NEWSDAY
May 9, 2003

Masur Returns to Premiere a Friend's Work
by Justin Davidson

After 11 years at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur left in the middle of last year in a burst of valedictory love. The tension and conflict were relegated to the archives; now, orchestra, conductor and administration basked in a circle of professed admiration. The payoff came this month: Three weeks of Masur redux, concluding some unfinished business.

Among the projects that never quite got taken care of at the end of his tenure was the premiere of a work commissioned from Masur's longtime friend from his East German years, Siegfried Matthus - a double concerto for trumpet, trombone and orchestra. The very combination prompts an incipient giggle. Trumpet concertos can be grand, show-stopping affairs, but move two brass players to the front of the stage and encourage them to show off, and you have the potential for music as a contact sport. This is especially true when the trumpeter is Philip Smith and the trombonist Joseph Alessi, two of the most self-assured virtuosi in the business.

In "Concerto for Two," Matthus relished the competitive aspects of the setup so much that after plying them with plenty of bravura passagework, he simply resorted to filling a page with indeterminate squiggles and written instructions to do pretty much whatever they wanted, so long as it was "high-spirited."

That it was. The soloists kept putting down and picking up instruments of various sizes - including toy versions - in their quest for the highest note, the fastest scale, the most inimitable riff. They wound up their double cadenza by improvising an homage to another former music director, knocking back and forth a passage from Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story."

Hearing Smith and Alessi crow in tandem is an undiluted pleasure, but somehow it came off as a forlorn patch of humor in the middle of an otherwise serious piece. Sincere melodies, earnest climaxes and dramatically deployed percussion made the buffo cadenza feel like a surprise and the ending feel abrupt.

Masur may have connected best with the sober side of Matthus' music, since he surrounded it with works of gravity. Before it came the overture from Schumann's opera "Genoveva" and afterwards Brahms' Symphony No. 1. Notwithstanding the intervening weeks of platinum precision under the new man on the podium, Lorin Maazel, the Philharmonic sounded like its warmly hazy old self. Hearing Kurt Masur conduct Brahms again was like returning to old Northeastern hills - the vistas have a placid, civilized beauty, with an occasional shiver of the unexpected - an undulating landscape smoothed by history and experience.