Music Review | New York Philharmonic: Tortoise Meets Hare At Lincoln Center

Heres a peculiar collaboration, perhaps the oddest of the season: Riccardo Muti conducted the pianist Lang Lang in Beethovens Emperor Concerto on Thursday evening at Avery Fisher Hall.

Mr. Muti performs with an Apollonian sense of proportion and precision, and a dramatic flair offset by a devotion to textual propriety. Mr. Lang is a Dionysian firebrand, whose crowd-pleasing style is rooted in speediness, display and a repertory of physical and facial gestures that telegraph his youthful exuberance.

Before this New York Philharmonic performance, a listener hoping for the best saw plenty of ways the matchup might work. Mr. Muti, after all, would not have agreed to perform with Mr. Lang if he regarded him as irredeemable; and Mr. Lang had to realize he needed to tone down his act with Mr. Muti on the podium. Mr. Langs recent appearances have shown greater maturity — fewer physical antics and more fire in the music itself — so perhaps he was moving in Mr. Mutis direction anyway.

It was a nice theory, and if the performance wasnt the train wreck it might have been, it was a muddle, nevertheless, and as dull as an Emperor can possibly be. Mr. Langs sound, especially in the first movement, was clipped and dry, and his reading was so businesslike that you couldnt help wishing for hints of his undisciplined earlier style.

They surfaced eventually. Mr. Lang seemed impatient with Mr. Mutis stately tempos and did his best to push the music forward. But Mr. Muti wasnt having any of it.

In the finale it seemed finally to dawn on Mr. Lang that he was behind Mr. Mutis back, and that if he couldnt win the tempo war, he could at least revive a few favorite physical moves, like waving one hand balletically over the keyboard while playing with the other, and flashing his Wow, this is fun! grin. To his credit, Mr. Langs pianissimo playing in fast passages was dazzling in a way that his full-throttle playing generally was not.

Mr. Muti and the Philharmonic checked in occasionally to match Mr. Langs clipped phrasing, but most of the time they seemed to be at another concert, or even playing another work: at one point early in the finale, Mr. Muti gave an orchestral tutti an Italianate twist that made it sound as if it had been wrenched from La Traviata.

The orchestra was heard to better effect in Cherubinis Overture in G, a blustery curtain raiser that Mr. Muti played with a Toscaninian gusto.

The second half of the program was devoted to Hindemiths Sancta Susanna, a one-act opera from 1921 about a novice at a convent whose sexuality is suddenly awakened and who, as the opera ends, is about to be buried alive as a consequence.

Its not a work for the ages, but Hindemith supplied a seamless, richly orchestrated score, and the Philharmonic played it with an appealing ferocity. The orchestra sometimes overwhelmed the singers — Tatiana Serjan, as Susanna, and Brigitte Pinter, as Clementia — but given the quality of the libretto, that was no tragedy.

The cast also included Jane Gilbert, Juliane Borg, Marcus DeLoach and the New York Choral Artists.

The program is to be repeated tonight and on Tuesday at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; (212) 875-5656.

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