Last week Music Director Alan Gilbert was the guest conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra in a program centered on Janáček's Glagolitic Mass. The rare work was performed alongside Sibelius's Night Ride and Sunrise and Dvořák's The Golden Spinning Wheel. (Rehearsal photo above: Facebook.com/The Philadelphia Singers)
The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, "Thursday's performance will likely stand among the more thrilling of the season. ... Gilbert's artistic cool was a good temperamental match [for the Janáček], shaping and building the piece's wild musical paragraphs but never actually taming them."
Superconductor wrote that in the Dvořák, "Mr. Gilbert's experience as an opera conductor served to drive the story forward, with bright orchestra colors coming from the Philadelphia woodwinds and strings, contrasting with wine-dark figures in the brass and a repeated sense of perpetual forward motion throughout."
Read about Gilbert's guest-conducting stint with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in September.
