Gustavo Dudamel started his reign on the New York Philharmonic on Friday with an ending.
Greeted with a roar from the viewers as he appeared with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall for the primary time since being named its subsequent music director, this famous person maestro performed Mahler’s ninth and closing accomplished symphony, one of many repertory’s nice evocations of farewell. Few works survey the span of a life — its highs and lows — extra totally and unsparingly, from the pastoral to the hysterical, from raucous existence to pianississimo dying.
The program was deliberate lengthy earlier than Dudamel’s appointment, nevertheless it turned out to be ideally suited for this second. Nearly an hour and a half lengthy, Mahler’s Ninth fills a live performance by itself. No overture; no soloist; no intermission.
On Friday it supplied an extended, targeted communion between a conductor and the gamers he’ll be main within the years to return. (Dudamel’s predecessor, Jaap van Zweden, finishes subsequent season and, due to classical music’s ludicrously gradual planning cycles, Dudamel, at the moment on the Los Angeles Philharmonic, gained’t formally begin his five-year contract till 2026.)
The Ninth was ideally suited for the second, too, as a result of this orchestra has a selected declare on Mahler, who briefly however indelibly served as its chief conductor across the time he was ending the symphony, simply earlier than his dying in 1911. While hardly a rarity, the Ninth is a bit that the Philharmonic has principally entrusted to its music administrators — together with Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, two of the twentieth century’s most influential Mahlerians.
With the weight of this history palpable, Dudamel achieved on this sprawling, advanced and bracing rating a type of casualness. He gave a way of this as simply one other piece.
This Ninth wasn’t a hothouse flower or a non secular ceremony. Leading with simple circulate and, particularly within the nice Adagio fourth motion, an inclination towards briskness, Dudamel had no real interest in the self-seriousness that may simply bend this symphony towards exaggerated solemnity. The purpose appeared to be shiny freshness greater than autumnal glow.
Conducting and not using a rating in entrance of him or a podium railing behind — there are, he appeared to be saying, no obstacles between me, the gamers and the viewers — Dudamel persuasively and naturally guided the rating’s many slight, vital shifts of tempo. The deceleration to the tip of the primary motion was suave, and the sophisticated transitions on the shut of the third have been lucid. The music by no means felt bullied, manipulated or artificially inflated.
At the beginning of the finale, the strings that interrupt a funeral dirge within the bassoon weren’t a slap within the face, however a swift tidal inundation. Those strings had earlier performed with mossy darkness within the first motion’s passionately unusual “Leidenschaftlich” passage.
Throughout the symphony, the trumpets had the precise coppery chew. The principal harp, Nancy Allen, introduced the easy, barely unearthly resonance of temple bells to her music. Ryan Roberts, on English horn, performed together with his regular flawless poetry in small but significant solos, particularly close to the tip. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, supplied each tenderness and tanginess.
And but lacking from the night was a sure diploma of character and depth.
If the start of the primary motion was clear and easy, it additionally lacked thriller and poignancy — an institution of temper past mere accuracy. The murky, brooding music later in that motion, a nod to Wagner’s depiction of the magical, shapeshifting Tarnhelm in his “Ring,” handed with out phosphorescent eeriness.
While there was understandably a way of celebration within the sold-out corridor on Friday, which bled into the efficiency, it’s not clear that love-fest is the precise temper for a lot of Mahler’s Ninth. In the second motion, bouncing up and down on the knees and making smiling cues with a flared left hand, Dudamel led a ländler dance that was extra sweetly rustic than ominously tough. And there was a breezy, circuslike really feel to the waltz it transforms into, quite than something sinister. This was not a rendition of the Mahler who prefigured Shostakovich.
Some restraint in that second motion — even some sunniness — would possibly make sense in order to depart someplace to go within the unquestionably extra explosive third. But on Friday, that Rondo-Burleske third motion wasn’t actually intense, both.
While the primary measures have been sumptuously grand, there was no sense of grotesquerie, self-mockery or greater than slight pepperiness in what adopted, so the sudden slowing into the consoling, contrasting theme — like a roof opening to disclose the total expanse of the starry night time sky — didn’t have the required influence. Dudamel hadn’t introduced us to a spot from which we would have liked to be consoled.
This wasn’t significantly light-textured enjoying, however the feeling was however nearly ethereal, with a reticence within the decrease strings. Eighty minutes appeared to cross shortly — maybe an excessive amount of so.
With the orchestra’s principal horn place at the moment vacant, Stefan Dohr, who fills that function for the Berlin Philharmonic, was a visitor, to uneven impact. In his essential half right here, Dohr was regular, however the mellow solidity of his tone, shading into leadenness, didn’t appear fairly in the identical sound world as his colleagues. The passing round of solos by the winds within the fourth motion supplied a sense of humanity however, like this efficiency as an entire, felt a bit stranded: neither elegant nor uncooked.
The Philharmonic nonetheless tends to gesture towards super-soft enjoying quite than actually reaching it, not to mention relishing it. And with an edgy thinness to the orchestra’s sound at full cry, quite than rounded, blended heat, I felt a revival of my considerations from the autumn opening of the renovated Geffen Hall concerning the house’s clear however stark acoustics.
Under Dudamel’s baton, the symphony’s closing minutes, because the strings progressively dim to nothingness, have been as wise as I’ve ever heard them. This was a pleasantly even-keeled lullaby quite than a radical or wrenching depiction of life draining away. The enjoying was poised, nevertheless it left a methods to go in profundity.
It was an ending. But for this conductor and this orchestra, it felt like a spot to begin.
New York Philharmonic
This program continues by Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com