Performer: Kent Tritle

The revisions were minor, but the Requiem remained a fitting work for a modern metropolis: reverent, mysterious, a little bit distant but a powerful prayer for peace.

Affable host Richard Gere united a starry musical cast to celebrate Carnegie Hall’s 125th Anniversary Gala.

In the 15,606 concerts given by the New York Philharmonic and its predecessors before this, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had received nearly 200 renditions.

So begins the fifth year of Alan Gilbert’s quest to make the New York Philharmonic the very model of a modern symphony orchestra: a concert in which the music director spent the vast majority of this time seated stock still; in which the luckier of the musicians spent most of their hours looking up at a big screen; and in which the audience spent most of their evening entranced by visuals and jump

In his biography of Richard Wagner, Michael Tanner writes that Tristan und Isolde is one of two great masterpieces that have the musical brilliance, the intellectual strength and the emotional power to convert you to its philosophical cause. The other, naturally, is the St Matthew Passion.