Marin Alsop and Yunchan Lim renew their collaboration in a twentieth-century Philadelphia journey

United States Various: Yunchan Lim (piano), Philadelphia Orchestra / Marin Alsop (conductor).  Marian Anderson Hall, Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, 5.10.2025. (ES-S)

Adams – The Rock You Stand On
Bartók – Piano Concerto No.3
Korngold – ‘Schönste Nacht’ (encore)
Prokofiev – Selections from Romeo and Juliet, Op.64
Shostakovich – ‘General Dance and Apotheosis (Finale)’ from Suite from The Bolt (encore)

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s 125th-anniversary season opened its subscription series with a twentieth-century journey that moved backward in time. Under Marin Alsop, now the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, the program paired the world premiere of John Adams’s The Rock You Stand On with Yunchan Lim’s much-anticipated debut in Bartók’s Piano Concerto No.3 and a sweeping sequence from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Heard together, these works traced a descent from contemporary pulse to classical poise and finally to theatrical vitality – a sequence that showcased the orchestra’s precision and expressive range under Alsop’s assured direction.

Adams’s The Rock You Stand On opened the program with a burst of rhythmic energy that Alsop shaped with meticulous organization yet a somewhat impersonal touch. Written for a large orchestra that includes eight double cellos and dedicated to Alsop, the slightly over ten-minute score conveys, through its title, the qualities the composer associates with her: ‘loyalty, determination and devotion’. It unfolds in what seems a loosely tripartite design, its jazzy syncopations and propulsive figurations recalling Adams’s trademark kinetic style without quite the wit or lyricism that animate his best work. The music’s perpetual motion occasionally bordered on the static, its fragments looping rather than developing, and the promised cinematic breadth remained largely rhetorical. Alsop maintained crystalline textures and a sharply defined pulse, eliciting vivid sectional playing from the orchestra, yet its relentlessness yielded more momentum than substance. It made for a glittering overture – if not an especially revealing one.

Bartók’s Piano Concerto No.3 proved to be the concert’s true center of gravity. The performance recalled the exquisite collaboration between pianist and conductor in the finals of the Van Cliburn Competition, where Lim’s career-defining Rachmaninov Third revealed the same balance of technical brilliance and emotional restraint that now served Bartók’s more inwardly drawn world. It was remarkable how such a young artist conveyed the richness of feeling and thought that imbue the concerto, a fusion of farewell and hope for renewal, written during the final months of the composer’s life.

In the Allegretto, Lim’s playing was limpid and conversational, his ideas shaped with rhythmic suppleness and grace. Each phrase and individual sound retained its own character, whether reflective, playful or lightly ironic, yet the movement as a whole felt perfectly proportioned. The Adagio religioso unfolded with unforced gravitas, evoking the spirit of its model, Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang from the String Quartet No.15 in A minor. Lim’s tone was exceptionally refined, his chords voiced with intimate deliberation, the chorale unfolding in a state of quiet suspension that seemed to draw the hall into stillness. The central ‘night-music’ interlude – softly murmuring with tremolos and fleeting echoes of birdsong – felt less a contrast than an extension of the same inward calm, returning seamlessly to the movement’s opening serenity. In the Allegro vivace, Lim released the stored energy with a lithe, kinetic pulse – playful yet controlled, the counterpoint delivered with a Mozartian clarity that illuminated rather than dramatized. The Hungarian-folklore inflections lent the finale its buoyant rhythmic energy and earthy vitality. Alsop supported him with unerring attentiveness, shaping textures with luminous precision and keeping the orchestra’s energy taut and responsive so that the closing bars felt less like a valediction than a quiet benediction. The single encore, Korngold’s ‘Schönste Nacht’ with its shimmering harmonies and glistening arpeggios, felt a touch superficial in context.

Alsop turned from Bartók’s inner world to the theatrical expanse of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, drawing together a substantial twelve-movement selection from the composer’s three orchestral suites that emphasized contrast over continuity. The familiar tableaux – the swaggering ‘Montagues and Capulets’, the lyric interludes of Juliet’s dances and the brutal ‘Death of Tybalt’ – emerged with striking physicality. The orchestra’s soloists added refinement and color: David Kim’s violin traced Juliet’s innocence with limpid tone, Jeffrey Khaner’s flute lent shimmer to the ballroom scenes, and the muted brass brought a burnished melancholy to the closing pages.

Conducting from memory, Alsop sculpted a vivid, tightly controlled performance: the brass imperious, the lower strings ferocious, the percussion incisive. The orchestra responded with muscular precision, though the massive wall of sound occasionally left insufficient room for the ballet’s essential delicacy and suppleness. It was an impression enhanced by the encore – the ‘General Dance and Apotheosis (Finale)’ from Shostakovich’s Suite from The Bolt – itself ballet music, but here full of grotesquerie and exaggeration, driven more by volume than wit.

In retrospect, it was an afternoon in which three distinct idioms were bound by motion, energy and precision, unified through Alsop’s unerring sense of momentum and structure.

Edward Sava-Segal

Featured Image: Marin Alsop conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra © Margo Reed