American Symphony Orchestra Conjures Romantic Fire at Carnegie Hall
Some evenings in a concertgoer’s life arrive not quietly, but with the heart-pounding certainty of fate fulfilled. The air at Carnegie Hall seemed almost to vibrate with anticipation, as if the music — yearning, insistent, long denied — had waited lifetimes for precisely this moment. Thursday evening at the Isaac Stern Auditorium / Ronald O. Perelman Stage was precisely such a night. The American Symphony Orchestra, under the sovereign direction of Maestro Leon Botstein, presented Weber & Berlioz: Der Freischütz Reimagined — drawing on Berlioz’s 1841 Paris version, Le Freyschutz — and ignited a spark that lingered long after the final note dissolved into the dark. Great music, when silenced, simmers. This was its release — Weber and Berlioz: Der Freischütz Reimagined.
The Right Kind of Tension
The evening was not without interpretive challenges. Blending Weber’s original German materials with Berlioz’s French recitative framework demands careful navigation — between periods, languages, dramatic styles, and the peculiar tension of performing a fully staged opera in a concert hall stripped of sets, lighting, and costume. At times, Berlioz’s recitative framework demanded even greater rhythmic clarity from singers and orchestra alike. But all that built the right kind of tension. Not errors but choices. And they paid off.
Here is the truth of the evening: when intellectual conviction, rigorous preparation, and raw artistry converge, centuries dissolve. The music gathers you up, thunderstruck, as if the fate being sung on stage might crash through the auditorium doors and into your own life. The Isaac Stern Auditorium held its collective breath. No one dared exhale.
L-R Foreground: Conductor Leon Botstein, Soprano Nicole Chevalier, Soprano Cadie Bryan, and Tenor Freddie Ballentine with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Bard Festival Chorale in Weber & Berlioz: Der Freischütz on stage at Carnegie Hall. Photo by Matt Dine.
Botstein Before the Curtain: Scholarship With a Pulse
Before a single note sounded, Maestro Botstein took the platform for his customary pre-concert lecture. He spoke with the ease of someone who has not merely studied this music but lived inside it for decades. He guided the audience through Weber’s masterwork and Berlioz’s 1841 French adaptation with remarkable specificity and infectious enthusiasm: the opera’s Singspiel roots, the scandal of Castil-Blaze’s bowdlerized Robin des Bois, the profound admiration Weber’s orchestration ignited in the young Berlioz. Anecdotes, compositional insights, and historical context flowed freely — each one a lantern illuminating a corner of this extraordinary, too-rarely-heard music.
This is a conductor who teaches before he conducts. Not every maestro can do both. Botstein’s program notes — comprehensive, elegantly written, generously detailed — further enriched the evening, offering biographical portraits of the composers, contextual analysis of the score, and illuminating essays by both Botstein himself and musicologist Dr. Samuel T. Nemeth of Ohio Wesleyan University. These notes did more than recount facts; they anticipated the questions an attentive listener might ask, providing vivid context without slipping into academic pedantry. By the time the performance began, the audience was not merely prepared. They were hungry.
The Man Who Was Born Thirty Years Too Soon
Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) was — as one distinguished music historian once observed — an authentic genius whose greatest tragedy was arriving in the world roughly thirty years ahead of his time. He was a polymath of the Romantic cast, a lithographer, guitarist, singer, unfinished novelist, and formidable critic who produced, from 1809 to 1818, a torrent of book reviews, poems, and journalism — including music criticism of uncompromising stringency and wit. He most bravely ventured derogatory words about Beethoven. He permanently ruined his voice in 1806 by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid. A detail almost too operatic to be true. Yet there it is.
Der Freischütz premiered in Berlin on June 18, 1821, and swiftly became one of the most consequential evenings in Western music. The twelve-year-old Felix Mendelssohn was shaken to his core. Schubert adored it. Even the skeptical Beethoven, who had nursed a complicated rivalry with Weber, grudgingly yielded to its power. And Richard Wagner — who would transform the lyric stage with his vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk — freely and publicly acknowledged that Der Freischütz led directly to The Flying Dutchman, Lohengrin, and Tannhäuser. Thursday’s concert brought this founding document of German Romantic opera to New York with reverence, intelligence, and irresistible energy. It was long overdue.
Bass Baritone Alfred Walker with Conductor Leon Botstein, the American Symphony Orchestra, and the Bard Festival Chorale in "Weber & Berlioz: Der Freischütz Reimagined" on stage at Carnegie Hall. Photo by Matt Dine
Berlioz Steps In: The Art of Faithful Reinvention
Hector Berlioz’s 1841 French adaptation of Der Freischütz — presented at the Paris Opéra as Le Freyschutz — is itself a story of passionate artistic stewardship. When the Opéra’s director Léon Pillet asked Berlioz to supply recitatives replacing the opera’s spoken dialogue (forbidden on that august stage), the composer hesitated. Adding another composer’s music to Weber’s score felt, to him, like desecration. But rather than risk the work landing in less reverent hands, Berlioz accepted, insisting on preserving the work’s integrity and resisting the cuts that had marred earlier adaptations. He additionally orchestrated Weber’s solo piano work Aufforderung zum Tanz as the required ballet interlude, renaming it Invitation à la valse — a piece that subsequently entered the standard orchestral repertoire worldwide. The result received more than sixty performances in its initial run at the Paris Opéra. Sixty performances. In 1841. That’s not a revival — that’s a triumph. Thankfully, it was this version that the ASO brought to Carnegie Hall on Thursday.
Carnegie Hall: Where Acoustics Become Architecture
You also cannot discuss the ASO’s evening without a loving word for the room itself. Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium / Ronald O. Perelman Stage is among the world’s supreme acoustic environments — a hall that seems to lean in and listen alongside its audience. The ASO’s characteristically rich, full-bodied orchestral sound bloomed magnificently in the Stern’s generous resonance. The five French horns announced themselves with a majesty recalling the very horn calls Weber devised to conjure the supernatural into the everyday world. Woodwinds navigated their extreme registers with effortless grace. One unforgettable moment came in the Wolf’s Glen scene, when an eerie hush swept the room as the violins began their icy tremolo and the clarinets answered with spectral softness that seemed to drift from the shadows — an effect precisely as Berlioz described it in his Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration. Every textural layer achieved both transparency and sumptuousness. A balance that only the finest halls and the finest orchestras can conjure together.
Holding the Arc of a Three-act Narrative While Attending to the Granular Demands of Phrasing, Dynamics, and Balance
Central to all of this was the commanding presence on the podium of Maestro Botstein himself. Imagine what it actually demands to conduct a full-scale opera in concert form — without the scaffold of scenery, lighting cues, or a director calling the dramatic shots. The conductor becomes everything: narrator, dramatist, timekeeper, and emotional compass, simultaneously. He must hold the arc of a three-act narrative in his mind while attending to the granular demands of phrasing, dynamics, and ensemble balance; coax a single pianissimo from the strings while cueing a tenor’s entry; follow a soprano through the uncharted topography of a long-breathed aria; keep the entire dramatic organism alive and breathing as one. Botstein did all of this with the authority of a seasoned operatic maestro. His tempi breathed naturally. His transitions between orchestral tumult and intimate chamber-like passages were handled with exquisite care. His attentiveness to the many moods of the score — the supernatural menace of the Wolf’s Glen, the tender pastoral warmth of Agathe’s arias, the boisterous energy of the hunting choruses — brought each successive tableau into vivid, specific relief. Throughout, his baton communicated everything needed and nothing superfluous. Simply: this is what great conducting sounds like when great music is at stake.
View from backstage as Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra and the Bard Festival Chorale in "Weber & Berlioz: Der Freischütz Revisited" at Carnegie Hall. Photo by Matt Dine
A Gallery of Distinction: The Soloists
The evening’s cast brought a remarkable assembly of vocal talent to the stage, confronting one of the most fascinating challenges in musical performance. How do you conjure the supernatural atmosphere of an early 19th-century Romantic opera — its dark forests, its demonic huntsman, its magic bullets, its moonlit wedding morning — without the aid of scenery, lighting, costumes, or theatrical staging? In a full operatic production, a director’s vision, a lighting designer’s palette, and a set decorator’s craft all share the storytelling burden. On Thursday evening, that burden rested entirely on the music, on Botstein’s orchestral direction, and above all on the voices and dramatic conviction of the soloists. That each artist not only rose to the occasion but seized it — with spirited verve, technical assurance, and deeply felt characterization — is, therefore, all the more remarkable.
Nicole Chevalier brought a radiant, commanding presence to Agathe, the opera’s luminous heroine. Her soprano — praised by The Guardian UK as “extraordinarily powerful — as good an actor as she is a singer” — soared with crystalline authority through Agathe’s lyrical, longing arias, her tone bright and emotionally grounded at once. She was, without reservation, the evening’s most complete achievement as a singing actress. Chevalier’s international reputation — built at stages from the Salzburg Festival to the Komische Oper Berlin — was fully on display. Notably, this evening also marked her professional New York City debut. The city should take note.
As Max, tenor Freddie Ballentine delivered a portrayal of genuinely tortured heroism. His voice — honed across the Metropolitan Opera, the Dutch National Opera, and the world’s great stages — navigated Max’s psychological unraveling with both vocal splendor and dramatic conviction. Ballentine doesn’t give you self-pity — he gives you anguish with agency. The Wolf’s Glen conjuring scene was all the more chilling for the desperation he brought to every phrase.
Bass-baritone Alfred Walker was a riveting Gaspard, his dark, plush instrument perfectly calibrated to the role’s menacing, morally corroded soul. Walker’s Gaspard doesn’t signal villainy — he inhabits it. Decades of experience spanning the Metropolitan Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Glyndebourne, and Cincinnati are registered in every phrase. He returns to the Metropolitan Opera as Porgy in Porgy and Bess, and on Thursday, every ounce of that seasoned artistry was on full display.
Liebigbilder 1901, Serie 495. Der_Freischütz. Oper von Karl Maria v. Weber. Agathe: "Schieß nicht! Ich bin die Taube!" Public Domain via Wikipedia Commons
Soprano Cadie Bryan as Annette brought warmth, sparkle, and a light comic intelligence, providing welcome relief from the opera’s mounting supernatural tensions. Her bright, agile voice complemented Chevalier’s with striking aptness, and their scenes together crackled with genuine dramatic life. Bryan arrives here from a season that has already taken her across the Metropolitan Opera, Des Moines Metro Opera, and the Atlanta Opera — and her ease on a major concert stage showed.
Baritone Joo Won Kang brought princely authority to Prince Ottokar — a role that might easily be swallowed by the surrounding drama, but wasn’t. Bass Philip Cokorinos — a Metropolitan Opera veteran with over 400 performances to his credit — lent imposing, richly colored tone to Kouno (Kuno in the original German), the Head Gamekeeper. Baritone Adam Partridge infused the peasant Kilian with fresh-voiced vitality — a young artist whose name you will be hearing at the highest levels of the profession soon enough. Bass-baritone Jason Zacher gave L’Ermite’s redemptive closing pronouncements a warmth and moral weight that resonated long after the music ended. And Jonathan Guss made the eerie, often wordless presence of Samiel haunting and expressive — a performer who understood that in opera, what is withheld can unsettle as surely as what is sung.
What must also be acknowledged is the sheer physical and musical stamina that Weber’s score demands of its principal singers. These are not modest roles. The arias are long, emotionally complex, and vocally exposed, requiring not only technical command but the dramatic intelligence to sustain a character’s inner life across extended musical paragraphs — without a costume, a set, or a director’s blocking to lean upon. To navigate Agathe’s soaring cantilenas, Max’s tortured declamations, and Gaspard’s malevolent projections with consistent power, nuance, and expression — and to do so in the unforgiving acoustic of the Isaac Stern Auditorium, where every breath is audible and every tentative phrase exposed — demands singers of exceptional resilience. On Thursday, every principal met that challenge with aplomb. There were no concessions to fatigue, no hedged phrases, no diminished dramatic commitments. Together, they delivered a fully inhabited operatic experience. Which proved, definitively, that the greatest stagecraft of all is the human voice itself.
L-R Tenor Freddie Ballentine, Soprano Cadie Bryan, Soprano Nicole Chevalier, Conductor Leon Botstein, Baritone Adam Partridge, Bass Philip Cokorinos, and Jason Zacher, Bass Baritone with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Bard Festival Chorale in "Weber & Berlioz: Der Freischütz Revisited" on stage at Carnegie Hall. Photo by Matt Dine
The Bard Festival Chorale: The Sound of Many Made One
No account of Thursday’s triumph would be complete without honoring the Bard Festival Chorale, directed by the estimable James Bagwell. Formed in 2003 as the resident choir of the Bard Music Festival, the Chorale draws from the finest ensemble singers in the New York metropolitan area — and it showed. In the hunting choruses and the nightmarish conjuring scene of the Wolf’s Glen, Bagwell’s singers achieved a unified sound simultaneously massive and remarkably clean. Intonation and blend were secure; dynamics were finely graded; commitment to the drama was absolute. Bagwell’s long experience with ASO productions — he is also associate conductor of The Orchestra Now — was evident in the seamless integration of choral and orchestral forces. A chorus that earns every ovation? This one more than earns it. They seized it.
The ASO at 64: Stokowski’s Dream, Botstein’s Realization
Founded in 1962 by the legendary Leopold Stokowski with a mission to bring great music within the reach of everyone, the American Symphony Orchestra has, for over six decades, occupied a singular, irreplaceable role in New York’s cultural life. Since Leon Botstein assumed the music directorship in 1992, that founding mission has expanded and deepened: the ASO now programs thematic concerts that illuminate music through the lenses of history, literature, religion, and the visual arts, consistently offering masterworks that no other major American orchestra would dare schedule. The ASO doesn’t play it safe. That’s the point. That’s the mission.
In doing so, the ASO performs an act of extraordinary cultural stewardship — not merely entertaining audiences, but educating, challenging, and genuinely inspiring them. Thursday’s concert, with its faithful and luminous revival of Weber’s too-rarely-heard masterwork in Berlioz’s equally rare French adaptation, was a perfect crystallization of everything the ASO stands for. Stokowski founded this orchestra to democratize musical greatness. Botstein has spent thirty-three years ensuring that greatness is always surprising.
