Music Review | Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra: A Maturing Leader Energizes A Venerable Ensemble

Since its founding more than 250 years ago by a group of music-minded merchants the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra has gone through 18 music directors, including Mendelssohn, and many changes. The new dynamism that this eminent orchestra displayed at Carnegie Hall on Monday and Tuesday nights is surely attributable to its 19th music director, the Italian conductor Riccardo Chailly. After Tuesday nights concert ended with an arresting, organic and richly colored account of Mahlers daunting Fifth Symphony, the audience responded with the most ecstatic ovation I have witnessed this season at Carnegie Hall.

Riccardo Chailly, the 19th music director of the 250-year-old Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducting it on Monday night at Carnegie Hall.

In recent decades the orchestra has had important associations with devoted music directors, including Kurt Masur and Herbert Blomstedt, a probing and solid conductor who nevertheless came in for criticism after a perplexingly ragged all-Brahms concert in New York in 2004. Mr. Chailly, who took charge in 2005, also holds the title of music director of the Leipzig Opera, for which the Gewandhaus Orchestra is the pit band.

Mr. Chailly, 54, has always been respected for his energy, ear for detail and technical finesse. Yet during his tenure as music director of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam he was sometimes criticized for erratic and idiosyncratic interpretations.

Over the last decade he seems to have gained maturity and become adept at channeling his dynamism into structurally cohesive performance. From the opening brass flourishes of the first movement of the Mahler, a restless funeral march, the orchestra crackled with intensity yet exuded confidence and control. The sound of the subdued strings was so rich you would have thought the Vienna Philharmonic was back onstage, fresh from its recent visit.

Mr. Chailly and his players conveyed the cataclysmic turbulence of the second movement while still projecting awesome textural clarity. The performance of the 20-minute third movement milked the fascinating ambiguity of the music, which shifts between an earthy rustic scherzo and a genial Austrian Ländler.

For once the great Adagietto did not seem like a consoling rumination from another emotional world, but instead an aching lyrical expression charged with quiet intensity and a natural extension of what preceded it. And, for all the busyness, there was a wonderfully relaxed quality to the exuberant finale, that is, until Mr. Chailly let us have it in the blazing conclusion.

The concert began with a novelty: Schumanns Symphony No. 1 (Spring), performed in an arrangement by Mahler. Schumann gets a bum rap for his orchestrations, which are thought to be thick and top-heavy, with melodic lines dominating gloppy harmonic textures. Mahler significantly reorchestrated the music, eliminating doublings and rescoring things so details come through clearly. It was a little disconcerting to hear Schumann sounding like early Beethoven. Still, the music seemed fresh in this vibrant performance.

Monday nights concert offered athletic, sonorous, aptly volatile yet organic accounts of Strausss Don Juan and Ein Heldenleben. Of special interest was the performance of Liszts Piano Concerto No. 1, with the young Chinese pianist Yundi Li as soloist.

With four Deutsche Grammophon recordings already to his credit and an ardent following smitten with his boyish appeal, this brilliantly talented virtuoso is off to a quick start. His impetuous, risk-taking performance was certainly captivating. The arm-blurring dispatches of octave outbursts and repeated chords, scintillating passagework, incisive attacks and steely tone, moments of lyrical poetry — all were impressive.

Still, Mr. Li is at a crucial stage of his career, and I would urge him to settle down a bit. He was in almost constant overdrive here; I wanted more repose, some contrasting moment of cool control. Mr. Chailly seemed a willing enabler, allowing Mr. Li to indulge his youthful enthusiasm.

But why not? Mr. Chailly has been there.

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