Lupu and Yannick at the Kimmel (1st review)

No matter: Moments later, without fanfare, Radu Lupu launched into Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto and immediately made the instrument sound impeccable.

Lupu is 68 and, unlike most pianists, plays from a chair rather than a bench (Horowitz did, too). Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s second-year music director, is 38 and has stopped wearing a tie when he conducts, at least for the past year, preferring an open collar with his tuxedo — perhaps because an open neck is less constricting, or perhaps because he finds it a way of connecting with all those tieless music lovers who now dominate the Kimmel audience.

There was a time when dressing down was considered disrespectful; the second-rate nightclub singer Frank Sinatra Jr. once explained that he always wore a tux as a sign of respect for his audience. But Sinatra Jr. lacked his father’s famous pipes and so had to compensate in other ways. The impressive thing about Saturday night’s concert was the way both Lupu and Nézet-Séguin connected with the audience without uttering a word, which is as it should be in a concert.

I found myself thinking of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons. A man in a clown costume sits behind a desk in an office; a client sits before him on the other side. “Yes, I can see your point,” the clown says to the client. “But on the other hand, if I weren’t a really good lawyer, could I practice law dressed as a clown?”

That was back in the ’80s. Nowadays, many really good lawyers practice almost every day in jeans and T-shirts, because it makes their 20-something Internet billionaire clients comfortable. If you’re a really good conductor or pianist, you can wear whatever clothes and sit in whatever kind of seat you like.

But I suspect that’s not really the message of Yannick’s open-throated look. He’s trying, I think, to demystify the music and make it more accessible by focusing on its essence rather than its packaging. Still, only a really good conductor with a very strong sense of self-esteem could carry that off.

To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.