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The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen tends to get seen for his formidable, even outlandish initiatives.
Perfume cannons puffing out scent alongside the music. A uncommon efficiency of one of many piano’s most gargantuan concertos. Contemporary opera within the live performance corridor. A roboticist being included amongst his creative collaborators. Ample helpings of his personal works. (Salonen is the uncommon maestro who can be a profitable composer.)
But as soon as all of the fragrance has dissipated, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Salonen, who led the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, is, at core, merely a wonderful conductor.
The Philharmonic program was uncommon for him in that it was so, nicely, uncreative. No premieres, no stagings, no intriguing juxtapositions. Just two traditional items — Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” — that, within the type of old style orchestra programming, appeared to have been thrown collectively arbitrarily. And but it was a terrific live performance, overseen by Salonen together with his attribute fiery readability.
Fiery readability is an efficient means of describing his most up-to-date profession transfer, too. Classical music is, outwardly at the least, meticulously well mannered. Few musicians go away positions amid publicly verbalized anger.
But in March, when Salonen introduced he wouldn’t renew his contract because the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, he instructed the reality — or at the least his reality. He had made his determination, he mentioned, “as a result of I don’t share the identical targets for the way forward for the establishment because the Board of Governors does.”
By the trade’s requirements, this was an expletive-ridden rant. It shortly grew to become clear that the issue was cash. The San Francisco Symphony has hobbled out of the pandemic much more deficit-laden than it was earlier than; its costly guarantees to Salonen — like that crew of creative collaborators, roboticist and all — have been going to must be curtailed.
The humorous factor about Wednesday’s live performance in New York is that it was precisely the sort of program that will be his future had Salonen chosen to stay in San Francisco: meat and potatoes repertoire, with out the flamboyant trimmings.
But even with out them, the Philharmonic performed superbly for him on Wednesday. The Shostakovich concerto was dotted with eerily mellow rips of brass close to the beginning, a hushed nightfall within the strings firstly of the second motion and characterful pierces from the winds within the last Allegro. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soloist, performed with a wealthy but centered tone, and he didn’t bask in extreme emotion. This resulted in a efficiency that was modest, straight-faced and basically serene — but in addition somewhat cool, somewhat environment friendly. The piece appeared to sail by briskly.
It was exhausting to recollect the concerto in any respect after the monster that’s Berlioz’s “Symphonie.” Last 12 months, I wrote that the Philharmonic’s rendition of this rating beneath Herbert Blomstedt was “leisurely, mellow, totally pastoral.” That may hardly have been farther from Salonen’s neurotically unsettled, icy-hot take, which grabbed each alternative to emphasise off-kilter rhythms and changeable textures.
The opening “Reveries, Passions” part had a dewy freshness to the sound that might shift, in a second, to intense fullness, after which again once more. Salonen couldn’t preserve the lengthy central “Scene within the Fields” part from feeling prefer it lingers. But it had quietly been constructing rigidity, with an undercurrent of hysteria — an anticipation of the trembling violas somewhat in a while — even in Ryan Roberts’s quiet, plangent English horn shepherd calls.
Salonen embraced the sudden swerves and floodlit brashness of the “March to the Scaffold,” which was, as it’s too hardly ever, genuinely scary. And the finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” was raucous however by no means messy — a ferocious, improbable party.
New York Philharmonic
This program continues by Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
