From the first muted gestures of their second performance at Carnegie Hall this week, Lahav Shani drew the Israel Philharmonic into a taut, luminous sound, controlled yet alive to volatility. Over the course of the evening, restraint gave way to amplitude, intimacy to breadth. The ensemble played with transparency that never dulled intensity – the kind of control that turns precision into expression.
Those muted gestures deepened into the sustained hush of Bernstein’s Halil (1981), written in memory of Yadin Tanenbaum, a 19-year-old Israeli flautist killed in the 1973 war. Shani maintained that suspended stillness through the opening measures, the flute emerging as a voice rather than a soloist. Guy Eshed’s playing was remarkable for its range of colour, the tone at once silvery and frail, the phrasing shaped by breath more than by bar line. Around him, the orchestral fabric alternated between fragility and tension, harp and muted brass puncturing the calm, percussion adding distant unease. What might have turned episodic held instead as one continuous pulse, the music’s dissonant language clarified by Shani’s sense of structure. The closing descent into silence felt less like repose than exhaustion, the sound of grief momentarily contained, glowing as if in amber.
Heard in its entirety for the first time at Carnegie Hall, Paul Ben-Haim’s Symphony no. 1 opened with the same disciplined intensity that had defined Halil, now unfolding on a larger symphonic scale. Shani shaped the opening gesture with firm clarity, the low strings and brass giving weight to a gradual accumulation of energy. The music’s momentum developed organically, its lyrical episodes unfolding in long, unforced spans. In the slow movement, sometimes excerpted as Psalms, the orchestra played with hushed concentration, the unison string line unfolding with quiet radiance, before being answered by harp and oboe. Shani’s pacing let the melodic phrases breathe, sustaining the pulse even in stillness. The finale brought release through rhythm, the tarantella’s whirling motion intertwining with the off-beat patterns of a hora, a folk dance of Eastern-European origin. It was a clear example of Ben-Haim’s integration of regional and inherited modal idioms into Western symphonic form. Overall, Shani drew a luminous, full-bodied sound from the orchestra. Yet for all its craftsmanship, the symphony left the impression of an expressive range more polished than persuasive.
Ben-Haim’s music underpinned this Israel Philharmonic series: each of its three programmes pairing a work by the foundational Israeli composer with one of Tchaikovsky’s last symphonies, suggesting how shared patterns of melody and affect, transformed yet familiar, reappear in different times and contexts. On Thursday night, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth followed without excess grandeur, the clarinet line emerging from the shadow much as the flute had in Halil.
Shani approached the score with structural clarity, building long spans of tension without slipping into overt rhetoric. The first movement’s cyclical theme emerged less as fate than as a thread of continuity, binding contrasts of mood and tempo. The slow movement began in near stillness, the horn solo phrased with inward poise, its lyricism edged by unease. Shani’s control of orchestral texture was again exacting yet flexible: the string sound was coherent, lean and pliant, the woodwinds colouring the texture in half-shades, percussion registering more as pulse than accent. The Valse offered grace without indulgence, its rhythmic lift carrying a hint of irony, and the finale achieved weight through balance, not force. The transformation of the opening motif into affirmation unfolded unheralded, the major-key resolution a release rather than unmitigated triumph.
