NEW YORK, NY.- He’s back: After six weeks of guest conductors — including some prominent contenders to succeed him as music director when he leaves in two years — Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic on Thursday.

And he’s back, too: A month after swooping into Carnegie Hall as a last-minute replacement for an artist with ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, pianist Seong-Jin Cho was once again in Manhattan.

They joined at Alice Tully Hall for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” its opening orchestral chord full and rounded; the balances between the strings and the winds, which had heavily favored the violins at Tully earlier this season, equitable; the tempos judicious.

Cho, who played a tour date with the Philharmonic in 2019 but Thursday made his subscription series debut, was most memorable when most delicate: his silvery playing under the horn just after his cadenza in the first movement; his gentleness in the questioning chords wandering from the second movement to the third; his shimmering trills at the end of the piece.

His forcefulness in his right hand sometimes tipped into rawness — which, in passages of worried repetition, added an intriguing note of obsessiveness but otherwise felt too steely for such an intimate space. In the Rondo finale, though, he and the orchestra shared a graceful mixture of lightness and weight.

In 1965, the Philharmonic premiered the final version of Julia Perry’s “Study for Orchestra” but hadn’t reprised it until a one-off last year. Also known by an earlier title, “A Short Piece for Orchestra,” it is certainly that: Barely seven minutes long, it opens punchily, with heated strings and sardonic brasses, then enters a slower section of poetic winds and quietly suspended harmonies. The music turns blocky and dramatic again, with the vehemence of a Bernard Herrmann film score, before a softening ensemble, with touches of celesta and piano, is surprised by a brief, fierce coda.

Perry’s “Study” felt connected — across the Beethoven concerto and the intermission that followed — to Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, another work whose swaths of high spirits are tinged with a bit too much aggression, a clenched grin. And both pieces relax into melancholy passages of seeming sincerity, haunted by eerie mists.

Shostakovich wrote it as World War II came to an end, and originally planned something huge and triumphant, akin to Beethoven’s full-chorus Ninth. When he delivered a slighter, merrier piece, less than half an hour long, some were charmed, while others — including, dangerously, officials in Josef Stalin’s government — felt he had failed to meet the historic moment.




The degree to which the music is ironic — its bubbly passages even politically subversive — is unclear, a familiar ambiguity from a composer adept at playing all the angles. Its sprightliness in a sober time recalls Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, written three decades earlier, which the Philharmonic played under van Zweden in February.

Sharp, precise performances of this kind of repertory are the main reason van Zweden — known in past positions as a martinet of polish — was hired, and the orchestra played Thursday with pep and something close to unity. The slower sections were particularly impressive, with icy waves of violin, brasses ominously smoldering, Anthony McGill’s clarinet aching and Judith LeClair’s bassoon offering eloquent humanity, without schmaltz.

What are the piece’s politics? The jury is, and always will be, out.

But playing the work makes its own political statement as Putin went on television Friday to decry what he called instances of the West canceling Russian composers like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff to protest his invasion of Ukraine. This is, of course, largely his fantasy, a message of division meant to rally his people against phantoms he imagines to be demeaning and destroying Russia’s cultural heritage.

For the Philharmonic to play this Ninth Symphony — and, next week, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev — is a gesture, however small, against that message.

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New York Philharmonic

This program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.