Bruckner from the Big Apple

{TABLE} Cor anglais concerto ................ Ned Rorem Symphony No 4 ....................... Bruckner {/TABLE} THE New York Philharmonic, America's oldest orchestra, made its Irish debut last night at the start of a 14 concert tour undertaken with sponsorship from Citibank.

The orchestra's roll call of conductors this century includes Mahler, Mengelberg, Toscanini and Bernstein, yet the importance of the New York Philharmonic as an institution has somehow never quite managed to capture for it the cachet of great orchestra status which, at various times, has attached itself to the orchestras of Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago.

In the 1990s, however, since the appointment of Kurt Masur as music director, the orchestra has undergone revitalisation both musical and managerial; the fruits of the changes were introduced to Irish audiences in a work commissioned for the orchestra's 150th season, the Car anglais Concerto by Ned Rarem, and Bruckner's Romantic Symphony.

Rorem, now in his seventies, is a prolific composer, particularly of vocal music, and he's also celebrated as a writer, especially for his published diaries. Musically, he's a conservative who aligns himself to French taste, and he wrote his concerto (half of it, he says, "literally in a hospital bed") with the intention of exploiting the solo instrument's "special lustre and pliability".

The work, cast in five programmatically titled movements, proved a gesturally and colouristically pretty effective (if musically unmemorable) vehicle for the New York Philharmonic's Thomas Stacy; Masur and his players partnered the soloist with admirably balanced transparency and support.

Masur's handling of the Bruckner symphony brought long stretches of remarkably quiet playing, some of the quietest I've yet heard from an orchestra at the NCH (to the point where the noise of an ever present fan came to obtrude unduly where I was sitting).

His reading was both studiously engineered and judiciously paced, though there wasn't always the feeling that the orchestra had accommodated with full success to the hall's acoustic. The violas, placed to the right of the stage, seemed when required to muster a greater substance of tone than the violins (who tended to lose out to the brass), and there were times when some of the woodwind detail seemed to get lost.

Perhaps the conductor and players, accustomed to venues of far greater capacity, engaged in overcompensation far the smaller space of the NCH. Whatever the cause, cumulatively the effect for me was of a Bruckner of impressively marshalled exterior the climaxes certainly carried sonic thrills not yet readily at the command of the NSO - but which yet lacked some essential pulse of inner warmth. Good, you might say, but not great.