Ambitious, risky, spectacular: We’re lucky to share a city with the Philadelphia orchestra

As the Philadelphia Orchestra’s subscription season came to its epic conclusion Sunday afternoon with Tristan und Isolde, evidence of being in the presence of a historic event piled up. Here was a reigning Wagnerian soprano’s last time in a signature Wagnerian role, and, for only the second time since 1934, the orchestra’s full performance of a score that changed the course of music.

But one other aspect of the concert was hiding in plain sight — the rare and exhilarating sensation of living in the same city with an ensemble as mind-blowingly good as this one.

An outburst of local boosterism this is not (not, at least, without some solid provocation). Sports teams have scores and other metrics by which they are judged, and although cultural opinion might be more subjective, there’s no way of hearing Sunday’s concert version of Wagner’s landmark work as anything but an artistic knockout few musical organizations anywhere could have pulled off so beautifully.

My colleague David Patrick Stearns has already reviewed the production, so I won’t re-review it here, though I do second his sentiment that next season the Metropolitan Opera might find it difficult to match Philadelphia’s achievement when it mounts its own new production of the opera.

What’s more, in terms of artistic ambition in the annals of an ambitious organization, this Tristan und Isolde has few equals. The orchestra’s performances of Schoenberg’s massive Gurrelieder in 2000 and Schumann’s luscious Paradise and the Peri in 2007 — both led by Simon Rattle — come to mind as similar Mount Everests.

There was an element of risk. Singers can be delicate creatures, and chief programming officer Jeremy Rothman said he woke up each morning leading up to concerts girding for reports of sick singers canceling. None did.

It was an expensive undertaking, and for this concert, the orchestra landed funding from (among others) the deep-pocketed co-chairman of the New York Philharmonic, Oscar L. Tang, and his wife, Agnes Hsu-Tang. Why this matters is no small point. The Tangs have been supporters of the orchestra and music and artistic director Yannick Nézet-Séguin for more than a decade, and Philadelphia needs more support from outside of the city to supplement its fatigued donor pool.

The opera took years of planning, and the timing turned out to be just right. Nina Stemme decided this would be her last Isolde. And yet there was nothing in her performance on Sunday to suggest that retiring the role was necessary. The Swedish soprano, 62, was incredibly powerful. Her colors spanned several distinct zones, each one lovely, and her phrasing was as intelligent as it was expressive.

But what made the whole great is that Wagner’s score is as much a piece for orchestra as singers. Individual contributions were nuanced and filled with character — Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia’s doleful English horn solos, and the brief appearance of a primitive trumpet — a holztrompete — that the orchestra had borrowed from the Metropolitan Opera. Philippe Tondre’s oboe sound was liquid gold.

More important, conductor Nézet-Séguin presided over an interpretation of enormous polish, with warmth, rapture, and terror in all the right places.

It was reassuring, too, that the Philadelphia Orchestra is a flexible enough instrument that it can do a Diana Ross hit on a Wednesday night (“I’m Coming Out,” at the orchestra’s Pride Concert), and then set standards in orchestral finesse a few days later.

A funny thing happens when you listen to a four-hour opera, especially one that plays around in the fuzzy realms between life and death, reality and delusion, philosophy and spirituality, and traditional tonality and chromaticism. You leave feeling that you are sharing time in this world with pure inspiration on a completely different level than anything we encounter in daily life.

If we can achieve Tristan, there’s hope for us yet.

Just as striking, the afternoon and its high level of ambition made the case for why cultural institutions exist and must continue to exist. Just a few years ago, COVID shut down the entire performing arts sector, and no one could see the path back to normality. Now, new threats to arts and culture are rearing their heads — funding cuts, culture wars — and once again the way forward seems fraught.

It’s tempting to say that someday we will get past this, too. But more useful is realizing that Tristan und Isolde is one of the great experiences of being human, and this performance made vivid exactly what is at stake.