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In an exciting live performance of Russian staples on Friday night time, the conductor Manfred Honeck unified the gamers of the New York Philharmonic utilizing one thing we don’t usually hear from the stage of David Geffen Hall: a definite viewpoint.
Guest conductors arrive every week by means of a revolving door to current concert events with the Philharmonic after only a few rehearsals with the gamers. Ideally, an ensemble’s music director — on this case, Jaap van Zweden — supplies continuity, however with repertoire that ranges throughout centuries in any given season, or certainly in any given program, the Philharmonic can typically seem faceless. Add the challenges of calibrating its sound to the acoustics of its new auditorium and you find yourself with some listless performances.
Enter Honeck, the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In a program that paired Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony with Rachmaninoff’s beloved Second Piano Concerto, Honeck effortlessly coaxed sweep and sweetness, breadth and refinement, from the gamers. The live performance had startling cohesion in its musical values.
A conductor recognized for his intense heat on the whole and his rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth particularly, Honeck introduced the consolation of certitude to works composed within the shadow of doubt. In his sketches, Tchaikovsky famous that his symphony incorporates “reproaches in opposition to xxx,” which some learn as struggles with rumors and nervousness about his sexuality. The Second Piano Concerto was the primary piece Rachmaninoff wrote after the fiasco of his First Symphony; he devoted it to the physician who handled his artistic block with hypnotherapy.
For an orchestra that typically solely goes by means of the motions, this program was animated by an expressive meticulousness. The Philharmonic’s strings shaded melodies to make them really sing through the use of a wide range of dynamics inside a single phrase. The woodwinds handed off phrases with snappy coordination. The brasses, which Honeck put to ominous use within the Tchaikovsky, snarled and shone, and the horns traced rainbow arcs over the stage within the Rachmaninoff.
Perhaps Honeck’s neatest trick was his means to conjure lightness and amplitude on the identical time. The strings’ opening melody within the Rachmaninoff had Romantic grandeur and beguiling translucence, blanketing however not muffling the piano’s arpeggios with gauzy tone. The waltz within the third motion of the Tchaikovsky was virtually airborne, its elegantly asymmetrical melody producing an unlikely aerodynamic high quality regardless of its sumptuousness.
The live performance opened with the New York premiere of Katherine Balch’s “musica pyralis,” an evocation of a night within the yard of the composer’s Connecticut house. The piece was a research in shifting atmospheres, wispy, mysterious and fleeting, with the firefly twinkle of the piano, the ribbit-ribbit of low brasses and the hole rustle of cellists rapping their fingers on the our bodies of their devices.
Honeck’s method of rallying the orchestra towards an enormous concept at occasions simplified what’s within the rating. The woodwinds’ falling sample within the first motion of the Tchaikovsky — a element that provides texture and complexity — got here throughout as a barely audible ornament.
Similarly, Beatrice Rana’s elegant dealing with of the solo piano within the Rachmaninoff didn’t all the time match Honeck’s high-Romantic conception. Rana anchored the opening with darkly rolling figures and robust downbeats, however over the course of the piece, she settled into feathery lightness and an virtually impish delicacy. Her sleek, understated method of rounding off phrases was by no means lower than beautiful, although operating triplets may very well be a bit prosaic.
The orchestra’s soloists, as common, had been dazzling. In the symphony’s gradual second motion, Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet, carved arabesques with gleaming definition, and Stefan Jon Bernhardsson’s horn solo was achingly dignified.
But Honeck might make a complete part sound soloistic in its unanimity. When the strings took the well-known melody of resigned heartache within the concerto’s Adagio sostenuto, their tone glistened and their phrasing pulsated as they dedicated to a single gesture, sincerely felt.
