Music Review

For a Composer’s Birthday, a Tribute at Full Blast

CreditCreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

“There’s a little piece of paper attached to your program, but I have still been asked to say there will be a gunshot fired — a blank, of course,” the composer John Corigliano announced from the Carnegie Hall stage on Saturday night.

“Now the reason this gun is fired is not just for special effect,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s because it’s supposed to frighten you.”

The occasion at hand was a concert by the Juilliard Orchestra honoring Mr. Corigliano’s 75th birthday, which actually arrives on Saturday. Despite rough weather a hardy audience liberally sprinkled with composers assembled to celebrate, and to hear Mr. Corigliano’s Symphony No. 3, “Circus Maximus.”

Mr. Corigliano won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for music composition for his Symphony No. 1. Two different recordings of that piece earned Grammy Awards. His Symphony No. 2, also performed here, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

That Mr. Corigliano’s Third Symphony has received comparatively less attention is almost certainly because he wrote it for wind ensemble rather than for symphony orchestra. The piece, introduced in 2005 by the University of Texas Wind Ensemble, is a major statement: the product of an enfant terrible grown into an elder statesman, his prodigious, provocative faculties razor sharp.

The symphony vividly expresses Mr. Corigliano’s discouragement with the modern world’s fragmented focus and lust for blood sport. “Introitus,” a recurring fanfare of nattering trumpets and machine-gun drum bursts emanating from players positioned in audience tiers throughout the hall, engulfs a listener, overloading senses immediately.

“Screen/Siren,” in which hidden saxophonists lure other players into taking up their lissome song, segues into “Channel Surfing,” where fleeting snatches of music in a variety of familiar styles are cut off sharply with percussive snaps, meant to suggest a television’s remote control. Two “Night Music” segments follow: the first a distant prairie with glittering stars and coyote yelps; the second an urban bustle punctuated with jazzy licks, heard briefly as if through nightclub doorways.

Bits of everything heard previously recur in the sixth movement, also titled “Circus Maximus,” in which a motley marching band stamped down one aisle and up the other. The concluding mass tutti might have been the loudest sound anyone has ever produced in Carnegie Hall. “Prayer,” awash in Mr. Corigliano’s distinctive strain of melancholy lushness, offered passing easefulness, before tumult mounted anew in “Coda: Veritas” — the forewarned shotgun blast a final jolt in a deeply unsettling work.

Marin Alsop, the conductor, was exemplary in shaping the piece’s thrust and keeping its disparate parts in balance. The musicians, presumably including many seldom afforded so prominent a spotlight, were uniformly superb.

During the concert’s first half Juilliard’s string players rose to the occasion for a confident, deeply sensitive account of Mr. Corigliano’s Symphony No. 2: a string-orchestra work eerie, driven and elegiac by turns, and dedicated here to the memory of the conductor James DePreist, Juilliard’s director emeritus of conducting and orchestral studies, who died on Friday at 76.


Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Monday with a music review of a concert by the Juilliard Orchestra in honor of the 75th birthday of the composer John Corigliano, at Carnegie Hall, referred incorrectly to the musicians shown. They are trombonists, not trumpeters.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: For a Composer’s Birthday, A Tribute at Full Blast. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe