As we were getting ready to deplane in Portland, people were whipping out their various smart devices, and the news came quickly: the New York Times review was an unabashed rave. Here it is, written by Allan Kozinn, in its entirety:
It is hard to believe that the Oregon Symphony had never performed in Carnegie Hall until Thursday evening, when it played a vivid, often wrenching program, “Music for a Time of War,” as part of the Spring for Music festival. The orchestra was formed in 1896, and its international reputation has grown since 1987, when it began recording big, opulent works and sonic spectacular CDs for the Delos label. Many of these discs, conducted by James DePreist, the orchestra’s music director at the time (and now emeritus), remain in print and show the ensemble to be a highly polished precision instrument. Since 2003 it has been directed by Carlos Kalmar, a Uruguayan conductor who has maintained it admirably.
In his introductory comments Mr. Kalmar acknowledged that his opener, Ives’s “Unanswered Question” (1906), had no real connection to wartime. Its concerns are existential, but Mr. Kalmar proposed that for the evening, Ives’s question could be “Why do we go to war?” He justified that leap with a thoughtful performance in which the pianissimo strings were so exquisitely hushed that for a moment you could hear a pin drop. Pretty soon you could also hear coughing, enough of it to shatter, repeatedly, the intensity Mr. Kalmar created with his careful pacing and the striking balance of the strings, the plaintive offstage trumpet and the dissonant, blaring wind choirs.
The three works on the first half of the program were played without pause (or applause), and the Ives proved an ideal prelude to “The Wound-Dresser,” John Adams’s 1989 setting of verses from a Civil War poem by Walt Whitman. Mr. Adams’s string textures mirror Ives’s, and a solo trumpet sings briefly. But perhaps because he is responding to the stark descriptions of maimed soldiers in Whitman’s text, Mr. Adams writes with more sentiment and less mystery than Ives, and he channels much of his music’s power into a wide-ranging vocal line, which the baritone Sanford Sylvan sang with his characteristic acuity.
Mr. Kalmar closed the first half with Britten’s “Sinfonia da Requiem,” a 1940 work commissioned by the government of Japan to celebrate the 2,600th anniversary of its empire. This was a dicey connection for Britten, an avowed pacifist: Japan was not yet at war with the United States but had invaded China in 1937. He may have sabotaged it by taking its movement names from the Roman Catholic liturgy, something the Japanese regarded as inappropriate to the occasion, apparently the reason they rejected it.
That history aside, the war in Europe distressed Britten, and this dark, driven symphonic requiem is an inventive early response. (It would be eclipsed, 22 years later, by his “War Requiem.”) Mr. Kalmar led his players in a taut, passionate account, with superb woodwind and brass playing and pointed percussion in the Dies Irae and a haunting string tone in the closing Requiem Aeternam.
Those qualities also contributed to a gripping performance of the Vaughan Williams Fourth Symphony. Composed on the eve of World War II, it is often taken as the composer’s comment on the tensions of the time, though he denied that. Whatever inspired it, the symphony is an angry, sharp-edged work — Mr. Kalmar, in his opening comments, described it as rude — and the orchestra played it with a furious, incendiary energy that made it the perfect ending for this pained, thought-provoking program.