Transcending transience: a thoughtful and moving Shirazi and Shostakovich from Parlando

‘Every concert tells a story’ is the motto of Parlando, a New York-based chamber orchestra founded in 2019 by Ian Niederhoffer, whose aim is to engage audiences in a shared sense of discovery through creative programming. Their most recent concert – the third in a season of four programs they regularly present at Merkin Hall – told several stories.

Not the least of these involves the remarkably effective formula Niederhoffer and his ensemble have been refining to build a welcoming, quasi-familiar bond with their listeners. Parlando’s bond is its brand. Each program’s works are chosen to illustrate aspects of a given theme. That is hardly an unusual practice, but the connections Niederhoffer posits are typically subtle and thought-provoking. Most importantly, the unifying themes connect topics we face in our lives in general as human beings with inherently musical concepts or processes.

Sunday afternoon’s theme was ‘Transient Voices’, referring to music’s capacity to ‘capture the ephemera’ – which Niederhoffer discussed in his introductory comments. That too is part of the brand: unfussy, easy-to-follow chats that are smart, articulate and packed with suggestions for tangents that might be helpful to audience members at any level of familiarity with classical tradition.

Niederhoffer described the ephemeral nature of music itself as a characteristic that equips this art with a special ability to help us cope with the impermanence we experience – not just to be more mindful of that condition, but to appreciate how what seems transient can endure – just as music, a transient phenomenon par excellence that dissolves into silence at the end of each performance, can reawaken dormant memories.

Without contrivance, Niederhoffer toggles between the abstract and the most concrete musical detail. Part of his uniquely compelling talent is an ability to bring these ideas to life without seeming reductive or oversimplified. This is an alternative to the predictable patterns of program music thinking, in which a one-to-one correspondence might be emphasized between, say, a dissonant climax and a stabbing in the associated story. What interests Niederhoffer and his Parlando musicians – and what they seek to engage the audience in experiencing – is how music tells these stories through specifically and uniquely musical details.

An affinity for underrepresented works or lesser-known pieces of the repertoire is likewise part of Parlando’s identity. Niederhoffer opened with Umbra, a short piece for string orchestra by Aida Shirazi from 2017. Born in Tehran in 1987, Shirazi cofounded the Iranian Female Composers Association as a platform to support creative work by young artists across the Iranian diaspora. The topic of transience in this case, according to Niederhoffer, is related to memories of a distant home. Shirazi went abroad to the West to study music, earning her doctorate at the University of California, Davis.

She channels a sense of being out of place, disconnected with her home culture, into the unsettling, shadowy, in-the-margins textures of Umbra – a moment of eclipse that totally blocks the light source. Niederhoffer shaped ultra-sensitive nuances of volume and textural weight to enhance the music’s compelling internal drama of filtered memories, with brief pizzicatos recalling haunting impressions of the santur, the ancient Iranian hammered dulcimer (a guidepost the conductor, in his prefatory remarks, pointed out).

Parlando’s concerts are designed to be efficient and compact – no intermission, but a chance to unwind in the lobby afterward and perhaps gather to chat further about the music. The performances are ideally calibrated to the intimacy and warm acoustic of Merkin Hall, which looked to be close to capacity (449 seats) with a fully attentive audience.

The main course was Shostakovich’s Symphony No.14, music that directly confronts the ultimate fact of human transience: the death that ends each story. The composer sketched the score at white heat during a hospital stay in 1969, when he was gripped by thoughts of imminent death. Niederhoffer is only in his twenties, but he showed an uncanny sympathy for this late work of an artist obsessed not just with death’s ineluctability but with its omnipresence. That, in a nutshell, is the ‘story’ of the Fourteenth, a work unusually structured as a sequence of eleven movements, each setting a poem dealing with the topic of death – most often a violent, cruel and tragic death that arrives prematurely. The scoring is similarly unconventional: string orchestra with two percussionists and two vocal soloists (soprano and bass).

Niederhoffer presided over a tautly dramatic interpretation, playing up Shostakovich’s radical contrasts of the lower depths of cellos and double bass with frantically screaming violins in highest register. Principal cellist Diana Golden contributed especially memorable lines of mournful cantabile, while the ensemble’s unison figurations and accents emanated a stark beauty.

For his poetic stories of death, Shostakovich chose four sources, using Russian translations (paraphrases and even rewritings would be a more accurate description) of non-Russian poets: Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Küchelbeker (in the pivotal ninth movement about a hero killed by the tyrannical state) and, in the epilogue-like final two movements, Rainer Maria Rilke. English translations were projected as surtitles.

Niederhoffer offered a fluent introduction to the background of Shostakovich’s tormented career, referring to a depiction of prison-camp life in one of the songs as another example of the composer ‘giving a musical middle finger to Stalin’. He also addressed the great paradox of the Symphony No.14: that music of such unrelenting, indeed exhausting, bleakness can impart a restorative feeling that even approaches joy. As Shostakovich himself put it: ‘I want listeners to this symphony to realize that “life” is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act’.

Soprano Irina Rindzuner and bass Mikhail Svetlov gave impassioned accounts of their parts, investing them with genuinely operatic intensity and effective touches of characterization to give each vignette or setting a recognizable atmosphere. They were also well-matched, joining voices in the final movement for the first time to devastatingly powerful effect in the poetry of Rilke.

Parlando’s next and final program of the season, ‘The Other Mozart Effect’, will take place on 1 May.