Gilbert leads the Orchestra (3rd review)

Just one flaw:
Gilbert shows his stuff

TOM PURDOM

As I explained in a piece I wrote last summer, I’ve followed Alan Gilbert’s career ever since his student days at Curtis. The first time I saw him conduct more than a decade ago, I immediately decided he possessed the leadership qualities a successful conductor must bring to his work. Gilbert was recently appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic, so time seems to have vindicated my judgment.

On the other hand, I reached that conclusion on the basis of two short student performances— the second half of a concert-opera production and one medium-size chamber piece. I’d never actually heard Gilbert conduct a full-length orchestral program.

I have now heard him conduct two programs with two different orchestras. Can a judgment based primarily on character survive an extended look at the performer’s artistic qualities?

Gilbert’s work with both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra this month suffered one serious flaw. Both orchestras tended to blare at the big moments when everybody is blasting away at the same time. The excess volume obscured the details that create effective textures.

That may have occurred because Gilbert was too anxious to make an impression. It’s also possible that Gilbert didn’t realize the need to correct for Verizon Hall’s acoustics. With that one qualifier, however, I will stand by my original assessment. Gilbert possesses the basic qualities a conductor should posses. He knows what he wants to do with the scores he’s working with, the musicians give him what he wants, and he usually wants the right things.

Interesting, colorful noise

In the first two pieces on the Philadelphia Orchestra program, the principal conductorly virtue on display was the ability to keep things under control. The opener, Anders Hillborg’s 2002 Exquisite Corpse, was an opus that could easily slide into chaos. Its overall arc is a long journey with no conclusion— a dynamic, very complex steady state.

As Beeri Moalem and Dan Coren note in their BSR reviews, Exquisite Corpse takes its name from a Surrealist word game. It’s a prime example of the great truth that the damnedest procedures can inspire successful works of art. There were times when Exquisite Corpse sounded like pure noise, but the composer had made sure it was interesting, colorful noise.

The second item on the program, Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion, and Orchestra, crowded the front of the stage with two pianos, two sets of percussion equipment, and chairs for two page-turners. In a standard concerto, the conductor is essentially an accompanist following the soloist’s lead. For the Bartok, Gilbert had to coordinate his accompaniment with one world-class pianist, two star percussionists and the pianist’s wife.

Handling the slow movements

The Orchestra concert and the Curtis concert both ended with symphonies by Denmark’s Carl Nielsen— a composer Gilbert has presumably become familiar with during his tenure as the conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.

The Orchestra’s selection, Nielsen’s Second Symphony, portrays the four personality types defined by Hippocrates. The opening movement was marred by that unfortunate tendency to blare, but Gilbert proved he can do a beautiful job with passages like the breezily dreamy slow movement. As in the earlier pieces, I was once again impressed by the control Gilbert applied to critical features like the movement’s final fade.

Wordless floating voices

Curtis’s Nielsen offering contained the two best sequences in Gilbert’s double-decker Philadelphia visit. The second movement is a poetic, ringing pastorale that includes a wordless vocal part that soprano Charlotte Dobbs and baritone Adrian Kramer floated over the orchestra from a position behind the strings. The last movement is a surge of broad, anthem-like melodies combined with elements that add complexity to the texture.

I attended the Curtis concert with a soprano who sings with a local choral group, and she pointed out a detail most non-musicians (including me) probably wouldn’t notice. During that big final movement, Gilbert let the section that was currently playing the melody have its head and concentrated on the musicians playing the other elements. He kept the proceedings coordinated, in other words, by focusing his efforts on the sections that needed the most attention.

When Gilbert conducted his half of the Curtis opera the first time I saw him back in the ’90s, I was struck by the way the musicians dug into their instruments after he took over the podium. At both these concerts, every face on the stage looked taut with concentration.

Advice for the search committee

In the last year, two major orchestras have handed their futures to young American conductors, the other pioneer being the Baltimore symphony, which gave the nod to Marin Alsop. For the New York Philharmonic, the decision could almost be considered a no-brainer. Gilbert made frequent appearances with that orchestra while he honed his skills with the Royal Stockholm and the Santa Fe Opera.

Other young conductors are out there, American and foreign. The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia has exposed its audience to several of them, in addition to its own conductor, Ignat Solzhenitsyn. Can’t the Philadelphia Orchestra’s search committee find one or two who deserve the same kind of regular exposure the New York Philharmonic gave Alan Gilbert?

In fact, it’s not unreasonable to ask why we didn’t hear more of Gilbert’s work over the past few years. He is, after all, an alumnus of a Philadelphia educational institution.



To read another review by Dan Coren, click here.
To read another review by Beeri Moalem, click here.