When Is an Orchestra Better Off Without a Conductor?

When it’s the NY Philharmonic on Saturday night: It gave a dazzlingly spunky performance of Leonard Bernstein‘s “Candide” overture, sans baton, followed by monotonously decorous renditions of two works each by Stravinsky and Mozart, conducted by David Robertson.
I can only assume that music director Lorin Maazel (or perhaps the ghost of Lenny) prepared the Bernstein, played by the leaderless orchestra in commemoration of the 16th anniversary of its laureate conductor’s death. How else to explain the sharp difference in spirit and execution between this and the subsequent pieces?
Robertson, whose performances I have greatly admired in the past, lowered the podium a couple of notches, both literally and figuratively, and managed to smooth the rough edges off Stravinsky and bleach the colors and contrasts out of Mozart. Violinist Gil Shaham, whose subtle, refined interpretive skills I have also greatly admired in previous live performance, seemed to have adopted the blandness of his conductor (who also happens to be his brother-in-law).
This was one of those (relatively rare) times when I wondered whether the NY Times reviewer and I had attended the same event. Actually, we didn’t: Bernard Holland had reviewed a prior performance of the same program, which did not include the “Candide.” According to Holland:
Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony at the end was a delight. Swiftly paced, soulfully accented and elegantly colored, it summed up Mr. Robertson’s good influence on this orchestra and its good influence on him.
I’ve heard the “Linz” umpteen times, and I can’t think of a run-through less riveting than Robertson’s. Holland also commended “the Philharmonic’s seeming happiness to work with” this conductor. Were they smiling more than usual? The subtext of such talk involves the big question hanging over the Philharmonic: Who should be named music director once Maazel steps down?
I thought I was experiencing another disconnect between the experience of a Times critic and my own as I read, on Friday, Grace Glueck‘s long, mostly descriptive review of the Guggenheim’s Lucio Fontana show, which I had panned the day before.
Then, I got to the zinger in the last sentence, where Glueck dismissed Fontana as “an innovative theatrical decorator,” not “the spirit of the future that his postwar admirers—young avant-garde artists like Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni—considered him to be.”
Exactly.
UPDATE: Linda Yablonsky saves a similar zinger for the end of her Fontana review in today’s Bloomberg.