EGN NEWS DESK
Recently, there was extra hypothesis than normal about the way forward for American orchestras. This week, the 28-year-old conductor Klaus Mäkelä turned the youngest music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and there are openings at plenty of the highest-profile ensembles within the nation — particularly after Esa-Pekka Salonen introduced his departure from the San Francisco Symphony in March.
One conductor underneath shut watch is Karina Canellakis, who made her New York Philharmonic debut on Thursday. A born-and-raised New Yorker, she is the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra — a job as soon as held by the Philharmonic’s departing music director, Jaap van Zweden — and principal visitor conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
With the Philharmonic, Canellakis made an thrilling and memorable debut, in a program that leaned closely towards meditative, dreamy reflection. She started with an incisive studying of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, retaining her conducting elegantly restrained, even economized — gestures that befitted this sharply angled, temporary set.
Where the Webern was spare, the subsequent piece, Strauss’s mystic “Death and Transfiguration,” was luxurious, with Canellakis and the orchestra rendering phrases in richly hued colours and delicate curves. She harnessed the ensemble’s full energy, using over the heaving waves of sound with a muscular confidence.
After a multiyear delay due to the pandemic, the German-Japanese pianist Alice Sara Ott lastly made her Philharmonic debut as properly, taking part in Ravel’s jazz-fueled Piano Concerto in G, which match her like a customized swimsuit. She had huge enjoyable with the 2 glowing and vivacious outer actions and introduced deep tenderness to the inside gradual motion, which she rendered as intimately as if she had been taking part in in a small nightclub.
This concerto, accomplished in 1931, is one thing like a French sibling of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Ravel requested to listen to the American composer play when he visited New York in 1928. (The admiration was mutual; at one level, Gershwin sought to check with Ravel.)
Ott introduced a fragile, dreamy contact when the rating demanded it, together with throughout a very magical trade of finely filigreed work with the Philharmonic’s harpist, Nancy Allen. But Ott, who has spoken with candor about dwelling with a number of sclerosis, additionally got here armed with virtuoso pyrotechnics. With ferocious precision, she matched the whip-crack of percussion that opens the concerto.
As an encore, she carried out Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 wistfully and freely floating. Rare is the pianist who permits herself to completely loosen up inside Satie’s unmetered labyrinth; Ott was the imaginative exception. (She prefers to play barefoot, and scurried merrily on and offstage with the lightness of a dancer.)
Like the Strauss earlier, Scriabin’s large-scale, turbulent “Poem of Ecstasy” is surge after surge of burning want: because the novelist Henry Miller as soon as memorably known as it, “a shower of ice, cocaine and rainbows.” Canellakis allowed herself the luxurious of sweeping gestures from the rostrum, however she retained tremendous sculptural management over her absolutely amassed forces. Psychically, artistically, it was worlds away from all the music-business-world discuss of conductor strikes and contracts.
New York Philharmonic
This program repeats by Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
