Philly’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin steps in for a disgraced Putin supporter at Carnegie Hall

NEW YORK — In this city of rampant subway rerouting and restaurant-out-of-business signs, one event was absolutely certain Friday at Carnegie Hall: Yannick Nézet-Séguin was welcomed like a hero.

The Philadelphia Orchestra music director stepped in to save the Vienna Philharmonic’s high-profile weekend of concerts after the originally scheduled Valery Gergiev plummeted to disgrace, having supported Vladimir Putin for decades and now, by implication, the Ukrainian invasion.

Amid a protracted standing ovation after the all-Rachmaninoff concert, Nézet-Séguin good-humoredly told the audience: “If you want an ... encore, please come back tomorrow!”

As if tickets were readily available. The Vienna Philharmonic’s annual residency is among the most prestigious events of the New York classical music season.

Nézet-Séguin’s full schedule includes opening a new production of Verdi’s five-hour Don Carlos on Monday at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is also music director, as well as preparing the world premiere of the Kevin Puts opera The Hours on March 18 and 20 at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center.

But he was free for the Friday-through-Sunday Vienna concerts, the Russian repertoire (also including Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov) is deeply familiar to him, and South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, one of his recording partners, was willing to fly in from Berlin, arriving at 2 p.m. Friday for the 8 p.m. concert. He replaced Denis Matsuev, also a Putin supporter.

At times, the Rachmaninoff performances took on an air of emphatic defiance: The musicians were likely outperforming the Russians on their own musical territory.

Gergiev’s plummet has been breathtakingly swift. Though his concerts have often drawn protesters (including his 2015 guest engagement with the Philadelphia Orchestra), he was one of the top conductors in the world as of Wednesday, opening Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at La Scala in Milan with a smattering of booing at his entrance. By Friday, his Western engagements were all but sure to be gone, not just the Vienna Philharmonic concerts at Carnegie Hall but his return in May with his Mariinsky Orchestra from St. Petersburg. Gergiev’s chief conductor position with the Munich Philharmonic will be ended by the city’s mayor if the conductor doesn’t in some way protest the Ukrainian invasion.

Guest engagements with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and current La Scala run (March 5, 8, 13, and 15) will also be canceled. Milan’s mayor, Beppe Sala, who is also director of the La Scala board, was quoted as saying, “We are asking him to make his position clear against this invasion and if he does not do so, we will be forced to renounce our collaboration with him.”

Pundits predict that the 68-year-old Gergiev — once the busiest and best-known Russian conductor, but not one to bow to pressure — may not conduct outside of Russia in the foreseeable future, if ever. Few details are known about Gergiev’s New York cancellation — other than the fact that he was not in the United States when the decision was made.

Carnegie executive and artistic director Clive Gillinson was on record — prior to the Ukrainian invasion — saying artists should be judged on their work, not their politics. Now, Gergiev has few if any defenders. If nothing else, the cancellation decision could have been made for security reasons. Prior to the Philadelphia protests in the less volatile times of 2015, Gergiev’s Metropolitan Opera appearance had a protester jump onstage during curtain calls, unfurling a sign with the Ukrainian flag. Though Nézet-Séguin has closer ties with other European orchestras, he knows the Vienna musicians from having led Wagner’s Flying Dutchman at the Vienna State Opera, as well as concerts with the orchestra.

And this is not his first encounter with the long shadow of Putin. While he was on tour with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Vienna in 2018, many members of the orchestra were displaced from the originally designated hotel rooms because Putin himself was due to arrive for a conference, and his entourage was given higher priority.

On Friday, the main barrier was rehearsal time. Cho, who was making his concerto debut at Carnegie Hall, had approximately 25 minutes with the orchestra for Rachmaninoff’s 40-minute “Piano Concerto No. 2.” The only sign of those circumstances in the performance was his overcompensating, at first, by playing aggressively. The Vienna Philharmonic has a limited past with Rachmaninoff’s expansive “Symphony No. 2,” and plays the music with a lean, lower-vibrato sound than the Philadelphia Orchestra, which the composer (1873-1943) considered ideal. While Philadelphia Rachmaninoff suggests a lush, fevered dream that confides secrets to the listeners, Vienna’s lens — perhaps reflecting the famous analytics of Sigmund Freud and expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg, both part of the city’s DNA — is more like Rachmaninoff on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Nézet-Séguin met the orchestra on its own terms, and convincingly delivered this alternative view.

Information on remaining tickets for the 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday Vienna Philharmonic concerts at Carnegie Hall is at www.carnegiehall.org.