Review: Marin Alsop Leads New York Philharmonic in World Premiere of Nico Muhly Violin Concerto

In Friday’s (3/7) New York Times, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim writes, “At David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Marin Alsop, restored fairy-tale mystery” to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. “When the finale’s horn solo emerged—noble, transcendent—it felt as if it arose from a place deep inside the subconscious. There were small epiphanies like that throughout the concert,” which also included works by Beethoven and Brahms, and a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly. “The violinist Renaud Capuçon joined the orchestra for the world premiere of Muhly’s brightly hued but emotionally aloof concerto…. He played with a gleaming, sweet sound and glassy clean intonation in double-stop passages where the solo violin seems to act like a prism refracting light from the orchestra. Muhly’s concerto leans heavily on traditional expressive devices including suspensions: temporary dissonances resulting from one voice moving a step out of sync with a second voice…. A strength of Muhly’s is his meticulous attention to instrumentation and the distribution of sound in space, including a wonderfully subversive series of ‘solos’—really just bright dabs of single notes—written for players on the last desk of the first and the second violin sections…. They were part of a fastidiously inventive sound world.”