Final September, he performed the season-opening manufacturing, “Useless Man Strolling.” That would appear like a given for a music director, however he was absent for “Medea,” the opener in 2022. “Useless Man,” a minimum of, represents Nézet-Séguin’s admirable try to modernize the Met’s repertoire. However after that present, he performed simply two of the six modern works on supply this season. You might say he was specializing in the classics as a substitute, however he led solely 4 of the 18 whole operas programmed.
When he does conduct on the Met, he has a penchant for extremes, both colossal or beautiful. On the delicate finish, he might be good, with detail-oriented transparency and prayerful serenity. However when he evokes immensity, it’s typically crude and unbalanced.
The overture to Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” at Carnegie on Friday, for instance, had the wild pressure of a stormy sea, however with none view of what churns beneath the crashing waves. The big string sections overpowered the winds, even after they had been meant to have a supporting, textural position. (Large sections, although, can nonetheless be balanced; simply hear the Cleveland Orchestra and Berlin Philharmonic on the identical stage.)
Brahms’s First Symphony, on Tuesday, was equally elevated, with the impatient tempos of a maestro making an attempt to make a dinner reservation on time. Phrases had little alternative to land; within the third motion, the orchestra stored up with Nézet-Séguin’s baton solely by sacrificing articulation and form. Within the finale’s homage to Beethoven’s “Ode to Pleasure,” the rating’s course of “con brio,” or “with vigor,” was by some means construed as “with ever-increasing velocity,” as if that had been tantamount to grandeur.
The Met Orchestra would possibly as effectively have been one other ensemble earlier that night, with a sensitively heat account of Jessie Montgomery’s “Hymn for Everybody,” from 2021. That piece begins with a easy, hummable melody that travels all through the ensemble, meditatively and communally, with an undercurrent of ahead movement. It’s as if the tune persists with the passage of time, generally harmoniously supported by the flowing momentum and generally seemingly threatened by it. The ending is unsettled, fading away with as a lot magnificence as darkness.
