Bruckner emerges best in mixed German program by Young, Philharmonic
On paper, this week’s New York Philharmonic program looks like a smoothly integrated survey of 19th century German romanticism: Schoenberg, Schumann, and Bruckner. On top of that, guest conductor Simone Young is one of the great contemporary Bruckner leaders. Cellist Steven Isserlis is on hand to play the Schumann Cello Concerto, everything seems set.
That’s not how things worked out at Thursday’s opening concert, with the first half turning out to be less than the sum of its parts. But balance was restored in the second.
The opener was Schoenberg’s 1895 Notturno for string orchestra. An early miniature, it’s as sweet and sentimental as one imagines a young man might be at the end of the romantic era. It’s also more than a little clichéd and insubstantial, though played nicely by the orchestra. Everyone has to start somewhere, but it’s impossible to imagine this music would be played if the composer wasn’t important.
Schumann was important too, and the one movement Cello Concerto is a superb work. Lyrical, almost conversational, and with a strong dramatic through-line, it calls for as much story telling as it does virtuosity. That made it an interesting choice for Isserlis. Schumann is earthy, direct, plain—spoken at his core, while the cellist is a stylist who often veers widely across the line into mannerism. And so the concerto turned out to be a collision of two musical minds.
Isserlis had a fine, singing tone, with a touch of throatiness. His sound and technical playing were good, the problem was how he tackled the music—as an opportunity to explore how to caress the phrases rather than follow where it was going.
There was a paradoxical, and unsatisfying, quality of how the cellist played with a sense of personal gravity, looking for profundity in each run of notes and worrying at them in search of some secret messages, while the music kept pulling the actual meaning into the future. That came through the energetic and alert orchestral playing, but this was two parallel tracks in time that never met.
After intermission it was Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6. This isn’t played nearly as often as the composer’s other symphonies, and it’s never developed the reputation of the warm, Fourth, the grand Fifth and Seventh, the mysterious and foreboding Eighth and Ninth. And it is an outlier from those, but it’s also an excellent work and arguably Bruckner’s best writing,
Symphony No. 6 is more conventional than his other mature works, with an elegant structure, sections transitioning easily into others rather his usual blunt, block-like juxtapositions. And the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material are superb, from the opening dotted-rhythm fanfare to the skillful derivations of the opening music that run through each movement.
What makes Young so good in this music is the basics; tempo, dynamics, the proportions and transitions between each. All were excellent, dynamics were beautifully terraced so that all the elements of harmony and melodic and rhythmic phases came together with entrancing, powerful drama.
She never does too much and always has the right touch for the crucial feature of Bruckner, which is how the music unfolds and rolls out unlike anything else of its time. The danger is that there might not be sufficient strength to keep it all going, and the energy in the Trio just about hit a brick wall, but this was a terrific performance, better than one would have expected on paper.
This program repeats 7:30 p.m. Saturday. nyphil.org
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