New York Philharmonic Honors Dutilleux at Avery Fisher Hall New York Philharmonic The cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a program celebrating the composer Henri Dutilleux at Avery Fisher Hall on Tuesday. The New York Philharmonic devotes relatively little of its stage time to contemporary works, but things may be looking up. Last year the orchestra established the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, a $200,000 award for a composer selected every two years by a committee of musicians. And if you award a prize, you might as well perform the recipient's work. The music director Alan Gilbert led the program. Under past administrations, composer celebrations at the Philharmonic were purely symbolic, with just a work or two (the works sometimes being early, uncharacteristic ones) offered on otherwise standard programs. Alan Gilbert is taking a more wholehearted approach. To honor the first recipient of the Kravis Prize, Henri Dutilleux, Mr. Gilbert presided over a program devoted fully to Mr. Dutilleux's music on Tuesday evening at Avery Fisher Hall. Actually the orchestra only played two of the program's three works: the transitional "Métaboles" (1964) and "Tout un monde lointain..." ("A whole distant world..."; 1970, revised 1988), a luminous cello concerto with Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist. Between those pieces, the Miró Quartet gave a focused, precise performance of the atmospheric "Ainsi la nuit" ("Thus the Night"; 1976). That is only an hour of music, all told: 90 minutes with stage resetting, a discussion of the prize by Mr. Gilbert and a reading of the lines of Baudelaire poetry (from "Les Fleurs du Mal") that Mr. Dutilleux inscribed into the score of "Tout un monde lointain ..." by Ms. Kravis, in French. Given the brevity of the intermissionless program, it would have been nice to hear at least a short piece by each of the three composers with whom Mr. Dutilleux, 96, chose to share his prize: Peter Eötvös, Anthony Cheung and Franck Krawczyk. But that will have to wait; the Philharmonic has commissioned new works from each of them. Mr. Gilbert also announced another new stipend, the $50,000 Kravis Emerging Composer award, given this year to Sean Shepherd, who will also compose a work for the orchestra. Mr. Dutilleux was a superb choice for the first award. Though his style has evolved through the decades, certain qualities run throughout his canon, as these three disparate scores on the program demonstrated. This is music built of morphing textures, subtle coloration, straightforward but involving rhythmic underpinnings and rich currents of melody, all cloaked in a harmonic language that embraces dissonance without making it the point. "Tout un monde lointain...," for example, uses the orchestra's palette and the cello's singing tone so arrestingly that you could easily miss the sheer virtuosity in the solo line, which Mr. Ma played with his customary warmth and drive. Even in the brisk finale he dazzled by stressing the line's lyricism rather than its challenges. Mr. Gilbert drew a suave, finely concentrated sound from the orchestra both here and in the introspective "Métaboles," a meditation on a simple idea seen from changing perspectives. The piece is a dialogue in light and dark hues that has become a surprise Philharmonic favorite, turning up in the orchestra's programs three times since 2000, most recently in 2010.