In January the New York Philharmonic appointed Jaap van Zweden as its next music director. According to the various news and magazine articles about the announcement, van Zweden seems to be more inclined toward Beethoven, Brahms, and other classical music meat-and-potatoes composers compared to his current director Alan Gilbert.

What does the data say? Some months ago the New York Philharmonic posted its historical performance data to Github. van Zweden hasn’t had that many performances with the New York phil yet, so unfortunately the archive won’t have much to say about his repertoire choices. We can use it though to get a sense of the artistic choices of the many conductors of the orchestra through its long history and see which composers’ pieces they tended to perform.

I wrote a Shiny app that allows you to see the top N composers performed by each conductor with the New York Philharmonic, availble here. For example, here’s Alan Gilbert’s top 15 composers:

Gilbert

He has actually played Tchaikovsky with the NY Phil more than 125 times, and there are many Romantic-era stalwarts on this list. But in support of Gilbert’s reputation for forward-looking programming, Christopher Rouse is his 10th most conducted composer. The composer called “Anthem” is not a person, I believe it’s just the US National Anthem.

How about the NY Phil’s most famous (arguably) conductor?

Bernstein

His list looks rather patriotic, with 5 Americans in his top 15. He conducted Copland with the orchestra more than 150 times, and of course he played a lot of his own works. We also see that he performed Mahler about 125 times; he was a major proponent of the composer.

Try out the Shiny app and let me know if you have any comments.