New York Philharmonic (March 3, 2011)

For his debut with the New York Philharmonic, Daniel Harding conducted Mahler’s Fourth Symphony—as part of a cycle of Mahler symphonies in honor of the former director of the orchestra. I fell in love with the symphony as a teenager and have listened to many recordings so I know that, for instance, conductors see how much they dare to slow down on the first three notes of the violin melody at the beginning of the first movement: D-E---F#--------…. (just think Knappertsbusch).

Daniel’s interpretation was original and inspired. He sprinted through those notes, and every time the theme came back, it was almost a Boulezian modernist account of the score, just letting the music do its job without any added schmalz. The first movement was fast. The second movement was fast. The third movement, the emotional core of the symphony, thus became the large-scale structural downbeat after two upbeats: a kind of Wagnerian stollen-stollen-abgesang writ large. Out-Bernsteining Bernstein--what a brilliant decision, bringing added expansiveness and intensity to Mahler’s gorgeous melodies, grinding dissonances, and harmonic turns (and in ten years I’ve never heard the orchestra sound better than they did here). The finale still brought the expected deus-ex-machina but instead of being the moment of maximal gravitas, it brought lightness--a transcendence that floated into E-major brightness rather than pushing up to it as it does in so many accounts (and soprano Lisa Milne sang beautifully). I’ve always thought Daniel was immensely talented—now I think he might be a genius. And he’s still only in his mid-30s. I wonder if he likes Boston….

The symphony followed a clean, no-nonsense rendition of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with Glenn Dicterow as soloist—what a great chance for Daniel to interact closely with the orchestra’s concertmaster—with a color palette encompassing capriccioso, scherzando, con passione, dolce and avvivando (the last an unusual marking on Szymanowski’s part). Dicterow played beautifully, if on the safe side, although his egolessness even in the long cadenza written by Pawel Kochánski (1887-1934), the concerto’s dedicatee and first performer, made me wonder if I mistook natural modesty for safety. Apparently Szymanowski believed that in collaborating with Kochánski for this concerto, he had created “a new style, a new mode of expression for the violin.” According to the program annotator James M. Keller, the composer wrote in a letter to the violinist’s wife in 1920:

All works by other composers related to this style (no matter how much creative genius they revealed) came later, that is through the direct influence of Myths and the [First] Concerto, or else through direct collaboration with Pawel.

I’m curious to learn what new violinistic possibility Szymanowski thought he’d discovered with Kochánski – it could be that Harding and Dicterow know already.