Above: Daniele Rustioni, photo by Chris Lee
~ Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Thursday January 9th, 2025 - This week the New York Philharmonic debuted another accomplished, youngish conductor - this time, the esteemed opera conductor Daniele Rustioni. Rustioni is a familiar face next door at the Metropolitan Opera, where he has been making appearances in the pit since 2017 and where he will serve as Principal Guest Conductor starting in the fall, lending a hand to the overbooked Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. In this program with the Philharmonic, Rustioni made a strong case for himself as a conductor of symphonic music as well as a welcome addition to the New York concert scene.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Overture to The Merchant of Venice opened the program. Written in 1933 but last played by the Philharmonic in 1941, it was an intriguing choice for a curtain-raiser. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a Jewish-Italian composer known for his film work in Hollywood, was a steadfast traditionalist and drew inspiration from historic literary sources for much of his music.
The piece opens with a crisp unison melody in the strings that quickly expands into textured, cinematic music in the full orchestra. The writing is tuneful and features curly orientalist lines in the oboes that pass around through the woodwinds and strings. A Hollywood-style violin solo was played with Golden-Age sound by concertmaster Frank Huang before a snarling unison string passage that elicited audible vocalizing from Rustioni himself. This music shows a clear debt to Camille Saint-Saëns’s bacchanale from Samson et Dalila (in character as well as in a handful of direct quotations) while pursuing a more narrative musical form. Hearing this music was like finding treasure in a grandparent’s attic: it showed its age (or, old-fashionedness) but its impeccable gilding and adornment still shone brightly when dusted off.
Above: Joshua Bell and Maestro Rustioni; photo by Chris Lee
Joshua Bell then joined the Philharmonic for Dvořák’s Violin Concerto. When the Czech Philharmonic played this concerto in December with Gil Shaham as the soloist, it was an intimate, gentle reading of the piece. By comparison, Bell, Rustioni, and the Philharmonic gave a much grander statement without becoming ponderous.
Bell’s playing was seamless. He handled fast arpeggiated passages with resounding flawlessness and slow melodic lines with bright, singing tone. The third movement theme was snappy and genuinely dancelike. Rustioni leveraged his experience as an opera conductor to keep the orchestra completely in sync with Bell’s solo playing. The result was a rich accompaniment that made no sacrifices in color and attack. There were brief moments where Bell’s energy seemed to lapse (surprisingly, he did not play his part from memory, occasionally relying on sheet music) but Bell’s playing remains boyishly exuberant. As an encore, he played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor—standard enough—with the unusual addition of harp accompaniment played by Nancy Allen of the Philharmonic. Here Bell had the yearning tone that I associate with his recording of John Corigliano’s music for the film The Red Violin, singing gorgeously in the mid and low range of his instrument. Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony was an ideal canvas for Rustioni and the Philharmonic. It showcased both Rustioni’s propulsive dramatic drive and mastery over contrasting characters as well as the Philharmonic’s facility in music of precision and intensity.
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth represents the explosion of sonata form that Mahler would later exploit in his symphonies. Tchaikovsky’s symphonic movements, unlike Bruckner’s, possess strong narrative contours that always drive the “action” forward and offer the listener legible forms.
In Rustioni’s reading of the piece, the first two movements give the sense of music that gradually unspools, with long melodic lines whose ends search for their next threads. Along the way, searing fanfares in the brass lead to the dreamy abstraction of masquerade-like waltzes and glimpses of foreboding crop up in the double-basses and brass. The end of the second movement exquisitely unravels when tight clusters of chords incrementally array into towering columns of ambiguous sound. The incomparably fun third movement, with its plucked strings and impossibly fast scribblings of woodwind figures was played to perfection and brought out a wide range of dynamics across the sections of the orchestra. Only in the last movement, with its triumphal music played so well by the Philharmonic players, does the piece respool itself. After this musical journey, the return of the fanfare from the first movement was immensely rewarding. The entire bloc of woodwinds was particularly strong in their various solo lines throughout the Symphony, as well as the timpani (played by Markus Rhoten) in its crucial role in this piece.
Rustioni’s conducting is one of embodiment. Accustomed to leading singers, he takes big breaths and shows in his face (especially his mouth) the kinds of feelings he wants to draw out of the musicians. He squats low to indicate pianissimo passages and unleashes courtly dance gestures if the music calls for it. Occasionally his gestures are too idiosyncratic and don’t elicit much from the players, but his conducting is always amiable, sincere, and without pretension.
~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin