The orchestra’s first indoor concert for a live audience in 13 months was a quietly joyful celebration.
The middle section of Sibelius’s “Rakastava” is a quiet, glassy dance of joy. It’s not untroubled. There’s dissonance; the celebration is muted, reticent, almost secretive. It lasts two minutes or so, then vanishes into the night air before you know it. But it’s joyful, nevertheless. And it was the most affecting part of the concert I heard after I walked into a building for the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday evening. Yes, that’s right: the New York Philharmonic, inside. Exactly 400 days after it last gathered indoors to play in front of an audience, the orchestra returned. As part of the series “An Audience With,” at the Shed’s cavernous McCourt space, about two dozen of the Philharmonic’s string musicians performed under a roof in front of a small, distanced, masked, vaccinated-or-tested crowd. That such a simple act was so momentous speaks to the deprivations of the past 13 months, and the compromises we’ll gladly make to move past them. The McCourt is not a classic concert hall; some amplification is required to make acoustic instruments penetrate what’s essentially an enormous box. And however reassuring it is these days to know that the ventilation is working overtime, the space’s HVAC system was a very audible accompanist. But it had been over a year since I had been hit by the vibrations of a sizable contingent of musicians sitting in front of me, and the sensation was sweet. I felt grateful and almost abashed, exposed — just as I felt last summer when I first heard a string quartet outdoors after months of sound coming from my computer and earbuds. (The Philharmonic, too, went outside for chamber music last year, delivering pop-up performances with a rented pickup truck that is expected to be back on the road as the weather warms.) Wednesday, the first in a two-night stand at the Shed, lacked this orchestra’s characteristic sonic glories. There were no Mahlerian trumpet blasts, no cymbal crashes. But after so much time away, there was arresting impact in the pluck of a single violin, in hearing instruments interact in space, a viola line emerging from a few feet behind the cellos.
