Adams was on hand to acknowledge the ovation.
The Haydn performance was elegant, with supple phrasing and mellow string textures, although it could have used crisper rhythmic articulation. Mr. Gilbert drew glowing warmth from the Philharmonic during the Schubert symphony, performed with an ideal mix of magisterial cool and somber urgency.
The orchestra almost doubled in size for the Berg. Here was a gripping, brilliant yet never flashy performance of a landmark expressionistic work, which ends with cataclysmic terror. Even though the program was under two hours, a couple of dozen people left the hall before the Berg. If Berg is still too modern for some listeners, Mr. Gilbert, the Philharmonic and the whole field of classical music have more work to do.