Kwamé Ryan, on podium, leads the New York Philharmonic and members of Yarn/Wire in the world premiere of George Lewis’s “…Ohne Festen Wohnsitz.” Photo by Fadi Kheir.
In Friday’s (4/10) New York Times, Seth Colter Walls writes, “This has been an adventurous and entertaining season for the New York Philharmonic. Its programming has balanced modern and contemporary pieces with more expected fare, but also real imagination. The program this week at David Geffen Hall is exceptionally broad … The orchestra plays works by Samuel Barber both familiar (‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915’) and less so (the rangy Second Essay for Orchestra); a scene from Stravinsky’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ … ; Ives’s ‘The Unanswered Question’; and, most notably, the world premiere of a meaty new piece by the composer, trombonist, scholar and computer music pioneer George Lewis.… Holding it all together was the conductor Kwamé Ryan, impressive in his Philharmonic subscription debut…. The Philharmonic players … rose to the hyper-modernist challenges of Lewis’s premiere, yet I found this work to be more fitfully engaging than many of his recent scores…. [Lewis’s] nearly half-hour, modernist concerto grosso was also designed for the pianistic and percussion talents of [new-music quartet] Yarn/Wire … Yarn/Wire players were assigned cadenzas that allowed for improvisation, which felt more rote than the fully written-out material that Lewis had given the Philharmonic…. That was too bad, particularly given the quality of Lewis’s other recent works.”