Bamberg Symphony Led by Jonathan Nott at Avery Fisher Hall




The English conductor Jonathan Nott is becoming less of a stranger to New York audiences, but not quickly enough. He has visited most years since 2005, usually with the Bamberg Symphony, though he has also made a strong impression conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain and as a guest of the New York Philharmonic.


He is a thoughtful interpreter, with fresh ideas and a fluid yet focused technique, and as he demonstrated in concerts with his Bamberg ensemble at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening, he can confound expectations, even in programs that rest heavily on the commonplace.


Mr. Nott opened the Sunday program with Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (1913), a set of idea-packed vignettes etched in delicate strokes and rapidly changing colors. The reading unfolded with startling efficiency, moving briskly through a cycle of aural imagery, from warm-hued suppleness to mechanistic precision, mysteriousness and sparkling fragility. The full set ends quickly — it runs only six minutes — and Mr. Nott moved immediately into the opening Adagio molto of Schubert’s Symphony No. 4 (“Tragic”) without stopping for applause.


Nearly a century separates us from the Webern, and nearly another separates the Webern from the Schubert “Tragic,” composed in 1816. Yet Mr. Nott’s transition seemed almost like a filmmaker’s dissolve, and for a brief, pleasantly disorienting moment, it was as if the two composers inhabited the same plane, with the roots of Webern’s spare language revealed in Schubert’s opening harmonies.


Mr. Nott set up the second half of Monday’s program similarly, when he had an enveloping account of Ives’s “Unanswered Question” melt into Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, again without pause. Where Webern and Schubert had nationality in common, Ives and Schubert were at least superficially at odds, with Ives in crusty Yankee mode, both drawing on and subverting the traditions of tonality and syntax.


You could quibble about balances in the Ives. The decision to link the two works meant that the string and woodwind groups could not be separated, as they ideally should be. Only the solo trumpet was offstage. But you could not argue with the hazy, distantly quiet sound Mr. Nott’s strings supplied, and this curious juxtaposition created the interesting illusion of a connection between the assertive dissonances that interrupt the suave theme of Schubert’s opening movement, and the blaring woodwind chords that punctuate the Ives.


Each program included a piano concerto, with Christian Zacharias as the soloist. Mr. Zacharias and Mr. Nott are temperamentally well matched. Neither is given to display for its own sake. Mr. Nott is unusually enamored of velvety pianissimos, which his players produce with transfixing purity, and Mr. Zacharias, in Brahms’s Second Concerto on Sunday and Beethoven’s Fourth on Monday, seemed to prize analytical clarity over drama.


This approach put both works at an unaccustomed remove, but if neither interpretation was for the ages, each offered a look, from an oblique angle, at how these pieces work.