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    Maurizio Pollini’s Final Recording, Made With His Son

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    Maurizio Pollini didn’t think his farewell on disc would be an album of music by Schubert with his son, Daniele. Now, it serves as an emotional coda.The pianist Maurizio Pollini was still exploring, right to the end.Throughout his long partnership with Deutsche Grammophon, Pollini, who died in March at the age of 82, offered invariably accomplished, intellectually alert recordings of repertoire including Bach and Chopin, Schoenberg and Boulez. In his twilight, he rethought music that he had recorded before, not least the last five sonatas of Beethoven — works with which he had previously confirmed his stature in the 1970s, in versions that still sound strikingly modern today.Pollini’s last recording, which was recently released, bids a somewhat surprising farewell. Dedicated to Schubert, it marks a welcome return to a composer whose music Pollini had not taped since the 1980s. But what makes the program so remarkably poignant is that Pollini is joined by his son, Daniele. Each musician first plays a solo work: Maurizio, a taut rendition of the Piano Sonata in G; Daniele, a shapely set of the “Moments Musicaux.” Then, father and son share a single instrument in a concluding, breathtakingly direct interpretation of the Fantasie in F minor, for four hands.And so Maurizio Pollini’s discography ends with one of the bleaker cadences in music, confronting tragedy without flinching. The recording was not intended to be valedictory, though. Made in Munich in June 2022, the Schubert was one of several studio projects that Pollini still had in mind, among them the second book of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”Instead, the sessions were an opportunity for father and son to work together. It was only their third time doing so. In 2016, they recorded a two-piano piece, “En Blanc et Noir,” as a coda to Pollini’s recording of the second book of Debussy’s “Préludes.” Before that, Daniele Pollini had conducted his father in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, in a filmed performance that made the elder Pollini particularly proud.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: Thomas Adès Meets the Profound Beauty of Schubert

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      The Danish String Quartet returned to Carnegie Hall with its Doppelgänger project, pairing Schubert’s String Quintet and a premiere by Adès.Franz Schubert and Thomas Adès are two composers whose works are capable of touching the cosmos — in different centuries, and often in different ways.The beauty of Schubert tends to be quiet and shatteringly calm, his postcards from the beyond written in lyrical melodies sometimes underlined with nothing more than a chord. Adès, particularly in the past decade, seems to have flung open the gates of heaven, unleashing forces that overwhelm and awe in their immensity.Yet each has also done the opposite: Schubert, in his aptly nicknamed “Great” Symphony, with its Beethovenian heft, for example, and Adès in his hypnotic and weightless “Paradiso” section of “Dante.” At Zankel Hall on Thursday, the composers met somewhere in the middle as they were paired for the fourth and final installment in the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project.One of the great pleasures of recent seasons, Doppelgänger has surveyed Schubert’s late quartets while commissioning new works that respond to them. Thursday brought perhaps the composer’s finest chamber work, the String Quintet in C; Asbjorn Norgaard, the Danes’ violist, joked from the stage, “We are the Danish String Quartet, with a Finnish cellist,” gesturing to their guest, Johannes Rostamo.In previous Doppelgänger programs at Zankel, Lotta Wennakoski’s “Pige” homed in on the maiden of “Death and the Maiden,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” played with the repetitive nature of the “Rosamunde” Quartet. (Because of pandemic delays, the project will actually return next season, with Part I.) Each evening has ended with an arrangement of a Schubert song; on Thursday it was “Die Nebensonnen,” from “Winterreise.”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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      ‘Winterreise’ Review: Hiding a Roiling Grief

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      On Friday, the pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore illuminated the bleakness of Schubert’s genre-defining song cycle at Zankel Hall.It was a performance of hard-won wisdom. When the eminent pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore teamed up for Schubert’s “Winterreise” on Friday at Zankel Hall, they brought the maturity of hindsight to a genre-defining work of young, unrequited love. The concert was part of Uchida’s Perspectives series with Carnegie Hall.Schubert’s cycle comprises 24 songs, most of them in minor keys, and derives from the natural world endless metaphors for heartache. The winter’s journey of the title begins with a breakup, and the narrator spends the rest of the time ruminating upon the fallout. The narrator’s beloved, he says, proved to be as fickle as a weather vane batted by the wind. His tears freeze and scald, and his numbness hides a roiling grief, like a river seething below a surface of ice.The piano part has the capacity to amplify or comment on the narrator’s mental state, and Uchida used it to console him like a wise, empathetic friend. She eased into key changes with subtle decelerations. The octaves of “Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”) were transparent, rather than towering, and the rustling of branches had a dusky quality as though seen through the mollifying haze of a dream. In “Wasserflut” (“Flood”), she handled chromatic semitones with utmost delicacy to minimize the impact of their dissonant pangs. Her performance came to a peak in “Das Wirtshaus” (“The Inn”), where a slow, firm sequence of full-fingered chords provided ineffable comfort.The narrator’s beloved dominates the first half, but in a curious twist, she largely vanishes in the second, as his despair consumes him and convinces him that he’s destined for life as a social pariah.Uchida achieved arresting coherence across the entire cycle, but Padmore dug more specifically into that point of divergence. His acidulous tone, an awkward fit for the cycle’s early expressions of young heartbreak, illuminated the existential anguish of a soul who has decided he’s better off lost. Rather than struggle with that anguish, Padmore’s narrator embraced it with a sense of finality beyond his years.Padmore muscled his way through the cycle’s first 12 songs, summoning a pointed resonance but no real sense of line in Schubert’s gracious melodies. The milky softness of his tone in early recordings has curdled, and his technique, which used to cultivate mellifluousness with frequent use of a precise and floaty mixed voice, now produces a hard and unwieldy sound that veers out of tune.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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      Schubert’s Operas Were Failures. Is Their Music Worth Saving?

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      “I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world,” Franz Schubert, suffering from syphilis and reeling from professional failures, wrote in March 1824 to his friend, the painter Leopold Kupelwieser. Imagine a man, he said, who will never be healthy again, and “whose most brilliant hopes have perished.”In the same breath, Schubert expressed sorrow over the fate of his attempt at a grand Romantic opera, “Fierrabras,” which had been canceled in Vienna, and that of another stage work, “Die Verschworenen,” which didn’t make it past a private performance. “I seem once again,” Schubert, then 27, wrote in his letter, “to have composed two operas for nothing.”He wouldn’t return to the genre again. And even after his death in 1828, at 31, when many of his works enjoyed posthumous adulation and were performed widely, none of his theatrical undertakings entered the standard repertoire.It’s surprising that opera eluded Schubert, who by most counts started about 20 stage works, completed fewer than a dozen and saw the premieres of just two. After all, he wrote some of the most beautiful vocal music in the repertoire: the song cycles “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise,” and hundreds of beloved lieder like “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Ave Maria.”And yet the operas remain curiosities better heard than seen, often composed to clumsy librettos and denied the revisions that could have accompanied rehearsals.A scene from “L’Autre Voyage” at the Opéra Comique in Paris. Stéphane Degout, left, and Siobhan Stagg.Stefan BrionWe 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: The Great Emerson String Quartet Takes Its Final Bow

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      A pillar of chamber music for nearly a half-century, the Emerson players bid farewell with Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s String Quintet.Farewell to the Emerson String Quartet, a group that has beaten at the heart of chamber music in the United States, and far beyond, for almost half a century.More than two years after the essential string quartet of its era announced that it had decided to retire, its players took their final bows on Sunday before an Alice Tully Hall audience that paid them the best tribute any musician can hope to receive: listening, and listening well.The time was right, and the place was, too. It was on a Sunday in 1981 that the Emerson made its breakthrough on that very stage, playing all six Bartok quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour-plus sitting. The host of Sunday’s concert, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, is the institution for which the Emerson served as quartet in residence from 1982 to 1989, and for which its cellist David Finckel left the ensemble in 2013 to co-direct.Finckel’s departure permitted his successor, Paul Watkins, to spend a decade with the violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer to his right, and Lawrence Dutton, the violist, to his left. Even at the end, as Finckel rejoined the group for one last performance of the Schubert String Quintet, Watkins looked as if he could barely believe his luck.Who would feel any differently? For if Sunday’s concert was a reminder of anything, it was that the Emerson String Quartet was never just a string quartet. It was an establishment, a touchstone, a catalyst. Entire generations of listeners grew up with its recordings, or made one of the hundred and more concerts it undertook each year, with famous collegiality, a habitual date in their diaries. As early as 1984, George Tsontakis had composed it a piece called “Emerson,” as if it already owned the genre; Sarah Kirkland Snider, the last living composer whose music it played, has written that, to her, the Emerson catalog had appeared to be “the definitive interpretation of all the great string quartets in history.”From left, Drucker, Setzer, Watkins and Dutton in the concert’s first half.Da Ping LuoWas the Emerson the Emerson to the end? Close enough. “We were afraid of going on too long,” Setzer said recently, and Sunday suggested that he, Drucker and Dutton have stopped at the timeliest of moments, without cause for regret. Watkins, a soloist and a conductor before he took his chance, still has half his career ahead of him. There were speeches on Sunday, quiet notes of pathos, even a joke or two, but nothing really to get in the way of the music, which is as it should be. The Schubert received a heartfelt performance of inimitable focus, and before it came Beethoven’s Opus 130, with the “Grosse Fuge” duly included as its finale. It was exactly the valediction that one would have hoped for.It was also touching. Nobody could pretend that Sunday saw the Emerson reclaim the heights from which it conquered chamber music, though it was hardly far-off. If its most celebrated predecessors, the Juilliard after World War II and the Guarneri later on, were responsible for a boom in American quartet playing, then it was the Emerson’s part to demonstrate how accomplished a quartet could become. Surely it was not a coincidence that Setzer, who once told The New York Times that “when things aren’t together in the quartet, it sets off a real alarm,” was the son of two violinists in George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra, and taught by two of its concertmasters.It did not take the Emerson long to set the formidable technical standards that we take for granted among chamber musicians today. “After five minutes of playing,” the critic Bernard Holland wrote of that Bartok concert in 1981, “one began to assume perfection. There were no disappointments.” There are none to be heard, either, in the Emerson’s recorded legacy, which, with all its vitality and its security, Deutsche Grammophon ensured defined the sound of a quartet in the digital age. Hearing them now is to be confronted with persistent excellence, an enduring commitment to quality that any musician would be proud of.If there was ever a justified criticism of the Emerson, it was that its playing was too responsible, too objective, too bland. That was not the case at its passing. Rarely can this ensemble have shaped Schubert’s melodies with such humanity and poignancy, or given such a raw, intense account of the Beethoven fugue. The Cavatina, the delicate emotional core of the Opus 130, will resound in the memory as little short of heartbreaking, and for all the right reasons: As its song faltered on the first violin, it seemed to be embraced, as if the other instruments were helping it through.Farewell, then, to the Emerson. But not to what made it great.Emerson String QuartetPerformed on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      ‘Doppelganger’ Review: A Soldier Confronts His Mortality

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, an imaginative and viscerally shocking staging of Schubert songs from the director Claus Guth and the tenor Jonas Kaufmann.In the classical tradition, a song often evokes intimacy and solitude: a poet baring vulnerability, a composer painting a miniature. That sense of seclusion extends to the performance as well: a singer and pianist alone onstage, a listener absorbing the work in an intimate recital hall or immersed, alone, with headphones.These conventions surround the final group of songs written by Schubert, known as “Schwanengesang” (Swan Song) and published after the composer’s death in 1828 at age 31. But those expectations were upended in “Doppelganger,” which had its world premiere Friday at the cavernous Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall. The director Claus Guth, the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, the pianist Helmut Deutsch and a raft of collaborators transformed “Schwanengesang” at the Saturday night performance into an entire wartime narrative.Kaufmann is a soldier who lies dying in a military hospital. Far from being alone with Deutsch onstage, he is one of nearly two dozen injured and sick soldiers being tended by a fleet of six nurses, the rest of the cast is made up of dancers. Deutsch and the piano are dead center among more than 60 hospital beds that stretch across the hall’s immense floor. Kaufmann’s soldier spends the last hour of his life revisiting his memories in a cascade of Schubert’s songs, stitched together with ominous new music by the German composer Mathis Nitschke.Guth’s imaginative and powerful staging for his New York debut recalls history. This drill hall has served as a hospital and shelter; “Doppelganger,” which had originally been intended for a fall 2020 premiere, also invokes the field hospitals hastily erected at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.The inventive and minimalistic set design by Michael Levine is dominated by hospital whites, and the clever lighting is by Urs Schönebaum.Monika Rittershaus/Courtesy of Park Avenue ArmoryMichael Levine’s inventive and minimalistic set design is dominated by the blanched shades of hospital whites and khaki uniforms. Growls of Nitschke’s sound and clever lighting by Urs Schönebaum suggest thunderstorms and bombings.Does the theatrical conceit serve Schubert’s songs? In the hands of Kaufmann and Deutsch, who have long worked together, yes — and it reignites the master’s music in a fresh, intelligent setting without sacrificing the duo’s artistry as classical performers.At one point, the piano becomes a main character in the drama, as Kaufmann and the dancers gather to listen in respite to Deutsch perform the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960. It was a rare treat to hear Deutsch, who usually performs an accompanist, take literal center stage.In a concession to the Armory’s sheer expanse, Kaufmann’s voice was lightly amplified. This was occasionally distracting when he turned his head away from his microphone, and his normally crisp articulation was slightly muddied. But Kaufmann’s sweet tone transcended the limits of the technology, particularly in Schubert’s yearning song of desire “Ständchen.”In the evening’s climactic song, “Der Doppelgänger,” Kaufmann’s soldier encounters his ghostly twin at the moment of death. Although the audience knows this was coming, having already seen the soldier being mortally wounded, the theatrical ingenuity and visceral force of “Doppelganger” was so strong that the audience let out an audible gasp of shock. When was the last time you heard something like that in a classical concert hall?DoppelgängerThrough Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      Jonas Kaufmann and Friends Take On Schubert at the Armory

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      The tenor Jonas Kaufmann stars in “Doppelganger,” a staging of “Schwanengesang” by Claus Guth, making his New York debut.In Schubert’s song “Der Doppelgänger,” a piano resounds with increasingly tormented chords as the narrator recounts a realization: that a pained stranger, wringing his hands in the night, is in fact himself.“I think there is something like a moment where your soul steps out, and your body is there,” the director Claus Guth said about the song over coffee in Munich. “It’s this shocking moment: You understand that you’re dying.”That instant, he said, is the heart of “Schwanengesang,” the posthumous collection of Schubert’s final songs, which is often performed as a cycle, like the composer’s canonical “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise.” And it’s that harrowing, transitional state that has inspired Guth’s staging of “Schwanengesang,” called “Doppelganger,” which premieres at the Park Avenue Armory in New York on Friday.The production — featuring the star tenor Jonas Kaufmann performing with his longtime collaborator, the pianist Helmut Deutsch — will be the New York debut of Guth, one of the most sought-after opera directors in Europe.Schubert’s music is regularly presented in the Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room, the site of most of the arts center’s recitals. But the composer’s songs, like those of “Schwanengesang,” originally sung in parlors, are much less expected, and seemingly ill-suited, for the vast drill hall. But “Doppelganger” will unfold there amid an installation (designed by Michael Levine) of more than 60 hospital beds occupied by wounded soldiers. Kaufmann will rise from one of them, to think back on his life at the moment of his death.Kaufmann and Guth at the Armory, whose enormous drill hall will be the site of “Doppelganger,” a staging of Schubert’s intimate “Schwanengesang.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe path to “Doppelganger” was long, and not just because the production, originally planned for fall 2020, was delayed by pandemic closures. Years ago, Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, approached Guth and Kaufmann about a music theater project for the drill hall, inspired by little more than their prestige and friendship, which goes back to their education at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich.“I gave them carte blanche to propose something,” said Audi, one of the few dreamers in New York who can still commission work on the monumental scale of the Armory. Kaufmann said that he and Guth discussed music by Strauss, Mahler and Wagner, as well as Janacek’s frequently staged cycle “The Diary of One Who Disappeared.”But the idea of mounting, say, Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” didn’t appeal to Guth. “If you have this huge orchestra, it will be the same structure you have at a normal concert,” he said. “So, how to get this very specific situation of not being in the opera house or concert hall? We thought it would be great to have in this huge hall just this lonely singer exposed.”They arrived at the idea of a song recital. And from there, Guth said, “It must be Schubert.”He researched the history of the Armory, and was struck as much by its use as a hospital and shelter as by its housing of a militia regiment. “It’s interesting to think of this place not as a drill hall, but the opposite,” he said.Guth also thought about the “Schwanengesang” song “Kriegers Ahnung,” in which a soldier worries about dying in battle and longs for “how cheerful the fireside glow seemed when she lay in my arms.” “My storytelling is, say, the last hour of this wounded soldier,” Guth said. “And in this last hour you see his flashbacks and his dreams.”Levine — a collaborator with Guth on a Metropolitan Opera-bound production of Janacek’s “Jenufa” — responded to that idea with a design incorporating a dreamily expansive field of hospital beds, in part as an attempt to rise to the drill hall’s size.“You want to address the space itself,” he said on a recent afternoon at the Armory, gesturing to the set as it was being arranged. “It’s a thrilling space to put anything in, and in a way it’s your responsibility to do justice to it. I’ve seen some beautiful, beautiful things here, but it’s not an easy space to get right.”He first submitted his designs in early 2020, just as he was reading about how Wuhan, China — a city of roughly 8.5 million people — was shutting down because of Covid-19. He couldn’t imagine that; it would be like New York City doing the same. Once that happened too, he began to see pop-up hospitals similar to the one he had conceived for “Doppelganger.”Now it has taken on an eerie resonance. Set vaguely in the first half of the 20th century, the production, with its rows and rows of beds, seems like a darkly familiar sight, especially to New Yorkers. And, Levine said, the isolation of a temporary hospital — whether during a war, as in “Doppelganger,” or somewhere like the Javits Center in the early days of the pandemic — is supported, even amplified, by Schubert’s music.“There’s something lonely about these songs,” Levine said, “and there’s something quite lonely about this space.”Kaufmann will be lightly amplified, but the concept of “Doppelganger” still relies on a performer with his immense presence, Audi said. “You need a personality like this,” he added, “because he’s alone onstage, and this is all taking place inside his head.”He won’t be entirely alone. Among the beds will be dancers, who play the parts of fellow soldiers, as well as actors playing hospital workers. And Schubert’s score will be joined by Mathis Nitschke’s original music — which joins the songs together, picking up the harmonic thread of one and transitioning to that of the next. (Deutsch also has a showcase in the form of an interlude pulled from a late Schubert piano sonata.)All this is possible, Kaufmann said, because “Schwanengesang” isn’t really a cycle. “We’re allowed to do something different with it,” he added, in a collaborative process among friends. “That’s our privilege, that we can present our ideas in a new package.” More

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      Review: The Danish String Quartet Spins Through Schubert

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      The group returned to Zankel Hall for the latest installment of its “Doppelgänger” project, featuring a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.Schubert’s song “Gretchen am Spinnrade” famously imitates a spinning wheel in the piano: the left hand repeating the rhythm of a pedal, and the right whirling a phrase in perpetual motion. It’s not exact, but it is evocative, like the Goethe poetry it’s based on.At Zankel Hall on Thursday, that spirit of repetition — oblique and constantly transforming — coursed through the third installment of the Danish String Quartet’s “Doppelgänger” project, which pairs Schubert’s late quartets with new commissions, and closes with an arrangement of a lied: in this case, “Gretchen.”Before that came Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet, a relatively light work among its “Doppelgänger” siblings, and the single-movement “Quartettsatz,” as well as the world premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals,” a slippery but entrancing series of permutations in which a set of musical gestures are rearranged like matter.That piece rarely repeats itself, but the Schubert ones do; the violist Asbjorn Norgaard, speaking from the stage, described the “Rosamunde” as one of the most repetitive works in the quartet repertoire. (Philip Glass would like a word.) But it was less so on Thursday as the Danes ­— Norgaard, as well as the violinists Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, and the cellist Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin — skipped the written reprises of the first two movements’ opening sections.Those cuts make for a slightly shorter performance, perhaps not even easily noticed by a casual listener, but not a materially different experience. More striking was the playing itself, in both the “Rosamunde” and the “Quartettsatz”: unshowy, soft with an ember glow, charismatically dancing. Phrases were passed around with ease; rhythms and voices doubled seamlessly. At any given moment there was, as David Allen recently observed in The New York Times, the impression that each note had been considered. This was ensemble music at its purest — a consensus interpretation, rendered selflessly in service of the group as instrument.Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” wasn’t written as a direct response to Schubert, but in the context of Thursday’s program it came off as something of a distant cousin; her work is less interested in repeating whole passages, but like her Viennese predecessor she obsesses here over gestures, reshaping them, foregrounding and obscuring them, layering them in explorations of counterpoint and compatibility.Read into the title what you will: daily routines, ceremonies, religion. They all are implied in the piece’s nine sections — effectively made 11 by two “Ascension” interludes with the rich harmony of a chorale and the serene lyricism of a hymn. The segments flow into one another without pause, except for some written rests, and unfold organically, each little motif introduced then recurring in a new guise.At the start are sputtering bows and glissando slides over a droning foundation that is occasionally built out into briefly sustained, then shifting chords. Those textures — others come along, including percussive col legno and open fifths that flip steady ground into weightless suspension — glide among the instruments, a vocabulary ordered then reordered, always expressing a fresh thought. Thorvaldsdottir, in a mode characteristically abstract yet suggestive, could prolong an idea like this ad infinitum. But at 21 minutes, her score speaks with poetic concision, ending before it has overstated its point.About poetry: The Danes concluded their recital with a Schubertian arrangement of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” in which the first violin acted as the soprano. But they also introduced a fifth instrument, a music box. As Oland turned its handle, the machine spun out a roll of paper punched with the swirling piano line — seeming to repeat itself but, in its small changes, irresistibly moving.Danish String QuartetPerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Michael Tilson Thomas Revels in the Present With the New York Phil

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      Thomas, who is fighting brain cancer, conducted two ruminative works, Schubert’s “Great” Symphony and his own “Meditations on Rilke.”The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always been a performer who communicates joy when sharing the music he loves. On Thursday, there was also a deep sense of gratitude: Speaking from the stage, he called his appearance with the New York Philharmonic “a lovely, affirming surprise.” Although he made no direct mention of his health, many in the audience understood the context: In the summer of 2021, Thomas, 78, learned that he had glioblastoma, an aggressive and terminal form of brain cancer. For him, every performance now is an opportunity to revel in the present.There are only two works on this program, both of them discursive and ruminative: Thomas’s “Meditations on Rilke,” which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2020, and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony.Thomas has always been a raconteur, and on Thursday he gave a 12-minute spoken introduction to “Meditations” from the podium. His speech may be more halting now, but the storytelling is as fluid as ever. And his quirky piece, which opens with a piano rag and quickly plunges into Mahlerian orchestration and psychic depths, needed at least some of that contextualization.“Meditations” is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano (the luminous Sasha Cooke), bass-baritone (an impassioned, rich-voiced Dashon Burton) and orchestra, with autumnal, meditative texts by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s also partly an instrumental fantasy based on an episode from the life of Thomas’s father, a scion of Yiddish theater giants who was thrust into a gig as a saloon pianist in an Arizona mining town (hence that opening rag); a zigzagging thesis on the similarities between cowboy songs and Schubert lieder; and a tribute to composers whose work is most deeply imprinted on Thomas, including Berg, Copland, Schubert and Mahler.Schubert’s “Great” Symphony did not need any introduction. It’s a broadly grand piece that was praised by Robert Schumann for its “heavenly length,” though many listeners have found it in need of a rigorous edit. In Thomas’s hands, it had a brilliant moment-to-moment tautness that made you forget the expanse of Schubert’s canvas, in which fine-honed details can sometimes get lost.The orchestra reveled in all those small turns — in each of the first movement’s gentle curves and crisply articulated angles, and in the surprising juxtapositions of the second movement, which shifts from proud march to sweet tenderness. Thomas, communicating with the most economical of arm gestures, made those internal transitions of mood and harmony seamless, their logic unstintingly clear. Many conductors treat the third-movement scherzo as an exercise in dance rhythm; here, the energy was certainly propulsive, but Thomas also coaxed out a riot of colors and textures.The final movement was nothing short of a joyous celebration, and more than a few of the Philharmonic’s players had barely sounded their last notes before erupting in laughter. Whether it was from the sheer pleasure of making music with Thomas or a quiet joke he might have made from the podium didn’t really matter; their delight was palpable — and shared.Michael Tilson Thomas at the New York PhilharmonicThrough Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More