When Kurt Masur began his fourth season as the music director of the Philharmonic with a gala concert Wednesday night in Avery Fisher Hall, it was clear that this season's opening was finally presenting an orchestra and a conductor at home with each other. There was nothing either had to prove.
And while a fair amount of ordinary musicianship was mixed in with some glorious moments, the event gave off an aura of comfortable seriousness. Yo-Yo Ma joined the orchestra, displaying consummate musicianship in cello works by Tchaikovsky and Boccherini. Mr. Masur showed off the robust sweetness of his ensemble in the Overture to Weber's "Oberon." And the opening movement of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra bristled with energy and imagination.
Under Mr. Masur, the orchestra has been remade; it has lost its brash, headstrong character and taken on some of the warmth and sheen of Central European ensembles. It has also, as this concert showed, become a conservative institution in the best sense. One does not look to Mr. Masur for leadership in the performance of new music. One looks to him for restorative, sometimes inspired interpretations of the great orchestral tradition.
This concert emphasized the Philharmonic's role as a conservator. A black-tie dinner followed the concert, and a Champagne reception preceded it, raising money for the musicians pension fund. But the concert had a low-key atmosphere compared with previous season openers. It was dedicated to Carlos Moseley, who for 40 years has served the orchestra as its managing director, president and chairman. After intermission the current chairman, Stephen Stamas, presented him with a commemorative scrapbook, Mr. Masur praised him, and Mr. Moseley offered thanks for the music itself, calling it "the ultimate tribute": "It touches me, heart and soul, and makes me immensely happy."
As for the music, each piece, as the program book pointed out, was concerned with looking backward to predecessors; earlier styles are refracted through later tastes. The Boccherini Cello Concerto in B flat, for example, is actually an 1895 creation of Friedrich Grutzmacher, a cellist who served in the court at Dresden. He wanted to bring the works of Boccherini to a larger public, so he took the Classicism of his predecessor and reshaped and rescored it, including themes and a movement from other Boccherini works. Classical symmetries take on a sometimes queasy character; keys slip into exotic regions; regularities turn into peculiarities. And Mr. Ma, throughout, became a welcome guide to its eccentric pleasantries.
Tchaikovksy's Variations on a Rococo Theme (Op. 33) was more remarkable, a work written in 1876 for a pupil of the enterprising Grutzmacher, in which a Mozartian theme is used as the foundation for a truly rococo piece, providing a fantastical vehicle for Mr. Ma. There was a moment of confusion toward the end, but this was extraordinary playing, spontaneous and so full of delight that even the late Romantic gestures of the composer sounded innocent and charming.
Mr. Masur treated the Weber "Oberon" Overture as another look backward, an early Romantic view of the Classical spirit. The performance was articulate; its phrasing and structure were always clear.
If those works reinterpret past styles, transforming them, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra somehow manages to leave them intact, so they peek through the skein of this late piece. Folk melodies veer into focus; quotations from Hungarian operetta make their home with a citation from Shostakovich, and the concerto grosso is turned into an elaborate modernist drama.
In the first movement it seemed as if Mr. Masur were going to give this piece a powerful reading. The music's interruptions and disruptions seemed part of a single drama in which large, imposing forces and vulnerable, introverted melodies struggle for dominance. The performance began to treat the concerto as program music, the way Bartok might have envisioned it: a tale of spiritual and political conflict and restitution.
But there were too many moments in the middle movements when episodes were left to fend for themselves, and too few when the music became gripping and weird. The ensemble's virtuosity also seemed a bit hazy from time to time. It may be that in coming days performances at the subscription concerts will bring this piece together.
In the meantime, the concert posed a challenge for the Philharmonic in its conservative role. Can it both conserve the past and act to transform it, as these pieces do? Can it also add to its regular programming more hints of the unruly styles and tastes of contemporary composition? It is something to hope for in coming seasons as the Masur era continues.
