http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/arts/music/alan-gilbert-conducts-the-new-york-philharmonic.html 2014-10-25 01:14:31 Alan Gilbert Conducts the New York Philharmonic The New York Philharmonic, under the direction of Alan Gilbert, performed Bruckner’s towering Symphony No. 8 and Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3. === Bruckner is difficult. Not just for players, who have to marshal enormous stamina in symphonies that last well over an hour, or for conductors, tasked with making sense of the vast architecture of these works with their succession of foaming crescendos and mystical lulls, sweeping plateaus and glittering climaxes. Bruckner’s music can also be daunting to the listener, as I was reminded during Thursday’s performance of his Symphony No. 8 by the The program opened with a brilliantly charismatic reading of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the pianist Bruckner’s symphonies are a different sort of guest. Here is a lumbering genius who holds court at your table with disquisitions of breathtaking complexity, lachrymose confessions, and, when all the wine is drunk, fist-pounding, yet somehow profound, pronouncements. He leaves you feeling exhausted, exhilarated — and inadequate. Such feelings of inadequacy came to bite me especially often in Mr. Gilbert’s reading of the Eighth, where I found much to enjoy in individual musical episodes but little guidance in how to make sense of the whole. The first movement emerged out of a soft haze of strings with delicate woodwind solos evoking sounds of nature. Soon the scintillating brass section flexed its muscles — the first of many impressive displays of power, in which the horn section did itself especially proud. The Scherzo, with its obtuse iteration of a Baroque bass line, lives on color contrast, and the Philharmonic players offered plenty, from cobweblike string tremolos to gleaming brass evoking the tolling of feast-day bells. But I came out of it no wiser as to the meaning of that obsessive bass line. It was only in the luscious, expansive Adagio that the music appeared to breathe in an organic, rather than self-consciously crafted way, creating moments of exquisite expression. In the finale the brass began to show strain, with some unevenly voiced chorales, but the sense of elation in the final measures was palpable — and, for this listener, enviable.