NY Philharmonic: Robertson & Shaham

I attended the NY Philharmonic performance on Thursday night conducted by David Robertson, with Gil Shaham as soloist in the Barber Violin Concerto.  The concert began with Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, and concluded with Bartok's complete ballet, "The Wooden Prince."

Attending this concert reminded me why I prefer the Saturday night concerts.  I had a conflict the previous Saturday night and traded my tickets (a pair) for two Thursday nights - last and this one.  The program gets its first performance on Thursday nights most weeks, and by Saturday night they are on the second or third rendition.  Thursday nights can sometimes sound a bit tentative, not fully "played in," and I sensed that this time.  Robertson was taking slower than usual tempi in the Ravel, and the orchestra wasn't quite settled into these unfamiliar tempi.  The first movement, for example, a slow dance (Pavane) was so slow that I thought the winds were having trouble sustaining the line comfortably, and it sounded almost static. 

I had a similar sense in the Barber Concerto.  This piece is coming close to being a repertory standard, and it is without doubt one of the most gorgeous compositions of the mid-20th century.  But I thought the coordination between orchestra and violin soloist was a bit loose at times.  I am a big fan of Shaham -- his performance of the Bartok 2nd Concerto with Boulez and the Philharmonic many years ago was a transformative experience for me -- but I wasn't totally sold on how he was playing the Barber.  The music has lots of romanticism written into it, so I don't think it's necessary to bend tempi quite so much as he was doing.  I also thought on Thursday his tone was a bit thin at times for this luscious music in the first two movements.  The finale was fine, however, just as fiery as needed.

I confess to a blind spot (deaf spot?) with The Wooden Prince.  Try as I might with recordings over the years, I have never found this piece to be more than a sure cure for insomnia.  It didn't help that Robertson was taking things very slowly at this concert, and I found my attention frequently wandering.  Somebody had the bright idea to project over the stage a running commentary of what we would be seeing were this a staged ballet performance.  I found that a distraction -- an unavoidable one, since I was sitting in the second tier side where the screen was right in my line of vision -- which led me to close my eyes frequently to avoid it, which helped to conduce to the slumber encouraged by Bartok's music.  This is Bartok before he had absorbed the Slavic folk-music tropes into his compositional style, so it is a rather faceless late romantic wallow in big orchestra sound - sort of like Richard Strauss without the great melodic and rhythmic variety and inspiration.  He became a great composer -- one of the greatest, in my estimation, of the 20th century -- but you couldn't persuade me from this piece.  Maybe as the subscription performances went along things got better.  I certainly think slightly livelier tempi would have helped.

So, not my favorite time at the Philharmonic, but some of that is due to my idiosyncratic tastes.