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Both lean on film-score tropes. A racing pulse out of Bernard Herrmann finds its method into the primary part of “To See the Sky,” and “Three Muses in Video Game” aspires, in its center, to John Williams-esque melodic sweep. But not like Williams’s finest, these items by no means took flight; Tan’s piece, for all its frenetic changeability, is plodding at its core.
Alessi introduced a transparent, clean sound to the solo half’s droops and hoots. His slippery, jittery cadenza within the first part, over a skinny frost of strings, is essentially the most memorable second within the rating, although the eerie sliding of these strings is an impact that will get previous quick. By the tip of the concerto, with the trombone part appearing as a form of assist workforce for the soloist, Asian and Western components come collectively, each traditions rendered equally cloying.
Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony (“Scottish”) was extra reliable, and its Adagio was pretty — the strings mixing seamlessly with the oboe line and the motion constructing with persuasive authority earlier than receding into a mild glow. The first motion was clear and nimble, its dotted rhythms by no means too heavy. But van Zweden pushed the tempos of the second and fourth, as he generally does in quick music, in a method that felt much less dangerous or exhilarating than hounded, leaving the gamers awkwardly scrambling.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, final week, fared higher. The renovated Geffen Hall has extra lucid acoustics than the house did in 2015, when van Zweden led this traditional work as a candidate for the Philharmonic’s podium. Now, as then, the third motion was the spotlight, its danciness by some means each menacing and celebratory.
It had a gracefully performed predecessor on this system in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, with Conrad Tao a witty, exuberant soloist. Tao carried out his personal cadenzas, which glanced previous Mozart’s time towards Sturm und Drang Romanticism and even hints of modernist fragmentation. And his playful ornaments within the Finale subtly enlivened this chestnut: really a gathering of previous music and recent spirit.
