New York Philharmonic – Alan Gilbert, conductor; Yefim Bronfman, piano. October 24, 2014.

Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.  Orchestra T106 ($61.50).

Program

Piano Concerto No. 3, BB 127 (1945) by Bartok (1881-1945).

Symphony No. 8 in C minor (1887/1890, ed. Nowak 1955/94) by Bruckner (1824-96).

For us, this is the first New York Philharmonic concert this season.  The tickets were bought with an eClub discount offer; for $59 a ticket we got excellent seats.  On the other hand, I am slightly worried that discounts were already needed to fill the hall so early in the season, and with a popular artist at that.

I didn’t give the program a lot of scrutiny before deciding to buy the tickets.  If I had been a bit more diligent, I would have discovered that we heard the most recent Philharmonic performances of both pieces (Bartok in April, 2014 and Bruckner in January, 2012.)  And to top that off, the last New York Philharmonic concert we saw also had Gilbert and Bronfman collaborating.  (Dicterow and Bray were also on tap at that farewell series.)  Had I noticed those factors, I would have saved the time and money for another concert: there is so much I haven’t heard.  It is a good thing I didn’t though; I would have missed a very delightful evening of music.

Perhaps the eClub and other discount offers did the trick, to my relief the auditorium was quite full.

I didn’t quite get the Bartok piece the last time I saw it with Peter Serkin at the piano and Pablo Heras-Casado conducting (and we saw Heras-Casado just a week before, speaking of the recycling theme.)  My reaction to that performance was at best lukewarm, and that because of his family name.  Tonight’s was a completely different performance.  Bronfman’s playing gripped the audience at the very beginning and was thrilling till the last note.  What I remembered as muddled and uninspired playing became crisp and spirited.  Since Bronfman was around a lot the last couple of seasons, he and Gilbert worked together very well, each supporting and urging the other along.

I had a lot of good things to say about the Bruckner performance led by Zubin Mehta.  I recall my reaction as being very positive, although a re-reading of the blog entry didn’t confirm that recollection.  A CD I bought since has been in my car for a long time.  During our driving trips, whenever we find ourselves in a location without good radio access we will turn on the CD, and there it is, all 80 minutes of it.  In other words, we have gotten very familiar with this particular symphony.

With a large scale work like this, nothing beats a live concert.  Especially one that is as well executed as this one.  When I heard this in 2012, I was trying very hard to analyze the music.  Today I just went along for the ride.  If it wants to keep coming back to the same theme, so be it.  If it wants to be very loud, so be it.  (Many musicians had to put on ear plugs, though.)  This is a long composition, played after a full concerto and an intermission, yet it didn’t feel long at all.  And to the artists’ credit, they were as fresh at the end as they had been at the beginning of the Bartok concerto.

Bruckner’s compositions are well-known to have gone through many different alterations after first completion, with many of the changes approved by the composer himself.  One does wonder if this particular theme (or variations thereof) needed to be repeated so often.  Anne tried to keep count, and she thought it was 68 times.  No one tried to cut out a couple of instances of this repetition?

The orchestra has not named a new concertmaster yet, as far as I know.  Apparently they were auditioning for one at this concert.  A young Asian fellow.  He seemed to fit in okay – not that I am in any position to judge – but perhaps he moved more like a soloist.  Speaking of personnel changes, there are quite a few changes to the roster.  The Ginsbergs (with the husband being the principal second violin) retired, so there are a couple of openings there.  Orin O’Brien is now part of the regular rotation (a demotion?).  Joshua Weilerstein left his post as assistant conductor, in his place is Courtney Lewis.  Those were known or at least not unexpected.  Most interestingly, Gilbert seems to have lost his chair.  Oh the palace intrigue.

Anne was not feeling well (we later decided it was stomach flu).  After a quick dinner at Europan where she had only soup, we bought pre-concert talk tickets.  She couldn’t make it as she thought she might black out, so I went by myself.  The speaker Mark Travis, the orchestra’s “in-house producer,” probably was a last minute substitute for the scheduled speaker.  His talk was not particularly insightful (on a good day I might come close,) but he did remind me Bruckner and Brahms were contemporaries and to a certain extent rivals.  As a young music student I learned the 3 B’s: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.  If Bruckner had written a wider variety of music, it could have been Bach, Beethoven, and Bruckner!

When this season was announced way back when, I lamented that it didn’t look as exciting as some prior seasons.  Actually with our rather busy travel schedule this year I had to work hard to pick ten concerts for the subscription.  I don’t remember exactly why this concert was not on my original pick list, perhaps it was my crazy travel schedule these two months, or because I thought I had heard the pieces before.  It was good that I still ended up going to this one.  If others are close to this high quality, this will be a great season after all.

The New YorkTimes reviewer spared no word in praise of Bronfman’s performance.  She is a bit more reserved when it came to Bruckner, saying that the performance “left [her] feeling adrift and disengaged.”