~ Author: Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Above: Maestro David Robertson, photo by Chris Lee
Tuesday October 30th, 2025 – For two nights only, the New York Philharmonic offered a program of music by Mason Bates, Karol Szymanowski, and Witold Lutosławski to be led by the young conductor Marta Gardolińska in her Philharmonic debut. It was a program clearly meant to showcase music of Gardolińska’s native Poland. Despite the fact that it was sandwiched between pairs of appearances by Gustavo Dudamel and Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gardolińska’s debut had garnered enough hype to appear in New York magazine’s biweekly Approval Matrix (in the highbrow / brilliant quadrant, of course). So I was naturally disappointed to learn that Gardolińska had withdrawn from these performances due to illness and that David Robertson would take her place.
The program opened with Mason Bates’s 2014 Devil’s Radio, a short piece whose title refers to the moralizing maxim that “gossip is the devil’s radio: don’t be a broadcaster”. As far as I could tell, the nine minutes of music that followed had little to do with any of that. They did, however, offer strong rhythmic drive and a varied palette of tone colors.
The piece, which at times brought to mind John Adams’s 1986 Short Ride in a Fast Machine, had no hint of the sinister or the malevolent. Overall the piece had a wholesome character, thanks to the use of celeste and repetitive fast figures in the strings, and only occasionally slunk into a more sly mood brought on by sounds of the drum kit. In a notable passage near the end of the piece, a series of radiant waves of sound crest in the brass and high woodwinds at the culmination of a long-building arc.
Bates, whose expansive The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is currently onstage next door at the Metropolitan Opera, managed in the much smaller-scale Devil’s Radio to craft a highly detailed musical statement.
The Philharmonic was then joined by Leila Josefowicz (photo above by Chris Lee) for Szymanowski’s second violin concerto, first performed in 1933. The first movement begins not with grand statements from the soloist or the orchestra but with an alluring and almost conversational episode of music that Josefowicz led with smoky (almost crooning), glamorous sound.
The urbanity of the first movement eventually gives way to the demonic fiddling of an extended cadenza at the center of the concerto. Josefowicz was undaunted by the pyrotechnic demands of the cadenza, executing each new fingering or bowing challenge flawlessly and giving herself over to the unhinged character of the piece. When sweet melodies return in the third movement, we sense lunacy lurking beneath them.
Robertson was a humble and sensitive partner, but there were numerous instances of the soloist’s finer passagework being buried by the orchestra. Josefowicz, despite not producing the most powerful sound to cut through this texture, seemed otherwise almost perfectly matched for this concerto. Her assured technique, tautly concentrated tone, and emanating (perverse?) pleasure are all necessary ingredients to pull off this fiery piece of music—a piece that would more aptly bear the title Devil’s Radio.
David Robertson did not bring the same animating spark to the final piece on the program, Witold Lutosławski’s menacing Concerto for Orchestra of 1954. Robertson—former music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, former chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and currently the director of conducting studies at the Juilliard School—commendably took on this quite idiosyncratic program at the very last minute. But his rather refined approach (which suited Bates’s piece and allowed Josefowicz to shine through in the concerto) did not serve the rough expressionism of Lutosławski.
The first movement begins with intricate counterpoint between the various sections of the strings, which Robertson admirably shepherded. In full orchestra passages, the strings and brass did not always cohere, with the strings adopting a darker tone and stronger attacks while the brass were brighter and more rounded. Robertson gave ample breathing room to transitions within each movement, which at times let the momentum drift away.
The highlight was the third movement, featuring strong contrast between the repetitive passacaglia in the basses, flitting perpetual-motion figures in the winds and strings, and the uncanny strangeness of harmonic oddities embedded within ravishing string chords.
It’s a shame that we missed our chance to hear Gardolińska’s take. Lutosławski’s piece is nervous—paranoid—maybe even a bit shabby, hanging as it does under the specter of Soviet repression. In Szymanowski, under Robertson’s baton and with Josefowicz’s impetus, we heard music on edge, pushing its own limits. I would happily have traded some of Robertson’s tameness and refinement in Lutosławski for that kind of bold statement.
~ Lane Raffaldini Rubin
Performance photos by Chris Lee, courtesy of the NY Philharmonic.
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