THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 1, 2002

CORDIAL NOTES RESOUND, AS TOUGH DOWNBEATS FADE
By Bernard Holland

Nothing sounds quite as happy as a happy ending. Certainly, the New York Philharmonic on Thursday night was not the orchestra it was a few years ago, when one heard it smarting weekly under the intense discipline of its now-departing music director, Kurt Masur. All that harsh, tight honesty seemed to melt away. Bartok's Divertimento for String Orchestra floated on air, ripe and relaxed. If cordiality could be translated into musical sound, Philharmonic players, even the ones who did not appreciate Mr. Masur's tough regime, were extending it here.

Bartok seemed beside the point. This was a law-and-order performance: every rule of symmetry submitted to. Germans like Mr. Masur have long seen themselves as Central Europe's civilizing hand, with a mandate to soothe whatever cultural savagery might spring up to the east. Unfortunately, savagery is the Divertimento's key component. Bartok, the ardent ethnomusicologist, centered his heart in the wild beauties of Hungarian and Romanian folk music, and the triumph of this piece is how subtlety serves grass-roots passions. Here playing of great sophistication rolled over them like a freshly paved four-lane highway.

The farewell gift to Mr. Masur on Thursday was Anne-Sophie Mutter taking the solo part in Beethoven's Violin Concerto. Armed with an extraordinary technique - purity of intonation especially at the higher positions, clarity of detail and a vibrating sound capable of penetrating big listening spaces even at the softest pianissimo - Ms. Mutter has developed into a risk-taker, with every ritard and every retreat into whispered sound milked to its fullest. In less capable and more egocentric hands, the results would have been excessive, if not vulgar. But Ms. Mutter's excesses are carried out with taste. Her explorations of extremes seem less self-advertisement than genuine attempts at some new level of communication.

The other music was Joseph Turrin's "Hemispheres," a new piece commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. "Hemispheres" is everything the other two items at this concert were not. Stripped of strings and fully loaded with winds, brass and percussion, Mr. Turrin's music is nervous, loud, swift and aggressive to the point of violence. It is also beautifully made, negotiating its constant changes of speed and pulse with grace.

"Hemispheres" operates in a certain corner of the American mind. Its hard, shiny surfaces are unambiguous and ruminate little if at all. There is an edge of world weariness to Bartok's energies. Mr. Turrin's music is young: no past, only future. Mr. Masur directed all the heavy traffic, but one suspects that most of this performance was turned over to his virtuoso players, knowing that they understood this music better than he.