Hsin-Mei Agnes Hsu, Younghee Kim-Wait, Karen LeFrak and Shirley Young ring in the new year

While Shindigger was giddy to celebrate the Chinese New Year last week with the New York Philharmonic at its second annual Chinese New Year Gala, not everyone was excited to ring in the Year of the Snake. Take Joan Rivers, for example. “I’m fucking angry, because they make a lot of our jewelry for QVC,” Ms. Rivers cackled at us as we left Dennis Basso’s 30th anniversary runway show. “So get back to work, guys ... Make that happy New Year. Now get fucking back to work!”

Perhaps Ms. Rivers just didn’t receive her invite. Because those who did showed up in high style. Angela Chen, one of the gala co-chairs, wore a dazzling sequined Armani gown that attracted Shindigger immediately to her side as she glided around Avery Fisher Hall’s promenade.

“I think the red color is very important for Chinese New Year,” she told us.

We hoisted a glass of bubbly to our lips in chromatic agreement but wondered: wasn’t she nervous about competing with the Fashion Week festivities that were still raging across Josie Robertson Plaza?

“This week, I can enjoy both,” Ms. Chen replied.

Taking off to replenish our glass, we ran into Karen LeFrak, board member and Special Events Committee chairman for the Philharmonic, who had embellished her black gown with some serious Chinese-inspired bling.

Of her floral cluster white-diamond earrings, la grande dame said, “My mother-in-law [Ethel Stone] is ill, and she had given them to me, and it’s kind of a spiritual wish for her to get well. You know, kind of a superstitious feeling of good luck for everyone.”

With that warm sentiment in our head, we headed again toward the bar, where Ambassador Sun Guoxiang and Madam Wang Min, Chiu-Ti Jansen and billionaire Wilbur Ross were hovering.

As we reached that boozy pot of gold, we also had the good fortune to run into the vivacious Shirley Young, another gala co-chair, who was decked out in a handsome Chinese silk brocade evening jacket with fur collar and a titanic-sized smile.

Was she excited for the Year of the Snake? Shindigger asked.

“Chinese women don’t have any problem with the snake,” Ms. Young said with a wink, going on to tell us about a fairy tale called “White Snake.” “In just a few minutes, you will see the dragon and Madame White Snake, which is a fable about a person from the other world who falls in love with a human being—she’s actually a snake.”

Which sounded eerily similar to Shindigger’s last relationship!

Reaching for another glass of champagne then, we stumbled into Gary Parr, deputy chairman of Lazard Frères and essentially the fairy godfather of the Philharmonic (officially known as chairman and gala co-chair).

“There’s really going to be a great mix of music, East and West, tonight,” said the Tuxedo Park resident, dressed in a custom-made blood-red silk brocade jacket. But just as he began to elaborate on details of the concert, the room was invaded by the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, which paid homage to “The Legend of Madame White Snake.”

Afterward, we enjoyed a final cocktail with British businesswoman and socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.

Ms. Maxwell, like Ms. LeFrak, is a proud owner of AKC-registered pooches, and her 3-year-old dog, Captain Nemo (named after the Jules Verne character, not the storm), had just competed to moderate success at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

“He was in the last six, but you know, there’s always next year,” she said.

Fashion! New Year’s celebrations! Fancy dog awards! How on earth did this dreadful month of February get so crowded?

The question hung in our mind like a Zen koan.

But no time to think. Moments later, we were wedged into our seats for the concert, which was marvelous. Under the baton of Long Yu, the performance highlights included jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, Peking Opera star Yan Wang and the Snow Lotus Trio, a folk ensemble.

Feeling as though we had maxed out our culture quota for the evening, Shindigger passed on the gala dinner and elected to venture over to arguably one of the best party venues in the entire city: the iconic Lever House on Park Avenue.

Inside, fashion demigod Carine Roitfeld was hosting a Veuve Clicquot- and Belvedere-fueled bash for the second issue of her glossy rag, CR Fashion Book. Shindigger pulled up and quickly eyed our favorite KCD publicist, Hallie Chrisman, at the door, and we knew we were in good hands.

“I like the idea of having a party uptown,” Ms. Roitfeld told Shindigger in a corner of the front bar. “I like the Warhols [on the walls], and it’s a great place for lunch.”

As trays of gourmet prosciutto di Parma, ratatouille crostini, saffron risotto and seared tuna whizzed by, DJ Nick Cohen spun remixes of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” and Chic’s “I Want Your Love.” We passed on most of the nibbles, enjoying friendly pours of champagne. Thankfully, the service was anything but Parisian and our glasses were refilled before ever reaching half-empty (or is it half-full?).

“I’m very proud to be here and celebrate this with my mom and my sister and the rest of the party,” said Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld in his charming French accent. And it turned out that he too had enjoyed some Chinese New Year festivities. “We had Chinese dinner last night,” he said. “I like to go to Shun Lee Palace.”

As the deejay was swapped out for a lively Latin band sometime after 11 p.m., designer Olivier Theyskens, fashionista Anna Dello Russo, model Karlie Kloss and Ms. Roitfeld swarmed the dance floor.

Shindigger, unwilling to be a lonesome wallflower and miss the excitement, dove right in, taking our old pal Joan Rivers’s advice to heart. We would enjoy a happy New Year. And then we would get back to fucking work—tomorrow.

“Hi, Kara, this is the New York Philharmonic,” the voice on the phone says.

“I’m not interested,” I say, trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible, feeling, once again, like a total heel.

I don’t not want to support them; I just don’t actually want to.

“We aren’t calling for a donation,” they say, but that’s exactly what they are doing. “We are just calling to see if you enjoyed the concert last fall.” It’s a trap. No matter how you answer, the next question they ask is whether you would like to become a member. But I don’t. It’s not like I listen to Tchaikovsky on Spotify or air conduct along to Brahms. I played Mozart on the recorder in elementary school, but that’s about as far as my classical music appreciation goes. It can be a pleasant background, but it’s one I rarely choose.

And yet one Thursday evening last fall, I found myself at the Philharmonic, watching Alan Gilbert conduct Mahler’s Resurrection. As with most pursuits one enthusiastically embraces for a brief time, the catalyst was a love interest. My boyfriend at the time was a classical musician, and I still had a valid student ID. So I bought discount tickets. And I’ve regretted it ever since. “We see that you bought a student discount ticket to the Philharmonic in September 2011,” came one call. “You should become a member!”

I hang up, but the calls don’t stop. Every few weeks, I get a call from a number I don’t know. I don’t answer. The emails keep flooding my inbox; the mailman keeps delivering schedules and postcards and special offers and invitations to donate. I throw them all away. The classical musician and I have long since broken up.

I might need a new number. The calls still come regularly. Sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly. I forget about them for a while. And then, out of the blue, my phone rings. I get postcards almost every week. They knew what I did last summer ... and it wasn’t going to the Philharmonic.

Turns out, it wasn’t just me.

It happened to a friend who went to see the Philharmonic as a requirement for a college music appreciation class. He didn’t appreciate it that much, and left at intermission. But years later, he was still getting phone calls asking for donations. “They were oddly personal and engaging,” he said. “I didn’t want to sound like a Philistine and tell them I don’t care about classical music.”

See, that’s how they work. That’s why people don’t tell them to screw off.

When confronted by a nice, well-modulated classical music fan, how is one supposed to say that you have no interest in supporting the symphony ... ever?

I pictured earnest Juilliard student string musicians and middle-aged women lurking around the Upper West Side, hiding behind sensible shoes and Channel 13 tote bags. They probably can’t even conceive of not loving the symphony. How to break the news?

Though I’m not the most avid concert aficionado, it did seem like a pleasant, reasonable thing to do at the time. And it was practically free. The New York Philharmonic offers rush discount tickets for just $13.50 on the web, so students and seniors can go to Avery Fisher Hall and watch Alan Gilbert conduct the orchestra. It seemed like a great deal when I purchased the tickets online. How did I know that those little red asterisks next to the required fields—phone number, email and home address—would come back to haunt me?

I’ve gotten discount tickets through TKTS, and to the Met and ABT and Alvin Ailey and random Off Broadway plays. They send emails. Sometimes postcards or schedules. And I get dunning emails from college, high school, even my elementary school. I once was plagued by a collection agency when I forgot to pay for a $15 subscription to Rolling Stone. After enough threatening letters about ruined credit, I eventually wrote a check. But the collective hawking might of these institutions has nothing on the Philharmonic.

A blogger who writes under the handle Miracle on 32nd Street had the same experience. After she stopped answering the Phil’s phone calls, they called her mother—despite the fact that neither of them still lived in New York.

“During the two years I spent in New York City, I attended a total of two concerts sponsored by the New York Phil,” she wrote. “Somehow, this meager action led them to believe that I’m a.) wealthy, b.) philanthropic, and c.) NOT plunged into grad school debt.”

Look, I get it. Youth is a prized demographic. The Philharmonic’s supporters are aging and dying off; the institution needs young people to replace them, and $100-a-year, tax-deductible memberships are a good place to start. Great art costs money. And there’s more than my own financial welfare at stake. Corporations need to see engagement numbers to know that an organization is viable before they are willing to underwrite programs. Matching grants are only given if the organization is making its own money off of pledge drives. And so they call. And call again.

Still, it’s annoying. There are other needy institutions in the world—and plenty more Philharmonic-going malcontents where I come from. A quick Google search of the phone numbers takes me to message boards where those assaulted by the N.Y. Phil’s fund-raising exchange tales of woe:

“Suspect that its the NY Philharmonic or similar performing arts org. I’ve had lots of missed calls from variants of this, -2245, -2246, -2251, -2242, etc.” wrote one victim. “I stopped answering this pattern when the NYPhil (to which I have been a contributor) pissed me off.”

“Received missed call from this number today; no voicemail left,” recounted another. “Wondering where it came from and the comment regarding the NY Philharmonic makes sense.  They have called me before.”

“I also got a call from this number. I didn’t recognize it as the usual NYPhil number ... but I can’t think of any other 212 number which would call me at 9 in the morning.”

“Not a day goes by without a call from this # or a one similar to it. The NY Philharmonic, apparently. I went there once on a student ticket—I don’t have any $ for them, and even if I did, wouldn’t give it with these aggressive tactics. Stop calling!!!”

I want them to stop, but I do feel a little bit guilty. These fund-raising drives aren’t just the lifeblood of arts organizations. They are a source of employment. The New York Philharmonic advertises on Craigslist, promising up to $15 an hour, the ability to work from home and free tickets. In this downturn, these underemployed viola players must really need the gig. The holidays are just around the corner, and new sheet music doesn’t grow on trees.

Ugh. And still, I want to be rid of them. I turn to an expert for help. Fund-raising consultant Robert Swaney tells me that being evasive and vague about “not being interested” won’t work. Nor will just hanging up or claiming to be too busy to talk. Only seven words will work, he says. And they are: “Please take me off your calling list.”

Haven’t I tried that? I think I have. I’ll try again. I really hope it works this time. At this point, I’m ready to get a burner phone, like in The Wire. Make a fake email address. Offer up a mortal enemy’s home address. March over to Lincoln Center telemarketing HQ and personally ...

Hang on, I think I hear my phone ringing.

Garrison Keillor (Getty Images)

NPR’s most venerable personage—in a post-Click-and-Clack era—is Prairie Homeboy Garrison Keillor, and he’s celebrating turning 70 with a concert at the New York Philharmonic. He’s not just sitting in the box: Mr. Keillor is narrating an orchestral performance with love sonnets and something called “Hot Bananas Poetry and Piano Ping-Pong.” The evening concludes with an improvisational piece featuring orchestra, singers and, per Mr. Keillor, “images and musical themes in the mind of a person of a certain age.” Richard Dworsky, the music director of A Prairie Home Companion, accompanies on piano and, we hope, will lend a bit of structure to all the improv!

New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, 7:30pm, tickets and information can be found at nyphil.org.

Igor Stravinsky

It’s opening night for the New York Philharmonic—finally, our fall is in full swing! We’ll be celebrating a different season, though, as music director Alan Gilbert opens the season with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a piece of music that once moved audiences to riot and is now the center of a lovely evening at Lincoln Center. Coming later in the season, Mr. Gilbert conducts Scheherezade, and Spanish conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos comes in to conduct Mozart and Mahler.

Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, 7:30pm, tickets and information can be found at nyphil.org

The money is proceeds from Mr. Baldwin’s Capital One Bank commercials, and part of ongoing donations from money he's earned from those ads to his favorite cultural institutions. This has also involved synergy with Capital One Bank itself making donations, as described in a Wall Street Journal news item last year about the actor's philanthropic activities.

Alec Baldwin.

“I have loved classical music all of my life,” Mr. Baldwin said in a statement released by the orchestra. “Zarin Mehta made my dream of becoming part of the world of classical music come true. I will miss working with him directly, but will always bear in mind his passion, commitment and insight as I continue my work with the New York Philharmonic.”

Mr. Baldwin’s dream came true when he began hosting The New York Philharmonic This Week in 2009. He’s also a member of the New York Philharmonic board.

Executive director designate Matthew VanBesien called Mr. Baldwin’s work with the orchestra “one of Zarin Mehta’s great legacies.” He added that he personally looks forward to working with the actor and “welcoming him further in the fold of the New York Philharmonic.”

A spokesperson for the orchestra said that the gift, not his first, isn’t earmarked for any particular purpose. “It’s just general,” she said, “it’s not specified for any particular program.”

So when Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos finishes a three-day run playing the work with the New York Philharmonic Saturday night—thereby missing the elections that could decide if Greece stays in the euro-zone or heads closer to the exit—it will not have been without a measure of irony.

Leonidas Kavakos

“The last elections, even though this was in the middle of a tour of mine, I flew just for the day to vote and back to play but that was because I was on tour in Europe,” Mr. Kavakos told The Observer. “Now my last concert is on Saturday with the New York Phil and the elections are on Sunday. And on Monday I have a concert in Saint Peterburg, so there is no way for me to make it.” He’s slated to play the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1 there, with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra.

Mr. Kavakos had just arrived stateside when The Observer caught up with him by phone earlier this week. He was preparing for the first of several rehearsals in advance of his performances with the New York Philharmonic. They were slated for Thursday night at 7:30 p.m., a Friday matinee at 2 p.m. and the Saturday 8 p.m. performance that, as he mentioned, would make it impossible to get back to Greece in time to vote in the country’s pivotal elections.

Asked about how the arts in Greece are faring, he seems more interested in talking about the broad reach of events there—the pensioner whose benefit has been dramatically slashed, or the cancer patient who can’t access the care or medicine they need.

“I do not know what has not been affected by the crisis,” he said. “Everything has been affected by the crisis and it’s not over yet and I do not think that it is going to be over very soon.” Like the majority of Greeks, he hopes the country will stay in the euro zone—but not at any cost.

“I feel that it’s absolutely existential for Greece to stay in the Euro and I am for that,” he said. Then: “At the same time I cannot see people that have cancer and they cannot buy their medicine because the economy is collapsed. And we get 100 billion Euros, of which only 3 billion goes to the Greek people. The rest pays the banks. This I cannot see. If this has to be the way than I would rather say that we should get out of it.”

Adding to the irony in Mr. Kavakos’s situation is the fact that, professionally, things seem to be going well for him. In late April it was announced that he had signed an exclusive recording contract with Decca Classics. Paul Moseley, the label’s managing director, said at the time that Mr. Kavakos had “slowly and surely risen to the top of the violinists’ tree,” adding that he had become “the first choice of great conductors and orchestras around the world.”

The partnership will produce recordings of some of the giants of the violin repertoire. First up is Beethoven’s cycle of violin sonatas. “The luxury of having a great company like Decca as a partner is that it helps me, and I’m sure any other artist, to create a recording journey that one wants to do,” he said. “I would say that the first thought was that I want to record two of what I consider the cornerstones of the repertoire on the violin and one is Beethoven violin sonatas because it’s of course one of the very few big cycles that you have on the violin—it’s a lot of music, it’s about six hours of music.”

The second cornerstone of the repertoire that he mentions will be the Bach Solo Sonatas and Partitas. They’ll be followed with the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. “For me it was important to create this line of the peak of violin repertoire because I have also a little objection to the way that the business goes today in the sense that you have more and more of these short little pieces here and there—arrangements, transcriptions—and all that we can do in order to become popular and likable which is of course the way to go,” he said.

For now, understandably, in addition to upcoming performances, his thoughts are at home. A possible way out of what he views as Greece’s moral as well as a financial crisis? The arts, he said.

“I think this is more than ever the time for humanity to look into the arts,” he explained. “And I’m not talking about music, especially, but into the arts in the sense that the epicenter of the arts is the gift of life for humans—that incredible gift that is at the same time a curse and a blessing. When that is not being appreciated—then that’s a source of problems.”

cgaines@observer.com 

Baldwin and Thomas.

It was a quintessentially March evening. Though the sun was shining bright, the breeze added enough of a chilling twinge that guests shivered as they checked their coats at Avery Fisher Hall. The troupe was gathering for the New York Philharmonic’s spring gala, and given the ambiguous weather, their outfits bespoke the seasonal purgatory.

Some donned bright patterned frocks, deciding to ring in the season with open, if goose-bumped, arms, while assorted grand-dames entered in full fur coats. Half of the gentlemen had dusted off their Easter ties, but the rest chose more subdued neckwear hues. Overall, the group’s collective attire oscillated undecidedly somewhere on the spectrum between lion and lamb.

The Observer walked up the stairs toward cocktail hour directly behind a bronzed and conspicuously trim Alec Baldwin, and his yogi belle, Hilaria Thomas. Where had they been basking, we asked. “We went to Florida for the weekend. It was unusual, because I’m not much of a Florida person,” Mr. Baldwin said. “We had three days, or two and a half days …” he began. “Of paradise!” Ms. Thomas interjected, finishing his sentence with an adoring, eyelash-fluttering gaze.

“We would exercise in the morning and then lay by the pool all day,” Mr. Baldwin admitted. “And then exercise at night,” Ms. Thomas added. The Observer blushed. “Yeah, we had a lot of exercise.”

Spring, it seems, will be a busy season for Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Thomas. “We have a lot of crazy travel,” he said, listing trips to Rome, and of course Cannes, which he pronounced with that added syllabic affectation on the “a.” “A partner and I—the film director Jimmy Toback—he and I are going to shoot a film at Cannes, about Cannes.” How meta! “It is somewhat meta,” Mr. Baldwin agreed.

A friend approached. “You look great! You’re like Dirk Bogarde. I mean that as a compliment,” Mr. Baldwin said, clarifying for good measure.

Not everyone in the room shared Mr. Baldwin’s escapist tendencies, however. Karen LeFrak, wearing a daffodil-yellow Carolina Herrera cocktail dress, said that she is looking forward to spending time cityside this spring. “It’s just beautiful! We’re so lucky,” she said, describing New York in full bloom. Social outings will take a backseat to grandmotherly duties this season, she explained. Ms. LeFrak intends to spend her time “not out and about, just playing with my grandson. Seeing the world all over through his eyes is pretty special,” she gushed, with a proud twinkle in her own eye.

We were briefly introduced to Jo Loesser, the widow of legendary show-tunesman Frank Loesser. The evening’s concert would honor her late husband’s vast repertoire, with selections from his most ubiquitous hits (“Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and “Luck Be a Lady” not the least among them), not to mention his lesser-known numbers. “I hope dinner is good,” Ms. Loesser said with characteristic pluck (combined with a healthy dose of irreverence). “Because I know the concert will be good.”

Soon, attendants were ringing preshow bells, gently shepherding guests into the concert hall. The philharmonic proceeded to accompany a series of cross-generational hits, familiar to older guests as original Broadway shows, better known to others as songs sung on Glee. The audience cheered as Mad Men star Robert Morse took the stage, reprising the role of J. Pierrepont Finch, for which he won a Tony in 1962.

The songs, which constitute a significant portion of Broadway’s classic canon, were beautifully nostalgic, gently evoking the heyday of the Great White Way. Full of innuendo and postwar chauvinism (“A lady doesn’t wander all over the room, and blow on some other guy’s dice,”), Mr. Loesser’s wit and clever subversion crossed beyond the fourth wall and through that most troublesome diaphane, time.

Ms. Loesser herself took the stage, singing “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,” to the crowd’s delight.
After the show, gala attendees found their seats on the Grand Promenade while concertgoers filed out.

Searching for our table, we ran into Liz Peek, who raved about the concert. “I thought it was charming and good fun,” she offered, wrapping her shawl tightly around her, the leonine aspect of March having seemingly prevailed after sunset. Like Mr. Baldwin, Ms. Peek had recently returned from the Sunshine State, and was dismayed by the cold snap in New York.

“We kind of expected to come back to 80 degrees, so this is a little disappointing,” she confessed. “We’re going to go back down to Florida again, but I hope by then we won’t really need to go to Florida.” In the meantime, Ms. Peek has serious horticultural concerns. “I’m actually quite worried about my garden, because I hear they’re expecting quite a freeze out in the country, the suburbs.”

Settling at our table, The Observer found ourselves seated in between Ms. Loesser and her son-in-law, actor and director Don Stephenson. Ms. Loesser’s daughter, Emily Loesser, was seated across the table with their two young daughters, Fiona and Hallie.

“I didn’t know Granny could sing like that!” Fiona exclaimed gleefully as she picked at the “Bushel and a Peck” first course.

Indeed, when Ms. Loesser took her seat, the table erupted in praise. Asked if she was nervous before her performance, Ms. Loesser laughed. “I couldn’t stop my leg shaking backstage, but then I thought, ‘Are you going to make an ass of yourself or are you going to get it over with?’”

“I need a drink!” she soon whispered in our ear. “I have to see my psychiatrist tomorrow, but that’s not until 11:15!” Obligingly rising from her seat when gestured to another table, Ms. Loesser leaned in our direction once more. “Oh, shit. I have to go over there, but I really don’t want to.”

Soon, Mr. Baldwin appeared at our table. “I’ll be your agent,” he offered to Ms. Loesser’s granddaughters, much to their delight. Fiona, however, soon looked at her father. “Daddy, what’s an agent?” she asked.

Guests began to file out, kissing and congratulating Ms. Loesser on the performance. Ted Sperling, the evening’s conductor, offered some final thoughts on Loesser’s continuing legacy.

“I think Frank Loesser is a great candidate to be appealing to young people, because his music is so of the people. Somebody said he just knows how to set ordinary speech to music. He’s not highfalutin or fancy, it’s just straight forward and gritty and personal and New York-y.”

As three generations of New Yorkers walked out into the below-freezing temperatures, many were left wondering whether spring would be a little late this year after all.
editorial@observer.com

Josh Bell (Photo courtesy of Chris Lee)

When Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in May of 1913, its thorny polyrhythms and pagan-inspired choreography completely unnerved the audience, whose booing and catcalls eventually erupted into a full-blown riot. Even after the police intervened, chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance as bar-room-style brawls broke out in the Parisian aisles, sending the evening into the annals of music history.

There was, however, no noted misconduct at the New York Philharmonic's Wednesday evening concert in Avery Fisher Hall last week (although we did spy several hefty rings that The Observer briefly mistook for brass knuckles). In fact, the most visible action Stravinsky's polytonalities provoked in the audience was a bit of toe-tapping from elderly feet stretched in the aisles.

Wednesday was the first of four performances conducted by the 36-year-old Daniel Harding, who, after getting his start assisting the esteemed British conductor Simon Rattle, frequently trots the globe, leading the world's premier ensembles. Mr. Harding is certainly not one of the most flamboyant of his peers, tending to forgo oversized gestures in favor of succinct, driven movements. The masterful playing of the ensemble conjured visions of the haunting ballet, from the frenetic brass cries in “Dance of the Earth” to the asymmetrically feverish “Sacrificial Dance,” the movement in which the chosen virgin dances to her death. Listening to Stravinsky's piece played by the Phil is like riding an orchestral roller coaster: it’s so visceral one's stomach drops with each forte.

The evening opened with Scottish composer Oliver Knussen's Flourish With Fireworks, a three-minute piece that lived up to its title, sparkling and popping with zeal.

Next up was Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major, which was famously critiqued after its 1881 premiere by Eduard Hanslick in Vienna's Neue freie Presse as “vulgar,” the product of “hideous notation,” particularly the first movement, in which the violin was, as he put it, “pulled, torn, drubbed.” While the solo violin part was deemed practically unplayable by leading violinists of the composer’s day (it requires tremendous endurance), the piece now stands one of the most beautifully lyrical legacies of the famous Russian composer.

Rising to the challenge was violinist Josh Bell, whose immense talent and charming blue-eyed head shots have earned him a loyal following of enamored female fans. He may be—dare we say it?—the Justin Bieber of violin soloists, at least in terms of star power. Mr. Bell's virtuosic mastery of his instrument brought to life Tchaikovsky's work, written while the composer vacationed on the shores of Lake Geneva, recuperating from a bout of depression.

The 44-year-old Mr. Bell first stepped into the spotlight at the age of 14 when he debuted with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Ricardo Muti. Since then, the Avery Fischer Prize recipient and Musical America 2010 Instrumentalist of the Year has enjoyed immense success and a consistently full house, Wednesday night being no exception. Mr. Bell played the demanding passages in the opening Allegro of Tchaikovsky's relentless concerto with superhuman agility, maintaining an intense look of concentration that quickly vanished as he gracefully wiped his brow during the orchestral interludes.

Mr. Bell managed to weave the three movements together into a comprehensive piece, his emotive legatos in the second movement balancing the challenging dance-like cadenzas in the Allegro vivacissimo. Members of his fan club sprang to their feet abruptly after the first movement, awarding their hero a well-deserved standing ovation. Although this was only Mr. Bell's first performance of the week, we had the feeling that he would continue to play to an exuberant full house, perhaps provoking yet another historical fight, should he decide to dole out a limited amount of autographs.

The Lincoln Center.

“We’re a very democratic place,” Eric Latzky, the vice president of communications at the New York Philharmonic, said over the phone last week. “I think there was a healthy expression of ideas from a lot of people.”

When it comes to creating a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it seems that everyone has an opinion. This Saturday, the night before the anniversary, the Philharmonic will play what it is calling “A Concert for New York.” The program is simple: Mahler’s Second Symphony, the uplifting “Resurrection,” with two excellent soloists: soprano Dorothea Röschmann and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung.

But the process of choosing the piece was more complicated. What tone do you want to set at an event like this? You don’t want to be too mournful, or too triumphant. Not too explicitly tied to 9/11, but not too general.

Alan Gilbert, the orchestra’s music director, and Zarin Mehta, its executive director, began planning for the concert almost two years ago along with then-artistic administrator John Mangum. “What came first,” said Mr. Latzky, “was the idea that the orchestra should acknowledge the anniversary musically. And I think Alan and Zarin began discussions about what that might be almost that far back. Probably the idea of the event came first and then the specific music that would be played. It’s different from most programming we do because this event had a very clear ‘theme,’ so to speak, from the start, which is not necessarily true of regular subscription events within the season or even most special events.”

“We were kicking around a lot of ideas,” said Mr. Gilbert, in an interview in his office in Avery Fisher Hall.

They considered Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the commemorative musical work to end all commemorative musical works. There was also talk of a larger program—“more of a potpourri,” Mr. Gilbert said—that would feature New York composers, as well as another one that would have involved lots of New York musicians. They thought of Mozart’s Requiem. They considered John Adams’s piece “On the Transmigration of Souls,” which was composed in the aftermath of the attacks and premiered by the Philharmonic in September 2002. That piece won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and the orchestra’s recording of it won a Grammy in 2005, but it hasn’t played it since.

“‘On the Transmigration of Souls’ is a wonderful piece and I think he’s a wonderful composer,” Mr. Gilbert said. “For me, though, this was the chance to look ahead and that was such a product, great as it is, of that moment immediately following 9/11. That’s potentially more limiting in terms of the way people can deal with the piece than a piece that’s more, I would say, timeless and universal. I think it’s a piece that deserves to stand on its own as a musical statement. It’s so loaded with associations that to do it, especially on the 10th anniversary, it would be unavoidable. I do think it will have a life as a pure and direct musical statement. This just didn’t seem like the time to bring it back.

“Finally, Zarin and I thought of the Mahler Second. It’s a huge work, but it is a very pure, musical, human statement and that’s how we decided to finally come down.”

In a post on his blog Seated Ovation last week the writer Will Robin called the Mahler symphony the wrong piece for the occasion, writing, “The arc of Mahler’s Second is ultimately one of triumph, even triumphalism … Commemoration should be about mourning and remembering, not resurrection.”

“It’s my favorite symphony,” he added, “but it has little to do with a sense of mournful peace,” and he suggested the Fauré Requiem instead, or Brahms’s “German Requiem,” which the orchestra played nine days after the attacks.

“We are kind of a voice for New York,” Mr. Gilbert said. “The possibility in a concert is for a shared humanity, a shared experience. I’ve been very struck and moved by what people have said that that Brahms Requiem meant for them.”

But for this occasion Mr. Gilbert didn’t want a requiem, nor did he want a piece that would be explicitly associated with either the attacks themselves or with death, including another of Mahler’s symphonies he considered.

“Obviously we thought of Mahler 9, which is a piece that is very much about death,” he said. “I love Mahler 9. We’re doing it later in the year. But to me that’s just too intense at the end. It’s too obviously about death. And while many people died and it’s a huge tragedy we want to remember that and commemorate that, at this point it’s 10 years later and people are trying to look ahead.

“I can see that we could have been more somber and more pointed and had a piece that is very specifically a memorial and emphasize that side,” he added. “But I don’t think this precludes that response. What is interesting to me about Mahler 2 is that the triumphant glory that he undoubtedly achieves at the end of the symphony has another side to it. It’s not one-dimensional by any means.

The Philharmonic’s press materials for the concert make much of the fact that the orchestra played the symphony on what it calls “a similar occasion”: Nov. 24, 1963, two days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Then-music director Leonard Bernstein, who led the orchestra on that occasion, wrote of his choice, “We played the Mahler symphony not only in terms of resurrection for the soul of one we love, but also for the resurrection of hope in all of us who mourn him.”

But as James Oestreich pointed out in The New York Times last November in a review of a book on Mahler, “Bernstein trotted out the ‘Resurrection’ for almost any occasion, including his 1,000th concert with the New York Philharmonic,” adding, of Mahler's Fifth, that “if many Americans know the Adagietto at all, it is probably from its use in the Visconti film Death in Venice rather than from any occasion of mourning.”

“Mahler 2 means everything, and thus nothing,” Mr. Robin wrote on his blog. “Mahler 2 opens seasons, it closes seasons, it marks moments of happiness and moments of tragedy … Classical music shouldn’t be this versatile; no art should.”

But Mr. Gilbert said that the symphony tacks with subtlety between narrative specificity and open-endedness.

“It has a very explicit message—resurrection—which for obvious reasons is appropriate for the moment,” he said. “But even more than that is the lack of specificity of response that it’s possible to have to this piece. Mahler himself had a very clear program in mind when he wrote the piece but I don’t think he ever wanted to limit the way people would react to the work. He himself was so multifaceted and so complex, with his Jewishness; his conversion, probably more for expedience than for anything else, to Catholicism; his interest in folk music and the mystical side of life. It can obviously be thought of as religious, but at the end of the day it’s not only that. There’s nothing predetermined in the way people can react to it. And I like that it can be a very individual and unique interaction between the audience and the work. It leaves [open] the possibility of people dealing with their emotions in a private way.”

The title of the event—“A Concert for New York”—was the phrase that the Philharmonic’s staff had used to informally refer to it during the planning process. While the concert will be broadcast on PBS on the evening of Sept. 11, Mr. Latzky said that the orchestra’s administration consciously chose not to add to the glut of events and memorials (not to mention traffic and security) that will take place on the anniversary itself. The orchestra is counting on the fact that in the midst of sobriety and sadness, people are also going to be seeking dazzling redemption.

“The journey that the Mahler Second takes you on is what people are for the most part trying to achieve 10 years later,” Mr. Gilbert said, “going from angst and despair and questioning the meaning of life, through the third movement, which he called this kind of frustration at a meaningless life, then to the movements that celebrate better times. That’s exactly what this story is about.”

editorial@observer.com

He's got some bad blood here. After a courtship in 2000, and then again several times over the next eight years, he turned down the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, though he remained a frequent--and beloved--guest conductor, one of those guests whose reviews tended to be better than those of the orchestra's own directors. He had said that he didn't want to come to New York because he didn't want a full-time gig, but it turned out he just didn't want that full-time gig: In 2008, he unexpectedly agreed to take over the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and started there last fall.

So there was palpable tension surrounding his first trip to New York with his new ensemble, for a three-concert stand at Carnegie Hall last weekend. Would he include opera, which has formed the foundation of his reputation? Yes, it turned out--but more than that, the opera would be Verdi's Otello, the sweeping work that James Levine has conducted at the Metropolitan Opera more than any other piece.

In bringing Chicago to New York with Otello, Mr. Muti was making a statement, staking a claim. But any thoughts about the politics and strategy were swept away by the sheer power of Friday's thrilling, discomfiting performance. Despite being an unstaged concert production, it was dazzlingly vibrant; when the tenor and soprano singing Otello and Desdemona stood up in unison (at their music stands, in evening wear) for their final confrontation, it was shiver-inducing. The opera's headlong energy, the way it uncannily re-creates Shakespeare's play's unremitting drive toward destruction, has rarely felt so powerful.

It was the orchestra's show. Mr. Muti is known for a devotion to the letter of the score that some people have criticized as overly fastidious, but there was, as critics invariably note of him, the sense of having the gunk from decades of sloppy Otellos wiped miraculously away. The performance revealed moments and whole lines of music that are usually lost in attempts at Verdi's dense orchestration. Mr. Muti brought a transparency to those massive textures--you seemed to hear every instrument--yet the force and pure volume were stunning.

Simultaneously beefed up and pared down, the performance was relentless. The first act was one long, furious convulsion, exhausting and effective except for its stinting of the relaxation of the closing love duet. Mr. Muti drove the duet's tempo mercilessly, making clear that there is no respite in his vision of the opera. (It's an approach that occasionally veers towards rigidity.) Appropriately, given this conception, the players seemed tireless. The justly famous Chicago brass shone. The strings were both warm and sharp, with tremendous eloquence from the cellos. The orchestra's resident chorus was perfectly focused and clear.

There were moments that were almost too vivid, in which Mr. Muti and the orchestra seemed so intent on being in your face--with a savage violin line, an unexpected flute solo--that individual effects upstaged the drama. But the honesty and naturalness of Mr. Muti's phrasing always returned, bringing with it the proper perspective.

The orchestra was so effective that it seemed at times to crowd out the singers. As Iago, Carlo Guelfi was gruff and a little blustery, without the slow-burning menace of his orchestral accompaniment. His great "Credo" would have been just as terrifying, the first-act drinking song as ominously jovial, if he hadn't been singing at all: You got the whole character from the playing.

Krassimira Stoyanova was a mature, wary Desdemona who grew more convincing as the opera went on. She seemed strangely abstracted in the love duet--Mr. Muti's precision there made it difficult to project warmth and personality--but deeply affecting in her fourth-act "Willow Song" and "Ave Maria."

In a world notably low on great Otellos, the rising tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko shows great promise in the role, trumpeting Act I's public proclamations and bringing a moving simplicity to the final monologue. The only real evidence of his announced indisposition for a stomach illness was some vocal strain in the difficult sequence that ends Act II.

Otello was undoubtedly the event that Mr. Muti wanted it to be, and if the singers were hardly classic, that only kept the spotlight on the podium. There, one of the great conductors of our time was doing work that you could argue with and wonder over, work that made you hope that he and his new orchestra return early and often to strike fear in the hearts of New York musicians who have to live up to their example.

editorial@observer.com