Tonight’s concert marks the New York Philharmonic’s first indoor performance for a live audience since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a Janus-like moment for New York’s Orchestra—looking back to what they most value of the past, but in a context that reflects what they’ve learned from the past year and will bring to the future. It is therefore fitting that the first work you hear is by a New Yorker with a fresh voice that reflects her love of the classics. A vocalist and violinist as well as composer and producer, in 2013 Caroline Shaw was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Partita for 8 Voices, which she wrote for the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. She is one of 19 women composers to whom the New York Philharmonic has extended a commission through Project 19, the largest-ever women’s commissioning initiative, marking the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

Entr’acte, originally composed for string quartet and heard tonight in the composer’s adaptation for string orchestra, stems from Shaw’s profound love for chamber music. Its use of traditional harmony lives alongside bracing dissonance, and precise rhythms evoking the Classical era give way to a more contemporary improvisatory feeling. Time blends and bends, and the listener may experience a sense of the surreal. About the piece Shaw wrote:

Entr’acte was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2—with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.

Those who think of Jean Sibelius as the father of Finnish musical nationalism could be forgiven for assuming that the work heard here was one of his many orchestral works inspired by the Nordic Kalevala, including Kullervo and the Lemminkäinen Suite. But that is not the case.

This master of the symphony in fact composed a remarkable number of art songs, and even works for chorus, though the latter is not well known beyond Finland’s borders. Rakastava began “life” as a piece for a-cappella chorus, composed for an 1893 competition hosted by the Helsinki University Chorus. Not surprisingly, Sibelius turned to Finnish folk poetry for the text, in this case the Kanteletar. Its three movements trace the arc of a love story. In the first a man wonders where his lover can be, not discerning her in the silent, joyless hills and forests that surround him; in the second he finds her trail in his discovery of brighter stones and lusher groves. The couple is reunited in the finale; they dance and kiss before they part.

Rakastava only received second prize, so to expand its opportunities to be heard, Sibelius soon revisited the piece, adding a string accompaniment to the men’s chorus setting in 1894, then arranging it for a-cappella mixed choir in 1898. More than 10 years later he returned to it, this time creating a purely instrumental work—a little suite for strings plus timpani and triangle—with the only sign of its narrative origins remaining in the movement titles. For some time Rakastava has entered the realm of rarities; the New York Philharmonic has only performed it once before, in 2004.

What was Richard Strauss thinking when he composed Metamorphosen? In ill health, with his great successes decades behind him, he was witnessing the destruction caused by World War II, and his thoughts turned to his hometown, Munich. In 1943 he sketched a fragment that he titled “Mourning for Munich,” and two years later that seed blossomed into this 26-minute meditation on Goethe. Strauss noted two poems by the writer-scientist-statesman in his Metamorphosen sketchbook, one titled “Know Thyself,” the other that demands that, despite the difficulties of the world, one must “Behave with good sense / As each day brings what it brings. / Always remember: it’s worked thus far, / And so it shall surely work until the end.”

Strauss builds his piece from four musical motifs. In the opening one hears an upward-thrusting, beautifully harmonized gesture. The second is a fresh take on the “Mourning for Munich” idea he’d noted over a year earlier. The third motif begins with four repeated notes before they develop into an eloquent melody. The fourth is less ornate, almost consoling. These themes intersect and combine, transforming each as they encounter each other, modulating into different keys. The tempo is elastic, and the music rises like a wave until it breaks off. After the music ebbs, the basses bring back the “Mourning for Munich” motif, this time more clearly evoking the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica—in this part of the score Strauss has written “IN MEMORIAM.”

Throughout Metamorphosen Strauss, this master orchestrator, makes great use of his 23 solo strings, though you may notice that it is rare that all of them perform at the same time.

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