Review: The Philadelphia Orchestra Revels, and Struggles, in Jazz

Much of 20th-century classical music owes a deep thanks to jazz. And while on paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night was organized for a festival at the hall, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, the subtext was American jazz.

All three of the composers on the program (Stravinsky, Weill and Gershwin) loved and, to one extent or another, made references to the style in their music. Although Stravinsky was based in Europe when he premiered “Petrushka” in 1911, he was already a U.S. citizen when he revised this piece in 1947, and had long experimented with incorporating jazz into some of his pieces — and jazz musicians loved him right back. Weill, who left Europe for the United States after the fall of the Weimar Republic, was also steeped in jazz. And Gershwin, of course, wouldn’t be Gershwin without it.

The Philadelphians opened with a magical performance of “Petrushka,” led off by a piquant solo from Patrick Williams, the associate principal flutist. The orchestra staked out rhythmic details with crystalline precision and saw each phrase through with patience and a rich sound. Stravinsky relays the spirit of Petrushka, the folkloric Russian trickster puppet, and the ballet’s tale of a deeply twisted puppet love triangle, with equal parts humor and darkness; the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the musicians captured the piece’s flickers of light and its swirls of despair.

Weill’s Symphony No. 2, from 1934, is an oddity: structurally and harmonically a mash-up of plush, Mahlerian harmonies, Weill’s acidic stage works, and jazz-inflected plain-spokenness. In its best moments, such as in the dreamy, lonely slow movement — with a trombone solo played gracefully by Nitzan Haroz — this music feels like being inside an Edward Hopper painting.

The giddiest part of the evening was a literally jazzed-up version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” featuring the jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and the members of his trio: the bassist Martin Jaffe and the drummer Jason Marsalis.

Roberts has made a specialty of reworking Gershwin; along with the “Rhapsody,” which he recorded nearly three decades ago, he has toured his version of the Concerto in F. In Tuesday’s account of the “Rhapsody,” the orchestra played its traditional score, but Roberts used the piano solos to introduce extended improvisations for himself, sometimes in flights of Romantic, Rachmaninoff-esque fancy, and occasionally nodding instead to the blues and stride piano. By the jazz standards of 2024, Roberts is conservative, and while he didn’t cast any new light on a cherished standard, his performance was still charming.