Review: A Rising Conductor [Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla] Makes Her New York Debut

[Frank Forman]

Speaking of lady conductors, I think a great deal of Marin Alsop of the
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Her Brahms symphonies are quite distinctive.

Review: A Rising Conductor Makes Her New York Debut
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/arts/music/review-a-rising-conductor-makes-her-new-york-debut-mirga-grazinyte-tyla-juilliard-orchestra.html

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

On an ordinary night--one lacking the first presidential debate of
the year and the opening of the Metropolitan Opera's season--it
would have dominated the attention of the city's classical music
fanciers. As it was, the New York debut of the rapidly rising young
conductor Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, leading the Juilliard Orchestra on
Monday evening, remained a subject of intense curiosity, as witness
the full house at Alice Tully Hall, heavily laced with music
industry professionals.

Ms. Grazinyte-Tyla (pronouned grah-zhee-NEE-teh tee-LAH), a
30-year-old Lithuanian, is riding the crest of an international wave
of established and emerging female conductors sweeping over the
profession. She has already claimed places at two institutions that
pride themselves on nurturing new talent, as associate conductor at
the Los Angeles Philharmonic and music director of the City of
Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England, where she started her
tenure last month.

In an odd way, she is also riding the coattails of Yannick
Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Both, with surnames barely pronounceable by Anglophones, are being
marketed by their first names, a further democratization of the
waning mystique of the maestro: thus, Mirga and Yannick to you.

In a nice display of solidarity, Ms. Grazinyte-Tyla opened her
program with "Fires" (2012), a compelling quarter-hour work by
another young Lithuanian woman, Raminta Serksnyte. The piece, one of
several by Ms. Serksnyte whose titles, in her words, "directly refer
to natural phenomena and elemental forces," was commissioned by
Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to
accompany Beethoven's Fifth in their multiyear cycle of his
symphonies.

Over two movements, the vaguely pictorial work builds from
atmospheric to blazingly brash. Motifs from the Beethoven symphony
are well hidden in a dense and colorful orchestral texture (even
including wah-wah trumpet) until the very end, when the "fate" motif
breaks through.

The Beethoven companion here was that composer's Third Piano
Concerto, with Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner, a 19-year-old master's
candidate at Juilliard, as soloist. Mr. Sanchez-Werner supplied
plenty of technique and an occasional excess of muscle, but he was
most impressive, perhaps, in quiet moments, sensitive and lyrical.

In Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," Ms. Grazinyte-Tyla had the
spotlight to herself and made the most of it with a rousing
performance. She conducts with admirable economy and clarity--her
beat, her cues--while injecting expressiveness and emotion
liberally.

If there was fault to find, it had mainly to do with balances, but
this was probably the flip side of the early-season prominence she
enjoyed: September roughnesses in an orchestra that, however
excellent, renews itself each school year. The woodwind players,
budding virtuosos in their own right, could have used some taming,
especially in the Beethoven.