David Robertson is one of the most promising young American conductors, and his one-week stint with the New York Philharmonic offered an interesting, if peculiar, mix of old and new.

On February 26, the first piece, the D-minor piano concerto of Brahms with Peter Serkin as soloist, immediately renounced its identity as the traditional symphonic battlehorse. Episodic, willful, and proudly self-indulgent, this performance stretched out in its dawdling way to almost an hour, making the once-notorious but now quite benign traversal of Glenn Gould in 1962 seem like a three-minute mile. Serkin mooned over the passages and exquisitely delayed the cadences in his raptness of vision, seconded by Robertson. The concerto collapsed into fragments, but was mightily applauded.

After the intermission, Robertson played the United States premiere of Listening Earth, a symphonic drama by the noted Danish composer Poul Ruders, whose recent operatic setting ...

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