Review: The Jaap van Zweden Era Begins at the Philharmonic

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Then he turned to more typical gala fare: Ravel’s jazz-infused Piano Concerto in G, with the brilliant Daniil Trifonov as soloist. This engrossing performance made clear that, for all its scintillating colors and jazzy riffs, modernist complexities run through the score.

Mr. Trifonov was manically exciting in dispatching the piano part’s spiraling passages and glissandos, its pummeling chords and jerky rhythms. When the first movement moved into a wistful, bluesy episode, Mr. Trifonov shaped the phrases with unabashed Russian Romantic rubato. That’s not the way I think of the music. But his honest, elegant playing beguiled me.

In the slow movement, which begins with a long piano solo, a kind of sad waltz, Mr. Trifonov played with affecting intimacy and tenderness, subtly highlighting the rhythmic twists in the melodic line while maintaining the overall gentleness. And in the breathless finale, he was uncommonly serious. During passages of oscillating piano chords, you might have thought this was Prokofiev.

The program ended with “The Rite of Spring.” Mr. van Zweden was brought to the Philharmonic in part because of his dynamic approach to the staples of the repertory, including this 1913 Stravinsky shocker. But this was a tale of two “Rites.”

During hard-driving, brutal episodes, like the all-hell-breaks-loose climax of the “Dance of the Adolescent Girls” and the crazed “Glorification of the Chosen One,” Mr. van Zweden drew incisive, blazingly powerful and vehement playing from the Philharmonic, though the sheer mass of sound was sometimes loud and raw.

But in the work’s mysterious and murky sections, including the introductions to each of its two parts, Mr. van Zweden seemed intent on bringing out depths, inner voices, unusual colorings, tectonic harmonic shifts and other details. Perhaps he tried too hard; the performance lost tension and became weighty, almost ponderous.

For an encore with a gala flourish, Mr. van Zweden led an aggressively feisty account of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Again, he sometimes pushed the orchestra to play with harsh, blaring sound. This tendency in his work is a warning sign.

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