Next week, Nézet-Séguin debuts in Verizon Hall as the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director-designate; he assumes the post full-time in 2012. In what might be called his last bachelor season - he makes prestigious debuts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Orchestra, and others before settling down to prepare for Philadelphia - Berlin is the most important of all.
Though he has conducted other Berlin orchestras, the Philharmonic is the city's storied ensemble, led by a series of legends (Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan), and its players have earned the right to be a tough bunch. The audience is among Europe's most sophisticated, while lacking Vienna's center-of-the-world pretensions. Concerts are usually sold out. And Nézet-Séguin's was the last in a month of young-conductor debuts, which can be hard on the orchestra.
It didn't show. The program was works the young French Canadian has conducted often - Messiaen's Les Offrandes oubliées and Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique - while also collaborating with pianist Yefim Bronfman with Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2. For all the Prokofiev's audience-thrilling virtuosity (with Bronfman crashing through the music like Godzilla), the restless, revolutionary Berlioz symphony was where Nézet-Séguin stood to make his mark, even if the timing was hardly optimal.
Any debuting conductor has to cope with the ghosts of past principal conductors. For more than three postwar decades (1955-1989), Karajan trained the orchestra to counteract the natural sound decay of any given note, creating a distinctively imposing wall of gorgeous string sound that was still very much apparent in the Messiaen. The gold-plated luster of the Claudio Abbado years (1989-2002) glistens every so often.
