NYP/Gilbert

The New York Philharmonic, the ­latest orchestra to sign up as one of the ­Barbican's International ­Associates, has a new music director in the form of Alan Gilbert, the first native New Yorker to hold the post. He's clearly big in the US, though UK audiences are more likely to associate him with ­performances of ­variable quality with a succession of ­visiting European ­orchestras: his ­success with the Mahler Chamber ­Orchestra in 2003 lingers in the ­memory, as does a messy effort with the ­Orchestre de Lyon two years later. His two London concerts with the NYP inhabited no such extremes of ­triumph or disaster. The orchestra is among the classiest, and its squeaky-clean playing fits nicely with Gilbert's precision. Yet there were also no major insights, and the first concert was ­particularly ­uninvolving. It opened with EXPO, a flashy collage of pastiches of everyone from Rimsky-­Korsakov to ­Gershwin, ­written by ­Magnus Lindberg to display the ­"qualities I find so ­gorgeous in Alan's way of music making". Yefim Bronfman then played Prokofiev's ­Second Piano Concerto as if he wanted to demolish the piano, and the evening was rounded off by Sibelius's Second Symphony, so stately it sounded like music for a parade of dowagers. Day two opened with a bland performance of Haydn's Symphony No 49, but thereafter proved more engaging. ­Schubert's Unfinished Symphony was done with impressive, if old-fashioned beauty, and Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces were finely sculpted and handsomely detailed. The high point was John Adams's The Wound-Dresser, an ­emotive ­Whitman ­setting linked to ­memories of the Aids crisis. Gilbert's cool conducting precluded any danger of ­sentimentality. Thomas Hampson was the restrained yet achingly ­passionate ­baritone soloist.