Alice Tully: Glenn Dicterow's Farewell Recital

Although Glenn Dicterow will continue as concertmaster of the NY Philharmonic until the end of the season, yesterday afternoon's recital at Alice Tully, a production of both  the Philharmonic and Juilliard (where it is part of the Saidenberg Faculty Recital series), marked his formal farewell to New York.  It was an occasion for nostalgia for those who have attended Philharmonic concerts over the years.  Mr. Dicterow was already installed in his position as concertmaster when I first began attending performances at Lincoln Center in 1986.  He was appointed to that position by Zubin Mehta in 1980 and has held it ever since.  In the process, he has become one of classical music's most familiar face to audiences here in the city.  Mr. Dicterow, however, also has strong ties to Los Angeles, where his father was principal second violin in the LA Philharmonic for a number of years, and will shortly be relocating to the West Coast.

The program opened with excerpts from the Much Ado About Nothing Suite (1918) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.  Remembered today primarily for the great number of Hollywood film scores he wrote (and for two of which he won the Academy Award), the composer was already at age eleven a child prodigy in Vienna where his music was praised by both Mahler and Strauss.  It was only after the Anschluss in 1938 that Korngold's residence in the United States became permanent.  Long before that, at age twenty, the youthful composer was commissioned by the Vienna Burgtheater to write incidental music to the Shakespearean comedy from which the instant suite for violin and piano was adapted.  As accompaniment to dramatic action, the music clearly foreshadowed that to which Korngold would devote himself during his Hollywood sojourn.

The next work was the Violin Sonata (1964) by John Corigliano.  What made the piece a particularly apt selection for this recital was the fact that the composer had written it for his father, himself concertmaster at the NY Philharmonic for over twenty years.  Unfortunately, the elder Corigliano did not care for the work and, according to one source, "discouraged his son's efforts at composition at every turn: 'Performers don't want to bother with your work and audiences don't want to hear it. So what are you doing it for?'"

On both the Korngold and the Corigliano, Mr. Dicterow was ably accompanied by pianist Gerald Robbins.

The program concluded with an old favorite, the "American" String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96 (1893) by Antonin Dvorak whose Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor I had just heard on Saturday as part of Juilliard's ChamberFest series.  The ad hoc chamber ensemble at Mr. Dicterow's recital was the appropriately named Antonin String Quartet.  Aside from Mr. Dicterow on first violin, the other members of the quartet were Lisa Kim (violin), Karen Dreyfus (viola) and Eileen Moon (cello).

At the recital's end, Mr. Dicterow and the other quartet members were repeatedly called back onstage by the audience's enthusiastic applause.