On Thursday, November 19, the New York Philharmonic held an open rehearsal for their performance occurring the next week, on Tuesday the 24th. The high attendance, even of its practice session, speaks to the well-earned renown of the orchestra. The works, played in fragments, repeated and corrected and repeated, were beautifully played to the ear of a student with no musical education. For several hours, the orchestra performed slices of Liszt’s Les Préludes, Symphonic Poem No. 3, Elgar’s In the South, and selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the rehearsal, particularly to the untrained ear, was the ability of the members to change so quickly. It was plenty surprising to watch them simply follow the music, as it rose and as it plunged with the seemingly capricious moods of three quite dead composers tugging the musicians bows and sending their fingers flying along their instruments. Working off each other, the relentless conductor, and the music, the musicians could rapidly alter their pace, from creeping to galloping through the notes, the volume, from whisper to great booming noise that bounded through the hall and against hundreds of ear drums, the mood, from melancholy, timid, sweet, to dark, foreboding, passionate, triumphant. In one moment, their instruments could evoke peace and nature, in another, violent uproar.
Almost as impressive as their collective path through the music was the way these many individuals, so human-seeming in their pedestrian dress, could pull together faster than iron filings on a magnet. Some older men wore tweed suits, brown shoes, wire-rimmed eyeglasses. One women on the right wore purple mary janes; a matching sweater was draped carelessly over her chair, from which it gradually slid to a puddle on the floor by intermission. Some hair was neat, some messy, pushed up, to the side. Make-up was undone, and the colors of everyday life splashed across the stage. Before the conductor arrived, the stage emitted so many different noises of instruments tuning and adjusting that the sound of all the papers rustling and chairs adjusting and greetings slipping between breaths were barely audible. But upon the raise of the conductor’s energetic hand, instruments were poised, hands steady and the entire stage near still. So quickly, these disparate elements of humanity, at first glance no different the average person on the subway, created awe-inspiring sound. The first moments of In the South seemed to lift a person’s heart, entrance their mind with some great and captivating landscape of sound. And the slightly chilling opening of Romeo at Juliet’s grave, before the thunderous landing of doom, seems to absorb the oxygen out of the air, leaving even the musically ignorant breathless.
