NEW YORK— It’s auditions
season at the
New York Philharmonic — and not for a seat among its players.
With
Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, having announced in
September that he will depart in 2024, every guest conductor now takes the
podium with the search for his replacement looming.
اضافة اعلان
This game of Fantasy Baton is complicated by the fact that
the Philharmonic is wandering while David Geffen Hall is renovated, playing
sometimes unfamiliar repertory in unfamiliar (and perhaps uncongenial) spaces.
But the fall brought good reviews for
Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young,
Giancarlo Guerrero and
Dima Slobodeniouk.
No guest so far, though, has received a platform like
Susanna Mälkki got Thursday. Making her fourth appearance with the
Philharmonic, she is the only outsider to be granted one of the orchestra’s
four dates this year at Carnegie Hall, its home until Lincoln Center was built
in the 1960s and where it had not appeared since 2015. (Van Zweden leads the
other three Carnegie concerts, this spring.)
The chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra,
Mälkki presided over a program tailor-made for a Finnish conductor’s tryout
with an ensemble across the Atlantic: two beefy, brassy American works followed
after intermission by one of Finland’s most famous symphonic exports, Sibelius’
Fifth.
Adolphus Hailstork’s 1984 overture “An American Port of
Call” depicts Norfolk, Virginia, as a mixture of bustling activity and sweet
nocturnal relaxation. Mälkki brought out piquant touches, like some
characterful wails of clarinet, and the tidal undercurrent of the low strings
at certain moments even anticipated the grand “swan call” climax of the
Sibelius.
She patiently, persuasively built that symphony’s fitful
first movement, and the whole work had a feeling of straightforwardness,
lightness and modesty; neither tempos nor emotions were milked; the performance
was more lovely than intense. Ensemble sonorities in the winds and brasses were
clean, if not pristine or particularly atmospheric — although Judith LeClair,
the orchestra’s principal bassoon, brought gorgeously buttery foreboding to her
important solo.
A former section cellist before embarking on her conducting
career, Mälkki was unafraid of encouraging some aggression in the strings: a
few forceful accents in the first movement and, most arresting, a slapping
spiccato burr in the double basses during the stirring swan motif in the
finale. But the chords at the end, in some performances slashing and stark,
were here warm, resonant, full, even mellow.
John Adams’ Saxophone Concerto is almost the same half-hour
length as the symphony, but felt far longer Thursday. The distinguished
soloist, Branford Marsalis, made a tender sound in some lullabylike passages,
but often Adams’ virtuosically burbling fabric of alto-sax notes seemed to
vanish into the dense orchestral textures — sometimes inaudible, sometimes just
bland in color and bite. Occasionally rousing for some of this composer’s
trademark peppy rhythmic chugging, and a fun section riffing on “The Rite of
Spring,” the 2013 work as a whole felt muted and glum, with a tinkling celesta
nagging.
This was my first time hearing the piece live, so I can’t be
sure whether these balance and energy problems are common. But the St. Louis
Symphony Orchestra’s recording under David Robertson — with Timothy McAllister,
for whom the concerto was composed, as soloist — makes a far better, more
seductive and varied case for it than Thursday’s performance.
As for the Philharmonic’s future, Gustavo Dudamel — whom the
orchestra’s CEO,
Deborah Borda, recruited in her last job to lead the Los
Angeles Philharmonic — conducts two weeks of Schumann in March. He and others
appearing in the coming months, like Jakub Hrusa, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Tugan
Sokhiev and Long Yu, could all be considered music director contenders.
Mälkki deserves to be on that list, too. But perhaps the
best indication of the field will come soon, when the orchestra announces its
lineup for next season, its return to the renovated Geffen Hall. Game on.
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