The highlight of the New York Philharmonic’s concert on Thursday at Avery Fisher Hall, with the guest conductor Sakari Oramo, was an incisive and colorful account of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, featuring the brilliant German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann. Yet in one basic way, it was not the performance Mr. Zimmermann had anticipated.
In 2001 Mr. Zimmermann leased a coveted violin, a 1711 Stradivarius, from a German bank. A limited number of violins exist from this golden era of string instrument craftsmanship in Italy. Many are lent or leased to players, who become their caretakers. Over the years, as Mr. Zimmermann told The Strad magazine, this splendid Stradivarius became “like part of my body.” Having it as his instrument altered his musical ideas and how he played, he explained.
After the bank went defunct, however, its assets were acquired by Portigon, a financial services company. Mr. Zimmermann’s lease ran out on Sunday, and he returned the violin to Portigon. Various news reports have recounted his negotiations to buy the violin. According to some, Mr. Zimmermann offered more than $5 million, apparently less than the company wanted. Portigon, on its website, asserts that it offered Mr. Zimmermann various arrangements and regrets that he did not continue negotiations.
In any event, he no longer has his cherished Stradivarius. On Thursday Mr. Zimmermann played another presumably priceless violin from that era, a Guarnerius del Gesù, on loan for a few weeks from a benefactor. Of course, countless violinists, including immensely gifted students who can only dream of having such an instrument, will not have much sympathy for Mr. Zimmermann as he makes do with what sounded like a glorious violin. Still, he does not exaggerate about how bonded a concert artist can become to a particular instrument.
For example, because the Stradivarius had such a rich, penetrating sound, Mr. Zimmermann could use considerably less vibrato in particular phrases. This allowed him to bring more focus and clarity to a line, without sacrificing a shimmering tone. He was able to translate that approach to the Guarnerius in the Sibelius performance. At the start of the first movement, when the violin emerges with a searching theme over subdued rumblings in the orchestra, Mr. Zimmermann played with lean yet gleaming sound and melancholic beauty. As the theme turned agitated, he summoned thick, pulsing tone, even while dispatching bursts of notes with crackling energy.
For all its familiarity, this concerto remains a mysterious and unconventional work. I prefer performances that emphasize its strangeness, as this one did. In the slow movement, the music comes close to a late Romantic outpouring of impassioned lyricism. But Mr. Zimmermann, backed by Mr. Oramo and the inspired orchestra, powerfully conveyed the quizzical crosscurrents in the music. And the finale, which, on the surface, seems a rustic dance, here sounded modern and wild, with the violin fixating on obsessive rhythmic riffs against the swirling orchestra.
Mr. Oramo, 49, the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, set the mood for the concerto by opening with Sibelius’s seldom-heard tone poem “The Oceanides,” a teeming 10-minute work from 1914 that evokes surging seas, squawking gulls and oceanic forces.
After intermission, Mr. Oramo led a clearheaded, no-nonsense, vibrant account of Brahms’s Second Symphony. Those looking for profundity might have been disappointed. But Mr. Oramo drew bright and energetic playing from the orchestra, with the exception of some rough passages in the brass.
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