“Philharmonic Renewed Under a Bold Conductor”, reads the headline of a New York Times article by Steve Smith. The article’s focus, however, is not so much on the orchestra but that section of the repertoire in which their music director, Alan Gilbert, has distinguished himself: music by postwar composers, particularly high-profile performances of music by György Ligeti, Magnus Lindberg, and others.

In fact, two of the best performances I’ve seen this season featured Gilbert at the podium: Lindberg’s Kraft with the Philharmonic, and Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil with Barbara Hannigan and the orchestra’s chamber players.

Smith’s article includes a number of canny observations but for the most part reads oddly like a publicity release of sorts.  And the article’s focus on new music — as has been the focus of many recent commentaries on Gilbert and the Philharmonic — completely ignores Gilbert’s very mixed record with the rest of the repertoire. He’s proven to be a solid and sympathetic concerto accompanist, but in much of the core classical and romantic repertoire this listener is too often left with a sense of disengagement and diffidence from the orchestra. Under the previous music director, Lorin Maazel, I’d feel a strong personal reaction (not always positive) to the highly characterized music-making, but there was always a strong interpretive foundation behind the playing.

Multiple sources have told me that the sudden retirement of one high-profile Philharmonic veteran was due to that player’s largely negative feelings concerning Gilbert. If this is true, it does not bode well for the orchestra — or its music director.