With two seasons to go before Gustavo Dudamel takes over as Music Director, the Philharmonic is hosting a parade of guest conductors. This week Ken-David Masur led a varied program curated by the orchestra’s musicians. Opening with a fusillade of forceful chords, August Read Thomas’s 2024 Bebop Kaleidoscope, a nine-minute tribute to ‘Duke Ellington’, delivered a constantly shifting pattern of short, sharply accented sounds, ranging from big-band riffs to more lyrical duos, trios and fanfares. Despite its title, the capricious, carefully layered score is not a jazz number per se, but an evocation of the kinetic energy of the bebop era, a work fizzing with life and color, constantly evolving and searching but with no feeling of resolution.
Completely different was Mahler’s compilation of movements from Bach’s Orchestral Suites 2 and 3. This week’s performances were the Phil’s first complete ones since the composer’s 1909-1911 tenure as Music Director. The arrangement combines the Overture and Rondo and Badinerie of the Suite in B-minor (BWV1067) with the Air and Gavottes I & II from Suite in D-minor (BWV1068). Performed with an expanded string section and rich sound, Bach’s music sounded distinctly Mahlerian yet managed to remain faithful to the Baroque style. Flutists Robert Langevin and Yoobin Son played especially well, and the ensemble as a whole was beautifully balanced.
Masur’s modest, unfussy conducting style was most impressive in Ellington’s Harlem (also known as A Tone Parallel to Harlem, orch. Lusher Henderson, ed. John Mauceri), a vibrant fifteen-minute tone poem celebrating the dynamism and culture of the composer’s adopted New York City neighborhood. The strings could have easily faded the colors in this musical portrait; instead it enhanced them. There was a wonderful, improvised feeling throughout, and many superb moments: Christopher Martin’s plunger-muted trumpet call at the opening and the orchestra’s elegant choral response; the percussionists’ fluctuating tempos as they see-sawed between a spirited swing feel and an upbeat Latin groove; Anthony McGill’s hauntingly melodic clarinet solo; and the blaring and joyful brass at the finale.
The second half began with a radiant reading of Blumine, which originally served as the second movement of Mahler’s First Symphony but was excised after three performances. The shimmering strings in the opening set the scene for the first of Christopher Martin’s exquisite trumpet solos. The intricate wind writing sparkled as the instruments intertwined and came together. Masur, in full command throughout, maintained an undercurrent of tension right up to the final chord.
That tension flagged in the Prelude to Act Two of Richard Strauss’s Guntram, a Wagnerian-influenced tale of love and redemption centering on a medieval minstrel. If little else, the outing allowed us to hear the most notable music from what the composer described as “an apprentice piece by a fledgling Wagnerian who was sensing his way to independence.”
Things perked up again with an energetic account of Hindemith’s sparkling but rarely heard Symphonic Metamorphosis. Masur elicited all the bounce and charm of the score, and the players responded with panache and brilliance. The most conspicuously characterful moments included the colorful Scherzo, the dancing flute solo near the end of the Andantino, and the sprightly spring in the concluding March.
There was an encore: a dazzling rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture, without a conductor, a practice that has become customary since the orchestra performed it that way at the former Music Director’s memorial service in 1990. It was an appropriately celebratory selection to mark not only the end of the concert but the announcement earlier in the day of the orchestra and its musicians’ union settling on a new three-year contract.
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