“Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Yannick.” A ripple of laughter went through the audience at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday when the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin took the microphone at the beginning of his Great Performers concert with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. To his adoring and vocal fans, he needed no introduction: As music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Mr. Nézet-Séguin is a frequent guest in New York. But the ensemble he was presenting on this occasion — and which he has led as music director since 2008 — is still unfamiliar to American audiences.
Some of his players were late, Mr. Nézet-Séguin, explained, because they had been stranded in Chicago by winter weather sufficiently severe to command respect even from a native Canadian such as himself. Some were only now arriving in the hall, straight from the airport.
As expected, it took the orchestra a while to warm up. Once it did, it revealed a sound of magnificent warmth and color, and playing that brimmed with infectious intensity. If there was cause for quibbles it was the program. Consisting of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (with the powerfully expressive Nicholas Angelich as soloist) and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, it was too safe for such an accomplished and ambitious orchestra to assert its identity.
In the opening movement of the Brahms, the ensemble’s sound was more pugnacious than pretty, and there were some understandable intonation issues in the woodwinds, given the last-minute arrivals. But with Mr. Angelich offering a panoramic reading of the score bracketed by ringing fortes and lovely soft-focus quiet passages, the performers soon found their emotional stride. The Adagio in particular was deeply felt, with whisper-thin strings cocooning the piano. The players gave a great deal of attention to detail, whether in the way Mr. Angelich calibrated the gradient of his crescendos exactly to that of the orchestra or in the way a feathery string fugue in the Rondo dovetailed perfectly with a following wind entrance.
It was a fully warmed up orchestra that returned for Tchaikovsky. Now there was a glossy sheen to the strings and wind solos, such as the highly expressive, vulnerable opening clarinet solo by Julien Hervé, which came to the fore with bright individuality. Mr. Nézet-Séguin conducted a performance of unbridled enthusiasm and energy with a rare optimistic touch, which, without making light of Tchaikovsky’s melancholy bent, infused his music with radiant health.
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