The New York Philharmonic is flying free.
Its former music director, Jaap van Zweden, left last summer. Its next, Gustavo Dudamel, is gradually deepening his commitment — including performances of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall through Sunday — but doesn’t officially start until fall 2026.
Those who follow orchestras tend to assume that their quality will dip without a devoted director to oversee things. Partly because of the myth of the indispensable, all-powerful maestro, it can be easy to fear that conductorless periods will be rudderless ones.
That certainly hasn’t been the case this season at Geffen Hall. The Philharmonic has been sounding great: fresh, vital, engaged, more cohesive. The chilly blare that seemed to frost the hall’s acoustics when it reopened in 2022 after a renovation has warmed and softened.
The most telling music-making of the year was in a program last month led by the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer. The final hour of the concert was given over to a rare performance of Bartok’s fairy-tale ballet “The Wooden Prince,” a sprawling, instrument-packed score that swerves from candied to bombastic, from radiant expanses to driving dances. The orchestra rose to the occasion with playing that was nuanced and colorful, and in Mozart’s “Turkish” Violin Concerto, the ensemble matched Lisa Batiashvili’s sensual flair.
But in a way, I was even more impressed by the opener: Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute,” a chestnut of the kind that is often passed over quickly in rehearsal. It glowed.
The true test of a great orchestra — what reveals its base line standard — isn’t how it does in the big symphonies and premieres that steal the lion’s share of attention and applause. It’s how the group sounds in little repertory standards, and that “Magic Flute” overture may have been the most encouraging seven minutes of the season.
Encouraging, too, was the appointment in December of Matías Tarnopolsky, an experienced administrator, as the Philharmonic’s chief executive. Tarnopolsky is under pressure to resolve a continuing legal battle between the orchestra and two musicians it fired after claims of sexual assault and harassment, but he has longtime ties with Dudamel that bode well for the coming era.
Dudamel, who remains the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director through next season, didn’t reach the podium in New York until March. Without a music director to bring the ensemble back after summer break, the honors went to Michael Tilson Thomas, who led Mahler’s Fifth Symphony last September.
It was a moving farewell to the orchestra for Tilson Thomas, who announced in February that he would scale back his podium appearances after a recurrence of brain cancer. The playing was inspired, with unusually sweet delicacy to lilting ländler dance rhythms and a mysterious softness in the strings after the stony force of the opening bars.
The orchestra wasn’t flawless in those early months. True, Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony under Santtu-Matias Rouvali was luminous, but Tchaikovsky’s Sixth under Rafael Payare tended bland, and in Beethoven’s Seventh under Manfred Honeck, the ensemble often sounded at loose ends as it tried to follow his intriguing, idiosyncratic interpretation.
Yet there were heartening signs even there. Honeck presented Beethoven’s second movement as a hushed chorale rather than the traditional sturdy dirge, a choice that elicited extraordinarily silky sound from a group that generally doesn’t like to murmur. Payare’s concert began with the Philharmonic’s first performances of Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Fairytale Poem,” played with evocative regard to piquant details.
Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, a work that can drag, was buoyant and flowing under Kazuki Yamada in November, even if the concert was a reminder of the burden on the Philharmonic, with the world’s best ensembles constantly touring a few blocks away: The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam had just played the symphony with considerably more glamour at Carnegie Hall.
In the new year, the Philharmonic emerged from its holiday break sounding vigorous, with the winds cozy in their thicket of intertwining lines during Kevin John Edusei’s taut rendition of Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
As with Honeck’s Beethoven, the orchestra seemed to enjoy its full dynamic range in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth under Daniele Rustioni, as well as in a program led by Karina Canellakis that explored musical modernism from its 20th-century roots into the 21st. To hear the orchestra reveling in really quiet playing was a joy, and the energy was palpable when Jakub Hrusa led Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, with the eruptive Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and Brahms’s First Symphony in April.
Dudamel’s first visit of the season, in March, featured glistening Ravel and granitic Varèse, with an excitingly volatile performance of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” to close. Last week, he conducted Philip Glass’s 11th Symphony; I think the piece is dreary, but the orchestra played it with focus, drive and a warm tone.
Mahler, who served as the Philharmonic’s music director near the end of his life, is a core composer for this orchestra, and Dudamel led the Ninth Symphony two years ago in his first concerts after his appointment. On Thursday, he charted a hot-tempered, sharply pointed course through the weird meanderings of the Seventh, reveling in incoherent juxtapositions and disjointed transitions.
In the second movement, one of two Nachtmusik (Night Music) sections, the character of the phrasing was grimly curt, with a sick suavity in the cellos that evoked overripe decadence. A rhapsodic passage in the other Nachtmusik was a rich, sudden flood, and the spooky central Scherzo between them was grandly harsh.
This wasn’t a super-stylish Seventh. The Philharmonic’s sound was sometimes ungainly, with the intonation in the brasses not always spot-on. Dudamel’s incensed interpretation tended to encourage the orchestra’s brisk steamroller approach to virtuosity more than subtlety.
But a slow section in the first movement was a solemn, muted hymn, touched by birdsong. More and more this season, the Philharmonic seemed to embrace whispering — which, for an ensemble that’s long been best known for shouting, is welcome news.
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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