Gilbert Smartens Up the Phil
Recent New Yorker and New York articles have depicted Alan Gilbert as leading the New York Philharmonic away from old-world stuffiness and toward a more laid-back intellectualism. For Alex Ross , Gilbert's first season marks a great awakening after "two drowsy decades," a return to programming that puts his orchestra's "virtuosity in the service of ideas," part of a tradition that dates back to Mitropoulos and includes Bernstein's championing of new American music, Boulez's Rug Concerts, and Zubin Mehta's Horizons festivals. Similarly, Justin Davidson describes a concert with Gilbert as "a little less drafty temple and more of a campus coffee house," where audiences can "hear and think about music in an atmosphere of animated informality." It wasn't quite that casual, but the September 30 concert certainly felt more friendly, rewarding, and entertaining than any show I've been to in a while. Most conductors, in