US premiere of Symphony No. 2 «Kenotaph»
«The first half of the concert was given over to the United States premiere of the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher’s visceral Symphony No. 2: Kenotaph….musically Kenotaph should be regarded as one of the New York Philharmonic’s most exciting premieres of recent memory […]»
Brad Ross, Oberon’s Grove, April 30, 2019
«Conducted by Semyon Bychkov […], its visceral intensity was its strongest quality. Whole stretches felt like teeming, sorrowful reflections of the human tragedy that inspired Mr. Larcher. It’s scored for a huge orchestra with an array of makeshift percussion instruments, including thunder sheets and oil barrels. Yet these myriad sounds are folded subtly into the orchestral textures. From the opening of the first movement, which begins with a thwacked chord that sets off fidgety riffs, the music is continually kinetic and shifting. Mr. Larcher’s ear for captivating sonorities and his sheer imagination kept pulling me in. Cluster chords are dense and hazy, yet pungent with tension. The music will break into a fleeting lyrical passage only to be pummeled down by an onslaught of percussion. The pensive Adagio movement comes closest to being a cogent entity, which made it all the more affecting. Echoes of Baroque-style chorales were intricately folded into the opening of the final movement, with tonal harmonies that splinter and turn vaporous.»
Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, April 25, 2019
«Here he succeeds brilliantly with reinvented chorales, coherent reprises, and gestural echoes of the colorful scores of Stravinsky and Messiaen. The work also possesses some of the “practical music performing a social function” philosophy of a Britten or a Shostakovich. And although he denies any programmatic quality to the music, it’s hard not to hear at times the visceral sounds of sea and wind, while the appearance at one point of a dismissive Austrian ländler folk-dance tune smacks of a Europe that is increasingly turning its back on this humanitarian crisis. […]
An interesting evening, and one that showcased a pair of powerful Viennese works, albeit written 130 years apart. At this point in time, I found Larcher’s poignant monument to the estimated 22,000 drowned at sea the more affecting.»
Clive Paget, Musical America, April 26, 2019
«For a first-time listener, this powerful, lugubrious score did bring forward real images: the agitated or just falsely becalmed waters of the sea, the people’s anger and the despair. […] Composed for a large orchestra, this captivating music, pendulating between bursts of energy and moments of stasis, is a testimony to Larcher’s remarkable talent as an orchestrator.»
Edward Sava-Segal, Bachtrack, April 26, 2019
«Mr. Larcher is perhaps Austria’s most renowned composer, and for good reason. He is meticulous, imaginative, he has the orchestral colors of a Tintoretto and the musical architecture of a Christopher Wren. More essential, his «Cenotaph» symphony has the kind of infinite energy which allows one to almost visualize the energy of a solar system or two. […] This Second Symphony was not music’s usual metaphor for energy. It was energy itself.»
Harry Rolnick, ConcertoNet.com
«Semyon Bychkov led a program consisting of two substantial symphonies–Thomas Larcher’s No. 2, Kenotaph, and Johannes Brahms’s No. 4—that had much in common: a tragic character, and truly «symphonic» ambitions when it came to orchestral sonorities and breadth of expression. Not to mention the four-movement form of Haydn and Beethoven—sonata-allegro, slow movement, scherzo, finale—which was considered old-fashioned when Brahms took it up for the fourth and last time in 1884, never mind Larcher in 2015. The goal was to put stimulating new wine in that old bottle, and we now know that Brahms succeeded four times over. And Wednesday’s U.S. premiere of Larcher’s harrowing symphony showed it can still be done.»
David Wright, The New York Classic Review