The New York Times
April 27, 2009

Mendelssohn, With Tyros, Then Teacher at the Helm

James Oestreich

On its face the program order might have seemed perverse: two symphonies followed by an overture. But the Mendelssohn concert on Saturday evening was the culmination of the fifth Kurt Masur Conducting Seminar in collaboration with the Manhattan School of Music, held for the first time this year at the Park Avenue Armory. And after the "Reformation" and "Italian" Symphonies conducted by eight young participants, one movement each, the "Ruy Blas" Overture was conducted by Mr. Masur himself, hardly an anticlimax.

Longtime Masur watchers will recognize familiar themes. Throughout his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, from 1991 to 2002, Mr. Masur agitated to have the orchestra set up shop in the armory for a summer series modeled after the BBC Proms concerts in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall in London. And even before that tenure had officially begun, Mr. Masur conducted a Mendelssohn concert at Tilles Center in Brookville, N.Y., in July 1991 that heralded an almost instantaneous transformation in the sound of a gifted orchestra gone complacent and sloppy. Appropriately for a distant successor to Mendelssohn as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (from 1970 to 1996) Mr. Masur has always been a magical interpreter of Mendelssohn.

Then there is Mr. Masur's intense social conscience, which includes fostering young talent: here not only 13 fledgling conductors chosen from 105 applicants worldwide but also 86 players of the Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra, over four days of intensive sessions that combined elements of master class and rehearsal. By Saturday the orchestra had become as fine a Mendelssohn vehicle as any young conductor could want, and most handled it capably, though without carrying it to great heights of inspiration.

One who did seem to inspire it was Ankush Kumar Bahl, in the finale of the "Reformation" Symphony. Mr. Bahl was also one of the few who, in the earlier sessions, took the lead in rehearsing the orchestra in detail rather than simply waiting for Mr. Masur to interrupt and take matters into his own hands.

In general the "Reformation" Symphony was a great success. The "Italian" Symphony, for whatever reasons arising from the chemistry between young players and a variety of young conductors, seemed far less settled in interpretation and execution. This was especially true of the first movement, which Mr. Masur had used for a major teaching moment in the first rehearsal, on Wednesday.

The supercharged young conductor there and the highly skilled players, obviously prepared to a fare-thee-well, made it a virtuosic romp, as Americans, Mr. Masur noted, are wont to do. But if the tempo is too fast to begin with, he demonstrated, it is impossible to observe the accelerando marking and whip up real excitement near the end of the movement.

Conductor and orchestra adopted Mr. Masur's slower tempo in the performance, at least at the start. But they did not seem wholly convinced by it, and the movement lacked focus, as to some extent did the work as a whole.

Then Mr. Masur took the podium for "Ruy Blas," showing by example all that had occasionally been lacking before, establishing solid rhythm, intense expressivity and, above all, focus, with minimal gesture and maximal personal force and charisma. This performance was, among other things, his gift to the orchestra by way of thanks for a hard week's work beautifully done. The players were left to bask longest in the applause, from the 700 or so listeners, the young conductors and Mr. Masur himself.