Song of a Reformed Headhunter

An inspired pairing by Alan Gilbert: the world premiere of Sebastian Currier's Time Machines  (2007) and Bruckner's Symphony No. 2 in C minor . Currier's rather literal and programmatic musical depiction of fragmented time, delay time, compressed time, overlapping time, entropic time, backwards time and harmonic time prepared the ear to hear the dynamics in Bruckner keenly. Gilbert writes in the program: There are few composers whose music I could conduct every day for the rest of my life and be satisfied as a musician, and Bruckner is one of them. He is a traditional symphonist but what he does the symphonic form is truly personal. There's a kind of suspension of time in which all the elements that you expect from a symphony are there, but they unfold at a pace that he controls exquisitely, and very deliberately. The New York Philharmonic played with committed urgency. The sound was in turns lush, etched, lyrical, precipitous, and powerful. The second movement, Anda...

To put it in monetary terms, the first movement of Mendelssohn's Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64, as played by Anne-Sophie Mutter with the NYP last night, was worth the price of the ticket. And more. It was piercing and sensitive. It was vigorous and delicate. Its softest note does not lose its expressiveness; its loudest chord does not lose its complexity. The other two movements were very fine, but the first was divine.  I like too Overture to Ruy Blas , Op. 95, that opened the concert. Mendelssohn declared the Victor Hugo's play "beneath contempt," but did not want to disappoint the Leipzig Theatrical Pension Fund, the worthy organization that asked him for an overture to their performance of Hugo. James M. Keller's program note describes the piece:  In the span of seven minutes, this angry, fiery work perfectly evokes the play's brooding atmosphere, with a stentorian motif of sustained chords for woodwinds and brass regularly punctuati...