Review: A Guest Conductor Reveals the Philharmonic’s Potential

When Jaap van Zweden led his first concert as the New York Philharmonic’s music director, in September 2018, he ended the evening with Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Instead of an auspicious climax it was a red flag, a sign of many more performances like it to come: paradoxically rushed and ponderous; stridently martial; so obsessed with detail, there was little sense of a cohesive whole.

An orchestra’s sound is not fixed, though. Music directors are often away — as van Zweden has been since November, with no plans to return until mid-March — which leaves room for guest conductors to reveal fresh potential in an ensemble you thought you knew well.

As if to prove that point, the Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali — a contender for the Philharmonic podium when van Zweden departs next year, and the only guest to be given two weeks of concerts this season — ended Thursday’s program at David Geffen Hall with “The Rite of Spring.”

If van Zweden’s reading of this work amounted to a warning, Rouvali’s was a glimpse of the insights and thrills he might bring to a tenure in New York. He, too, teased out details — a dancing ostinato in the basses near the end, prominent from the moment it started, took on a relentless terror — but didn’t sacrifice momentum or primal energy. Once Judith LeClair’s opening bassoon solo unfurled with liberal rubato, his “Rite” remained organic, in its wildness more unpredictably frightening than van Zweden’s brash yet controlled account.

Rouvali’s performance was the kind that made you wish he would stick around a little longer, if only for the opportunity to hear what he has to say about other corners of the repertory. By that point, however, he had already covered so much ground, his visit to the Philharmonic was beginning to come off like a prolonged audition.

Last week, he led Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture (episodic where it should have steadily escalated); Magnus Lindberg’s new Piano Concerto No. 3 (lucid and well shepherded); and Beethoven’s Second Symphony (gracefully lithe and transparent). And Thursday’s program, in addition to the Stravinsky, opened with the New York premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s recent “Catamorphosis,” followed by Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, featuring Nemanja Radulovic in a staggering debut.

Thorvaldsdottir’s work opened the evening, but with a 20-minute running time it was more substantial and satisfying than a typical curtain-raiser. Her music often has the feel of transcriptions from nature; like Messiaen notating bird songs, she seems to translate the sounds of tectonic and cosmic forces for the concert hall. Similarly immense, “Catamorphosis” at first appears like more of the same before developing into one of her most intensely felt scores to date.

The environment she conjures here is one of entropy. Over a foundational pedal tone in the lower strings, textural fragments — brushed percussion, a piano played both inside the instrument and at the keyboard — come and go as if by chance. Occasionally, wisps of melody are emitted from the winds, too light to follow. In the violins, glissandos that slide the pitch slowly up and down are redolent of a distant siren.

It’s fitting, in a sense, that “Catamorphosis” premiered without a live audience in the darker pandemic days of early 2021, streamed by the Berlin Philharmonic on its Digital Concert Hall. This is the music of natural forces indifferent to human witnesses; yet in those violins and their sense of looming urgency, a doleful cry for help — from Thorvaldsdottir, from the earth itself — begins to emerge.

Percussive textures continue to pass through while the strings, rarely rising above a mezzo piano but made richer by divisi lines that add voices to each section, flare with the emotional tension and release of Barber’s Adagio for Strings — though, crucially, never for phrases long enough to tip into sentimentality. It is a requiem taking shape but held at bay.

Radulovic was similarly withholding in the Prokofiev concerto. After lifting his bow above the strings of his instrument repeatedly, like a tennis player bouncing the ball before a serve, he softly let out into the work’s opening solo, resisting its invitation for a vibrato-heavy, singing line and opting instead for something lighter and more objective, befitting the transparency of the score.

Modest at first, he was nevertheless an immediately commanding presence. Part of it was his pop star look, including platform boots and a mane of long, wavy hair with a topknot. But he was also charismatic in his adventurous rubato later in the Allegro moderato; in his simply lovely and smartly shaped melodies in the second movement; and in his folk freedom and crunchy chords in the Spanish-inflected finale. His encore — Paganini’s showy Caprice No. 24, made showier in an arrangement by Aleksandar Sedlar and Radulovic — was a dose of old-fashioned fun, with the kind of virtuosic, at times laugh-out-loud showmanship that has had audiences cheering for centuries.

Throughout the concerto, Rouvali was a willing accomplice, lending the score the clarity it requires with a whiff of daring. It’s the kind of playing you might expect from the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, where he is the principal conductor. There, his close relationship with the ensemble has often resulted in lively performances that change from night to night in a spirit of experimentation and curiosity.

Those aren’t qualities I usually associate with the New York Philharmonic. But I did on Thursday — and hopefully will more often in the future, whether Rouvali returns next as the orchestra’s music director or, at the very least, as a welcome guest.

New York Philharmonic

This program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.