Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Distinctively French, American: William Christie’s LES ARTS FLORRISANT and a Gustavo Gimeno-led NY PHILHARMONIC

• By drediman
• December 10, 2025
• No Comments

This past weekend, two music ensembles strove, respectively, to evoke distinctly French and American stylings. These would be William Christie’s early music specialists Les Arts Florrisant at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a Gustavo Gimeno-led New York Philharmonic at its home base at David Geffen Hall. Read on for my thoughts on these vibrant concerts.

LES ARTS FLORRISANT
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

This past weekend, Les Arts Florrisants (RECOMMENDED), led by the great William Christie, returned to to perform a relatively modest holiday concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the institution that has hosted the esteemed French ensemble on their previous visits to New York. Although the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House is arguably too large of a venue for such an unadorned program of music — the early music specialists have typically accompanied full productions of dance or opera — the compact showing, comprised of a pair of works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, was nonetheless richly satisfying. The evening commenced with the composer’s Pastorale de Noël, a rarely-performed, exceedingly beautiful French Baroque retelling of the Nativity story (the piece was allegedly written for Louis XIV’s daughter). Largely told from the fascinatingly juxtaposed perspectives of shepherds and angels on Christmas Day, the work’s human scale and spirited narrative captured my imagination. The second half of the evening delved deeper into the sacred music tradition (Charpentier was the Master of Music at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris) with Messe de Minuit pour Noël, which sets the familiar mass texts to the melodies of French Christmas carols. Christie and his ensemble have been widely acclaimed for their soulful reverence for early classical music, and once again they proved their mettle. Under the maestro’s inspired conducting, the period instrumentalists produced stylishly textured and elegantly rhythmic playing, and the beautifully-trained chorus and soloists sang both scores with unfussy radiance. Indeed, the music-making at large casted a soft spell that lingered well after the performance.

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
David Geffen Hall

Also last weekend over at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, I was able to attend a concert by the New York Philharmonic inspired by New York City’s 400th anniversary (RECOMMENDED) . At the helm was Toronto Symphony Orchestra Music Director Gustavo Gimeno — in his Philharmonic debut — who confidently conducted the accessible, crowd-pleasing program comprised of works with strong ties to the city that never sleeps. The bill began with Three Dance Episodes from Leonard Bernstein’s ebullient 1945 musical On the Town, a work that brims with the hustle and bustle of The Big Apple and the irrepressible American optimism of the post-war era. Suffice to say, it was an excellent opener, which segued seamlessly into George Gershwin’s jazzy yet undeniably romantic Piano Concerto in F. Featuring soloist Hélène Grimaud, the piece was emphatically played with brilliant technique and refreshing unsentimentality — a bold risk that paid off handsomely, in my opinion. The same can be said of Gimeno’s account of Antonin Dvořák insistently melodic New World Symphony, a work that was written while the composer was living in New York (the work premiered in the city in 1893) and has, over the years, been arguably over-programmed. Under the Spanish maestro’s intelligent conducting, however, the familiar work seemed to breathe anew with authentic emotional undercurrents that struck me as a sort of hopeful prayer for or a dream of the kind of societal exceptionalism that seems to be fast slipping from our grasp.