Review: The Philharmonic Puts a Young Composer’s Twist on Bruckner

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On Thursday, the music built to feverish episodes, thick with swirling strings, writhing riffs and whiplash cracks. Passages of soft, buzzing string tremolos — interlaced with pointillist squiggles and Messiaen-like bird calls — were almost more nerve-racking than the thick demonic eruptions. But the piece eventually lost “appendages,” to borrow Mr. Tao’s word, and thinned out, quizzically, as if turning over the stage to the Bruckner symphony — which, in this context, seemed to pick up from Mr. Tao’s music. The first movement began with subdued sustained tone, with an ominous, questioning, fragmented phrase in low strings underneath.

Mr. van Zweden has made a specialty of Bruckner, and this performance demonstrated the strengths he brings to the task of conducting the monumental Eighth Symphony. In each of its four movements, Bruckner grapples with large-scale elements of form, as if using musical structure to posit larger questions of meaning. Something will happen, then just stop until something else happens as the piece explores another direction, another dimension. Bruckner also fixates on some motif or statement and puts it through a series of sequences, or subjects it to intricate development.

The Bruckner performances that have most moved me emphasize the questions the composer seems to pose. Mr. van Zweden conducted the Eighth Symphony as if he had an answer for every query. Phrase to phrase, episode to episode, everything sounded purposeful. The musical rhetoric of the piece — that is, what leads to what — came through clearly. He certainly drew out the music’s character: the curious mix of Wagnerian surging and symphonic rigor in the Allegro; the weighty, pummeling energy of the Scherzo; the throbbing, melting expressivity of the Adagio; the architectonic grandeur of the finale.

Mr. van Zweden’s general penchant for making everything overly emphatic was the downside here. The last movement, for example, builds inexorably to a late episode of glittering, all-out intensity. But in this performance, Mr. van Zweden had pushed the orchestra to make several earlier episodes equally climactic. So by the time that late passage came, it sounded redundant and ineffective.

To his credit, the performance had visceral intensity and won a long ovation from the audience. And it was a great idea to pair an adventurous young American composer with an august Austrian symphonic master.

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