Soulful Cityscape

NEW YORK--It is traditional, to say nothing of civil, to grant the new music director of an orchestra a honeymoon or, at the very least, the benefit of the doubt. But not in New York. Being America’s most arts-friendly city doesn’t necessarily make it the most artist-friendly one.

Still, Lorin Maazel, who has more than his share of enemies among the local press and within the music world, hardly seemed daunted Thursday night at Avery Fisher Hall, as he began his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic.

The notoriously finicky orchestra played brilliantly for him. The notoriously finicky subscription audience cheered him loudly for his flashy performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, even though (or maybe because) it was just about the opposite of the kind of Beethoven they were used to from Maazel’s somber and respected German predecessor, Kurt Masur.

And Maazel made sure that the evening meant something both timely and lasting, opening it with the premiere of John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls,” the most high-profile art work commemorating Sept. 11. Written for orchestra, adult and children’s chorus and city sounds that evoke Lower Manhattan, this commission by the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center Great Performers series seemed destined to feel exploitative of New Yorkers’ fixation with the tragedy. Instead, it gave us something of wonder, mystery and beauty to contemplate.

But don’t think for a minute all that will be enough. Maazel’s music directorship is certain to be tempestuous.

On paper, Maazel appears to be the ideal leader for America’s oldest orchestra, the orchestra of Mahler, Toscanini, Mengelberg, Stokowski, Walter, Bernstein and Boulez, to name some of the outstanding principal conductors over its 160-year history. An American, Maazel first conducted the New York Philharmonic in 1942 as a boy of 12 (astonishingly, he made his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut five years earlier, in short pants, at the Hollywood Bowl). He has held prestigious posts in Berlin, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Vienna and Munich. His conducting technique is legendary. He is a virtuoso violinist. He is an active composer of symphonies and concertos and is currently writing an opera based upon Orwell’s “1984.”

Yet he was far from an obvious candidate. Although he has conducted the New York Philharmonic more than 100 times throughout his long career, he hasn’t been on this podium often in recent years--because his fees are so high. Maazel pioneered the million-dollar, then the multimillion-dollar conductor contracts that are now breaking orchestral bank accounts. He was perceived, at 72, as too old and too out of touch. He is disliked personally by some who find him arrogant and he is disliked musically by those who find his interpretations persnickety.

Say what you will about Maazel, he did the right thing by “On the Transmigration of Souls,” leading it with a gratifying combination of competence and seriousness. Although even here, he and the Philharmonic came under criticism for not including the work on its televised gala concert Wednesday night, substituting Beethoven’s “Leonora” Overture No. 3.

The musical starting point for Adams’ 25-minute score was clearly Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question,” with soft, uncertain open string chords and a trumpet solo played off stage, from the lobby behind the audience. But first the audience hears the noise--soft and curiously comforting--of traffic, footsteps and sirens from loudspeakers surrounding the auditorium. By letting in the very street sounds concert halls are built to keep out, “Transmigration” begins with an evocation of the dreamlike state that great tragedy seems to generate.

The texture of “Transmigration” is very complex, what with the electronic cityscape--which also includes voices reading a litany of randomly selected victims’ names--the luminous orchestral colors and the adult and children’s choruses singing fragments of the spontaneous messages to loved ones. But the effect is an immediate, enveloping sonic tapestry.

Adams’ music, however quiet on the surface, has an inner pulse, and that underlying teeming sensation has never been stronger or more gratifying than it is here. Ultimately those pulses overpower all else, as the choruses sings, “I know just where he is.” Welled-up emotion has no place to go but to explode, resolving with overpowering effect as the adult chorus pulses on the word “light,” while the children stutter the word “love.” The return to serenity is otherworldly, three solo violins playing a rising line in tremolo quarter tones against the still mellow colors of winds and percussion.

The New York Philharmonic, the outstanding New York Choral Artists and the wonderful Brooklyn Youth Chorus presented all this with great care and concern. The stage was darkened, Maazel conducting in silhouette, with only over-bright, over-emphatic projections of the text to diminish the effect. The sound design by Mark Grey was another glory of the experience. To this writer’s taste, Adams’ only miscalculation was the litany of names, which verged on the maudlin.

Beethoven’s Ninth, which begins with tremolo strings in its own mysterious meditation of the cosmos, sounded as though it picked up just where Adams left off Thursday, leading to the famous ode to brotherhood an hour later. Maazel’s interpretation revealed why people like him and why they dislike him. Especially impressive was the clarity of the first movement, where a level of detail allowed one to hear absolutely everything that was going on in the music.

But there was also Maazel’s slickness to contend with, giving the impression of calculated ostentation. The symphony proceeded with dizzying taffy pulls on the notes and startling eruptions of timpani. By the Finale, when a listener might have thought he had had enough, Maazel propelled things along with such a thrilling sweep that it felt useless to resist. The soloists were very fine, and they included Marina Mescheriakova, Jill Grove, Michael Schade and Rene Pape. Once again, the New York Choral Artists was the terrific chorus. All the singers were pushed to their considerable limits, and that, too, was thrilling.

Maazel’s contract runs four years. There is not likely to be a dull, or uncontroversial, moment.