The end of the Philadelphia Orchestra's 2014-15 season

Somebody, I guess, has to write the music of our moment, and Muhly, a 33-year-old Vermont native, is one of the hotter properties around. He’s a crossover musician who has worked with pop artists and scored Hollywood films; the question is whether he has a distinctive voice, which in this eclectic age seems harder and harder to come by. Mixed Messages — the title wasn’t particularly reassuring — seemed not so much an answer to this question as a challenge to it. The music sets up various clashes between orchestral choirs against an underlying minimalist beat, with some lyrical passages thrown in to show that Muhly can write a tune, too. The result was skillful and fitfully interesting, but at the end of the music’s 12-minute span, there was no particular sense of profile or result.

Echoes in a vacuum

Most second-tier music in any era is derivative; a lot of forgotten composers sounded like Brahms at the end of the 19th century, and a lot of them like Stravinsky a bit later on. The problem today — and it has been the case for some time — is that there simply aren’t any dominant voices to follow. What this produces is eclecticism, in which music becomes a dab of this and a dab of that. When that becomes the norm, eclecticism is then seen as a value in itself rather than as the absence of an ordering style produced by strong talent and, in the lucky case, genius. That is where we are and what music such as Muhly’s represents.

The centerpiece of the program was Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, with the outstanding Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili — currently artist in residence of both the New York Philharmonic and Hamburg’s NDR Symphony — as soloist. As with many of Shostakovich’s works, the concerto has a lugubrious history. It was completed just before the notorious attack on musical “formalism” by Andrei Zhdanov at the 1948 Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers, which identified by name Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and others as the purveyors of an art that reeked of “the musical gas chambers,” among other choice epithets. Zhdanov’s attack signaled the beginning of Stalin’s final purges.

Shostakovich had been through this drill before, when a denunciation of his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, had compelled him to withdraw his Fourth Symphony, which would not be heard for 25 years. He quietly shelved the new violin concerto after showing it to its dedicatee, David Oistrakh, privately performing it on the piano for close friends. Not until 1955 could it be heard publicly, and when it was published it bore the opus number 99, implying it to be a recent work. In short, the very fact that the work had been hidden itself had to be hidden, and it was some time before it was renumbered as Op. 77.

Hamlet confronts Stalin

Oistrakh, who owns this work as thoroughly as any artist can, described the solo part as Shakespearean in scope, and it was a felicitous comparison. The opening Moderato is in effect a long, ruminative solo for the violin against a mostly dark and subdued accompaniment that only occasionally pauses it. The third movement, an Andante built on a passacaglia figure, similarly foregrounds the violin, finally yielding to an extended cadenza in which it plays completely alone. In contrast, the orchestra comes to the fore in the second-movement Scherzo Allegro and the rondo finale, challenging the soloist to keep up. Might the Shostakovich character be Hamlet? In the soloist’s alternation between brooding meditation and sudden flashes of engagement, the conceit is perhaps not wholly implausible — and Shostakovich did set Hamlet both for stage and film in other scores. That something was rotten in the state of Russia he might have allowed us to take for granted.

Batiashvili’s performance was as far from Oistrakh’s driving vigor as can be imagined, but on its own terms it was deeply felt and uncommonly probing. Women have played Hamlet well, too, and this introspective reading — with flashes of steely brilliance and assertion when required — was a welcome addition to the growing performance tradition of what has now become the most internationally popular violin concerto since Sibelius. Only in the more orchestrally dense passages of the work could one have wished for more projection, but it was a price worth paying for what Batiashvili gave us, and her technique throughout was superb. Nézet-Séguin’s accompaniment was deftly coloristic, and the soloist and the conductor had a clear rapport: Batiashvili leaned so closely toward the podium that at times it almost seemed as if she were playing for Yannick personally.

Simply irresistible

Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony, whose world premiere the Orchestra gave under Leopold Stokowski in 1936, completed the program. Rachmaninoff wrote that the symphony was performed “wonderfully” but that the reception was “sour.” That has changed with the years, and the Third has long been one of the Orchestra’s signature works. A ceaseless fountain of melody and invention, it lacks the tautness of argument one expects of a symphony — the complaint of an early reviewer — but it is so enticing on every page that, like a treat you shouldn’t have but can’t resist, you wolf down the calories without worrying about the final nourishment. Maybe what’s missing is the composer’s characteristic melancholy, often a unifying element; what one hears instead is a remote nostalgia. Nézet-Séguin put the work through its paces smartly, noticing its touches of austerity, and the audience departed happily.