Rouvali, Santtu-Matias

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    Young Artists Make Back-to-Back Debuts at the Philharmonic

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    The conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s two-week Philharmonic residency included the arrivals of the violinist Esther Yoo and the pianist Bruce Liu.For the past two weeks, the New York Philharmonic’s podium has been occupied by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a Finnish conductor who with a little spontaneity and a lot of sprezzatura offers a jolt to whatever orchestra he encounters.But that’s not what has made these two weeks interesting.Rouvali, after all, led multiple programs last season, making a long-awaited return after his debut in late 2019. Having proven himself as a guest worth keeping around, he has become comfortably part of the orchestra. His latest residency, though, has been more notable for the appearances of other artists: the violinist Esther Yoo and the much-hyped pianist Bruce Liu, both in their debuts, who with any luck will be just as present as Rouvali in the years to come.Liu’s Philharmonic debut at David Geffen Hall on Thursday followed a stop last season at Carnegie Hall, where he performed works by Chopin in a nod to his winning the top prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021. As if to signal that he wasn’t at all nervous about the sudden spotlight, at Carnegie he blazed past the concert’s two-hour running time, returning to the stage for no fewer than seven encores.There was some showmanship, too, in his appearance with the Philharmonic, as the soloist in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” In the opening, his large hands, redolent of the composer’s, sprang high above the keyboard, more than was necessary; but as he settled into the performance, mannerisms like that cooled, and Liu revealed the depth behind his theatricality.He played with feline agility and lightness of touch. But, as a cat can be lethally powerful when necessary, he can also take on a muscularity that turns sensitive phrasing into tintinnabular resonance. That nimble versatility also made for fluid shifts between limpid precision and alluring rubato, between concerto virtuosity and the recital-like intimacy with which he opened the famous 18th Variation. (Liu demonstrated something similar in the pairing he made with his encores: crowd-pleasing dazzle in Liszt’s “La Campanella” and meditative warmth in Alexander Siloti’s B-minor transcription of Bach’s Prelude in E minor.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A Guest Conductor Reveals the Philharmonic’s Potential

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a contender for the orchestra’s podium, shined in “The Rite of Spring” — the piece Jaap van Zweden began his tenure there with.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.Nemanja Radulovic made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.Chris LeeThorvaldsdottir’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 PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: A Philharmonic Contender Returns to the Podium

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      With a change of the guard imminent at the New York Philharmonic, Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the only guest conductor leading two programs this season.A changing of the guard on the world’s great orchestral podiums was in the air on Friday. Daniel Barenboim, 80, the longtime music director of the Berlin State Opera, had just announced he would step down at the end of the month because of his declining health.A potential generational shift was looming at the New York Philharmonic, too. The evening before, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, 37, had conducted that ensemble with crisply elfin spirit as one of the leading candidates to take over when Jaap van Zweden, 62, leaves at the end of next season.Rouvali faces steep competition — not least from Gustavo Dudamel, 41, who is widely considered the favorite for the position and who arrives in New York this spring for Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a classic music director showcase.But it is no accident that Rouvali is the only Philharmonic guest conductor this season to get two weeks of concerts. After the current program of works by Rossini, Magnus Lindberg and Beethoven, he leads music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Prokofiev and — like the Mahler, a prime assignment — Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” starting next Thursday.It is an added sign of trust in and respect for Rouvali, the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, that each of those programs includes a new work co-commissioned by the Philharmonic: Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis” and Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 — bless him for being one of the few contemporary composers who favor plain, simple concerto titles — with the calmly formidable Yuja Wang as soloist.Yuja Wang, front, was the soloist in Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3.Chris LeeOn Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Rouvali, too, was a calm and lucid guide through the piece — which came off, however, as billowy and somewhat baggy. The score’s meter markings are precisely gauged for shifts of pulse that don’t come across audibly as slow-fast contrasts of tempo; this may be why Lindberg has cheekily described the work as a concerto in three concertos, rather than three movements.But while that is an impressive technical achievement, the whole thing ends up registering for the listener as a bit homogeneous, a roughly half-hour foray into richly chromatic nostalgia, swaths of it reminiscent of golden-age film music à la Korngold. (A modernist sheen over a late-Romantic spirit has become a trademark Lindberg move.) Like the Groundhog Day spectacle of votes for a House speaker this week, the performance gave the sense of hearing the same concerto again and again.If this repetitiveness yielded little urgency, the piece wasn’t exactly sluggish, either. Moment by moment, passage by passage, the music doesn’t feel heavy. Lindberg keeps the orchestra airy, often adding complexity by dividing the strings into ever-ampler harmonies rather than using denser instrumentation or greater volume. And the daunting solo part emerges — particularly in Wang’s cool hands — as quicksilver and subtle, integrated into the general textures and restrained even in the fevered portions of the cadenza near the end of the first movement.Lindberg is never less than artful, as in how that cadenza seems to silkily melt out of softly plush strings, which just as quietly and cleverly rejoin the pianist a minute or so later. The shadows at the start of the second movement organically grow into an expansive, grave grandeur reminiscent of Debussy’s “La Mer,” with passages of candied glockenspiel woven beautifully into the golden wire of a tiny group of violins. The third movement has bits of sumptuous playfulness, punctuated by yelps of brass.But overall the work’s impact is muted and breezy, which is striking given the broad, Rachmaninoff-esque sweep of Lindberg’s musical gestures.Rouvali, one of a full lineup of conductors accompanying Wang in the coming months as she tours with the work, which premiered in San Francisco in October, matches her clean, objective style. There is a conscientiousness to Rouvali that can tip into squareness, as I felt when he led the Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony a year ago. And Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture on Thursday lacked the steadily accumulating propulsion, even through lyrical passages, that is the piece’s reason for being; the soufflé never really rose.But in Beethoven’s Second Symphony — a classic that is still somehow underrated — he was superb, with his deliberate, even careful conducting yielding a graceful, stylish interpretation. I have rarely been more clearly yet delicately aware of Beethoven’s most visionary passages here: the orchestra mistily reconstituting itself near the end of the first movement, the amorphous clouds of harmonies in the finale.Under Rouvali, the second movement was intimate and sober, but it gradually relaxed, even to a charming daintiness; the third, never rushing the eager rhythms, reached elegance. This conductor doesn’t do breathlessness, and he could probably do with a little more liveliness. But when he avoids plainness, his judiciousness can seem very like maturity.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali Knows His Way Around a Score, and a Farm

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      YLÖJÄRVI, Finland — “Here I grow peas,” the conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali said, gesturing to a plot of land the size of a small room. “Why? I just love fresh peas.”That pea garden is a blip in the scale of Rouvali’s property here — a farm, dating back to the 16th century, on over 34 acres. It is among this place’s wildflowers, evergreens and moss-covered rocks that he feels most at ease, especially compared with where he’s more often seen: inside the world’s major concert halls, whether at the podium of his Philharmonia Orchestra in London or as a guest with ensembles like the New York Philharmonic, where he is a contender to become the next music director.“I was never someone who wants to be famous,” said Rouvali, 36. “But of course, with this profession it comes automatically.”Rouvali has structured his life so that he can spend as many weekends as possible on his farm, about 20 minutes outside Tampere, in the southwest of Finland. One morning this month, he was at the start of a welcome break between the Philharmonia’s performances not far away in Mikkeli and another to come in early August at the Edinburgh International Festival.Rouvali conducting the Philharmonia in 2019.Kaupo KikkasHe and his wife, Elina, live in the property’s main house but make use of all the surrounding buildings. They include a sauna, a guesthouse with music and pole-dancing studios, and a garage with a room for Rouvali to slaughter and skin the game he hunts, like ducks and deer. He fishes in the nearby lake, where he was having a beach built (along with a waterfront sauna). They eat everything he kills and fill the table with dishes made from other local ingredients, such as foraged chanterelles or new potatoes from a neighbor.“I need this,” Rouvali said, “to kind of rest and have a mental break and not really think about music.”When he is at work, Rouvali has developed a reputation as a lively conductor, one who revels in experimentation and fluid interpretations, and who has a gift — befitting his background as a percussionist — for internal rhythms and harmonies. When he returns to the Philharmonic next season, for his third engagement there, it will be with a precious two weeks of the season’s real estate, in varied programs that include repertory mainstays and local premieres by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Magnus Lindberg.In a time when every guest’s appearance with the Philharmonic has the air of an audition, ahead of Jaap van Zweden’s departure from the podium in spring 2024, Rouvali’s concerts come with added scrutiny and pressure. He acknowledged as much himself, though only at a whisper in the privacy of his own yard.The Philharmonic, for its part, doesn’t have anything to add. Its music director search, said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, is “a very confidential and sacrosanct process, and we just don’t discuss it.”“I need this,” Rouvali said of his time at home, “to kind of rest and have a mental break and not really think about music.”Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesRouvali is a charismatic, natural leader — a trait that has endeared him to musicians in rehearsal.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesROUVALI WAS BORN in Lahti, Finland, to two members of that city’s orchestra. He played piano, and learned violin from his mother, but he eventually settled on studying percussion seriously — mostly, the mallet instruments. A fan of much music beyond the classical concert hall, he also took up jazz and rock, and was comfortable at the seat of a drum kit.Music brought him to Finland’s storied Sibelius Academy, and it was there that he made a decisive move to devote himself to conducting. “Maybe to play triangle can be a little boring,” Rouvali said. “I always loved a symphony orchestra, and as a conductor you can do more. So I thought, Why not?”He had already studied briefly with Jorma Panula, the teacher and mentor of Finnish conducting luminaries like Esa-Pekka Salonen, Susanna Mälkki and Osmo Vänskä. As a master’s student, Rouvali later worked with the podium veterans Leif Segerstam and Hannu Lintu, who gave him an essential bit of advice: You can do whatever you want at the podium, but you just have to make sure everyone understands it.In other words, Rouvali said, “It has to work, and it has to work around the world.”That freedom helped to inform his style today: one in which he retains some of a drummer’s gestures, but also in which that physicality is an expressive vessel for open, sometimes trial-and-error interpretations with a liberal use of rubato. “As a conductor, I play the orchestra,” he said. “And if I were a violin player, I wouldn’t always play the same. Sometimes, it’s not the best idea, but it makes the live performance fun.”Musicians tend to listen. Rouvali discovered at an early age that he is a natural leader, with a sense of empathy that has endeared him to instrumentalists in rehearsals. He also learned, he said, from his parents’ and his own experiences playing under various conductors. But his charisma is for the most part innate; he carries himself as if cheerfully unaware of his position in classical music.Rouvali studies scores at his piano, building out his interpretations from inner voices and rhythms.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThat may be what once made him a good candidate for the Finnish reality TV show “Not Born to Rock,” which assembled a group of classical musicians to form a band. In one episode, they were shown learning how to dress like a rock star; in another, how to party like one. As a group called Taltta, they ended up writing a song that they performed at a music festival. “Of course it was just for entertainment,” Rouvali said. “But it’s good to take part in those things.”Rouvali’s lightness belies scholarly rigor. He studies scores at the piano slowly, beginning with foundational inner voices and harmonies and working his way outward to melody. It’s a method that shows in his performances, which prioritize unexpected, often revelatory sounds other conductors might overlook; the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, rather than recurring, coursed throughout the entire work in his Mikkeli performance with the Philharmonia.He first appeared with that ensemble in 2013. Not long after, he started as the chief conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra — a tenure that comes to an end with the coming season. Another chief conductor post followed in 2017, with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. At the same time, he began as the Philharmonia’s principal guest conductor, ahead of being named as Salonen’s successor and taking over in 2021.Salonen said that when he called Rouvali to offer him the principal guest post, Rouvali was at a Finnish kiosk buying a six-pack of beer. Rouvali responded, “Yeah, that sounds great” with an emphatic expletive, then told the cashier, “I’ll have another one.”ROUVALI’S RELATIONSHIP with the Philharmonia has been a happy one so far; his appointment to chief conductor was the result of a vote by the musicians. Michael Fuller, a double bassist in the orchestra, said that Rouvali’s interactions with them are more or less nonverbal, so closely attuned are they to each other. That held true during recent rehearsals in Mikkeli, where he was shaping phrases more than keeping time — to the degree that he regularly, without warning, ran from the podium to hear the music from farther back in the hall.“He’s able to get results very quickly,” Fuller said. “There’s so much that he can do just through his beat. All the sudden he’ll do this thing, and the piccolo or harp will come out of the texture, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard this that way before.’ It’s all connected to this kind of pulse that he radiates.”Rouvali studies music in the main house of the farm, which dates back to the 16th century.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThat comes in handy, said the Philharmonia horn player Kira Doherty, because of the “unfettered” view Rouvali has of the scores they take up. “With him, it’s like he still has this fresh, almost first-time thing that, in looking at the score, brings out things that nobody has done before,” she added. “Some of them are bonkers, and later he’s like, ‘I’m not going to do that anymore.’ But he’s trying it, and it’s a way of engaging with the actual act of creativity.”The reception has been mixed. When Rouvali made his New York Philharmonic debut in 2019, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that “every gesture expressed some element of the music.” But last season, the critic Zachary Woolfe was much cooler, finding that Rouvali’s interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony “tipped into plainness.”Rouvali has nevertheless garnered praise within the industry. Salonen said that, “first of all, he conducts the orchestra, not the audience, so the gestures are really focused and all carry something essential.” He added: “The guy has got a very good rhythm, a sense of tempo, of pulse. And that gives the orchestra a certain kind of security that allows them to express themselves quite clearly.”Rouvali on his lawn, which is kept trim by a robot mower nicknamed Jens.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesBorda, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, said that their time together has often been lighthearted and fun. Once, in New York, the actor Bradley Cooper appeared in her box accompanied by Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. They all went to meet Rouvali afterward, and, according to Borda, Wintour told him, “Maestro I love your shirt, is it Prada?” He responded, simply, “No, my mom got it from a friend in Lahti.”He is, Borda, said, “a conductor very much on the rise.” Whether that rise entails a post at the Philharmonic is an open question, even for Rouvali.At the farm, while Rouvali’s robotic lawn mower, nicknamed Jens, roamed the garden like a curious dog, he thought about how he would respond to an offer from New York. “I’d probably say, ‘Let me have a beer and call you back,’” he said. There would be much to consider: what the lifestyle change would mean for his time at home — with his wife and their children, with the high school friends who join him every year for the start of Finland’s hunting season — and what it would mean for his post at the Philharmonia.“It’s hard to say yet,” Rouvali said. “Let’s see if they even ask. But has there ever been a conductor who says no to the New York Phil?”Salonen said that, regardless, he hopes Rouvali remains with the Philharmonia “for a long time.” Rouvali feels similarly, but added that if there’s a moment to take on a lot of work, it’s now, while he’s still young. He doesn’t want to be a conductor who works well into old age; he has the farm, after all.“I do find that he’s wandered out from the forest,” Doherty, the Philharmonia player, said, “and he’s going to do some amazing stuff, then one of these days just wander back into his forest-dwelling life.” More

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      Review: Another Week, Another Philharmonic Podium Candidate

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the latest potential music director to lead the orchestra, in a program of Zibuokle Martinaityte, Strauss and Tchaikovsky.Jakub Hrusa and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, two of the world’s most respected rising maestros, keep ending up in close proximity. In 2017 they were simultaneously named the principal guest conductors of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. (Rouvali was elevated to that ensemble’s top post two years later.)When Rouvali made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in fall 2019, it was a week before Hrusa appeared there. And now they have returned to the orchestra, once again in tandem: Hrusa, 40, last week, and Rouvali, 36, on Thursday.Their appearances — and those of other Philharmonic guest conductors this season — are being closely watched since the announcement in September that Jaap van Zweden would be stepping down as music director in 2024. These two young, talented artists are among the prominent candidates to succeed him.Hrusa’s recent concert was, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times, “rich with novelty and spirited throughout.” Rouvali’s was, too — if not in its main offering, Tchaikovsky’s all too often played Fifth Symphony. But the program on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center began with the American premiere of a recent work by Zibuokle Martinaityte, and continued with a rare account of the full set of Strauss’s six Op. 68 songs, the “Brentano-Lieder.”Martinaityte’s dense, moody “Saudade” (2019) begins with a ceaselessly rocking motif and a quality of awakening, which is swiftly obscured by strange oscillations in the cellos and oozy, sliding dissonances in the violins.A passage of grumbling darkness becomes almost palpable, as in the unsettlingly visceral music of Ash Fure, before gradually expanding into a wailing full-orchestra crescendo. That climax comes about halfway through the 17-minute piece, which loses some urgency after, with droning tidal motions continuing to rise and fall, even if the colors in Martinaityte’s orchestral writing remain intriguingly agitated.Making her Philharmonic debut in the Strauss songs, the soprano Golda Schultz was — as in “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Metropolitan Opera last month — serene and confident, her voice silky and immaculate. You got a sense of why these pieces are not often performed as a group; a voice light and agile enough for the middle four songs can struggle with the grander ones that frame them.And Schultz, whose slender instrument sweetly penetrates but doesn’t exactly bloom, was not in her element for the rapturous opening “An die Nacht.” But with Rouvali softening the orchestra into intimacy, she brought characterful wit and zestful German to “Ich wollt ein Sträusslein binden” and “Säus’le, liebe Myrte!” and Zerbinetta-esque dexterity to “Amor.”The closing “Lied der Frauen” wants tone a bit more majestic, but Schultz attacked it with gusto and brought gentle ambivalence to the end. And in “Als mir dein Lied erklang,” she was superb, singing with the combination of purity and humanity that characterizes the best Strauss ingénues.Throughout the evening, Rouvali stepped around the podium with a kind of cheery calm, like a genial general directing troop movements. He kept a precise beat, his left hand often clenched but for a pinpointing index finger.His Tchaikovsky was logical, restrained and orderly — and also relaxed and natural in its phrasing, as opposed to the mannered, manicured style that van Zweden often brings to the standard repertory. But the straightforwardness of this Fifth sometimes tipped into plainness, as when the strings in the first movement covered rebellious passages in the winds. It was a brisk account, neither particularly grand nor intense.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More