Jaap van Zweden, shown in Dallas in 2007, conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in Verizon Hall.
Van Zweden conducts a breezy Bruckner
You can divide and subdivide the orchestra world's current top dozen or so young conductors in several different ways. One emergent strain is the maestro who seems to be anticipating the listening public's stinted attention span by applying faster tempos to most every score.
Contact music critic Peter Dobrin at 215-854-5611 or pdobrin@phillynews.com. Read his blog at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/.
It's entirely possible that these men (yes, almost exclusively, they are men) sincerely feel the music this way. If so, it's convenient that conductors such as Jaap van Zweden are coming along now. The assured music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra made his debut Friday night with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Verizon Hall audience seemed dazzled by his breezy way with Bruckner's Symphony No. 9.
Tempos, it is often said, are a matter of taste. That's true, but there's more to it. Practical and aesthetic consequences stem from a tempo too slow to show connections between musical material, or too quick to expose detail. If you didn't know what you were missing by hearing other performances of this work, van Zweden's quick tempos might have come across as vigorous or energetic. But if you were listening for the enigmas, the contradictions, and the profound questioning that other conductors dig for in the score, all you might have come up with was a certain glibness.
The 48-year-old Dutchman comes to conducting by way of the violin - he studied with Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School and was concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra - and you can sense some of that experience. He has a fluid and legible baton, which, in some places, he used to great effect in the fine shaping of phrases. He clearly knows how to make the ensemble go like clockwork; his ability to use that skill to communicate more human experiences was less clear.
He sought, and got, a pleasingly lean sound from the orchestra in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major (K. 459). Horacio Gutiérrez was soloist. Also Juilliard trained, Gutiérrez made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1975 and is always a sturdy presence. He didn't explore a wide range of ideas in this piece, but, in his own refined way, was committed to the idea of Mozart as, above all, the place for pretty playing.
Contact music critic Peter Dobrin at 215-854-5611 or pdobrin@phillynews.com. Read his blog at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/.
