New York Classical Review

The New York Philharmonic is back from Europe, but without Gustavo Dudamel for the first post-tour subscription program. 

On the podium in David Geffen Hall Thursday night was conductor Rafael Payare, music director of both the San Diego Symphony and Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal leading music of Liszt and Bruckner.

The evening was about the rewards of superior musicianship, for both the audience and, yes, the musicians. The program began with Jean-Yves Thibaudet joining the orchestra and Payare in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and finished with Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.

Thibaudet is not the first name one thinks of when it comes to Liszt. His charm, savoir-faire, and even touch of irreverence aren’t what one expects to hear in the romantic, egocentric world of Liszt. But there is plenty of outward-looking wit in the great 19th-century virtuoso-composer’s music, and Thibaudet was the artist to set some of that free.

The pianist took a relatively dry approach (as did Payare with the orchestra, a consistent theme for the night). This wasn’t cold or clinical, more warm and grainy with a stimulating diffidence toward the most bombastic passages in the score. The opening was gentle, almost pastoral, and while Thibaudet put plenty of force behind the crashing chords of the Adagio sostenuto, there was a crispness to his touch and a sharpness to his accents that left small spaces between.

There was the feeling that rather than being inside the music and trying to channel the spirit of Lizst, as so many pianists do, Thibaudet was outside, examining things with pleasure and a slight insouciance. The remarkable ease in his technique were about enjoying the spinning single-note runs for how they went up and down, not how they ended up on pounding bass notes, the chordal fanfares for their harmonic transitions rather than for their self-proclaiming announcements.

Rhythms had a nice horizontal flow from both pianist and orchestra, and there was no lingering to milk ostentatious emotionality out of things like the Allegro moderato. So much of this music has been borrowed for cartoons that it can sound like self-parody. But this performance bought out the fine, subtle compositional details, the elegance and charm that are substantial, though often veiled, in Liszt.

After the performance, as Thibaudet was returning to the stage for applause he was joined by Philharmonic president Matias Tarnopolsky in his capacity as a member of the Avery Fisher Artist Program’s Executive Committee, to announce Thibaudet was the recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize (previous awardees have included Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Jeremy Denk, Anthony McGill, and Claire Chase).

After intermission Tarnopolsky returned to the stage to dedicate the performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 to Herbert Blomstedt, the great Swedish conductor who passed away Wednesday at age 99. The program was perfect, for Blomstedt’s mastery with Bruckner and the symphonic music of the romantic era, and the Philharmonic fulfilled the honor with an excellent performance.

Like Thibaudet with Liszt, the Philharmonic doesn’t have the typical Brucknerian sound—it’s a more agile, tougher, leaner sound than the lush, thick organ tones usually associated with the composer’s symphonies. But organs come in all sorts of models, with series of stops and pipes and reeds that differ from place to place. This organ had cutting brass, soft winds, and a un-sanded wood grain to the strings.

This Ninth began with a nice, hushed tension, and what followed was a clear, smart, idiomatic view from Payare. With Bruckner, that means an eye on the large-scale form. The conductor shaped it with superb, smooth gradations of dynamics and tempos. These were satisfying in the moment, and also in the subliminal effect of taking the series of climaxes in each movement and terracing them, so that each was slightly bigger and louder than the last. This is the essential and most powerful way with Bruckner.

Interventions were few, discrete, and well-judged. In the first movements final recapitulation before the coda, he pushed the tempo with thrilling aggression, then pulled back to set up a dramatic contrast. This reinforced what had been a strong, narrative feeling in the performance. The scherzo was wonderfully fast, and the trio section not only accelerated but had greater color and lightness. The shape of the Adagio movement was fantastic, every moment seeming to resonate while still flowing into the next.

The sole drawback in the performance, aside from a gnarly woodwind passage in the finale, had do with volume. Bruckner should be felt, not just heard, and at full volume the orchestra’s sound pushed at the listener like a breeze, but didn’t make it into the body. The orchestra can now do that in this revamped hall, as it has with Mahler. But even with the speed in the scherzo there wasn’t a full wildness in the sound at the big climaxes, which one longed for. 

Still, at the crushing thirteenth chord in the finale, one felt a scintillating shaking. With Payare and the strings crafting translucent-block-like figures in the final pages, this performance came to a perfect close.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday. nyphil.org