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      N.Y.C. Arts Organizations Awarded $51.4 Million Dollars in Grants

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      The Department of Cultural Affairs is awarding $51.4 million in grants to more than 1,000 nonprofit arts and cultural groups that are seeking to rebound from the pandemic.As New York City’s arts and culture sector seeks to rebound from the economic devastation wrought by the pandemic, the Department of Cultural Affairs announced on Thursday that it would award $51.4 million in grants to more than 1,000 nonprofit arts organizations.The grants, for the 2022 fiscal year, represent the largest-ever allocation for what is known as the Cultural Development Fund. Some of the grants will broadly increase funding for organizations that need a financial shot in the arm; other grants will offer more targeted support of disability arts, language access, arts education and more.Officials also said that a chunk of the money — about $5.1 million — is being sent to more than 650 groups working in underserved communities that were hard hit by the pandemic.“This improved funding will encourage artists, creators and producers across the city to continue to express their insights and stories on their own terms,” Vicki Been, the deputy mayor for housing and economic development, said in a statement.A survey of the effects of the coronavirus commissioned by the Department of Cultural Affairs in the spring of 2020 found that overall, about one in 10 arts organizations thought they would not survive the pandemic. Smaller organizations in particular were some of the hardest hit, according to the survey.Some of the grants, of less than $10,000, have been awarded to small theater companies, choirs and museums. And to further help ensure that modestly sized groups and even individual artists receive a share of the funding, almost $3 million will be given to five local arts councils serving each borough. Those councils, in turn, will distribute the money to local constituents, city officials said.But large organizations will also benefit. Some of the city’s most recognizable arts institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the 92nd Street Y are among the organizations that will receive some of the largest grants, in excess of $100,000 each.The grants — $45.5 million in mayoral funds and $5.9 million in City Council member items — are part of what officials said was a roughly $230 million annual budget for the Department of Cultural Affairs.“Culture is essential to healthy, vibrant neighborhoods, and there is no recovery for New York City without our cultural community,” Gonzalo Casals, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, said.Sarah Bahr More

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      Review: An Ambitious Project Returns at the Philharmonic

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      Project 19, the orchestra’s series commissioning female composers, came back with a new work by Joan Tower.After a long delay, Joan Tower’s “1920/2019” was premiered on Friday by the New York Philharmonic at Alice Tully Hall. It was worth the wait to hear this 14-minute work by one of America’s most eminent composers — who, at 83, is as inventive as ever.The piece is part of Project 19, the orchestra’s initiative to commission 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which extended the vote to women. It began auspiciously in February 2020 with Nina C. Young’s “Tread softly” and, later that month, Tania León’s “Stride,” which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize this year.Ellen Reid also got her work in under the wire before the pandemic shut down the performing arts. But with the premiere of Tower’s hurtling, dark new piece, Project 19 has finally resumed. Her title juxtaposes 1920, when the amendment was ratified, with 2019 — “another significant year for women,” as Tower writes in a program note, “the height of the #MeToo movement, which raised the status of women to yet another level.”In her description Tower leaves the larger thematic resonances to listeners’ perceptions and focuses on the materials — steady repeated notes, chords, runs in scales and such — that drive the music. The piece begins with weighty blocks of orchestral chords heaving over kinetic rhythmic riffs. Rising runs and, soon, a persistent yet varying five-note motif keep spiraling forward. Imaginative writing for percussion and bustling rhythmic activity — long traits of Tower’s music — course through this restless, episodic score. On the surface the mood is ominous, even threatening. But the sheer intricacy lends a stirring fortitude to the music.During a long later section, the piece becomes like a little concerto for orchestra, featuring star turns for instruments in solo, duo, trio and small ensemble groups. Some observers have found Tower’s lucid music accessible almost to a fault. A better word to describe this engrossing, effective piece — and her style overall — is audible: All the multilayered, meter-fracturing workings of the score are laid out clearly. The Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden drew a glittering, moody performance from the orchestra.Though the program didn’t make thematic or musical connections between Tower’s piece and the longer works that followed — Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 and Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony — it was a pleasure to hear both those classic scores in such winning performances. Emanuel Ax was the animated and elegant soloist in the Mozart.The variety of his articulations and shadings was especially fine: sometimes crisp and sparkling, other times milky and subdued, as when the piano part shifts into wistful, minor-mode excursions during the sunny first movement. In the restrained, lyrical slow movement, Ax proved sensitive to Mozart’s evocations of his operatic aria style. The finale, a buoyant theme and variations, was splendidly stylish.Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony is suffused with the breadth, lyricism and wayward approach to harmony of his hero, Brahms. Yet Dvorak’s distinctive, rustic voice pervades the score. The Philharmonic’s performance captured the engaging yet elusive quality of the episodic first movement, and the dancing, bucolic third movement was especially vibrant. Van Zweden summoned fervor and opulent sound in the teeming finale without slipping into overdrive, as he sometimes does. And the players finally seem to be adapting to Tully, one of their temporary homes as David Geffen Hall is renovated.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: On Thanksgiving, Gratitude for a Dependable Violin

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      Joshua Bell, playing Beethoven with the New York Philharmonic, is always enjoyable, though never intense or unexpected.Thanksgiving is a time to feel gratitude for things we take for granted during the rest of the year. So it’s appropriate that the violinist Joshua Bell is appearing this week with the New York Philharmonic.Bell is one of classical music’s biggest, most salable stars, and he tours diligently. But he doesn’t take on new work with the enthusiasm of Renée Fleming, or unveil splashy unions of Bach and social justice like Yo-Yo Ma. Less noticed by the press than those two — and many others far less famous — Bell just plays, rarely veering these days from the absolute center of the standard repertory.But if he just plays, that playing is almost uncannily lovely. On Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall, he made not a single ugly sound in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. At 53, his face remains preternaturally youthful, and his tone is similarly unlined. If the solo part in this work is often an exuberant unspooling of golden wire, Bell’s wire was always gleaming and smooth, never thin or cutting.When he wasn’t playing, he swayed a bit to the orchestral accompaniment, and sometimes turned from the audience entirely to take in the mass of musicians. (While Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, was on the podium at Tully, Bell, who has led the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields for almost 10 years, is by now used to leading an ensemble while soloing.) At one point he even made a tiny, enthusiastic stomp on the stage.But while Bell is a genial partner for an ensemble, there is something sedate about him — always enjoyable, never intense or unexpected. He is, for better and worse, dependability itself.He came closest to surprising in the cadenza he created for the first movement, which had ruminative dissonances and lively string crossings. But you would have to be generous to describe even this as truly passionate.The Philharmonic played with mahogany-rich ardor in the strings in that opening movement, and its winds were graceful in the second. In the third, van Zweden paced a burnished Allegro, more aristocratic than fun or wild. That seemed just fine for Bell, whose playing smiles but never grins, and certainly never loses its cool.The program was an inversion of the usual ordering of a concert’s halves. The Beethoven concerto, at 45 minutes the most substantial work, sat alone before intermission; after the pause came Chen Yi’s brief but meaty and varied “Duo Ye” for chamber orchestra, then Stravinsky’s 25-minute “Pulcinella” Suite.Those last two pieces played well together. Written in the 1980s and inspired by a folk performance Chen attended around a bonfire in a Chinese village, “Duo Ye” has vitality in passages for sharp, crisp percussion and mystery in its dreamy duet of violas and vibraphone. Perhaps it was the program’s juxtaposition, but Stravinsky seemed in the air: Some moments in “Duo Ye” evoked a friendlier “Rite of Spring,” others the woodblock-stark angularity of “Les Noces” — both pieces which, like Chen’s, locate in the primitive a genesis of modernism.“Pulcinella” was also a modernist’s look back — but to the graceful energy of early 18th-century Italian music, which Stravinsky transposed into airy yet tender arrangements. Including bright, buoyant playing by the flutist Alison Fierst and by the featured string quintet at the work’s center, the eight sections on Wednesday had holiday conviviality.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: A Surprise Conductor Makes a Superb Debut

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      Dima Slobodeniouk was an excellent fill-in with the New York Philharmonic in works by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.After decades of attending orchestra concerts, I’m still impressed when a conductor is able not only to jump in on short notice, but also confidently to take on a program planned by others.Especially when — as with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall — the works, though hardly rarities, are not often heard and pose technical and interpretive challenges: Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 (“Winter Dreams”).Dima Slobodeniouk was the fill-in, making his Philharmonic debut leading a concert that had been devised by Semyon Bychkov, who withdrew a week ago. (The orchestra only said that Bychkov “will be unavailable to conduct.”)Slobodeniouk, the music director of the adventurous Galicia Symphony Orchestra in Spain and the former principal conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland, arrived in New York fresh from an appearance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I’m not surprised that his Boston engagement was praised: Slobodeniouk had one of the most auspicious Philharmonic debuts of recent years, leading the orchestra in a Shostakovich concerto played with glittering brightness and a stylish, colorful and exuberant account of the Tchaikovsky.Shostakovich composed this work in 1947 and ’48, a period when his stock with the Soviet authorities who policed culture had once again plummeted. Perhaps that accounts for the elusive nature of the first movement, which he called a Nocturne: music of pensive, brooding darkness unfolding at a moderate, inexorable tempo. The violin plays an elegiac, wayward melody that seems just eloquently melancholy.The soloist, Karen Gomyo, making her Philharmonic subscription series debut, conveyed with richly warm and textured sound the ruminative quality of a lyrical line that keeps trying to take clear shape; the orchestra supported — almost comforted — her with plush, wistful chords, rich with deep strings. Yet Gomyo pressed below the surface to suggest that this music was not simply sad, but truly grief-stricken.The Scherzo comes as a complete contrast: biting and frenetic music, in breathless perpetual motion, with an intensely difficult violin part that tussles with a rattling, boisterous orchestra, especially some ornery woodwinds. A noble yet still dark Passacaglia slow movement leads to a vehement cadenza, and then a Burlesque finale. Here the bitter, almost hostile, ironic Shostakovich seems to come through in episodes of blaring fanfares and faux-triumphant marches. The orchestra captured it with brilliant sharpness, and Gomyo was extraordinary, dispatching the tangle of technical challenges with fervor and command.Tchaikovsky was 26 when he completed his “Winter Dreams” Symphony. He struggled with writing it, and later expressed mixed feelings about it. (He revised it in 1874.) But whenever I hear it, especially in a performance as good as this one, I wish I could have told Tchaikovsky to go easier on his youthful self: It’s a spirited, well-crafted and beguiling piece.Slobodeniouk found an ideal balance between breezy tranquillity and jabs of somberness in the first movement, “Daydreams of a Winter Journey.” The lovely, lyrical slow movement; the restless Scherzo, with its Mendelssohnian lightness; and the episodic Finale, which builds to a driving coda — all were splendidly performed.New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: The Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason Makes an Entrance

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      A young star made his New York Philharmonic debut in an evening of bold, charismatic musical storytelling.It takes a long time for the soloist to enter in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto: three and a half minutes of orchestral music with the force and sweep of a symphony. But when that entrance finally comes, it’s marked in the score as “risoluto” — resolute, bold, declarative.And it could hardly have been more so than it was at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, when the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason made his debut with the New York Philharmonic. Having sat patiently at his instrument during the introduction, Kanneh-Mason, 22, became suddenly animated, matching the ensemble’s grandeur with his own: fiery vibrato, dramatic phrasing, richly voiced yet crisp forzando chords.This wasn’t the Kanneh-Mason whom nearly two billion people saw perform at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018. Then, he was more restrained — with the occasional expressive, searching look in his eyes, but generally measured as he played three short pieces. One of them, Fauré’s “Après un Rêve,” has racked up millions of streams on Spotify.The streaming numbers for his latest album — “Muse,” with the excellent pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, his sister — are much smaller so far. But that recording is far more revealing than the wedding performance of his sound and style, proving his gift as a compelling musical storyteller in sonatas by Barber and Rachmaninoff, whether charting thorny passages or soaring to emotional heights.That was recognizably the musician who played the Dvorak concerto on Thursday: a charismatic protagonist and a generous collaborator in chamber-like passages. But Kanneh-Mason could also be a bit of a ham, his extremities of expression sometimes tipping into an unwieldiness that, as he maintained the overall shape of a phrase, sacrificed intonation along the way. These passing errors, though, were less memorable than the grace of his bow gliding over harmonics, or the control and tension with which he was able to build long crescendos.After the standing ovation that followed, he announced that his encore would be a premiere: “3-Minute Cello Concerto,” by the 11-year-old Larissa Lakner, part of the Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program. Delivered with the same sincerity afforded Dvorak, this work was a dialogue between soloist and orchestra, in varied episodes of Mozartean tidiness and melodies that wouldn’t be out of place on a “Harry Potter” soundtrack; Kanneh-Mason had his share of pyrotechnics in agile fingering, double stops, octaves and passionate legato. It has been heartening to see ever-greater attention given to the children in this initiative, whose work has been featured in widely attended outdoor concerts, pandemic Bandwagon performances and, here, a high-profile subscription program.The concert was conducted by Simone Young, lately a more regular presence at the Philharmonic.Chris LeeThe conductor was Simone Young, who stepped in two years ago after a long absence to lead the orchestra because its music director, Jaap van Zweden, burned himself with an ice pack, and is thankfully becoming a more regular presence at the podium here. Preceding the Dvorak was a brief opening in the form of the “Fuga (Ricercata)” from Bach’s “Musical Offering,” arranged by Webern in a modernist showcase of 18th-century complexity; after intermission came Brahms’s First Symphony.With an ear for easily overlooked details and dramatic instincts that gave the whole evening a sense of drive and accumulation, Young subtly threaded elements of the Bach through the pieces that followed. By slightly emphasizing the section cellos in the opening of the Dvorak, she lent their part the brightly articulated counterpoint of individual voices in the “Fuga”; later, in the first movement of the Brahms, Webern’s arrangement was echoed as a leading line was passed from oboe to flute and cello.Young led the orchestra with decisive urgency and refreshingly little over-the-top physical extroversion. (She had that combination of qualities in common with another star of the evening, Sheryl Staples, the principal associate concertmaster, who was heavily featured as a soloist in the Dvorak and Brahms.) Most impressive was the reserve Young employed in the opening movements of those two works. Substantial, and with spectacular endings, each could almost be a stand-alone piece.But Young withheld somewhat in both, preferring a slow burn that built toward truly stirring finales — the galloping Brahms blossoming into a radiant chorale and popping chords that sent the audience, once again, standing to greet the music with enthusiastic applause.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats Friday and Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Michael Tilson Thomas, a Podium Hero, Returns

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      The eminent conductor appeared with the New York Philharmonic, his first public performance since brain surgery this summer.In early August, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas announced that, following surgery to remove a brain tumor, he was withdrawing from his upcoming performances to receive treatment. “I look forward,” he said, “to seeing everyone again in November.”Even coming from such an indefatigable musician, still dynamic at 76, that promise seemed optimistic.But on Thursday at Alice Tully Hall, looking a little weather-beaten but still vigorous and bright-eyed, Thomas took the podium to lead the New York Philharmonic in inspiring performances of demanding works by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Berg and Beethoven.This was his first public performance since his announcement, as well as his first time with the Philharmonic in 10 years, and he was clearly determined not to miss it. He is scheduled to lead two upcoming programs with the San Francisco Symphony, where he ended a quarter-century tenure as music director last year. But returning to the Philharmonic at this difficult time was very meaningful, he said in a short video released this week.What moved me most about the video was that Thomas said nothing directly about his illness. Instead, ever the educator — the best explainer of music to general audiences since his mentor, Leonard Bernstein — he shared keen insights into the works he was offering. He kept it all about the music.On Thursday at Tully, the hearty ovation that greeted his appearance might have gone on longer had Thomas not quickly taken the podium to get to work — standing to conduct and looking alert and immersed, his cues a deft combination of precision and flexibility.He began with Crawford Seeger’s visionary Andante for Strings, written in the 1930s but anticipating experimental styles of 30 or 40 years later. The quasi-atonal music unfurls in small recurring motifs that overlap and build into outbursts of intensity. It was gripping.Thomas, with the superb Gil Shaham as soloist, then turned to Berg’s Violin Concerto, one of the greatest works of the 20th century. Berg dedicated the piece to “the memory of an angel” — the 18-year-old daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler Werfel, who had died of polio. In the video Thomas says that the piece contemplates death, but “goes beyond that to a really big and beautiful vision of what the totality of life is, in our whole planet, and in the whole universe.”Berg drew upon 12-tone techniques here, though the first movement deftly folds in musical evocations of a young woman’s youth in Vienna, with bits of waltzes and folk songs. From the start, Shaham (with glowing sound and, when called for, spiky intensity) and Thomas (drawing rich, lucid sonorities from the orchestra) brought out the lyrical elements that run through the score.In the second movement, which begins with wrenching expressions of grief and anger, Shaham dispatched the tangles of skittish lines and blocks of heaving chords with eerily controlled vehemence. The strains of “Es ist genug,” one of Bach’s most harmonically daring chorales, gradually enter as a gesture of consolation. Yet this performance remained alert to the unresolved, searching strands that linger until the end.During the bows that followed, Thomas interrupted the applause. “I forced Gil to learn this piece,” he told the audience, smiling. “Good idea, wasn’t it?”After intermission — the Philharmonic’s first this season, after a run of shorter performances — Thomas led a compelling account of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. In the first movement, rather than just going for stirring energy and grandeur, he seemed intent on bringing out the intricacies and inner textures of the music.Perhaps overly so — though the performance gained in sweep and determination as it went on. The slow movement, a noble funeral march, was magnificent, almost Mahlerian. And the Scherzo showed that Thomas was in no slow-tempo mode: The music whisked by with fleetness and crackling rhythms. The Finale was joyous — majestic and exciting, even teasing out the touches of silliness.At one point, between movements, Thomas unabashedly pulled up his visibly sagging pants, which elicited some good-natured laughter from the audience. He turned around and said, “Post-pandemic waistline,” prompting more laughter.But in general he looked fit and lively. Beethoven famously scratched out the original dedication of his “Eroica” — to Napoleon — and instead titled it in honor of a nameless hero. On Thursday, that hero was Michael Tilson Thomas.New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, Contemporary Is King for a Week

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      Music by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams was conducted by Dalia Stasevska, in her debut with the orchestra.You could hear a tantalizing possible future for the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday evening at Alice Tully Hall — as well as some of the orchestra’s present difficulties. The program at Tully, one of the Philharmonic’s bases as David Geffen Hall is renovated this season, featured three contemporary works. One was by the safely canonized John Adams, the other two by names newer to Philharmonic audiences: Missy Mazzoli and Anthony Davis.Not that either of the two is really unknown. Both have been tapped for premieres at the Metropolitan Opera in the coming years — for Davis, the belated Met debut of his “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from the 1980s, and for Mazzoli, a new adaptation of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” But until this week, neither had been played on a Philharmonic subscription program.Their works landed with persuasive panache on Wednesday, aided by powerful but never overly brash conducting by Dalia Stasevska, also making her Philharmonic debut. But there were some problems with the overall sound. The sonic glare of Tully, generally a home for chamber music rather than larger-scale contemporary symphonic repertory, sometimes worked against the haunted sensuality of Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres),” written in 2013 and revised three years later.Stasevska fostered warmth whenever possible, shaping the 12-minute piece’s transfers of elegantly gloomy melodic ornaments from section to section of the ensemble with care and relish. And when a small army of harmonicas gently peeked out from behind the work’s often mournful textures, they glimmered delicately. Stasevska also found moments to collaborate with the bright harshness of Tully’s acoustic, allowing herself a leap and a stomp on the podium during one transition between a string glissando and a full-orchestra blast. Call it fighting the hall to a draw.Davis’s 25-minute, four-movement clarinet concerto “You Have the Right to Remain Silent,” written in 2006 and revised in 2011, fared more unevenly. The superbly varied work was inspired by a time that Davis, who is Black, was pulled over by the police while driving in Boston in the 1970s. Amid the dense music, he sometimes asks the players to recite portions of the Miranda warning. (On a recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, this is done in a deadened Sprechstimme.)On Wednesday, the Philharmonic did well by the concerto’s debt to Charles Mingus in passages of gravelly extended technique and others of deceptively breezy swing — and, as with Mingus, at the intersection of the two.But the initial vocalization of the Miranda text wasn’t quite crisp enough, slightly deflating the dramatic stakes. And the frenetic cello figures that followed lacked the tight ensemble necessary to suggest the first movement’s title: “Interrogation.”Yet the soloist, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, excelled in the grave material for contra-alto clarinet in the second movement, “Loss,” while his sound turned more arid amid more assaultive music in the third movement, “Incarceration.” The sly final movement, “The Dance of the Other,” felt the most inspired. There’s a satirical edge to this music, but in lingering, affecting phrases McGill also evoked a fully sincere yearning to travel from the grimness of interrogation, loss and incarceration.With its febrile mixture of influences from Minimalism, Hindemith’s pellucid peculiarity and classic cartoons, Adams’s 22-minute Chamber Symphony for 15 musicians, from 1992 — which the Philharmonic has played just once before, in 2000 — needs subtlety as well as brio. On Wednesday the middle movement, “Aria With Walking Bass,” was more plodding than witty. But an energetic “Roadrunner” finale was a saving grace. (And McGill deserves plaudits for playing the fiendish piece right after the Davis concerto, and without any intermission.)Philharmonic audiences will get more Adams soon, and in more welcoming acoustics, when the orchestra plays his Saxophone Concerto at Carnegie Hall in January. But here’s hoping we also hear more of Davis’s music; how about his piano concerto “Wayang V,” with its composer as soloist? And more Mazzoli, too. Hopefully both will be frequent presences once the Philharmonic returns to Geffen Hall next season. Refreshed acoustics do only so much; Davis and Mazzoli can be part of a refreshed repertoire.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Schumann at the Philharmonic. Robert, Too.

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      With a debuting pianist and conductor, a solo by Clara Schumann preceded works by her husband and Brahms.Hasn’t the New York Philharmonic been through enough? Closed for a year and a half by the pandemic, and exiled from its home for renovations during its return season, the orchestra is now at the mercy of visa delays.Caused by backlogs and staff shortages at embassies and consulates around the world, these delays are plaguing a classical field that depends on the easy travel of musicians from abroad. They kept the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes from coming here this week to play; and if one cancellation wasn’t enough, the planned conductor, Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, also withdrew, because of a family medical emergency.But when the dust settled, this left an enjoyable double debut with the orchestra at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Thursday: the pianist Alessio Bax and the conductor Giancarlo Guerrero.There was a quiet milestone in the program, which was retained with the new performers. While Robert Schumann’s works are fixtures of the repertory, those of his wife, Clara, an accomplished composer and one of the great piano virtuosos of the 19th century, are decidedly not. So when Bax entered and began Clara Schumann’s brief but eloquently wistful Romance in A minor, it was the first time her music was being played for a Philharmonic subscription audience.Its subdued ending led, without pause, to the dramatic burst that begins another work in A minor: Robert Schumann’s war horse piano concerto. Bax, well known to New York audiences in chamber music over the past decade, started with a tone of pristine Classicism that swiftly dissolved into washes of dreamier mistiness, without ever losing clarity.With the strings often evocatively gauzy, wind solos slicing piquantly through the textures, he and Guerrero conveyed the work’s mercurial swerves of mood without affectation or exaggeration. The lyrical effusions of the second movement were answered with crisp changeability; the finale had a surreally martial undercurrent. The performance was suavely manic, as it should be.It was a progressive move, yes, to bring the Schumanns together. Next it would be wonderful to hear Clara’s piano concerto — also, as it happens, in A minor — from the Philharmonic; Isata Kanneh-Mason, among others, has recorded it to impressive effect.Critics often valorize concert programs that sprawl across time. But the Philharmonic did well to pair the Schumanns with their great friend Johannes Brahms for a tightly focused evening of works written in the 1840s and ’50s. And not one of his frequently played symphonies — the First comes to the Philharmonic next month — but the second of his earlier, rarer pair of serenades.Brahms wrote these works as he was still experimenting with composing for orchestra; revised in the mid-1870s, the score of the 30-minute Serenade No. 2 lacks violins, for a melancholy tinge to the general geniality. Guerrero — the music director of the Nashville Symphony and a grinning presence with expressive fingers and a shiny suit — led a subtly energetic performance, bringing out both the delicacy and the darkness in the third movement and the Schubertian wistfulness in the fourth.Vivid yet unexaggerated, just like in the Schumann concerto, the playing had the intimate warmth that the orchestra also brought to Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony in the same space a few weeks ago. It speaks to how successfully the Philharmonic is scaling down to the 1,200-seat Rose Theater, and to two auspicious debuts.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More