Monumental Playing by N.Y. Philharmonic

New York has a new image: The big city is still exciting but now safe. Cabs may continue to careen carelessly as ever, but Disney has helped make Broadway fit for the family; Fifth Avenue has grandly welcomed the chain stores that support every suburban mall; the art museums, the Metropolitan Opera and many of the rest of the city’s major arts institutions have found that they can lure endless hordes of tourists with blockbusters. “Cats” will surely run forever.

The New York Philharmonic, which is presently venturing out into the rest of the United States for the first time since Kurt Masur became its music director in 1991, seemed almost an ambassador of the new New York over the weekend, when it appeared at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Last heard here in 1986, with Leonard Bernstein conducting it at Royce, the orchestra was like a barely tamed beast then but one ferociously loyal to its legendary laureate conductor. One remembers little of the playing, only the extraordinary emotion, the sense of opening up Tchaikovsky’s psyche and working through pain to transcendence. So smoldering an atmosphere of danger was in the air that a false fire alarm caused evacuation of the hall.

Masur’s concerts may stay in the memory as well, but for different reasons. The blockbuster at both venues was Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, and it was breathtaking. I have never heard this orchestra sound better. I have seldom heard any orchestra sound better. But it was more a safe spectacle of controlled fire than unpredictable emotional heat.

To say that Masur has been a controversial music director doesn’t mean much. Given the orchestra’s high-strung musicians, its inflexible audience and New York’s tradition of fractious music criticism, every music director of the orchestra during the last half-century--Dimitri Mitropoulos, Bernstein, Pierre Boulez and Zubin Mehta--has been controversial. What separates Masur from the others is his lack of involvement with New York as a vital cultural capital, with its composers and its modernist and postmodernist traditions.

What Masur is is a rock-solid musician of the old school and the Old World, and the programs he chose to take around America represent that, not New York. Along with the Shostakovich Fifth, which was written in 1937 and has become one of the best-known symphonies of the century, Masur brought two early Richard Strauss tone poems--”Don Juan” and “Death and Transfiguration”--to Orange County on Friday night, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to UCLA. All is music close to Masur’s heart, and there could be no question of the authority he brought to its performance.

At the center of Masur’s commitment to the music is an enforcement of committed playing. The orchestra, under him, does not have weak spots. Flu is raging through the ranks, and several key players, including the orchestra’s noted principal horn, Philip Myers, were sidelined. Yet it hardly seemed to matter. The brass blazed trails of glory in the Shostakovich outer movements. The winds splashed vivid color everywhere, and especially in the Shostakovich Scherzo. The strings were beautifully in tune, and rich in sound. The cellos and basses opened the Beethoven Scherzo with the impossible combination of a weighty deep tone and agile flexibility. The thud of the timpani at the end of the Shostakovich was the sound of tremendous, focused power.

But there was little to differentiate Beethoven, Strauss or Shostakovich. Despite an admirable attention to the smallest details of balance and dynamics, Masur tended toward the monumental in all the music. Strauss’ “Don Juan” was less lothario than icon, cut from much the same stuff as the goodly man who dies and enters the cosmos in “Death and Transfiguration.” Masur is a conductor who can marshal forces (the bigger the piece and the bigger the band, the more impressive he is), and his sheer control of them tends to give a triumphant overall impression.

Beethoven’s symphony, which does end in triumph, was certainly impressive in its very big-boned way, made to seem all the bigger with the repeat of the Scherzo, as dictated by a new edition of the score. Nor was it necessary to worry whether Shostakovich’s symphony was Stalinist propaganda with its thumping martial finale, or hidden anti-Stalinist diatribe. Masur removed it from history and made it seem an unshakable musical monolith, a structure so strong on purely musical terms that it can easily outlive its era. For better or worse, Masur’s Shostakovich and Beethoven are comrades in the same Valhalla.

At home, the New York Philharmonic faces unfair competition from the world’s finest orchestras, which continually bring specially prepared tour programs to New York, and so the New Yorkers sounded delighted to turn tables. This tour is bound to attract ever more tourists, but they bring an inherent danger in creating expectations for New York to become even more a city of monuments. Fortunately, though, the Philharmonic has a young, savvy and up-to-date management, and change is in the wind. Next season, with several commissions for new work, a festival of all of Copland’s orchestral music and even a concert performance of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” there finally is reason for an occasional glance east for something more than old monuments and the same shopping as everywhere else.