The orchestra, led by Mälkki with focused confidence on Wednesday, tends to be active but subdued, the way you can perceive seething activity even in a seemingly still jungle.
“Placing an old piece in new surroundings can make you think about it in a fresh way. Until the New York Philharmonic played Charles Ives’s short, indelible “The Unanswered Question” on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall under Susanna Mälkki’s baton, I had never thought of it as a tiny double concerto.
It isn’t, exactly. A double concerto adds two soloists to the orchestra, and the Ives has five: four flutists and a trumpeter. But its structure — in which soft expanses of consoling strings are the ground for interjections of somber trumpet and bursts of talkative flute — suggests the flutes are a single many-headed unit. It’s a kind of double concerto, then, in which two solo forces have a relationship to one another and to the main ensemble.
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The orchestra, led by Mälkki with focused confidence on Wednesday, tends to be active but subdued, the way you can perceive seething activity even in a seemingly still jungle. There are hazy effusions of brass; little thickets of rattling, shivering percussion; and whooshing, glistening strings that were a textural link to the Ives, as well as to Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” which came after intermission.”
“With rarefied Ives, a bold new concerto, and a scintillating Petrushka, Susanna Mälkki and the New York Philharmonic put the reconfigured David Geffen Hall through its acoustical paces Wednesday night.
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Conductor Mälkki kept Ives’s six-minute tableau at the brink of audibility, as weightless as a thought.
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Mälkki—who had godmothered this piece from a new friendship of two exceptional musicians to a concerto commission for them from the Helsinki Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic—expertly oversaw the boom-slap of percussion and the short, wrenching string phrases that punctuated the solos in the early going.”
“In the U.S., it’s a shame star conductors like Mälkki rarely venture beyond the American coasts, with maybe a Chicago stopover. But at least in a program of three works composed in the last hundred years, Mälkki certainly validated the glowing reviews she’s been getting.
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Stravinsky’s complete Petrushka, brilliantly performed in the 1947 version, left no doubt of Mälkki’s finely honed control — and the hall’s almost startling éclat. Things are sounding good in New York.”
“In Mälkki’s calm and precise hands, chamber music-like and pandemonium-evoking sections blended well. Gradually allowed to display more and more improvisatory skills, the two protagonists conversed with ease, their exchanges culminating in a jam-session-like cadenza…”