Conductor Duncan Ward combines precision with maximum expressiveness ★★★★☆

It first album of Philharmonie Zuidnederland with its new chief conductor, the British Duncan Ward (33), seems a mixed bag. That the four compositions tell ‘musical stories’, as the explanatory notes write, is an open door. The real core is a conductor who combines precision with maximum expressiveness.

Take La creation du monde (1923) by Darius Milhaud. The Frenchman composed his ballet music after a dip in the jazz cellars of New York. Some conductors give an exaggerated crank to Milhaud’s swing rhythms and blue notes. Not Duncan Ward. He puts the sounds together like a watchmaker and lets them do the work themselves. The same strategy culminates in a pleasant, uninflated version of Edward Elgars Enigma Variations.

Ward also conducts his own piece, Fumes (vapors). It is more than six minutes of energetic modernism that finally evaporates nicely. Philharmonie Zuidnederland is lucky with the man who will make his debut this month at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.