Ades, Thomas

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares189 Views

    Review: Thomas Adès Meets the Profound Beauty of Schubert

    by

    The Danish String Quartet returned to Carnegie Hall with its Doppelgänger project, pairing Schubert’s String Quintet and a premiere by Adès.Franz Schubert and Thomas Adès are two composers whose works are capable of touching the cosmos — in different centuries, and often in different ways.The beauty of Schubert tends to be quiet and shatteringly calm, his postcards from the beyond written in lyrical melodies sometimes underlined with nothing more than a chord. Adès, particularly in the past decade, seems to have flung open the gates of heaven, unleashing forces that overwhelm and awe in their immensity.Yet each has also done the opposite: Schubert, in his aptly nicknamed “Great” Symphony, with its Beethovenian heft, for example, and Adès in his hypnotic and weightless “Paradiso” section of “Dante.” At Zankel Hall on Thursday, the composers met somewhere in the middle as they were paired for the fourth and final installment in the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project.One of the great pleasures of recent seasons, Doppelgänger has surveyed Schubert’s late quartets while commissioning new works that respond to them. Thursday brought perhaps the composer’s finest chamber work, the String Quintet in C; Asbjorn Norgaard, the Danes’ violist, joked from the stage, “We are the Danish String Quartet, with a Finnish cellist,” gesturing to their guest, Johannes Rostamo.In previous Doppelgänger programs at Zankel, Lotta Wennakoski’s “Pige” homed in on the maiden of “Death and the Maiden,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” played with the repetitive nature of the “Rosamunde” Quartet. (Because of pandemic delays, the project will actually return next season, with Part I.) Each evening has ended with an arrangement of a Schubert song; on Thursday it was “Die Nebensonnen,” from “Winterreise.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Thomas Adès Takes a Step Toward the Classical Music Canon

      by

      As Adès premieres an orchestral work, “The Exterminating Angel” is receiving something rare in contemporary opera: a new production.Pity living composers, toiling away in a field that has long favored dead ones. If they get a precious commission, the cycle tends to go something like this: The work premieres, and then travels to any other ensemble or company that helped to pay for it. After that, who knows. The fate of contemporary music typically comes down to marketability — hits still exist! — and to that strange, slippery thing called legacy.One recent work that is worthy of the canon yet seemed doomed to obscurity is Thomas Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel.” It had a prestigious start, premiering at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, then playing at the Metropolitan Opera the next year. But it was immense: written on a grand scale, with more than a dozen principal roles, a chorus and an orchestra equipped with idiosyncratic sounds like that of the spooky, electronic ondes Martenot.In his book, “The Impossible Art,” the composer Matthew Aucoin recalled hearing an opera administrator say that putting on “The Exterminating Angel” was “like watching money burn.” Regardless of its merits, there didn’t seem to be much hope for this work’s future.How extraordinary, then, that “The Exterminating Angel” has not only been revived, but has also received something even rarer in opera: a new production, by Calixto Bieito, at the Paris Opera. (It continues through March 23 and is streaming on the company’s platform until Saturday.) And, revised by Adès, with the composer in the pit, it sounds better than ever.“The Exterminating Angel,” with a libretto by Adès and Tom Cairns adapted from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film, is one of the finest operas of the century so far, alongside works by George Benjamin and Kaija Saariaho. It represents opera at its most fundamental, an elevated expression of humanity on the edge. There is sex, violence and desperation. While the meaning can’t easily be explained, crucially for opera, the plot can be described in a single sentence: People enter a room, then lose the will to leave it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

      by

      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      ‘Last Days,’ Opera Inspired by Kurt Cobain Film, Heads to L.A.

      by

      Oliver Leith’s opera, based on the Gus Van Sant film that fictionalized the end of Kurt Cobain’s life, has its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles.It can feel easy to cast a swift judgment on the composer Oliver Leith. First, there are his titles, such as “Uh huh, Yeah,” “Bendy Broken Telemann No.3,” and “yhyhyhyhyh.” Then, there is the inspiration for his sounds, in which everyday objects like glass bottles and cereal bowls are considered intensely, becoming weird instruments themselves.But if Leith seems flippant, he rejects that characterization entirely.“People talk about irony in society all the time now, and I find that a little dull,” Leith said in an interview. “It’s a very British way of looking at things. Like, ‘Oh, are you being serious or are you not?’ No; I am deadly serious when I’m doing these things. I’m just chasing this strange feeling.”Leith’s way of talking about music is a lot like his actual music: blurry and discursive, but also precisely evocative. That strange feeling he’s chasing, for example, is one he compared to being at a wake, where “outward joy and outward sadness” are possible at the same time.Listen to his works, and you’ll see what he means. Take his opera “Last Days,” which receives its U.S. premiere on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series. (The opera’s first recording will also be released on the Platoon label on April 5.) It is adapted from Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film of the same name, which fictionalizes the final days of Kurt Cobain.During its premiere run in London, in 2022, the opera garnered a lot of attention based on the assumption that it was a biographical work. “It’s so not about Kurt Cobain,” Leith said. “It couldn’t have more distance from its subjects than it has, I think.”Instead, Leith and the opera’s librettist, Matt Copson, wanted to write archetypes — like characters in a genre film, in which the magic lies in how far they stray from their stock expectations. Formally, “Last Days” also mirrors “the way that oral histories or myths are transmitted, where every iteration keeps the soul of a story, but changes skin,” said Caroline Polachek, who sings a prerecorded aria in the show.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      How California Became America’s Contemporary Music Capital

      by

      On the eve of a sprawling new festival, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel and others recount how the state reinvigorated classical music.Nobody will be able to take in the entire California Festival, a statewide series of classical music events spanning 650 miles with such density that some nights will have 10 or more performances happening at once.The festival, Nov. 3 -19, was conceived by the music directors of the state’s three largest orchestras: Esa-Pekka Salonen of the San Francisco Symphony, Gustavo Dudamel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony. But it grew to contain nearly 100 partnering organizations, who are presenting a host of world premieres and programs of contemporary music under the festival’s banner.It’s an overdue pat on the back for a state that has long encouraged new music, providing freedom and a sense of possibility that has made it the center of gravity for composers who work with a spirit of innovation, a long list that includes Harry Partch, Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros in the past, and Terry Riley and John Adams today.Much has centered around distinct communities in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. “Those of us who make music in San Francisco,” wrote Michael Tilson Thomas, who led the city’s orchestra’s for 25 years, “are blessed with an audience that comes to the concert hall more to discover the world than to escape it.” That was one reason he championed what he called American mavericks.Further south, Los Angeles became a microcosm of the California spirit, with sky-high ambition and musical curiosity that was cultivated by power players like the commission-happy philanthropist Betty Freeman and the strong-willed Philharmonic leader Ernest Fleischmann. And Dudamel brought pop-star power to the orchestra before, in a jolt to the city, he announced this year that he would leave for the New York Philharmonic in 2026.Ara Guzelimian, who grew up in Los Angeles and now leads the Ojai Music Festival nearby, described California’s classical music culture as “the lingering positive presence of the pioneers heading West and looking to escape a kind of conformity” before adding: “That’s sort of romanticized, but I think the reality is that a lot of good work has been done by individuals and institutions to develop that.”Here are edited interviews with some of those people, who shared their ideas about the diffuse histories and beliefs that brought about the California Festival.Far From EuropeMATTHEW SPIVEY (chief executive of the San Francisco Symphony) This goes back to the émigré composers, what Stravinsky and Schoenberg were doing in Los Angeles. You have this European tradition that felt like it was being evolved into a new, American version.ARA GUZELIMIAN The East Coast has historically been weighed down by facing the Atlantic and Europe. But here, there hasn’t been the same glare of the spotlight of everything having this kind of weight of being on the record. So, there’s just been a lot more freedom to experiment and move away from any sense of orthodoxy.JOHN ADAMS (composer who lives in Berkeley) When I arrived, there was a far out community mostly centered around Mills College [in Oakland]. Robert Ashley was the guru. There was a lingering scene of academia composers, sort of the last echoes of the Schoenberg-Sessions influence. But at the same time, there was this very romantic myth about San Francisco, and when I got there, I felt it was very open and gave me the freedom to experiment, which I just didn’t feel in the East.From left, Rafael Payare, Gustavo Dudamel and Michael Tilson Thomas.A Hungry AudienceMARTHA GILMER (chief executive of the San Diego Symphony) People are always looking for the next and the new, so it is a canvas in which to create.JEREMY GEFFEN (executive and artistic director of Cal Performances) This is an enormous state. There’s a whole part of life outside the metropolitan areas, which is what attracted Lou Harrison and others. And there are smaller orchestras that are just as adventurous, because that is the standard.GUZELIMIAN As a teenager, I saw Julius Eastman not in some isolated, alternative venue, but with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta. I saw Stravinsky at a concert of “Les Noces.” I saw Lawrence Morton’s Monday Evening Concerts. And I saw Xenakis because that was a completely normal thing to do. Here’s the great secret of arts management: Organizations create their own audience expectations. You can’t blame a so-called conservative audience.Why CaliforniaGUZELIMIAN I’ve rarely experienced the arts here as having a critical mass as they do in New York City, in which randomly on a subway or walking down the sidewalk you overhear people talking about an opera they’ve seen, or a play, or whatever show at MoMA that’s “unmissable.” That has incredible virtues, but in a funny way it can create a constraint. Whereas on the West Coast, it’s not as pervasive, not as self-conscious. So, there’s room for an imaginative venture to kind of make a go of it. Now, L.A. is bursting with new music groups and series, and to me the height of that spirit in New York is more historical. It doesn’t feel that its bursting at the seams.ADAMS I was really struggling, because back East [he grew up and was educated in New England] there was enormous prestige granted to the sort of Elliott Carter brand of composition back in the ’70s, and I had absolutely no interest in it. But the composers I knew of in California gave me more of a sense of freedom and permission to experiment.ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Many composers came here to find themselves, to find their language. And, as opposed to the East Coast and Europe, there has never been a sense of mainstream modernism, of what new music should be.The Bay AreaDEBORAH BORDA (longtime chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who worked earlier with the San Francisco Symphony) I got to the San Francisco Symphony when I was 27 [in the mid-1970s], and there was almost no contemporary music. But then came Edo de Waart, and he was really a devotee of new music. We brought John Adams, who was doing New and Unusual Music concerts, we brought in Diamanda Galás, you name it. We did a lot of Louis Andriessen music, like “De Staat.” Sometimes the audiences would boo and hiss his music, but he would come out and laugh in his ripped jeans.ADAMS There was a lot of talk about a West Coast aesthetic, and I suppose that included composers like Daniel Lentz and Terry Riley, and for sure Lou Harrison. I made my own synthesizer, which was a really West Coast thing at the time, and I think the person that did most creatively was Ingram Marshall. He made this amazing amalgam of Balinese influences and these wonderful rich drones and himself singing at what we called performance sites, which were usually just someone’s garage; we didn’t have the term “pop-up.”PAMELA Z (composer and performer) I moved to San Francisco in 1984, and I distinctly remember being excited by the broad range of new music and performance scenes. There were all these different factions: the improvisers, the instrument-builders, the avant-garde contemporary music, people who were doing performance art and people who were doing live performance with electronics, like Diamanda Galás. I was interested in all those different scenes, and I wanted them to be in the same room with each other. I started doing these events called Z Programs, that were almost like an avant-garde variety show. And when Michael Tilson Thomas was at the San Francisco Symphony, he was always interested in opening up things more. So there were connective tissues across the city.From left, Claire Chase, the Rady Shell in San Diego and the composer John Adams.San DiegoCLAIRE CHASE (flutist) I grew up in north San Diego County, and went to public schools where there was no music program. A lot of my musical education happened instead at the San Diego Youth Symphony, which is, I think, a really important cultural organization. It has this storied and really progressive history. California is this maze of contradictions. It has this D.I.Y. fervor — and I don’t mean in the corporate, Silicon Valley co-opting of that word — that gave birth to and sustains every artistic organization: Asian Improv Arts, the Tape Music Center and Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley’s “In C” being a totally D.I.Y. concert.I have these beautiful memories of Pauline barefoot with her accordion embodying this you-can-be-whatever-you-want-to-be feeling that’s so typically Californian and beautiful and true. She was this queer iconoclast doing her thing but also community building.GILMER When I was going to move out here, someone told me, “Whatever you can dream, it’s possible.” I really think that’s true. I don’t know where else I could have opened the Rady Shell [an open-air stage on the San Diego Bay] and started a hall renovation within five years.RAFAEL PAYARE And anyone can see us at the Shell because it’s outside in the park. We are rehearsing, and there’s someone walking their dog.Building in Los AngelesSALONEN When I did my debut with the L.A. Philharmonic [in 1984], I’d never been to this country. They put me up in the Biltmore, which in those days had a suite with a grand piano. I tried to go for a walk, and the doorman said, “Shall I call you cab?” I said I’d just stroll around a bit, and he said, “I don’t recommend that.” Anyway, there was an older cellist who came up to me after the second rehearsal and said, “Welcome to your new home.” I started coming back every season, and when André Previn stepped down, there was this letter from the board that modestly said they would like to develop the L.A. Phil into the world’s best orchestra, would I like to be a part of that process?One morning much later, when I was living in Santa Monica, I got up really early, and my kids were still asleep. I sat in the kitchen, made myself a coffee and thought, What is this weird feeling? And I realized: I’m happy. I feel free, not straight-jacketed by some kind of European, dusty modernist discourse.BORDA There was a real community around music in Los Angeles. In the audience you’d see composers. You’d see Annie Philbin, who runs the Hammer Museum. You’d see politicians.SALONEN Somebody who has to be mentioned in all this is Betty Freeman [who died in 2009 and was an influential donor behind the Los Angeles music scene]. She was quite spiky. She would call me and say: “I heard your new chamber piece. Utter rubbish. Would you like to come over for dinner?” But she did commission quite a lot of stuff, and was behind the scenes supporting composers when they fell on hard times.THOMAS ADÈS (composer) Betty picked me up from LAX my first time in L.A. She sped out to wow me with Los Angeles in those first hours. We were on our way to visit David Hockney, and we were driving past the Hollywood Bowl when I saw a sign that said, “Thomas Adès, Piano.” Then I stayed with her, and not only did she have these [Joseph] Cornell boxes that she got directly from Cornell, but I also knew that this was the house where she had salons with Nancarrow, or Stockhausen and Boulez. So, in a way, I had this impression of Los Angeles as avant-gardist more than any of the reasons other people go to live there.She had very strong taste. She used to put Post-it notes on everything; one on a CD said “BORING” and another said “I DON’T LIKE THIS.” She was bracing, but could get away with it because she was also so sweet. I came back, year after year, and bought a house there, and I would trace it all back to her.FRANK GEHRY (architect) Betty didn’t want me to do Walt Disney Concert Hall, but she did invite me to her house for dinner. The person who got me involved with that project was Ernest Fleischmann [who ran the Philharmonic from 1969-1998]. He asked me to do the competition, and of course I was excited to do it. There was a lot of anti-Frank sentiment, because I worked with plywood, chain link and corrugated metal. But we proved them all wrong.SALONEN (who inaugurated Disney Hall in 2003) The timing was a bit problematic, because the L.A. riots happened in ’92, and in the aftermath the idea of building a sensational concert hall in Downtown L.A. didn’t feel like a huge priority. But the hall changed everything. Now, if you ask people about any kind of visual idea of L.A., it’s the hall. Any action scene in L.A. in a movie, at least one car chase goes by the hall.And for me, I started to understand how much nonverbal messaging there is in a building. It was open from the street level, so it was warm and inviting, and it was complex but not incomprehensible. And there’s this kind of amazing feeling of unity; the geometry is such that everybody inside the hall sees a bunch of other people at all times. It also sounds pretty good. For me, it’s still the reference for balance and sound, and it will be so until the end of my days.From left, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pamela Z and Walt Disney Concert Hall on its opening night.Los Angeles TodayBORDA We started the Green Umbrella [free-form contemporary music concerts], and had Steven Stucky and John Adams as partners for contemporary music. Steve and Esa-Pekka were extraordinarily close; they spent hours eating together, and drinking together, and talking about music and life. It was very difficult for Esa-Pekka when Steve passed on [in 2016]. Now you have Wild Up and other small groups. And you have what Yuval Sharon has done with opera. The Green Umbrella concerts are still going. There’s an appetite for all this.YUVAL SHARON (founder of the Industry opera company in Los Angeles) What drew me to L.A. was the possibility of smaller, more nimble, freer, more entrepreneurial endeavors to move with some fluidity in and among the community. When I think of L.A., I think of this John Cage book, “Silence,” in which he talks about having an interaction with a European composer who was deriding him: “How could you write so much serious music away from the center?” And Cage [who came of age in Southern California] says, “How can you write such serious music so close to the center?” That was in the 1950s, but I think there’s an element of that ethos that’s still there today.GUSTAVO DUDAMEL (who succeeded Salonen at the Philharmonic in 2009) I was a huge admirer of this orchestra and of Esa-Pekka. Los Angeles is about new things. It’s a place that every day is getting built. It’s very open all the time to new things, and I’ve loved having a relationship with John Adams, who brings these very young composers to be part of the programming of this orchestra.ADAMS Well, I think Los Angeles is teeming with composers. I wish there was that level of creativity and activity in the Bay Area.And in San FranciscoSPIVEY Knowing that Michael Tilson Thomas was going to be stepping down after 25 years at the helm, and all that he had accomplished, there was a sense that those were going to be some difficult shoes to fill. We wanted someone who was not only a great conductor, but also a great orchestra builder. And Esa-Pekka is one of those people.SALONEN Honestly, the optics of a major U.S. orchestra hiring a 60-year-old Finnish guy who’s been around the block a few times, I thought: That in itself is not sensational news. But we talked about bringing in collaborative partners [eight artists who include Chase, the composer Nico Muhly, the computer scientist Carol Reiley and more], who would energize the thinking of the orchestra.ADAMS There are still some wonderful composers from the Bay Area. So when Esa-Pekka came, and the symphony appointed their collaborative artists, and they were pretty much from New York or Europe — flying in and flying out — that was really an insult to California culture.SPIVEY Whether it’s successful or not, we’ll learn from what happens.A New FestivalPAYARE California has, all the time, been nurturing the music of the future. But everyone has been doing it on their own, which is why it was good to do the California Festival.SALONEN We are collectively proud of what has happened in California and what has kept happening, and the California Festival is a manifestation of that. And of how much there is. It’s interesting that there’s no real school. You could say that this is the birthplace of minimalism. I was talking with Terry Riley on Zoom, and I asked him if “In C” was a reaction against East Coast, European modernism. He said: “No, not really. It was more about psychedelic drugs.” I thought, Oh, he kind of nailed it, that lack of pretension here.Always ChangingGEFFEN Something that I worry about is that this state has become so expensive. We’ve already seen this in the Bay Area, that the freelance scene is not full because we’ve lost so many people to the cost of living.BORDA I think the most powerful force for good and innovation is Esa-Pekka. That gives me hope for the north. And for the south, I think what’s embedded there already won’t go away; the history of Los Angeles is reflected in that integration of different art forms and excitement at the new.ADÈS More than in London or New York, I still have a feeling that in California I’m just left to get on with things. A lot of that world of Ernest and Betty have moved on, but it’s evolved into something else. I don’t know if I’m a part of it or not, but whatever attracted me in the first place is still there, that expansion of my molecules that I instantly felt.SHARON This is a moment of real — if we want to put it euphemistically — transition. It’s not just California. Listening to my colleagues on a national level, I think that we have to redefine classical music’s role for contemporary society, and there are a lot of growing pains associated with that. Everyone has seen attendance down, and donations down, across the board. I do think that the ethos of Los Angeles will make things easier to adapt than elsewhere. The L.A. Phil is going through tremendous change in leadership. This is the moment for that attitude and perspective, the time for that push forward to show the way. It’s an opportunity for California to lead, but it’s not going to be easy. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      The Boston Symphony Finds Surprises and Strengths in New Music

      by

      Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra presented the New York premieres of works by Thierry Escaich and Thomas Adès.When orchestras come to Carnegie Hall, their programs typically tell you two things: who they are and what they can do.That was true earlier this season when the Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann offered authoritative Strauss and Bruckner. Or when the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko opened up the complex worlds of Mahler’s Seventh with coordinated virtuosity. Or when the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel found irrepressible dynamism in blazing scores by Gabriela Ortiz.And over two nights at Carnegie this week, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Andris Nelsons, told their story gradually, one piece at a time, in canonical works by Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and Mozart. It was only when they unveiled two New York premieres — Thierry Escaich’s “Les Chants de l’Aube,” with the cellist Gautier Capuçon, and Thomas Adès’s “Air,” with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter — that they tapped into something special all at once.Among American orchestras, the Boston Symphony’s sound is enviably rich. That opulence was readily apparent in the ceaseless flow of cantabile melodies in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. You could hear it too in the briefest articulations, such as the resonant pizzicatos of Ravel’s cheeky “Alborada del Gracioso,” which on Monday opened the first concert, or the sonorous orchestral stabs on the last page of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, which on Tuesday closed the second.The Rachmaninoff often felt like an hourlong showcase for the spacious, burnished tone of the orchestra’s violin section. Nelsons coaxed gorgeous, heart-in-your-throat playing from them in one long-breathed line after another. As if to balance that, the Sibelius symphony was rife with woodwind and brass chorales; the strings don’t even enter until the 18th measure. The ensemble’s new principal horn, Richard Sebring — a longtime Boston Symphony player who recently won the chair after an international search — anchored his section with a glowing, edgeless sound.Nelsons seemed to celebrate one section at a time without employing his full forces — or full imagination — in the standard repertory pieces. Occasionally, an overwhelming plushness traded the vulnerability of Rachmaninoff’s music for invincible solidity. In the final movement, the players relaxed into the piece’s complexity, its romance caught in a swirl of vexed intent. Nelsons took the second movement of the Sibelius, built on a deceptively simple rhythmic unit, at face value, without the pluck, personality or sly contentment others have mined in it. In a piece as graceful and zesty as the Ravel, the slowly accumulating strength of the orchestra could be taken for turgidity.The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, left, was the soloist in the New York premiere of Thomas Adès’s “Air.”Fadi KheirIn the two New York premieres, though, Nelsons unleashed the ensemble’s astonishing range of colors to enliven the particular atmosphere of each work.In a program note, Escaich compared his cello concerto “Les Chants de l’Aube” to a stained-glass window. The metaphor isn’t readily apparent; the music doesn’t bring to mind a mosaic of translucent, jeweled tones. If anything, its palette feels cool, foreboding.Escaich might be embodying spiritual forces both good and evil. With a glinting, coppery tone, Capuçon gave the opening phrase — a Baroque homage that nods to Bach’s Invention No. 13 — a cunning flicker of darkness and light. The violins played long notes on high, not unlike the angelic overture to Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” as the horns droned down below. Flutes dipped like swallows, and brasses popped out like goblins. Tubular bells tolled ritualistically. Within this frame, both beatific and ominous, Capuçon’s cello maneuvered: warm, bodily, determined.In that sense, the cello, in both design and execution, was very much the piece’s animating force, passing through light and shadow, and knowing something of both. Escaich wrote cadenzas to link the three movements into a continuous form, and Capuçon emphasized their atmospheric expressivity as opposed to their show-pony virtuosity. The orchestra navigated the shifting meters and watery textures of the second movement with conviction, and Nelsons masterfully plotted the way in which the final movement’s heavenly motif for celesta and harp melted away into a dangerous dance. Jazzy dalliances and an abrupt ending didn’t ultimately detract from the concerto’s absorbing sound world.Adès’s “Air,” by contrast, devotes itself to a single idea — one of fragile beauty — for its 15-minute duration. The way Adès pitches the violin writing high up, almost daring the soloist to sustain it, recalls the extreme tessitura for the soprano role of Ariel in his opera “The Tempest.” This time, though, the effect is serene instead of unnervingly otherworldly.Mutter, who gave the world premiere of “Air” at the Lucerne Festival last year, played at Carnegie with a platinum tone, densely concentrated. The orchestra drew mesmeric circles around her, conjuring a world of glass, as Mutter’s sound irradiated a childlike innocence full of whispered awe.With the sensitivity of an opera conductor who loves his singers, Nelsons consistently scaled the orchestra’s sound to his soloists’ resources. If his rendition of Sibelius’s “Luonnotar” — a tone poem about the mythic creation of the earth and firmament — lacked a cosmic spatial sense, then at least its quiet intensity was of a piece with the soprano Golda Schultz’s rosy tone and haloed high notes; these performers were very much describing, rather than dramatizing, the piece’s world-shattering dimensions. Nelsons cushioned Mutter’s elegantly assured playing with spirited, swift touches in Mozart’s First Violin Concerto, and he matched Capuçon’s dazzling, consuming focus and mercurial coloring. Each collaboration felt natural, intuitive.At times during the Boston Symphony’s performances, the parts were greater than the whole. A textbook reading can be exemplary but also plain. But when this orchestra had a new story to tell, it was full of surprises. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2023-24 Season

      by

      We choose highlights from events featuring Mitsuko Uchida and Franz Welser-Möst as Perspectives artists, and the composer Tania León in residence.The threats facing democracy will be a central focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter announced on Tuesday, with a festival devoted to the flourishing cultural scene in Germany between the two world wars.From January to May, Carnegie will host “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” an exploration of creative expression during the fragile democracy in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The festival will feature ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s performing works by composers of the time, including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.“We’re seeing the challenges to democracy more and more clearly, and it’s all the more reason we have to treasure it,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “We want people to ask questions and contemplate why democracy matters, and what the threats are in our day.”The 2023-24 season, which begins in October, will feature some 170 performances, beginning with two concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its outgoing music director, Riccardo Muti. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the conductor Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, will each organize a series of Perspectives concerts.The composer Tania León, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2021, will lead a season-long residency; in January, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will offer the New York premiere of a new piece by her.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Here are a dozen highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZEnglish Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, Oct. 25You can safely bet on a few things whenever the conductor John Eliot Gardiner comes to town: agile, historically informed performance; obsessively precise articulation; and virtually ideal readings of beloved repertoire. In early 2020, he led his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in just about as good a Beethoven symphony cycle as you could imagine. And now he brings the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir to Carnegie for Bach’s Mass in B minor and, on Oct. 26, Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.” JOSHUA BARONEThe mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre will appear at Weill Recital Hall with the lutenist Thomas Dunford.Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLea Desandre and Thomas Dunford, Nov. 2These two artists — Desandre, a clarinet-mellow mezzo-soprano who can burst with bright agility, and Dunford, an eloquent lutenist — are among the brightest lights of a young generation of early-music specialists. They join in Weill Recital Hall, ideally intimate for this repertory, for “Lettera Amorosa,” a program of love-focused Baroque works by Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and Handel, alongside names like Tarquinio Merula (his songs exquisite) and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (a specialist in music for lute). ZACHARY WOOLFEAmerican Composers Orchestra, Nov. 9This essential organization has brought music by George Lewis to Carnegie’s various spaces before — the most notable instance being his Virtual Concerto (for a “computer-driven” piano soloist) back in 2004. The orchestra will continue its productive relationship with the composer to perform one of his latest orchestral works. No title for the piece is available yet; the same goes for a few other new works on the bill (including those from the likes of Guillermo Klein and Augusta Read Thomas). We do have one title: “Out of whose womb came the ice,” by the up-and-coming composer Nina C. Young, whose premiere was co-commissioned by Carnegie. SETH COLTER WALLSStaatskapelle Berlin, Nov. 30When the Staatskapelle Berlin and its longtime music director, Daniel Barenboim, last appeared at Carnegie, in 2017, it was an epic nine-performance stand that paired Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies. A lot has happened since then; most recently, in January, Barenboim stepped down from the orchestra’s podium because of health problems. So their return will be poignant: just two nights, and the four symphonies of Brahms, a composer Barenboim performed as a pianist in this space in 1962. ZACHARY WOOLFEEnglish Concert, Dec. 10The British soprano Lucy Crowe’s expertise and imagination in Baroque music gives her the freedom to turn da capo arias into feats of feeling. That exhilarating sense of spontaneity uplifted the English Concert’s performance of Handel’s “Serse” at Carnegie last year, and it will be exciting to hear Crowe apply her gifts to more dramatic material when she takes the title role in “Rodelinda.” OUSSAMA ZAHRThe pianist Daniil Trifonov will appear on Carnegie’s main stage to perform Beethoven’s mighty “Hammerklavier” Sonata.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesDaniil Trifonov, Dec. 12Arguably the mightiest of the under-40 generation of superstar pianists meets the mightiest of repertoire in this recital, as Daniil Trifonov takes on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata. It’s a banner year for youngish soloists in ambitious repertoire, in fact: Vikingur Olafsson plays the “Goldberg” Variations (Feb. 7); Beatrice Rana does the Liszt Sonata (Feb. 28); and Seong-Jin Cho journeys through the second book of the same composer’s “Années de Pèlerinage” (May 17). DAVID ALLENMet Orchestra, Feb. 1Yannick Nézet-Séguin has decided not to share next season. Rather than engage a guest conductor, he helms all three of the Met Orchestra’s concerts himself, embracing opportunities to bask in the tonal floodgates of Lise Davidsen’s soprano in Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder” and, later, the heavenliness of Lisette Oropesa’s Mozart arias (June 11), and the intense standoff of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with Elina Garanca and Christian Van Horn (June 14). OUSSAMA ZAHRYunchan Lim, Feb. 21This precociously mature pianist, still in his teens, played Liszt’s deliriously difficult “Transcendental Études” on the way to becoming the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year. He’ll reprise the Liszt as part of his recital introduction on Carnegie’s main stage. By this point, another pianist, the spectacularly creative Igor Levit, needs no introduction at this point to this hall’s audience; on Jan. 20, he’ll play two symphony transcriptions (Liszt’s of Beethoven’s Third and Ronald Stevenson’s of Mahler’s 10th) alongside Hindemith’s Suite “1922,” raucous and very Roaring Twenties. ZACHARY WOOLFEVienna Philharmonic, March 1Most of the five concerts in Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series — Jan. 20 and 21 with the Cleveland Orchestra, March 1-3 with Vienna — are emblematic of his thoughtful, idiosyncratic, ultimately endearing approach to programming, but the March 1 performance looks especially constructive, full of connections and contrasts to draw: Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for Wind Orchestra, Strauss’s Symphonic Fantasy from “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra and, as if to bid farewell to a whole world of music, Ravel’s “La Valse.” DAVID ALLENJason Moran will return to Carnegie with a tribute to the pioneering jazz musician James Reese Europe.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesJason Moran, March 9In addition to being an elite improvising pianist, Jason Moran is a keen programmer; his Carnegie survey of Black American music from the Great Migration was a well-attended success. You can all but bank on the same when Moran brings his latest concert concept to Zankel Hall. This time, the focus will be on the music of the early 20th-century American original James Reese Europe. You might expect some of the same expert arrangements heard on Moran’s latest album, “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield.” But prepare also for some surprises; this restless innovator rarely does anything the same way twice. SETH COLTER WALLSEnsemble Modern, April 12Much of the festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice” is more confusing than informative. This period in history produced so much excellent and overlooked music; why are we seeing Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler (among other head-scratchers)? At least there are engagements like that of Ensemble Modern, which will perform works including a lithe but still barbed smaller arrangement of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” led by HK Gruber, one of our greatest living Weill interpreters. The group returns April 13 as part of León’s residency, playing her “Indígena” and “Rítmicas” alongside pieces by Conlon Nancarrow and others. JOSHUA BARONEDanish String Quartet, April 18A highlight of Carnegie’s spring months in recent seasons has been the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project, which juxtaposes Schubert quartets with premieres. Coming this April: a new work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. And, for the fourth installment next year, the group is adding the cellist Johannes Rostamo to perform Schubert’s endlessly moving, even sublime String Quintet in C, paired with a commission from Thomas Adès. JOSHUA BARONE More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘In Seven Days’ Conjures the Creation, With Video

      by

      The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Ruth Reinhardt, played Thomas Adès’s “In Seven Days,” for piano, orchestra and moving image.When will the New York Philharmonic stop importing all things Los Angeles?First, New York poached the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive — then, earlier this month, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s conductor.And concerts this week bring more: images of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, projected over the stage of David Geffen Hall. It’s getting ridiculous!Not that you would recognize Disney Hall in this form. The images of the building have been abstracted as part of the film accompaniment to Thomas Adès’s 2008 piano concerto “In Seven Days,” which the (New York) Philharmonic is performing with the pianist Kirill Gerstein under the baton of Ruth Reinhardt, in her debut with the orchestra.Adès’s music here, some of the best and most moving he has written, was conceived alongside Tal Rosner’s video. The half-hour piece is described by its creators as a “concerto for piano with moving image,” drawing on footage of Disney Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London, the two spaces for which it was commissioned.Some of the film is lovely; I like the evocation of a shadowy, glinting jungle, and shifting, expanding geometric shapes conjure the jazzy, mid-20th-century look of Saul Bass’s movie title sequences. But on Thursday the endless kaleidoscope fractals mostly felt like a busy albatross around the score’s neck.And what a score. This is Adès at his most confident, elemental and ingenious. Brilliantly, the chaos of genesis at the start is not immediately chaotic, but rather an assertive, spiky motif with the slightest off-kilter dip to the rhythm, like something trying to catch its breath, to gather itself. The darkness of the universe is a brooding, gorgeous aria; the creation of the stars, a superhigh undulation amid glassiness, scattered through the piano and orchestra.Grim density flows into shining expanses, but this composer’s changeability and the creativity of his instrumental combinations keep it from ever sounding saccharine or sodden. Gerstein, who has played the piece many times, calmly negotiated its furious runs, granitic chords and tender wandering. For an encore, he gave Adès’s arrangement of the lonesome Berceuse from his opera “The Exterminating Angel.”The concerto offers a tantalizing impression of organic development and proliferation. That same quality was present — if in a quite different, more formally minimal vein — on Monday at Geffen’s new, intimate Sidewalk Studio in Julius Eastman’s “Femenine,” a piece from the mid-1970s that has been central to this composer’s posthumous rediscovery.At the Sidewalk Studio space, members of the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players performed Julius Eastman’s “Femenine.”Chris LeeSmall cells of material — including annunciatory themes as compelling as Adès’s — repeat (and repeat and repeat) and slowly evolve through the 70-minute work, over the ceaseless wintry shake of sleigh bells. The performers on Monday, a group drawn from the Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players, juxtaposed, as Eastman intended, rhythmic alertness and regularity with woozy, oozing, shaggy sprawl.The Philharmonic can certainly play the Adès concerto, but its textures were not as clear or vivid on Thursday as they can be: the darknesses not as brutal nor the transparencies as shimmering. Grazyna Bacewicz’s motoric Overture for Orchestra, which opened the program, felt thick, too.After intermission, Dvorak’s Fifth Symphony was sometimes overly forceful. Reinhardt gave welcome prominence to the winds, but this orchestra doesn’t tend to dance gracefully, which made the internal movements heavy. By the Finale, though, more drama was made out of contrasting dynamics, with a candied, fairy-tale character to both the wistfulness and the high spirits.At the start of the concert, Reinhardt told the audience that the Philharmonic wanted to respond to the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria, a lovely idea. But that response turned out to be an awkwardly played rendition of a cliché: the second movement of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, best known as the “Air on the G String.”Couldn’t the ensemble have simply dedicated the whole concert — or at least Adès’s concerto, a musical depiction of the wonders and terrors of nature — to those affected?New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Conductor Takes a Victory Lap With Her Orchestra

      by

      Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has returned to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, now as a guest, for a tour that stopped at Carnegie Hall.When Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a rapidly rising young Lithuanian conductor, announced last year that she would step down from her post as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director, her statement had the euphemistic wording of a breakup.“This is a deeply personal decision,” she said at the time, “reflecting my desire to step away from the organizational and administrative responsibilities of being a music director at this particular moment in my life and focusing more on my purely musical activities.”But she was being honest: An outlier in classical music, at 36 she would rather dedicate time to her own interests and her growing family than be tied to an orchestra. When I met her in January, as she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” in Munich as part of a year dedicated to various iterations of that opera, she said lightheartedly, “I’m not sure the big orchestras will be interested in having me if I say I’ll do only ‘Vixen’ for the whole season.”If more proof of Gražinytė-Tyla’s sincerity were needed, she has also delivered on the final part of her statement that “we shall continue to make music together in the coming years.” She is touring with the Birmingham, England, ensemble, now as its principal guest conductor. One of their stops was at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night: a program that was something of a victory lap not only for her six-season tenure with these players, but also for the group’s pandemic-delayed centennial celebrations from 2020.Among those celebrations was a series of commissions that included Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” Symphony, a four-movement adaptation of his 2016 opera that had its New York premiere on Saturday.“The Exterminating Angel” is one of the great operas of our time — a work of wicked humor and dark beauty that befits both the 1962 Luis Buñuel film that inspired it and the overwhelming dread and instability we try to live with today. (Now, its story of surreal, indefinite imprisonment in a single room comes off as prescient and all too familiar.) The sound world Adès conjures throughout is dramaturgically airtight: shifting harmonies, the eeriness of an ondes Martenot, dense forces of cosmic immensity.It’s a lot to take in, and there have been few opportunities; “The Exterminating Angel” is an expensive production, with a sprawling principal cast and an orchestra of Wagnerian heft. Adès conducted the American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 2017, and given the house’s unreliable continued support of contemporary work, however successful, it’s difficult to imagine a revival any time soon.Thankfully, Adès has made further music from the score: the solo piano Berceuse, written for Kirill Gerstein, and this symphony, which cleverly echoes the opera without excerpting it. Gone is the eerie ondes Martenot, though it lives on in swinging glissandos in the strings; still intact, however, is the opera’s excess and horror, made all the more unsettling by the orchestra’s coolly crisp, virtually objective delivery on Saturday.The first movement, “Entrances,” nods at the grotesquerie and layered textures of the opening scene; “March,” from an interlude between Acts I and II, could just as easily be called “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Firing Squad,” with martial terrors reminiscent of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. The grim lyricism of Adès’s love songs and lullabies returns with another Berceuse, followed by the finale, “Waltzes,” a rhapsodic assemblage that evolves into a relentless danse macabre analogue to the opera itself.Had the symphony not come after an intermission, it would have been a whiplash response to the work that opened the program: Elgar’s sparely orchestrated and often quiet Cello Concerto in E minor, featuring Sheku Kanneh-Mason as the soloist. He’s an expressive musician, who defaults to a wide, emotive vibrato — especially in his encore, a harmonious arrangement of Bach’s “Komm, süsser Tod” for five cellists. Gražinytė-Tyla deferred to him as the concerto’s narrator, with modest accompaniment and rarely blooming grandeur.And a compelling narrator he was. Kanneh-Mason plays with the seeming spontaneity that can come only from extreme discipline, but also a freedom that occasionally slides into flawed intonation. And in a work as plain-spoken as the Elgar, his elevated articulation was more Shakespeare than, say, the Chekhov it should have been. But all that could be forgiven for the sheer charisma of his performance.The most traditional showcase of the Birmingham ensemble’s sound under Gražinytė-Tyla was in Debussy’s “La Mer,” which closed the evening in a transparent interpretation that revealed the piece’s rich, subtly maximal orchestration. Gražinytė-Tyla’s reading wasn’t the most volatile, but it was revealing in its clarity, balancing texture upon texture below a gracefully buoyant melody in the brasses or winds.Players in every section of the orchestra responded to her gestures — sometimes efficiently small, sometimes evocative of a swerve or plunge — with lived-in ease. Gražinytė-Tyla might not be attached to them full time, but neither is she fully detached. Whatever she has decided to do, to reconcile her own interests with that of this orchestra, it’s working.City of Birmingham Symphony OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More