New York Philharmonic/van Zweden review — Julia Wolfe’s unEarth skirts pastiche with a worthy message

The stage dims to a blue light, the double basses begin an ominous drone and a white-clad children’s chorus files onstage in silence. There’s no doubt that Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe’s unEarth is meant to be an extremely serious experience. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as part of a series exploring climate change, unEarth is Wolfe’s most directly political work yet.

Cast in three movements entitled “Flood”, “Forest” and “Fix It”, Wolfe draws upon a wide array of texts from the Book of Genesis and Emily Dickinson to quotes from members of the children’s chorus on what climate change means to them. A suspended circular screen projects the text superimposed on to images of nature both pristine and polluted. The concept may sound dreadfully self-righteous, but it ends up being a compelling, if imperfect, theatrical experience.

Much of this is down to Wolfe’s score, which while largely tonal uses an unusually wide range of orchestral colours. Most effective is the second movement, where creaking strings and conga drums create an intricate rhythmic web above which the chorus repeats the word “tree” in different languages. Elsewhere, Wolfe’s minimalist score sounds dangerously close to pastiche, with influences from Debussy, Britten and Adams interspersed between what resembles a documentary soundtrack.

Meandering onstage in angelic white, soprano Else Torp sounds ethereal as she sings fragments from Dickinson’s “Who robbed the woods”, though her overamplification ruins her balance with the orchestra and chorus. The Young People’s Chorus of New York City and The Crossing are eloquent in their contrapuntal choral passages, urgently building to a call to action in the final movement. unEarth is at its best when it combines all of these forces, highlighting the dichotomies between young and old, the individual and the collective in advocating for a cleaner planet.

Sibelius’s perennial Violin Concerto may not seem an obvious pairing, but the dark isolation of the composer’s Finnish landscapes proved an effective foil for the Wolfe. Conductor Jaap van Zweden drew transparent, layered sound from the orchestra, particularly the swelling lower brass. Van Zweden and violinist Frank Huang, the longtime concertmaster of the orchestra, made the case for the piece as an orchestral tone poem rather than the usual virtuoso showpiece, though Huang offered silvery tone and assured technique.

★★★☆☆

Programme to June 3, nyphil.org