EGN NEWS DESK
Jaap, we hardly knew ye.
On Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, carried out a lean, pushed rendition of Mahler’s sprawling Second Symphony. After two extra performances by Saturday, he’ll depart his Lincoln Center podium, a mere six years after stepping onto it.
No Philharmonic creative chief has been much less current in entrance of its gamers and viewers since Mahler himself, who died two years into his tenure, in 1911. There was barely sufficient time to satisfy van Zweden, not to mention get a full sense of him, as man or maestro.
He had no signature initiatives, and his selection of works revealed little private stamp. His interpretations of the classics solely often relaxed from a tense punchiness. And although I wasn’t at all times displeased after listening to him lead a program, I used to be by no means impressed to return and listen to it once more.
The interval of van Zweden’s tenure has been vastly consequential for the Philharmonic. There was the orchestra’s survival by the prolonged pandemic lockdown, the renovation of its house at Geffen Hall and a flood of music by composers past the same old roster of white males of the distant previous.
But van Zweden, 63, has appeared extra a participant in all this than a frontrunner. When he was getting ready to start out in New York, he expressed enthusiasm about bringing again Deborah Borda, an business legend, as chief government. Having such a robust, visionary administrative companion, although, ended up making this really feel extra like Borda’s period than van Zweden’s.
The pandemic arrived throughout his second season. Van Zweden, a Dutch-born violinist who got here to conducting late, spent greater than a yr at house within the Netherlands and appeared absent from the orchestra, even by the social-distanced norms of that videoconferencing period.
The lengthy break allowed him and the Philharmonic to take inventory. Both sides appear to have acknowledged the match wasn’t proper, and there was greater than a touch of euphemism when he introduced, again in 2021, that he can be leaving and stated a significant motive was to spend extra time in Europe together with his household. Less than a yr later, he took a job in Seoul.
Van Zweden’s closing months have been shadowed by resurfaced sexual misconduct allegations inside the gamers’ ranks, grabbing consideration from what ought to have been his victory lap. But his lame-duck standing was cemented a yr in the past, when the superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, as outgoing as van Zweden is reserved, was introduced as his successor and the orchestra may barely resist beginning to flip the web page.
Yet even Dudamel could be daunted by the place. When you’re the conductor of, say, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which van Zweden constructed from good to wonderful within the decade earlier than he got here to the Philharmonic, you’re a metropolis’s high-culture star.
In New York, although, the orchestra and its maestro should compete with the mighty Metropolitan Opera subsequent door and the world-class ensembles biking by Carnegie Hall — to say nothing of the remainder of a crowded cultural scene. Oh, and the ghost of Leonard Bernstein nonetheless hovers, reminding everybody that you just’re not bringing the Philharmonic almost as a lot charismatic glamour as he did within the Sixties.
It’s an irresistible however maybe unattainable job, and van Zweden didn’t summon the artistry or creativity to outline himself inside it. He was employed by the Philharmonic to repeat what he did in Dallas, this time with a higher-end start line: to implement rigorous requirements and gleaming depth in time-honored favorites, whipping the orchestra’s Beethoven and Bruckner into form.
As normal with the Philharmonic’s post-Bernstein alternatives, selecting van Zweden and his martinet forcefulness embodied an “reverse of the final man” ethos — on this case, Alan Gilbert, who had pushed for unconventional programming and extra easygoing music-making. When van Zweden was about to start, Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, advised Strings journal, “We’ve not had as a lot meat-and-potatoes repertoire as possibly we should always have had.”
Translation: Things had gotten just a little too attention-grabbing underneath Gilbert, and a large contingent of gamers needed a swing again towards custom.
That was a doubtful recipe for fulfillment. And, in any case, van Zweden didn’t constantly deliver the coruscating Brahms and Shostakovich that was hoped for. Surprisingly, for a conductor hardly recognized for up to date music, a few of his most memorable performances had been of recent items and premieres, which by all accounts he took on with honorable conscientiousness, and which he tended to guide with sensitivity.
The exact moodiness he introduced out of David Lang’s one-act opera “prisoner of the state” involves thoughts, as does John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives,” glistening underneath his baton. There had been brooding renditions of Julius Eastman’s crushing “Symphony No. II” and, a couple of weeks in the past, Sofia Gubaidulina’s darkly obsessive viola concerto.
In the classics, although, van Zweden usually appeared to be imitating the blazing fashion of Georg Solti on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra within the Seventies and ’80s: crashing louds; fierce fasts; clenched-fist management over phrasing; a way of the conductor’s foot firmly on the orchestra’s accelerator.
But if van Zweden may produce a few of Solti’s hard-edged glint, he and the Philharmonic struggled to conjure the Chicagoans’ superior radiance and cliffhanger rigidity. The leads to New York could possibly be tightly performed and exactly detailed — as within the Mahler on Thursday — however looming bigger in reminiscence are the likes of van Zweden’s harried Beethoven Ninth, a dully pummeling “Rite of Spring,” a “Pines of Rome” unsubtle even by “Pines of Rome” requirements, a charmless trudge by Copland’s Third Symphony, a briskly unmoving Mozart Requiem.
His alternatives from music of the previous had been unusually slender, with out quirks or depth. Two years in the past, when the Philharmonic gave its first performances of the little-done twelfth Symphony of Shostakovich, whose work is an efficient match for van Zweden’s fashion, it was led by another person. Van Zweden was not in New York lengthy sufficient to supply greater than a scattering of even composers he focuses on; the Second this week was simply the fourth of Mahler’s 9 symphonies he has carried out right here.
With a pair of vocal soloists and a hundred-strong choir, an enormous orchestra, an organ and church-style bells, the Second, almost an hour and a half lengthy and nicknamed the “Resurrection,” is considered one of classical music’s all-purpose big-event items. Bernstein introduced it out for events each celebratory (his thousandth Philharmonic efficiency) and mournful (after John F. Kennedy’s assassination). The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has scheduled it for his closing program with the San Francisco Symphony, a yr from now.
On Thursday, the piece was clear, clear, excellently performed and effectively managed, with van Zweden coolly relishing every swoop as much as one other blasting climax. The textures revered Mahler’s ardour for transparency: the flute audible by the strings, the harps palpable amid the brasses. Ekaterina Gubanova sang “Urlicht,” the nice alto aria, with melting tone, and Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s soprano, wealthy however not heavy, soared with the mellow New York Philharmonic Chorus within the grand finale.
The heat ovation raised the query: Had the pandemic not derailed him, would van Zweden have ultimately settled in with the Philharmonic, and with New York?
Many doubted from the beginning that an artist recognized primarily for strict rehearsal self-discipline in chestnuts would have the sweeping imaginative and prescient to information a significant orchestra into the longer term. But generally music administrators take some time to jell. At the Cleveland Orchestra, it was six years or so earlier than Franz Welser-Möst and the gamers discovered an actual groove; when he leaves in 2027, it will likely be after a quarter-century.
At Geffen Hall of late, there have been glimpses of what may need been. In October, the phrasing in Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony felt much less rigidly manicured than elegantly sculpted, the muscle leavened with naturalness. Van Zweden has been a courteous concerto accompanist, and in January, with the pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, a soloist of patrician grace, Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto glowed, surging ahead with out feeling pressed.
Finally, the music was respiration.
