LINCOLN CENTER

New York Philharmonic
Beethoven & Strauss

Suppé - Poet and Peasant Overture
R. Strauss - Oboe Concerto
Beethoven - Symphony No. 6, Pastoral

Manfred Honeck - Conductor
Liang Wang - Oboe

Beethoven’s love of nature overflows in his Pastoral Symphony. Listen for the babbling brook, bird calls, a summer storm, and the sun. Plus Strauss’s virtuosic Oboe Concerto with Principal Oboe Liang Wang, whose “ability to hold the pitches true, with haunting beauty and eerie calm, [is] astonishing” (The New York Times).

The New York Times review is below.

Review: Manfred Honeck Leads the New York Philharmonic 

Both Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony begin quietly yet actively, as if we were joining music that’s already flowing. It’s an effect maximized through naturalness and subtlety, qualities native to Manfred Honeck, who led the New York Philharmonic in both works on Thursday at David Geffen Hall. 

The conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Honeck was widely believed a contender for the Philharmonic music directorship, which recently went to Jaap van Zweden. If Mr. van Zweden, who starts in 2018, seems cast as the ensemble’s strict taskmaster father, producing performances of driven intensity, Mr. Honeck is perhaps its sweet-tempered uncle, fostering a mood of bright, unforced geniality. 

Mr. van Zweden’s account of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the fall was hypercontrolled, blazing. Mr. Honeck’s take on the “Pastoral,” Beethoven’s Sixth, was warmer, creamier, smiling, the third movement’s merriness alert yet suave. 

The storm sequence wasn’t raging, the joy at its passing not portentously grand. Mr. Honeck’s vision of the symphony was always human in scale, a reminder that this work, which I’d always taken to be about nature per se, is more precisely about the experience of people in nature. 

In the Oboe Concerto, Liang Wang, the principal oboist, handled Strauss’s solo part with candied tone, and the ensemble had accuracy and bristling intimacy, but brought out little magic in the work’s autumnal colors. 

The playing was accomplished, yet, as too often with this orchestra, a bit anonymous when it came to these crucial details of tint and texture. Mr. Honeck can clearly give the Philharmonic some heart in his guest appearances, but he can’t give it a fully rounded personality.