A CONCERTO IN WHICH EAST MEETS WEST, AND PEACE REIGNS

 By ZACHARY WOOLFE

Anoushka Shankar at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Ravi Shankar’s first concerto for sitar and Western orchestra, from 1971, is a tame, lush, quite pretty piece. The ensemble serves as a kind of velvety pillow, atop which Mr. Shankar weaves coppery skeins for himself, as soloist.

The two sound worlds — West and East — coexist peacefully, perhaps a tad sedately. There are slower and faster moments, of course, but the general feel is relaxed, moderate. For his second concerto, “Raga-Mala” (“Garland of Ragas”), Mr. Shankar, who died in 2012, clearly intended to make something more vivid, more Technicolor.

The New York Philharmonic gave the premiere of that second effort in 1981, under the baton of Zubin Mehta, its music director then and a friend of Mr. Shankar’s. On Thursday evening at David Geffen Hall, Mr. Mehta, now 80, was to lead the Philharmonic’s first revival of it, in his return to the orchestra after an absence of nearly five years.

But, on Oct. 25, he canceled his run of performances, citing illness, leaving “Raga-Mala” in the rather unlikely hands of Manfred Honeck. While Mr. Honeck, the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which is currently on strike, is well loved by the Philharmonic — he was among the finalists to become its next leader — he is known more for his humane, authentic touch in the Austro-German standards than for sitar concertos.

He is above all, though, a very good conductor, and he led a lucid, colorful performance of an engaging if not entirely successful work, its four movements lasting more than 50 minutes. In its fevered moments, it’s like Shostakovich, all angular brasses and whip-smart percussion. Slower, grander sections evoke Holst’s earnest colonial-era mysticism.

If these episodes — dreamy passages endlessly alternating with punchy, driven ones — never really cohere, and if the blazing, rushing climaxes grow exhausting, there are lovely moments throughout. Bits of soft pizzicato plucking in the strings serenely introduce the sitar at one point; sinuous, handsome solos emerge from the orchestra.

Improvising on the ragas — the melodic germs of Indian music — that form the work’s core, Anoushka Shankar, the composer’s daughter and a proselytizer for his music, was a magnetic soloist, her sound sprightly and sly. Blending with the strings but with a reedy brightness that complemented the winds and brasses, her sitar was a persuasive orchestral chameleon.

The second half of the program was a different world, and very much Mr. Honeck’s specialty. In the classic repertory, he draws from the Philharmonic playing that is far more intimate and elegant than its norm.

On Thursday, there was an exhilarating blur of movement at the start of the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 93, and an almost inaudible hush in the second movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, lusciously shaped throughout. After a subterranean start to the Schubert, Mr. Honeck approached its famous melody with unusual deliberation and buttery smoothness, lingering over it and finding within its familiar contours new worlds of nostalgia, sweetness, sadness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/arts/music/review-ravi-shankar-concerto-for-sitar-and-western-orchestra-raga-mala-new-york-philharmonic.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FClassical%20Music&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=collection