Review: Children Sing of Resistance at the Philharmonic

Beyond this reminder of Britten, Neuwirth folds in nods to other styles and works — crisp, courtly echoes of Baroque music; touches of louche, dirty blues; the solemn bells of Wagner’s “Parsifal” — in the eclectic manner of Berio’s 1968 “Sinfonia” or Mahler’s symphonies, to give a sense of the weight of history on modernity, sometimes oppressive and sometimes inspiring.

It struck me that the main structural challenge of “Hippogriff” is that, with the voices representing activism and virtue, Neuwirth looks to her orchestra to provide evocations of both the world’s repressive forces and the fertile, creative wildness out of which resistance might emerge.

The result, perhaps necessarily, is muddled — particularly over half an hour of quite repetitive musical and thematic material. The Berlin Philharmonic’s performance, archived on its Digital Concert Hall platform, offers, as a recording can, a more transparent capture of this dense work, and the sound of the boys in the Tölzer Knabenchor is more distinctive than the Brooklyn Youth Chorus’s girls.

Played after a fresh, vibrant version of Lili Boulanger’s dewy “D’un Matin de Printemps,” “Hippogriff” made a nice pairing with another crashingly grand piece in which triumph is touched with darkness: Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, given a comfortably warm performance under Sondergard, the new music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, who made an impressive Philharmonic debut with this program. (Saturday was the last of three concerts.)

Both works contain subtle but crucial references to the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — Neuwirth in a brief passage of quiet, stalwart marching in the low winds (as well as in as her brotherhood-celebrating text), and Prokofiev in the bit of hymn in the low strings that sets off his Fifth’s stirring conclusion.

Throughout the symphony, Sondergard kept the balances clear between the orchestra’s sections, never losing the winds in the strings or the strings in the brasses. And the Philharmonic played vividly but without exaggeration, the climaxes blazing without blaring.

New York Philharmonic

Performed on Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan.