I said so long to my client Alan Gilbert on Wednesday as he prepared to head out of town to Vail, Colorado with the New York Philharmonic (I won’t see him again now until early September, when he starts his second season as music director). He had come back to town for a single concert with the orchestra that was part of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival.

The program featured six pieces by Edgard Varèse and was the second part of a two-day presentation of the pioneering composer’s complete works. I think the concert will go down as another milestone in Alan’s tenure with the Philharmonic. Coming so soon after their triumph with Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, the concert created a sense of heightened momentum for Alan and the Phil that could be sampled by searching Twitter after the concert for effusive commentary by audience members and critics alike. Olivia Giovetti, who contributes to many publications including Time Out New York and Gramophone, tweeted, “Alan Gilbert just made me whoop.” She wasn’t the only one whooping!

A concert comprised entirely of music by Varèse might seem like an undue challenge for the ears, but the experience was, for me – and clearly much of the enthusiastic audience – entirely exhilarating. Visually, it was striking too, with an especially large and colorful percussion section (including siren) fanning across the back of the hall and a large lighting installment that hovered above the expanded stage like an alien spaceship. When called for – which was often – the dozen percussionists made a bloody but carefully orchestrated racket that somewhat defined the evening. They got the concert off the ground on their own, in fact, with a scintillating performance of Ionisation.

The sparse Octandre – for eight instruments, naturally (woodwinds, horns and single double bass) came next, followed by the enormously fun and parodistic Tuning Up, completed by Varèse’s disciple, composer Chou Wen-chung.   As he did for most of the night, principal oboist Liang Wang threw himself into Varèse’s writing with especially animated aplomb in the latter (and, as he told me afterwards, on a new oboe to boot).  The first half ended with the substantial and powerfully evocative Arcana, which Varèse considered his most representative work. 

Forced to choose one word to describe Nocturnal, which opened the second half, I’d select strange. Once again, Varèse was helped with this work by Chou Wen-chung, who completed the score. Anu Komsi, a Finnish soprano, sang the obscure text – a mix of words and phrases from Anais Nin’s House of Incest and nonsense syllables by Varèse – with expert control and, when needed, otherworldly beauty. 

The concert ended with Varèse’s most famous work, Amériques, and the Philharmonic’s utterly commanding performance of this beast of a score was one for the history books. The stage was packed – Amériques calls for 125 performers – and the climaxes were huge, and you couldn’t help but revel in the sheer virtuosity and power of the Philharmonic at full throttle. Those tempted to find an aural depiction – with oodles of wailing siren – of a bustling city were dissuaded from that idea by reading James Keller’s excellent program notes. He let Varèse speak on this one, quoting the composer who observed, “This composition is the interpretation of a state of the soul, a piece of absolute music, completely unrelated to the noises of modern life.” That might be true, but for anyone who has lived his or her life entirely in New York City, the work nonetheless sounded very much close to home.

Alan was fairly exhausted, but clearly pleased with the result, when I saw him backstage afterwards (turns out he was battling a cold on top of an evening’s length of extremely complicated scores). I overheard Chou Wen-chung tell him that Varèse would have been proud of what he had heard. Searching for an appropriate metaphor, I told Alan that he looked as though he has just taken a long ride on a wild rhinoceros. Compared to the challenges of conducting an all- Varèse program on less than an ideal number of rehearsals, a ride on a rhino might actually be a less daunting experience!