This was more or less the same lucid vision of the piece that Petrenko offered with his former ensemble, the Bavarian State Orchestra of Munich, in a recording released last year. With the Berliners on a higher level of technical accomplishment, the performance on Thursday was even better than that on the album. But it still left the symphony, especially those sizable bookend movements, fleet, sleek, slightly weightless and cool, giving the sense of a long series of superbly executed effects.
I was glad that I returned on Saturday, when the performance had settled in without losing its panache. It wasn’t that the playing became awkward, but the piece’s awkwardness, its sprawling weirdness, came through more strongly. There was the same luxury, the same silky suavity, the same lightness in the brasses, but also more fierceness and density. All those musical effects felt better integrated into a power that accumulated both within each movement and over the symphony’s full span. It was no less impressive, but hotter, more riotous.
Norman’s “Unstuck,” from 2008, was also a tightly controlled riot on Friday, and Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 1 — with Noah Bendix-Balgley, one of the orchestra’s concertmasters, as the soloist — sang with full-bodied sweetness. Korngold’s symphony, his only completed exercise in the genre, was written in the wake of World War II, after its émigré composer had achieved Hollywood fame with the scores for films like “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
A poignant jumble of modernism and nostalgia, Europe and America, “The Rite of Spring” and “Appalachian Spring,” the symphony is — like Mahler’s Seventh — a study in overripeness and unsettled mood. A silvery Scherzo sends out soaring filmic fanfares, as mystical harmonies breathe out of vigorous rhythmic activity. A big, sincere Adagio both mourns and rages. As with the Mahler, Petrenko kept the playing full, but airy and propulsive enough that the Korngold’s 50 richly scored minutes never felt too long or heavy.
The Philharmonic is hardly making anything of it, but this tour — which continues in Boston; Chicago; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Naples, Fla. — is a landmark for an ensemble that was, during its grimmest period, known as the Reichsorchester, under the control of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.
The old Reichsorchester is now led, for the first time, by a Jewish chief conductor who is touring with two symphonies by Jewish composers and a concerto featuring a Jewish violinist whose father’s family, like Korngold, fled the Nazis for the United States in the 1930s.
Bendix-Balgley returned after his affectionate performance of the Mozart for an encore of two keening, quicksilver klezmer tunes: a quiet benediction over a dark history.
Berlin Philharmonic
Performed Thursday through Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.
