“Had Karina Canellakis made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut Thursday night with just a thorny Lutoslawski score and an atmospheric 2013 piece by New York composer Zosha Di Castri, she would have impressed mightily,” writes Peter Dobrin in Saturday’s (2/8) Philadelphia Inquirer. “But the conductor emerged as a full personality … in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Emanuel Ax was his usual elegant, insightful self. But Canellakis has the spark of interpretive imagination…. My favorite stretch: those passages of floating near the end of the second movement when orchestra and pianist ‘speak’ back-and-forth to each other in the most tender way imaginable. Ax’s sound echoed in the body of his instrument and into Verizon Hall. The orchestra whispered…. Di Castri’s Lineage … mixes modern sounds with an imagined folk music… Its best quality is its dream-state sense of altered reality. The folk element in Witold Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra is easy to hear…. Lutoslawski … is not well known to most listeners, but Canellakis made a convincing case for his accessibility. This orchestra’s virtuosity helped. What is that second movement ‘Capriccio’ if not a close cousin to cinematic Harry Potter? It passed with the aery flutter of a golden snitch.”
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