LINCOLN CENTER

Avery Fisher Hall
New York Philharmonic

Christoph von Dohnanyi - Conductor
Martin Helmchen - Piano

Dvorak - Piano Concerto
Dvorak - Symphony No. 9, From the New World

The 1st movement of No. 9

Slow movement with melody we all know.

The joy of the New York Philharmonic is the sound it is able to produce.  In a perverse way, the music and the composers are merely the facilitators to enable the musicians to produce the sound.  The musicians have to have something to play!  Yes, we enjoy the beauty and creativity of the music.  But, we love the sound of the orchestra.

It's like having a beautifully built thoroughbred horse.  You can put any rider and any saddle you wish on it, but watching the horse move is the treat.  Of course, the better the rider, the more fun to watch.

With that point made, when the orchestra plays a particularly interesting and beautiful piece, it all comes together for a wonderful experience of hearing the best perform at their best.  Beautiful music, beautiful sound, wonderful evening.

MUSIC | MUSIC REVIEW

A Steady Hand at the Helm as Heat Turns Into Sparks

Dohnanyi Conducts New York Philharmonic in Dvorak Works

By ZACHARY WOOLFEDEC. 14, 2014

Call it “Demi-Dohnanyi/Dvorak.” After missing the first week of the New York Philharmonic mini-festival named for him, the eminent conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi, evidently recovered from the flu, made it to Avery Fisher Hall on Thursday for the series’s second and final program.

What was supposed to have been an immersion in a single maestro was instead a study in contrasts. The stand-in last week, Krzysztof Urbanski, music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, is 32 and athletic on the podium. Mr. Dohnanyi is 85, his presence calm and collected, his gestures (seen on Saturday evening) restrained.

His interpretation of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” was calm and collected, too. Full of individual marks, from the daringly drawn-out pause that followed the subdued opening statement to the wistful elongation of a note in a violin melody, this was steady, secure, sometimes stolid playing. Brass fanfares were emphasized in a way that made the work seem more stentorian than the norm.

Atmosphere was conjured, nowhere more so than at the start of the Largo, when the strings made a hazy, vibrating halo around the classic English horn melody. But details were highlighted at the expense of structural logic, and this ruthlessly forward-moving work meandered.

Programmed by the New York Philharmonic for the third time in three seasons, the Ninth (1893) still clearly packs them in, but the novelty here was Dvorak’s Piano Concerto in G minor (1876), redolent of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Liszt. While it was done in Avery Fisher Hall as recently as June, with Garrick Ohlsson and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Philharmonic hadn’t performed it since 1986.

Beyond attracting an audience, it makes sense to play this concerto — with its premonitions of the Ninth’s declarative rhythms and its aching slow melody, like a germinal “New World” Largo — opposite this evergreen symphony. Mr. Dohnanyi’s control was such that in the first movement, the orchestra executed a sudden diminuendo more unified and yet also more subtle than its usual.

He led a performance so streamlined and lithe that it exposed some wiry strings and thin brasses. But this conception was perfectly tailored to the lucid heat of the rising pianist Martin Helmchen, making an impressive Philharmonic debut with these performances.

Mr. Helmchen has a noble bearing and a noble sound, shaping lines as elegant and clean as a Greek temple’s. While Dvorak’s concerto is notorious for the discomfort it induces in its soloists, he never seemed to break a sweat, unleashing chromatic runs and laying down octaves with a style that was technically assured but also sly and nuanced, passing in and out of the orchestral textures. If Mr. Dohnanyi kept the emotional temperature rather cool throughout the concert, Mr. Helmchen provided ample sparks.