The New York Philharmonic is capable of playing quietly; the orchestra just hasn’t always seemed to enjoy it. Particularly under their last music director, Jaap van Zweden, the musicians tended to approach soft dynamics unwillingly, as if they were waiting impatiently for the next explosion.
So it was noteworthy that some of the most memorable passages in the Philharmonic’s excellent concert on Thursday evening at David Geffen Hall, conducted by Karina Canellakis, were the most delicate ones.
There was the spooky haze at the start of Kaija Saariaho’s “Lumière et Pesanteur.” The somberly gentle woodwinds echoing the tune of a Bach chorale in Berg’s Violin Concerto. The hovering transcendence of the strings drawing to a nearly inaudible hush at the end of Messiaen’s “Les Offrandes Oubliées.” The haunting melody in a duo of flute and oboe that emerges from a mist in the third section of Debussy’s “La Mer.”
The players didn’t seem like they wanted these moments to end as soon as possible; they reveled in them. That attests, of course, to the musicians themselves — and, perhaps, to their continued acclimation to the renovated Geffen Hall, in which even the most fragile sounds register clearly.
But it also speaks to Canellakis’s leadership on the podium. Throughout the concert, she elicited playing of poise and patience, inspiring the ensemble to relax into phrases — which gave the music more organic energy than pressing relentlessly forward would have.
For all the bits of breathtaking stillness in the performance, there were also forceful climaxes, but Canellakis arrived at them with naturalness. At the end of the first section of “La Mer,” the volume swiftly swells from pianissimo to fortissimo. While some performances land flat on the loudness, she drew out the speed ever so slightly, making the rise in dynamics feel like a thrilling wave rather than an abrupt boom.
Her program was ambitious, and it had unusual coherence: This was a sustained exploration of musical modernism, from its early-20th-century roots in Debussy to its spectral 21st-century tail end in Saariaho.
“Lumière et Pesanteur,” Saariaho’s six-minute adaptation of part of her stage work “La Passion de Simone,” is a study in simmering textures, which are cut through at one point by a subtly yearning piccolo. On Thursday, Mindy Kaufman played the passage with a tone so whitened that it sounded like an ancient instrument, calling from far away.
Berg’s Violin Concerto begins as if the solo line is awakening, unfolding. The violinist Veronika Eberle, making her debut on the Philharmonic’s main subscription series, was better suited to that cool, measured wariness than the more heated music that follows. Canellakis smartly emphasized a moment near the start that feels like a recalled flash of Mozart’s Requiem, and later in the first movement she kept it aptly ambiguous whether the waltziness was rustic or courtly. The concerto’s final measures had a perfect golden glow.
One of Messiaen’s earliest works, “Les Offrandes Oubliées” is too little heard, and Canellakis and the orchestra captured its fevered emotions while preserving its clarity, as in a superbly balanced moment when the flute was just present enough behind the strings. Her conception of “La Mer” didn’t have the otherworldly, forbidding, even violent quality of some interpretations; this was warmly spirited, flowing, downright charming Debussy, with an ending that felt, quite simply, like a party.
Canellakis, 43, is the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. That happens to be a post that van Zweden held from 2006 to 2012, a few years before he came to New York. So you have to hope that she, like him, ends up with a prime position in the United States, one commensurate with her considerable gifts.
New York Philharmonic
This program continues through Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
