Yannick in New York: Success beyond music

NEW YORK — In the wake of Saturday’s 9/11 Verdi “Requiem” performance and PBS telecast from the Metropolitan Opera, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is doing more than rebuilding the long-dormant, much-missed company, but filling a considerable leadership vacuum. And his longtime association with the Philadelphia Orchestra stands to play a key role.

The Verdi performance was one of those singular occasions: Even before the first note, a long, spontaneous standing ovation for the musicians who were on their home stage at Lincoln Center for the first time after 18 months of lockdown, economic hardship and union strife. No moment of silence for 9/11 victims was declared. But there was silence — as intense as silence can be — when the ovation stopped and Verdi was to begin.

The only misstep was on the live telecast, when an ill-placed promotion ad broke in at the end of the music, breaking the spell of a performance in which music, performers and audience were communing as a single entity. But the Verdi performance — which sold out in an hour at the $25 special price — was an unquestionable success that came on the heels of last weekend’s also acclaimed free, outdoor Met orchestra performances of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2″ (“Resurrection”).

As much as these events had larger purposes, Nézet-Séguin’s presence and esteem in this high-velocity musical capital can’t help but burgeon, aided by his common-touch manner that leaves listeners feeling as if they know him personally. The city is full of fine conductors, but even the New York Philharmonic and its music director, Jaap van Zweden, are somewhat compromised by having to play a variety of venues while its Lincoln Center home is being renovated.

It’s fair to say that Nézet-Séguin is on his way to becoming (unofficially) a much-needed musical mayor of New York, like Leonard Bernstein and now-disgraced James Levine before him.

Besides his work at the Met, Nézet-Séguin will open Carnegie Hall on Oct. 6 with the Philadelphia Orchestra in a total of eight concerts encompassing Beethoven’s nine symphonies plus programs that reflect the orchestra’s ongoing commitment to the works of Florence Price (1887-1953), the previously forgotten, Chicago-based African American composer.

Other plans show him in step with quickly changing times. At the Met, he will open the official opera season Sept. 27 with “Fire Shut Up in my Bones” by Terence Blanchard, the first Black composer to be presented there. Later in the season, he will open the new Matthew Aucoin opera Eurydice, based on the celebrated Sarah Ruhl play that tells the famous Orpheus legend from a female viewpoint. Philadelphia programs include a new work by African American composer Valerie Coleman.

Nézet-Séguin’s short Carnegie Hall season with the Met’s orchestra in the spring of 2022 will feature composer Missy Mazzoli.

All of this comes at a time when Nézet-Séguin is emerging from one of the few dark clouds of his career. When the Met orchestra was furloughed in 2020 without pay, many turned against him for doing nothing to help. Music directors rarely get involved with labor union matters, though this one was different. In January this year, he successfully established a fund-raising campaign, matching donations dollar for dollar up to a total of $50,000 that would be split between orchestra and chorus. Too little, too late was one oft-heard reaction.

Now, with the dust settled, his conciliatory manner has come with something more important: musical consistency. Though his concerts in Philadelphia have lent themselves to quick assemblage because the musicians there have been somewhat active during the lockdown, the Met machinery had to have been rusty but was given the luxury of what was reported to be longer-than-usual rehearsal time.

The orchestra’s old sound was back, and its usual sense of instinctual cohesion was strained only occasionally in the more adventurous moments of the Mahler “Symphony No. 2″ last weekend. In the Verdi “Requiem,” the Met chorus had some sonically opaque moments, though in all fairness, this quasi-Old Testament portrayal of The Last Judgment is not meant to be pretty, and was given high-opera characterization.

The best news is how Nézet-Séguin got the solo singers to give their best. Soprano Ailyn Pérez not only nailed her high-wire solo moments but made them feel unusually celestial. Bass Eric Owens had a welcomed elegance that allowed his sense of gravity to emerge more clearly. Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung sang with a precision and sense of ensemble that eluded her in some of her Philadelphia appearances. Tenor Matthew Polenzani projected the words with highly personalized imagination.

But Nézet-Séguin’s success here doesn’t necessarily presage any departure from Philadelphia. The Met is a huge boat and he is only one of the captains.