{"id":11555,"date":"2023-02-23T19:16:15","date_gmt":"2023-02-24T00:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=11555"},"modified":"2023-03-09T19:20:18","modified_gmt":"2023-03-10T00:20:18","slug":"review-at-the-philharmonic-a-guest-challenges-common-wisdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/review-at-the-philharmonic-a-guest-challenges-common-wisdom\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: At the Philharmonic, a Guest Challenges Common Wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

The conductor Nathalie Stutzmann surrounded a showcase for cellist Alisa Weilerstein with idiosyncratic readings of repertory staples.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Anastasia Tsioulcas
\nNYT Critic’s Pick<\/p>\n

The conductor Nathalie Stutzmann, who made a hotly anticipated debut with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday, has had a skyrocketing career. Most notably, she started this season as the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra \u2014 making her, regrettably, the lone female conductor among the 25 largest American orchestras. Women comprise about half of all orchestral players nationally and even outnumber men in the playing ranks of the Philharmonic.<\/p>\n

Many orchestra musicians reportedly love Stutzmann \u2014 who first made her name as a contralto and has recorded as a singer \u2014 for her deeply felt opinions and direct communication style. At the Philharmonic, she laid out her bona fides by beginning her program with Wagner\u2019s \u201cTannh\u00e4user\u201d overture. (She will be making her debut at the Bayreuth Festival in August with this opera, so Wednesday\u2019s performance felt like a bit of a preview.) She led it with a singer\u2019s innate sense of phrasing and generous expanse; the orchestra seemed happy to luxuriate with her across every small hill and valley of the score.<\/p>\n

The most arresting work on the program was Prokofiev\u2019s sprawling Sinfonia Concertante, a piece of constantly shifting moods that demands only the most virtuosic of soloists: It\u2019s considered one of the most technically challenging, and exhausting, works written for cello.<\/p>\n

The Sinfonia Concertante has never quite found a home in the repertory, though Prokofiev revised it extensively for his friend Mstislav Rostropovich. Before Wednesday, it had not been performed by the Philharmonic in two decades; the last time was with Rostropovich at the podium.<\/p>\n

But the piece has a profound champion in Alisa Weilerstein, the soloist this week. She is an artist who adroitly channels fierce work with her penetrating, brilliant sound \u2014 her performances of works by Kodalyand Shostakovich provide ample proof \u2014 and she made a compelling case for the Prokofiev. She dispatched every technical test with astonishing ease and visceral joy, and took obvious pleasure in the music\u2019s often sardonic humor.<\/p>\n

Read the full review.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times The conductor Nathalie Stutzmann surrounded a showcase for cellist Alisa Weilerstein with idiosyncratic readings of repertory staples. By Anastasia Tsioulcas NYT Critic’s Pick The conductor Nathalie Stutzmann, who made a hotly anticipated debut with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday, has had a skyrocketing career. Most notably, she started this … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3688,3633,3685,3686,3612],"class_list":["post-11555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alisa-weilerstein","tag-cello","tag-concerto","tag-orchestra","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11556,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11555\/revisions\/11556"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}