Andsnes, Leif Ove

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    Review: New York Philharmonic Plays New Steve Reich Piece

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    In “Jacob’s Ladder,” which premiered at the New York Philharmonic on Thursday, Reich’s signature chugging rhythms returned.Thursday evening was a major moment for musical Minimalism.The Chicago Symphony Orchestra brought Philip Glass’s new piece, “The Triumph of the Octagon,” to Carnegie Hall. And further uptown, at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere of Steve Reich’s “Jacob’s Ladder.”It is no longer news that these composers, indelible faces of an era-defining movement, are eminences. Reich turned 87 on Tuesday, and Glass reaches the same age in January.But don’t forget: They were once downtown rebels, writing for their own ensembles rather than major symphonic forces. (In 1973, Reich’s “Four Organs” was nearly heckled off the Carnegie stage.) Imagine predicting, back then, that they would have new work presented on the same night by two of the country’s great orchestras, in the two temples of New York’s musical establishment.And that it would be cheered. At Geffen Hall, “Jacob’s Ladder” and Reich were warmly received at the center of an excellent concert that placed the premiere between a pair of repertory masterpieces, all conducted by the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden.“Jacob’s Ladder” is something of a return to form for Reich after a quietly daring departure. Since his breakthrough experiments of the late 1960s, his music has been defined by its chugging pulse.But in “Traveler’s Prayer” — begun before the pandemic, completed during lockdown and first performed in 2021 — the pulse was gone. That piece seems to float, with mellow vibraphone charting the calm, patient chant of four voices as a piano makes occasional, deep interjections — somehow questioning and affirming at once.Reich’s work for voices has long suggested the combination of purity and complexity in medieval polyphony; he has cited Pérotin as an important influence. But “Traveler’s Prayer” really felt medieval in its rapt yet free stillness.“When I began to write ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ I had to ask myself, ‘To pulse or not to pulse?’” Reich says in an interview with his publisher. To pulse, he eventually decided. L’chaim!And from the start, the 20-minute new piece burbles with a steady, propulsive rush of vibraphone. The rhythms are far more tart than in “Traveler’s Prayer,” the melodies more brightly etched and stepwise — more ladderlike. The intimate forces are similar to those Reich used in his last work, with the vocal quartet, small circle of string players, piano and pair of vibes now joined by a handful of flutes, oboes and clarinets that add more lilting vividness.Like its predecessor, “Jacob’s Ladder” sets biblical text in the original Hebrew — in this case, the verse from Genesis in which Jacob dreams of a ladder to heaven, angels ascending and descending on it. But Reich means for the consonants to be smoothed, almost blurred, and on Thursday the four singers of Synergy Vocals managed the difficult task of sounding simultaneously precise and misty, with an antique nasal tang in the two male voices and cool freshness in the women.Swaths of the piece are just instrumental, and the Philharmonic musicians approached the whole thing with forthright gusto. Presumably Reich observed rehearsals and sanctioned the performance style, but the string players used an amount of vibrato that sometimes jarred with the straighter tone of the singers and other instruments; this premiere wasn’t ideally clear.The piece is not as plainly poignant as “Traveler’s Prayer”; the musical and emotional landscape of “Jacob’s Ladder” is more changeable, even flickering. Reich flashes — without lingering — on jeweled moments, and at one memorable point, briefly brightening harmonies in the strings are brought back to somber earth by just a few dark piano notes.Yet nothing is overstated; even the dissonances in this subtle work are softly luminous. Energetic while meditative, “Jacob’s Ladder” doesn’t feel insubstantial, but it does feel light, graceful, refreshing. Twenty minutes passed like a song.Programming the piece alongside Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony seemed less about drawing musical comparisons than about proving how easily Reich fits in with the classics. New works are sometimes doomed by juxtaposition with beloved standards, but “Jacob’s Ladder” plays serenely yet confidently with the big boys.The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, returning to the Philharmonic for the first time since 2018, did the first movement of the Beethoven concerto with lucid authority and some superb textures, like downward runs that truly sounded as if they were sliding. His slow movement had poetry without indulgence, and the witty, visionary transition from that Adagio to the lively Rondo finale had an exciting sense of improvisation.Schubert’s “Unfinished” was a questionable choice, since the Philharmonic last played it just six months ago. Yet here, as in the Beethoven, van Zweden was strong but not hectoring, with depth and focus to the orchestra’s sound. In the second (and final completed) movement, passages of storminess and lyricism were both persuasive and vibrant.The orchestra played with polished precision. I’ve criticized van Zweden for overly manicured, pushy performances, but on Thursday, in both concerto and symphony, the phrasing felt sculpted with panache, the tension honestly built.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Leif Ove Andsnes Adds to Carnegie Hall History

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      The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes brought Dvorak’s sprawling 1889 rarity to New York with committed playing and interpretive wisdom.“Probably few pianists will have sufficient courage to play them all in succession,” Antonin Dvorak predicted about the 13 sections of his sprawling, nearly hourlong “Poetic Tone Pictures.” But, he added, “only in this way can the listener obtain a proper notion of what I intended, for this time I am not just an absolute composer but also a poet.”He was correct; since it was written in 1889, “Poetic Tone Pictures” has been taken up by so few pianists, it didn’t arrive at Carnegie Hall until Tuesday evening, as the dreamily kaleidoscopic second half of a recital by Leif Ove Andsnes.It has been a week of firsts at Carnegie. On Saturday, Yuja Wang accomplished the sensationally unheard-of — at the hall, if not in the world — by muscling through Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” in a marathon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Tuesday’s recital was another impressive milestone, but, in Andsnes fashion, a more modest one.His performance of the Dvorak — measured in appearance but interpretively varied, played with thorough commitment and characteristic wisdom — had the qualities of a standard-setting account. Even if “Poetic Tone Pictures” doesn’t return to Carnegie any time soon, Andsnes made a compelling argument for why it should: how, despite its unpianistic moments and longueurs, it is, in its entirety, a touching display of awe at life itself, told with a folk tune or a naïve melody, a solemn march or a sentimental dance.The work’s expansiveness was a contrast to the recital’s first half, which was thematically focused, with a trajectory from reticence to unambiguous passion in a clear but gentle gesture toward the war in Ukraine. Andsnes fashioned something like a suite from four pieces played straight through, beginning with Alexander Vustin’s “Lamento,” from 1974, and drawing from over 200 years of classical music history.Vustin, a Russian composer who is thought to have died of complications from Covid-19 early in the pandemic, straddled tonality and the avant-garde fashions of post-World War II music. In “Lamento,” for example, Andsnes’s left hand faintly beat chords of shifting harmonies, while his right one, more angular and unpredictable, entered with a trill before letting out atonal flourishes and chirping interjections — but never for long, like fervent ideas held back from full expression.By the end, all that remains are the chords, at a whisper, which on Tuesday led naturally into the quiet, pained opening of Janacek’s sonata “1.X.1905, ‘From the Street,’” written in memory of a 20-year-old Czech worker who was killed — pointlessly, Janacek believed — by a German soldier during a political demonstration. Here, it was as if the sentiment of “Lamento” had surfaced in mournful lyricism and waves of rage.Janacek destroyed the sonata’s third movement, tearing it out of the score and throwing it into a stove the day it premiered in 1906, but Andsnes programmed a fitting coda in a 2005 bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s pre-eminent composer. Like many Silvestrov pieces, this one was a touch too pretty, even in Andsnes’s unforced reading, but after the Janacek, its insistent serenity came off as a plea for beauty, if not for peace.That could have sufficed for the recital’s first half. If there was a misstep on Tuesday, it was in following the bagatelle with Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, which might have provided an impassioned climax had it not been performed with such a level head. Instead, it prolonged a point that had already been made.If anything, the slowly accumulating final chord of the bagatelle could have set up the softly arpeggiated one at the start of “Twilight Way,” the first of the “Poetic Tone Pictures.” (Hardly representational, Dvorak’s character pieces would be better served by a more literal translation from their Czech title, “Poetic Moods.”) From there, Andsnes was a masterly shepherd of this score, never losing sight of its sometimes obscured line and maintaining control of its agonizingly tricky articulations to bring out the reverent dignity of “In the Old Castle”; the sweet, I-could-have-danced-all-night shadow of a melody in “Furiant”; and the shards of light cutting through a chorale in “On the Holy Mountain.”At Carnegie, you could understand, even appreciate, Dvorak’s pride in what he had created with these humble observations of Czech life. “It is an ominous number,” he wrote to a friend of the 13 movements, “but there were just as many Moravian duets and they, after all, managed to wander quite a way through the world! Perhaps they will do so again.” Over 130 years later, they have.Leif Ove AndsnesPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      ‘The Great Czech Piano Cycle’ Arrives at Carnegie Hall

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      The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is appearing at Carnegie with Dvorak’s “Poetic Tone Pictures,” a rarity being performed there for the first time.Carnegie Hall might have hosted the premiere of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony in 1893, but it’s not every day, 130 years later, that a major work by that Czech composer is heard there for the first time.Still less, a solo piano cycle that lasts almost an hour. That’s what the unerringly sophisticated Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will offer on Tuesday, in a recital anchored by Dvorak’s “Poetic Tone Pictures,” thirteen character pieces, written in 1889, that Andsnes recently recorded for Sony.Andsnes has known the work since he was a boy; his father had one of its few recordings in his collection. But he came to study it properly only in the time afforded by the pandemic.“Most of my colleagues won’t even know that Dvorak wrote this wonderful cycle for piano,” Andsnes, 52, said in an interview. “There is such a strange reputation around his music because he wasn’t a pianist, and people think that he didn’t write very well for the instrument.”But, Andsnes added: “He uses the piano in a very colorful way, in a very versatile way, every piece has new textures, new techniques. For me, this cycle really stands as the great Czech piano cycle.”In Dvorak’s piano writing, Andsnes said, “the imagination, the richness of melodic and harmonic invention and characterization is so wonderful, and so unique.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesTuesday’s concert will be Andsnes’s first solo recital at Carnegie Hall since 2015. Clive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director, said that the lapse was a matter of bad luck — injury, the pandemic — but also, more tellingly, that it spoke to the breadth of interests that makes Andsnes special.“We’ll say we’d love to have you back, and he’ll come back with an idea of collaborating with others, rather than just doing a piano recital,” Gillinson said. When Andsnes has appeared at the hall, it’s been in Brahms’s Piano Quartets, the Grieg concerto with the Boston Symphony and a “Rite of Spring” as a duo with Marc-André Hamelin.Andsnes’s latest solo recital is a case study in sensitive programming. Czech nationality connects Dvorak to Janacek, whose early 20th-century sonata, “1.X.1905,” commemorates a murdered political protester. That work’s relevance to demonstrations today, particularly over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prompted Andsnes to surround it with a “Lamento” by Alexander Vustin, a Russian who was little known outside his country and died early in the pandemic, and a bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, whose music has come to represent Ukrainian resistance. Beethoven rounds out the program, because, as Andsnes put it, “Beethoven always seems to have a message.”In the interview, Andsnes discussed the “Poetic Tone Pictures” and more of Tuesday’s program. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The standard view of Dvorak’s piano music, and especially his concerto, is that it is poorly written because he wasn’t a virtuoso himself. Could we say instead that he wrote pretty well for someone who didn’t play to a high standard?Absolutely. Sometimes when you’re not playing the instrument you might come up with solutions that are new, and unheard-of. I remember Christian Tetzlaff said a few years ago that, you know, who were the composers who wrote the groundbreaking new violin concertos? They were all pianists: Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bartok. Nobody could imagine these shifts and sounds on the violin, and they didn’t know its limitations.I think Dvorak wrote wonderfully for the piano, most of the time. It’s not as comfortably written as Chopin or Schumann or Debussy, but there’s a lot of music like that. The imagination, the richness of melodic and harmonic invention and characterization is so wonderful, and so unique.Dvorak’s “Poetic Tone Pictures” will have its first Carnegie performance at Andsnes’s recital.Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesDid Dvorak intend the pieces to be played as a cycle?I found this quote from him. He wrote to a friend after finishing these pieces that he’s tried to be a poet, à la Schumann, but that it doesn’t sound like Schumann. And then he says, I hope that someone will have the courage to play all the pieces continuously, because only by doing that could one really understand his intentions.That was extremely interesting, because we’re talking about an hour of music here. If he thought about it as a cycle, that’s a very ambitious undertaking, and a much bigger cycle than any that were known at the time. Clara Schumann would always select pieces from her husband’s music, rarely playing “Kreisleriana” as one, or “Carnaval” as one. Sure enough, one gets into a state of mind and it seems to work out well — the contrasts between the pieces, and this wonderful farewell, “On the Holy Mountain,” which is such a benediction. It’s a real journey.Listening to your recording, I wondered whether the music’s fate has not just been about preconceptions about the writing, but the fact that an hourlong cycle is tricky to program.Even the single pieces are not known. I played these pieces in Prague in November, and I met the daughter of Rudolf Firkusny, the great Czech pianist. She said, “Maybe I can remember that my father played the third piece a couple of times as an encore,” but she didn’t know the music. Can you imagine? Firkusny played so much Czech music, and was famous for playing the Piano Concerto.Does the cycle have a narrative to it, or is it more a series of tableaux along the lines of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”?More like that, maybe a picture of Czech life. What I love about the cycle is, you have very spiritual pieces, the mystery of “The Old Castle” and “Twilight Way,” and on the other hand you have a piece called “Toying.” Another piece is called “Tittle-Tattle.” It’s everyday life, which you also have in “Pictures at an Exhibition,” or even in late Beethoven.Do you have a favorite piece among the 13?I love them all in very different ways, but there is one piece, the ninth, called “Serenade.” It’s such a great example of Dvorak’s real strengths. It begins as such a trivial piece, it has this very simple melody, serenading a loved one, with a guitar accompaniment. There’s almost no harmony in the beginning, and you wonder, is this really it?It isn’t, of course, because he suddenly changes the harmonies and it becomes so much richer. It gets to a middle section which is a sort of slow siciliano, which has a feeling of prayer, or a really beautiful love song, the most tender one can imagine. You just wonder how he went there, with the same melodic material. For me, he has such an ability to develop a very simple idea into a real jewel.Dvorak always suffers a bit in comparison with Brahms, because they were contemporaries and admired each other. Brahms has this obvious counterpoint and resistance in the music, we always feel that every voice is so rich. Dvorak doesn’t have that, and one can feel that the music is a little bit too easy to swallow. It depends on the performer to bring out all these subtleties.Has it become more important for you to reflect the world in your playing?It became quite special with this program. If one can find a relevant conversation with the music that we do and what is going on with the world, it’s wonderful, but I wouldn’t want to always look for something. It can be fabricated.The Janacek was speaking to me about now. Like so many, I felt affected by what’s going on, also being in this part of the world. As Norwegians we are a neighboring country to Russia, it really has affected so many of us everywhere; of course in the United States, too, but maybe even more in this part of the world.And in grim times, we often turn to Beethoven.Yes, so often there is a feeling of going through struggle, or fight in Beethoven’s music, trying to find solutions, or answers, or victory — somehow.If the “Poetic Tone Pictures” are a cycle, Andsnes said, “that’s a very ambitious undertaking, and a much bigger cycle than any that were known at the time.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York Times More

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      5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

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      Recordings of Brahms, Haydn, Grieg, Nikolai Kapustin and George Walker are among recent highlights.‘Blueprint’: Piano Music by Nikolai Kapustin for Jazz TrioFrank Dupree, piano; Jakob Krupp, bass; Obi Jenne, drums (Capriccio)When I reported last year on the pianist Frank Dupree’s first album of works by Nikolai Kapustin, Dupree previewed things to come. For his follow-up engagement with Kapustin, a swing-influenced Russian composer, Dupree said he would release a series of solo piano works played by a traditional jazz trio.Now that the results are out, the wisdom of the idea is evident. Dupree could have recorded an enjoyable solo set, as his feel for Kapustin is as fluid as ever. But we currently have no lack of one-player recitals of this music — including from Marc-André Hamelin, Steven Osborne and Kapustin himself.The improvised element on “Blueprint” is subtle. Dupree plays the piano solos as they were notated, and the bassist Jakob Krupp follows his left hand. The album’s distinguishing element of improvisation is left to the percussionist Obi Jenne. And it’s his interventions that truly elevate this set. In a piece like the Op. 41 Variations, Kapustin moves briskly between different syncopated styles; Jenne’s mutable beat-juggling highlights each change. Perhaps not every item here needed the jazz combo treatment. But when the arrangements work — as on selections from the Eight Concert Études — this trio adds to the material a new jolt. SETH COLTER WALLSBrahms: Late Piano WorksPaul Lewis, piano (Harmonia Mundi)To listen to the pianist Paul Lewis’s new album of late Brahms, you would think these pieces had been written just after the last sonatas of Schubert, which Lewis has recorded with wrenching restraint. Splicing the gap between 1828 and the early 1890s, Lewis’s is a vision of Brahms as fully Classicist; these final four sets of solos are rendered with judicious tempos and a clean, calm touch — intelligent, sensitive readings.The pearly moderation that makes Lewis’s Schubert so movingly humble sometimes keeps his Brahms shy of grandeur and especially mystery. These are tender, affecting interpretations more than pensive, let alone unsettling, ones; Lewis sometimes stints the softest dynamics, giving a slight sense of straightforwardness when you want intimations (at least) of the epic. The Intermezzo in E flat (Op. 117, No. 1) doesn’t seem to lose itself in the middle section — as it does in Radu Lupu’s benchmark 1987 recording — so the return to the theme is less than overwhelming.But a cleareyed Intermezzo in A (Op. 118, No. 2) is deeply satisfying; the Intermezzo in E Minor (Op. 119, No. 2) leavens lucidity with dreaminess. And Lewis’s sparkle in the middle of the Romanze in F (Op. 118, No. 5) gives the shift back to sober feeling at the end quietly immense power. ZACHARY WOOLFEGrieg: SongsLise Davidsen, soprano; Leif Ove Andsnes, piano (Decca)The recording industry has finally found a way to capture Lise Davidsen. A luminous soprano of remarkable range, equally capable of floodlight power and the piercing smallness of a laser pointer, she wasn’t well represented on her first two albums for Decca, which were documents of sensitive and intelligent interpretation more than versatility or resounding might.Now, after programs of Wagner, Strauss, Beethoven and Verdi, comes a much more intimate album of Grieg songs performed with the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes — a pairing of two excellent Norwegian musicians in works by their country’s most treasured composer. The scale of this program is better suited than Davidsen’s earlier albums at conveying the dexterity of her voice, and her gift for endearing levity; there are playful turns of phrase here that you just don’t get in “Tannhäuser.”Throughout the album — which begins with the eight-song cycle “The Mountain Maid” and continues with excerpts from other collections — Andsnes is an evocative tone painter, with dreamy glissandos in “Singing,” galloping festivity in “Midsummer Eve” and flowing momentum in “A Boat on the Waves Is Rocking.” And Davidsen is a nimble raconteur, lovingly warm in the opening cycle’s “Meeting,” then shattering in its Schubertian finale, “At the Gjaetle Brook,” and later bringing both folk lightness and Wagnerian heft to the six songs of Op. 48. To the credit of Grieg and these artists, you’ll never be so moved by a song called “Snail, Snail!” JOSHUA BARONEHaydn: SymphoniesAcademy of St. Martin in the Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor (Eloquence)It’s easy now to be a little sniffy about Neville Marriner’s achievements with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a partnership renowned as the most recorded in history. With the success of the period-instrument movement, their hundreds of recordings on modern instruments have gained the reputation of being a bit staid — practical and reliable, to be sure, but nevertheless dusty relics of an era best forgotten.But this thoroughly enjoyable 15-disc set — which for the first time brings together 33 Haydn symphonies set down between 1970 and 1990 — is ample reminder that there were perfectly good artistic reasons Marriner and his chamber-orchestra forces were such a roaring commercial success.Conceiving their work initially as a crisp, stylish rejoinder to an older, stouter approach to the Baroque and Classical repertoire, they played this music with insatiable collective commitment — the slow movements singing gracefully, the outer movements sparkling in their drive and invention. If there is a little more zest in their accounts of Haydn’s earlier symphonies than his later ones, they are all brilliantly well judged, and full of life. DAVID ALLENGeorge Walker: Piano SonatasSteven Beck, piano (Bridge)In 2018, when the composer and pianist George Walker died at 96, there were plenty of accomplishments to memorialize, including his Pulitzer Prize — the first awarded to a Black composer. But there was also a dispiriting acknowledgment of a missed opportunity, given that so few elite classical institutions had seriously engaged with Walker’s work while he was alive.The inattention extended to recordings; there remains a notable dearth of sets devoted exclusively to Walker. Very partial redress comes in the form of this new album, in which Steven Beck takes on all five of Walker’s piano sonatas, written between 1953 and 2003.The first sonata, revised in 1991, offers some of the galloping energy seemingly required when suggesting Americana, but it also includes a rambunctious harmonic edge that bristles with maverick spirit. By the time of the Third Sonata, written in 1975 and revised in 1996, atonality had taken center stage. But Walker’s signature feel for contrast — including alternations between motifs that ring out and peremptory chordal bursts — is still evident. With playing that’s slashing and sensitive by turns, Beck’s recital accentuates the through lines in a protean artistic life. SETH COLTER WALLS More