Critiques

Though somewhat amorphous, the music is engaging, and the piece hangs together, perhaps because of the pulsing performance Mr. Lacombe drew from the orchestra. It was an honor to be in the hall for the astonishing performance of the Busoni concerto…

It has been six years since Carnegie Hall was a place for Jersey pride, but the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra more than made up for lost time, playing at the Spring for Music festival on Wednesday. The festival awards North American orchestras for adventurous programming, and for his Carnegie Hall debut, music director Jacques Lacombe delivered not only bold, intelligent choices, but also sure-handed performances.

The New Jersey Symphony, under their splendid Quebec-born conductor Jacques Lacombe, not only showed up at Carnegie Hall, but their choices satisfied every requirement for great programming … Musically, the three works had three totally diverse styles. And audiences looking for imagination found (as is the rule in ‘Spring For Music’) music rarely performed in New York. Even better, it gave the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra all the space they needed to show how deft they are. [W]e were offered intensity, stolidity, innovation–and enough percussion to make that Shostakovich 11th Symphony Monday night sound like a Telemann flute concerto.

A gripping performance of Ferruccio Busoni’s mammoth Piano Concerto brought the Spring for Music festival to the halfway point Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall. It was the New Jersey Symphony’s turn in the spotlight at the six-day festival … [The] NJSO is led by Jacques Lacombe, a conductor who molds a rich sonic palette with precise and economical gestures. Few pianists have taken [the Busoni concerto] on … [but Marc-André Hamelin] mastered its rising and falling cascades of scales, biting rhythms and thunderous textures as though he was Busoni himself. Cadenzas occur unexpectedly, and he made them part of the work’s overall drive. The partnership he forged with Lacombe was remarkably unified, never lagging despite the lulls in the score.