Clearly Mr. Honeck knows how orchestras work from the inside, and the musicians — to judge from their incisive, alert playing — trust him.
And I find it altogether too attractive - how the orchestra played for me this year, how the chorus sings, how the young singers progress..
What has always mattered most to him was how the orchestra played on the night.
Yet the festival concept has a radical component: Audiences are invited, for once, to think less about how an orchestra plays and more about what it plays.
Two good spot tests of the early symphonies is how an orchestra plays the lyrical Adagio cantabile of No 1 Winter Dreams, or the delicious, jaunty folk melody in the finale of No 2 (Little Russian), before the whole work builds to a brassy climax.
How the whole orchestra plays a symphony, however, is still a big, complex and beautiful mystery.
That said, it was remarkable not just how well the piece stood up to concert hall scrutiny but also how marvellously the Mariinsky Orchestra played it under the company's artistic director, Valery Gergiev, following their gruelling Covent Garden schedule.
This is one reason that Levine is stressing new music in Boston: he thinks it will have an invigorating effect on how the orchestra plays and on how the audience listens.
It is hard to keep finding new ways to describe how magnificently the Met Orchestra plays for Mr. Levine.
