Two Successions

Are comparisons odious or instructive? When it comes to one leader succeeding another, comparisons are inevitable. The new head of a complex organization—such as an orchestra or an opera company—will shift priorities, import new talent, and redirect the vision. Very often a leader is brought in as a kind of corrective to the prior regime, as happens in national politics. Whether a new captain is deemed successful depends on a combination of wisdom, talent, timing, and luck. It also depends on expectations, largely engendered by what has come immediately before.

The season's opening concerts of the New York Philharmonic this fall ushered in Alan Gilbert as the new music director, with colorful posters grandly trumpeting the start of "The Gilbert Era." At Avery Fisher Hall, the audience was abuzz—perhaps with hope for a new era and with a sense of relief that the old one had passed. In 2002, when Gilbert's immediate predecessor, Lorin Maazel, took the helm, it was after a lengthy and failed search for a young, dynamic conductor. Maazel (born in 1930) was widely viewed as a short-term place-holder, but his tenure dragged into seven seasons.

Let's compare. First of all, the Philharmonic finally got its young leader—Gilbert is a relatively young forty-two. He is known for working hard in rehearsals, while Maazel was notorious for reading through repertoire with his players and then dismissing them early (the Philharmonic musicians—a tough bunch—loved Maazel for that at first, according to one orchestra musician who did not want to be quoted by name, but over the years grew weary of him because he did not push them musically). Gilbert has led most of the major orchestras as a guest, but is untested as the leader of a world-class orchestra, so this appointment will be a stretch for him—there is an inherent drama in whether he will succeed; Maazel arrived having headed orchestras in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Munich, with the Philharmonic as a kind of coda to his career. But more to the point, Gilbert has been dazzling this listener with energetic and fresh conducting since he appeared on the scene; in contrast, Maazel rarely delivered a memorable performance over the past three decades.

Maazel is not untalented. On the contrary, his brilliant insights—apparent when he conducts well and in his best recordings—demonstrate a superior musical mind. He has the expressive body of a dancer, able to convey myriad subtleties of interpretation. But more often than not, whether out of boredom or laziness, he seems to give five percent on the podium, and as a listener, one feels simply shortchanged.

So, the Gilbert Era began. From before the first night's downbeat, Gilbert had already put his stamp on the orchestra by reseating them. In recent decades the Philharmonic's first and second violinists have been seated to the conductor's left; Gilbert split the two sections, as is very often done mostly in Europe, placing the second violinists to his right and shifting the cellists toward the center of the stage with the violists. While there are arguments to be made for both seating arrangements, the immediate effect was that the Philharmonic musicians heard a new sound onstage and had to listen more carefully to one another. Keeping top-flight unionized orchestra musicians from delivering the same-old is one of a conductor's major challenges; this worked.

For the opening concert, telecast on Live From Lincoln Center, Gilbert chose a program with works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries in reverse order. The orchestra commissioned a ten-minute piece by Magnus Lindberg, the Finnish composer who is beginning his two-year appointment as the orchestra's composer-in-residence. At first hearing, the work came off as formless and incidental, without inherent architecture and far from one of this talented composer's better works. I'd like to hear it better conducted—but more on that in a moment. This was followed by the shimmering song cycle, Poèmes pour Mi, by Olivier Messiaen, gloriously sung by soprano Ren...