The first Philadelphia Orchestra season opener in Marian Anderson Hall packed a punch

The host for the evening sounded a little uncomfortable, and it’s not at all clear how much money was raised.

The music, though, carried Thursday’s gala opener of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 125th season. At a minimum, the orchestra sounded assured in its first opening night since the renaming of Marian Anderson Hall. Often, the ensemble was quite a bit more — mighty, tender, and ardent.

In some ways, Terry Gross made sense as a choice to host the concert; she’s interviewed music and artistic director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on Fresh Air, and she is beloved by many. But her natural habitat is radio, where her disarming gusts of curiosity always seem to bring unexpected candor from guests.

Here, reading from a script, her questions came across as dutiful and the answers, not terribly revelatory. She asked about specific pieces; the Philadelphia Sound — it comes from a “generosity” of sound, Nézet-Séguin said, as he always does; and about the evening’s “playlist,” otherwise known as the program.

“Every concert is in a way a playlist. I feel like a playlist is quintessentially diverse,” the conductor said. “I think music is essentially that — there is something for everyone.”

Maybe not everyone, but the program’s three works each occupied a different dimension — a world premiere, a promising young soloist, and an old favorite.

The orchestra this season has already played one concert at the Mann Center of Mahler and Debussy, and another in Marian Anderson Hall of scores from M. Night Shyamalan films, but Thursday was the more society-ish opener, planned with help from the orchestra’s volunteer committees. In a break from tradition, leaders declined to say how much money the event raised. Last year’s gala netted slightly more than $1.1 million with 2,400 in attendance. This year drew 1,800 listeners to the hall, said a spokesperson, who called the amount raised to benefit the orchestra “proprietary” information.

The event marked a debut for Rhubarb Hospitality Collection by Oak View Group, which handled the after-concert dinner, its first time catering a big sit-down meal for an orchestra event. About 430 listeners stayed for dinner — a mix of Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center Inc. board members and donors, arts leaders, orchestra musicians, and government officials.

Patrons dined in the Commonwealth Plaza near a still-dark cafe and restaurant expected to reopen with new formats sometime this fall. And so the 2024-25 season begins with the plaza once again feeling like a space you just want to get through on your way to somewhere else. But at least Marian Anderson Hall awaited, its stage decorated with pale-pink bouquets to echo the gown of violinist María Dueñas, who, at 21, is already an A-list soloist with a Deutsche Grammophon recording contract.

You had to wonder who chose the slightly sluggish tempo of the last movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26 — soloist or conductor — which failed to capture the music’s characteristic lightness. But elsewhere, Dueñas was a wonder. She has a rich, deep sound, a polished ember that glows as easily in extremely quiet passages as it does at the top of the dynamic range. Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra hugged her subtle twists and turns of phrasing and pacing.

Nézet-Séguin also brought a souvenir from his other job as artistic chief of the Metropolitan Opera: the premiere of Terence Blanchard’s new 15-minute orchestral suite drawn from his opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which in 2021 became the first opera by a Black composer to be staged at the Met. It’s big music, a score in which tragedy arrives in swells. Blanchard writes in an original, American-sounding language, a little Copland-esque and sometimes tinged with jazz harmonies. The suite generally follows the arc of the opera, Nézet-Séguin said, but even if you didn’t know the story, a strong sense of narrative comes through.

Which made it a resonant companion to Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture, Romeo and Juliet, where images of love, Juliet’s youth, the duel, crypt, and twinkling stars are made vivid. Here was the “generosity” of sound, and although the question of this orchestra’s sound legacy is more complex than that single phrase, the larger point was made: this is an orchestra that still packs a punch.