Orchestra’s New Year’s Eve concert

Because the music is incidental to the evening’s celebratory business, you don’t find Curtis students and starving vocalists lining up for last-minute rush tickets to this party; come to think of it, as far as I could tell, on Wednesday night the only person in Verizon Hall under the age of 40 was the Orchestra’s conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. For more than a century, this orchestra’s music directors — from Stokowski to Ormandy to Muti to Sawallisch to Eschenbach — indulgently tolerated this annual feel-good exercise in Viennese schmaltz, but you always came away with the feeling that they’d rather be home alone with a piano and a few of their favorite dead composers.

Not Yannick. To judge from his two New Year’s Eve concerts that I’ve attended, this conductor really likes New Year’s Eve, looks forward to it, draws energy from the glitzy crowd, and genuinely believes, as he put it Wednesday, that this concert is “the best party in town.”

Echoes of Las Vegas

Yannick’s soloist for the evening, the veteran mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, eagerly seized the opportunity to banter with Yannick and with the audience about her cross-dressing Mozart roles and other subjects that used to be considered beneath the dignity of serious musicians. When Yannick, who is about a foot shorter than Graham, leaped from the podium to give her a hug, it reminded me of nothing so much as a Las Vegas skit that Milton Berle did eons ago with a statuesque showgirl whose bust level coincided with his eye level, with results you can imagine.

By the finale, when Yannick and Graham emerged wearing psychedelic glasses, a woman in the upper tiers shouted approvingly, ”It’s so you!” We’ve come a long way since the time, some 90 years ago, when Leopold Stokowski scolded his Academy of Music audience for its poor concert manners, only to be reminded by a grande dame, “Young man, you were hired to lead the band. Play on!”

So — what momentous musical insight emerged from the Orchestra’s New Year’s Eve concert? I would suggest this: Unlike his predecessors, Yannick is essentially a happy person and secure enough not to pretend otherwise.

Longstreth's complaint

But is he a serious conductor? It’s too soon to say, other than to point out that joy and substance aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

In his 1990 memoir, the late Philadelphia civic leader Thacher Longstreth stressed the critical role that humor had played in his business and political life, even though it led many people to dismiss him as a lightweight. “If important people were really as deep as they claim to be,” he argued, “they wouldn’t be so serious so much of the time.” The 17th-century French philosopher La Rochefoucauld said much the same thing: “The man who lives free from folly is not so wise as he thinks.” New Year’s Eve offered Yannick yet another opportunity to demonstrate that he may be wiser than we think.