After City of Dreams, the adventurous and arduous three-week festival that the Vienna Philharmonic presented at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere around the country last year, the orchestra may be forgiven for having reverted to a tidy package of core repertory for its annual weekend in New York. Namely, music of Brahms: It performed his First and Third Symphonies at Carnegie on Friday evening, the Second and Fourth on Saturday evening and the “German Requiem” on Sunday afternoon, all conducted by Daniele Gatti.
Not that this visit was a walk in the park. Mr. Gatti and the Philharmonic had just come from performing some or all of the symphonies in Vienna, Athens, Hamburg and Munich, and this is music that, for all its familiarity, takes intense concentration to perform (as well as to take in).
But if there was any weariness or loss of edge on the part of the players, it did not show. Fully at home in the music, the orchestra gave plush, beautiful accounts, comfortable in the best sense of the word: not without risks but totally lived in.
The conductor’s contributions, on the other hand, raised questions. Mr. Gatti, whose American appearances have been sporadic, led impressive concerts in recent years with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and seemed to be in contention to be that orchestra’s music director before Andris Nelsons took the post this season.
The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam announced in October that Mr. Gatti would become principal conductor in 2016, no small consolation prize.
All of which is to say that Mr. Gatti, at 53, has reached the top of his profession. But his work here, with an orchestra that could undoubtedly give presentable performances of these works unconducted, was often intrusive. If he erred in tempo, it was almost invariably on the side of deliberation. Slow tempos were often lacking in energy, almost inert.
In addition, Mr. Gatti, conducting without scores but with obvious command of the music, added many rhetorical touches, stretching and stressing the first note of a phrase or the phrase as a whole, exaggerating pauses, pushing or pulling at tempos.
These interventions were especially troublesome in the Second and Third Symphonies, which benefit most from a natural flow. Brahms himself put a lot of rhetoric into the First and Fourth and the “German Requiem,” almost enough, apparently, to satisfy Mr. Gatti.
The Westminster Symphonic Choir was a fit match for the orchestra, singing with subtlety and strength and clear articulation, except at the beginning, where Mr. Gatti had the choristers sing so quietly that you heard only a wordless murmur. There was occasional separation between the groups, the chorus staying right atop the conductor’s beat in good American fashion, the orchestra, as European ensembles tend to do, coming in slightly later. (On the last chord of the penultimate chorus, the orchestra seemed a full beat behind).
Diana Damrau was a fine soprano soloist, singing with pure, well supported tone. The other vocal soloist, Christian Gerhaher, fresh from what was said to be a stunning performance of Schubert’s “Winterreise” at Lincoln Center, took things to an altogether higher level.
Mr. Gerhaher began disarmingly, singing with a natural, seemingly untrained light baritone sound, free of vibrato and unconcerned with air columns and the like (though his voice is in fact exquisitely trained). Soon after, he mustered unexpected power, and he went on to explore every dynamic and tone quality in between in a monumentally expressive performance.
Rainer Küchl, 64 and a year short of the orchestra’s mandatory retirement age, was the concertmaster and his big solo in Brahms’s First Symphony, supremely lyrical but not oversweet, exuded authority. Other notable soloists in the First were Josef Reif, strong on French horn, and Walter Auer, superb on flute.
A second of the orchestra’s four concertmasters was also present, the charismatic Rainer Honeck, and it was amusing to see him seated at the very back of the first violins in the symphonies, substituting for a missing player. For the requiem, Mr. Honeck joined Mr. Küchl on the first stand.
The encores avoided the obvious — the usual Johann Strauss waltzes — but made an odd couple. After the weightiest and thickest-textured of the Brahms symphonies, the First, which ended the concert on Friday, the airy-fairy Scherzo of Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” came as a delightful release. But after the hardly less dense and even more sober Fourth on Saturday, the Prelude to Act III of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” seemed an almost perverse choice, doing little to refresh the palate.
For those keeping score at home (and who isn’t?), the orchestra’s roster of 138 players now includes 12 women; four are members of the parent Vienna State Opera Orchestra and still on probation at the Philharmonic.
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