Near the end of the lullaby that gives way to the blazing finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite, the music slows and thins to a whisper.
In the ballet, this is the moment when an evil sorcerer and his minions fall into a deep sleep. In some renditions, it registers as little more than a pause. But at David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Marin Alsop, restored fairy-tale mystery to that transition.
Just moments earlier, she had coaxed some of the most opulently sensual playing of the evening from the ensemble, including a voluptuous bassoon solo and swooning strings. Then, as the texture tapered, she appeared to drain the music of its pulse with medicinal deliberation. An unnerving trance settled over the room. When the finale’s horn solo emerged — noble, transcendent — it felt as if it arose from a place deep inside the subconscious.
There were small epiphanies like that throughout the concert, which also included works by Beethoven and Brahms, and a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly. Alsop has an ability to manipulate time to expressive effect, and the sound she drew from the Philharmonic was cohesive and malleable, the playing poised between discipline and individual dazzle.
In Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3, she leaned into the uncertainty of the opening phrase, shaping each swelling chord with its own gradient from quiet to louder, its own testy relationship to the beat. When the music erupted and rushed onward, the release felt all the more liberating for having gone through such visceral hesitation.
Brahms’s work Variations on a Theme by Haydn requires forensic attention to balance with ever new iterations that often need to be adjusted and contained in such a way that they just barely shine through the finicky business of the rest of the score. Alsop led a transparent reading that patiently marshaled its forces for a majestic finale.
The violinist Renaud Capuçon joined the orchestra for the world premiere of Muhly’s brightly hued but emotionally aloof concerto. Capuçon’s performance felt tense at times, although that may have partly resulted more from the visual awkwardness of his stiff stance while reading from a music stand lowered to the height of his waist. He played with a gleaming, sweet sound and glassy clean intonation in double-stop passages where the solo violin seems to act like a prism refracting light from the orchestra.
Muhly’s concerto leans heavily on traditional expressive devices including suspensions: temporary dissonances resulting from one voice moving a step out of sync with a second voice. In Baroque music, that push and pull typically lends a slow movement its sense of flow, but here, they hang in the air with throbbing ambivalence.
A strength of Muhly’s is his meticulous attention to instrumentation and the distribution of sound in space, including a wonderfully subversive series of “solos” — really just bright dabs of single notes — written for players on the last desk of the first and the second violin sections. With Capuçon spinning high lines that tangled with resonant metallic percussion accents, it was easy to miss these solos on the periphery of the orchestra, and yet they were part of a fastidiously inventive sound world.
New York Philharmonic
This program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.
