NEW YORK, NY.- So far, Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s tenure as the Metropolitan Opera’s music director has been mixed. That much was evident over two Met Orchestra concerts at Carnegie Hall last week that were by turns excellent and mystifying.

This group’s specialties can seem indistinct; its quality, inconsistent. And, in general, it has been difficult to assess these players under Nézet-Séguin, who took over in 2018. A music director needs to be present to shape the sound of an ensemble, and he has been chronically overscheduled, juggling the Met with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal, not to mention his post as the head of conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music.

On a practical level, a music director also needs to build an orchestra, and the Met’s is still regrouping from a wave of retirements during the pandemic. For reasons perhaps beyond his control, though, Nézet-Séguin has hired a mere 13 instrumentalists since he started.

He has exuded contemporary cool, proudly displaying his painted fingernails on Met posters; yet he has also, in a reinforcement of maestro mythology, referred to himself as the “father” of the company. In 2021, he broke convention by speaking out in favor of the orchestra’s musicians during a labor dispute, but only when it mattered least: nearly a year after they had been furloughed during the pandemic, and after they had already reached a deal for partial pay.

Last September, he conducted the season-opening production, “Dead Man Walking.” That would seem like a given for a music director, but he was absent for “Medea,” the opener in 2022. “Dead Man,” at least, represents Nézet-Séguin’s admirable attempt to modernize the Met’s repertoire. But after that show, he conducted just two of the six contemporary works on offer this season. You could say he was focusing on the classics instead, but he led only four of the 18 total operas programmed.

When he does conduct at the Met, he has a penchant for extremes, either colossal or exquisite. At the delicate end, he can be brilliant, with detail-oriented transparency and prayerful serenity. But when he evokes immensity, it is often crude and unbalanced.

The overture to Richard Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” at Carnegie on Friday, for example, had the wild force of a stormy sea, but without any view of what churns under the crashing waves. The enormous string sections overpowered the winds, even when they were meant to have a supporting, textural role. (Big sections, though, can still be balanced; just hear the Cleveland Orchestra and Berlin Philharmonic on the same stage.)

Johannes Brahms’ First Symphony, on Tuesday, was similarly elevated, with the impatient tempos of a maestro trying to make a dinner reservation on time. Phrases had little opportunity to land; in the third movement, the orchestra kept up with Nézet-Séguin’s baton only by sacrificing articulation and shape. In the finale’s homage to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the score’s direction of “con brio,” or “with vigor,” was somehow construed as “with ever-increasing speed,” as if that were tantamount to grandeur.

The Met Orchestra might as well have been another ensemble earlier that evening, with a sensitively warm account of Jessie Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everyone,” from 2021. That piece starts with a simple, hummable melody that travels throughout the ensemble, meditatively and communally, with an undercurrent of forward motion. It is as if the tune persists with the passage of time, sometimes harmoniously supported by the flowing momentum and sometimes seemingly threatened by it. The ending is unsettled, fading away with as much beauty as darkness.

Nézet-Séguin and the players gave the piece a touching, persuasive reading. And in the two Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart concert arias that followed, they were a genial partner to agile soprano Lisette Oropesa’s coloratura fireworks.

The orchestra was at its best, though, in Erich Leinsdorf’s suite from Claude Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” on Friday. No piece at Carnegie so embodied the gentle side of Nézet-Séguin’s style; unfurling as a single movement, the suite meanders through the opera’s instrumental passages, rarely at more than a whisper, in a wash of color and mood.

Under Nézet-Séguin’s baton, the piece was a perfumed essence of the opera, mysterious and alluring, an enchanting blend of shapelessness and shifting atmosphere. It’s the kind of approach that would pair naturally with Béla Bartok’s one-act “Bluebeard’s Castle,” which followed on Friday. But once again, the conducting went beyond what the score called for.

The moments of awe-inspiring power and crashing drama in “Bluebeard’s Castle” are effective because they contrast with unnerving quiet, in an opera of antipodal intensity. But the floor of Nézet-Séguin’s volume was so high, there was little room to grow, making it all too easy to drown out Christian Van Horn’s creamy bass-baritone and Elina Garanca’s clear, though comparatively thin, mezzo-soprano. At one point, Nézet-Séguin overshadowed them entirely, conducting with the scene-stealing theatricality of Leonard Bernstein.

It seemed strange for this “Bluebeard” to follow such a superb “Pelléas.” But, if anything, that can only be expected from a maestro whose tenure so far has been a mixed success. Which, of course, is not really a success at all.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.