Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, just gave his last Lincoln Center performance with the company he has led since 2009. The house program on June 10 had a cover page that misleadingly referred to “Alan Gilbert’s Farewell Concert.” This excellent performance of Mahler’s Symphony no. 7 was his last in David Geffen Hall, but he and his players have more music to make together.
There will be the annual free concerts in New York City parks from June 13-16. They will then appear in Shanghai (July 2-7), the Bravo! Vail Music Festival in Colorado (July 22-28) and Santa Barbara with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (July 31).
As I sat in Geffen Hall, watching and listening to Gilbert and the Philharmonic (as well as 22 guest musicians from 19 nations in what was called A Concert for Unity), I reflected on many Gilbert performances I have been privileged to hear.
Just before the concert began, I jotted down the names of conductors who have inspired me in the wonderful masterpieces of opera and classical music. My gold standard is Claudio Abbado and just after him are Leonard Bernstein, James Levine and Georg Solti. I wrote down a few other names, past and present, including Harry Bicket, William Christie, James Conlon, Valery Gergiev, Carlo Maria Giulini, Carlos Kleiber, Gianandrea Noseda, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Klaus Tennstedt. Within moments of the performance’s beginning, I realized that Alan Gilbert has earned his place on my list of conductors whose work moves me, inspires me and challenges me to think in new ways about music and its place in our lives.
Gilbert is not as flamboyant as many conductors and seems to feel most at home as a colleague who makes music with other talented musicians. At the curtain call, he came out with a bottle of Pils beer and took a celebratory swig. He is eclectic in his tastes (which is a good thing) in a way that defies easy definition (also a good thing). I am grateful that he led the orchestra on a long exploration of the music of Danish composer Carl Nielsen and that most of these performances were recorded. He created Contact!, a new music series and has engaged many collaborative artists, such as Salonen, composer Magnus Lindbergh and singer Eric Owens for fascinating musical programming. He has conducted 28 world premieres at the Philharmonic.
He made an outstanding Met debut in 2008 leading the company premiere of Dr. Atomic (by John Adams and Peter Sellars) with a superb cast led by Gerald Finley, Sasha Cooke and Owens in his first role at the Met. The production was by Penny Woolcock and a superb team of designers. It was in every way an ambitious undertaking and the largeness of everything—the opera ends with the detonation of the atomic bomb, expressed more in musical than visual terms—meant that the contribution of this conductor was not sufficiently lauded. I recall it as some of the finest playing by the always excellent Met orchestra.
Gilbert has been a valuable presence at the Juilliard School as the Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies. He conducted a lovely Così fan tutte there in 2012 in collaboration with the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program in a lucid production by Stephen Wadsworth. The quicksilver plot changes and subtle shifts in mood and emotion were exquisitely captured by Gilbert and his young musicians.
In 2015 he led ten performances of Don Giovanni at the Met with a cast including Elza van den Heever, Emma Bell, Peter Mattei and Luca Pisaroni. I think the Michael Grandage staging is the least successful in the current Met repertoire. I have seen marvelous singers in it but the production never comes alive. I attend instead to hear the music because, as theater, it is inert. I experience a conductor’s work more fully because it is up to him to use the orchestra for telling the complex story in this Mozart masterpiece.
Also in 2015, Gilbert conducted the American premiere of British composer George Benjamin’s stunning new opera, Written on Skin, at the Lincoln Center Festival. Doctor Atomic, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni and Written on Skin are, in their own ways, very difficult works to conduct and to make viable in musical and theatrical terms. Gilbert excelled in all four and proved that a conductor need not be defined as a specialist in one kind of music. Rather, he is absorbed in music that inspires him and then shares it with us.
In the same period, Gilbert brought opera and other kinds of music drama to the New York Philharmonic, including Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, Janácek’s Cunning Little Vixen, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake and, earlier this month, a magnificent rendering of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. (Full disclosure: The education department of the Philharmonic engaged me to do a video about Joan of Arc as an inspiration to composers and creative artists).
Gilbert is moving to Sweden, where his wife is from, but I hope that major musical organizations around the world will engage him and allow him to explore his passions. I would love to hear him conduct Lohengrin. He is more than up to the task musically and this is an opera about belief which he would make a meaningful experience.
Alan Gilbert began his final season at the New York Philharmonic with Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony (“From the New World”) as part of a year-long exploration of that work’s particular relationship to the orchestra for which it was composed while Dvořák lived in New York in the 1890s and to the city that was part of its inspiration. Alan Gilbert has new worlds to explore in the next phase of his career but I hope that New York (his hometown) will always find a place for him and his very special talents and mission as a musician.