Beethoven, Ludwig van

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      Review: A Recital Brings Together Two Schubert Masters

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      The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore subtly threaded a program of Beethoven songs and Schubert’s “Schwanengesang.”It’s difficult to avoid superlatives when writing about Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Padmore.Especially when it comes to Schubert. Among pianists, Uchida is our reigning interpreter of his music — returning to it repeatedly, revealing ever more layers of mystery, wit and aching beauty. And Padmore, his tenor sound delicate and direct, with an unforced undercurrent of sadness, can feel like the incarnation of this composer’s style.As a pairing, Uchida and Padmore are wellsprings of wisdom and sensitivity, a truly equal partnership. The performances that result from their deep study of these scores are unpretentious master classes in the art of letting music speak for itself.Yet they have never recorded any Schubert together. (Padmore has released albums of this repertory with Paul Lewis and Kristian Bezuidenhout; Uchida, with Ian Bostridge.) So it was a gift to hear them in recital at Zankel Hall on Sunday in the posthumous collection “Schwanengesang” and Beethoven songs, including the pioneering cycle “An die ferne Geliebte,” all studies in extreme longing.Apart from “An die ferne Geliebte,” Beethoven’s lieder are chronically overlooked next to his towering achievements in the symphony, sonata and string quartet. But his songs are fascinating and unwieldy: shifting with little predictability among folk melody, recitative and concert aria virtuosity, sometimes from verse to verse. With their voice-forward writing, they put the most strain of the recital on Padmore, who can fill an opera house but scaled his sound back to Zankel’s intimacy, with flashes of full power all the more effective for their judiciousness.There were rattling contrasts even in the first song of the program: the Op. 94 setting, Beethoven’s second, of “An die Hoffnung” (“To Hope”), which starts with a recitative-like questioning of God’s existence before launching into lyrical lines that showcase the fine softness of Padmore’s upper range, and a radiant climax. “Resignation,” which followed, had the Schubertian spareness to which his voice is best suited; simpler still was “Abendlied unterm gestirnten Himmel” (“Evening Song Beneath the Starry Sky”), its closing chords of childlike purity played by Uchida as if a private prayer.“An die ferne Geliebte” (“To the Distant Beloved”) is often regarded as the first song cycle: six brief text settings, flowing without pause, in a precursor to longer Schubert masterpieces like “Die schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise.” Throughout, Uchida and Padmore behaved like a single instrument; so thorough was their shared vision that they almost never cued or acknowledged each other, even for rubato stretchings of the line or for abrupt changes in tempo.As in the account of “Schwanengesang” (“Swan Song”) that followed, Padmore’s sound was remarkable most for its balance of clarity and character. Similar to Uchida, his performances are compelling — without the theatricality of, for example, Bostridge, who tends to serve Schubert with a side of self-immolation.“Schwanengesang” wouldn’t benefit from histrionics, anyway; a loose collection of Schubert’s final songs, it lacks the through line of his cycles, packing their intensity into discrete pieces that demand discrete interpretations. If one trait united them here, though, it was restraint. The famous “Ständchen” (“Serenade”), for example, has an expressive style that invites schmaltz, but also maintains a chilly distance in its articulation — a tension borne out in Padmore’s wide vocal contours and Uchida’s staccato, choked off like a series of declarations repeatedly withheld.Schubert verges on tone painting in some of the collection’s later songs; Uchida responded with pedal work that, in “Die Stadt” (“The Town”), allowed the rumbling low notes to evoke a dense fog occasionally penetrated by a mysterious run in the right hand, like an image coming in and out of focus. In “Der Doppelgänger” — one of Schubert’s most terrifying songs — she sustained dissonances, letting their uneasiness warp and linger under Padmore’s stark melody.The frighteningly open chords of “Der Doppelgänger” recall those of “Der Leiermann” at the end of “Winterreise,” but “Schwanengesang” concludes in an entirely different mood: “Die Taubenpost” (“Carrier Pigeon”), a comparatively sunny setting of text by Johann Gabriel Seidl. That pigeon, the narrator reveals, is named “die Sehnsucht,” or Longing.Speaking from the stage earlier in the recital, Padmore reflected on that word. He tallied its appearances in the Schubert and Beethoven songs, as a noun and a verb, and noted that it figures in the finales of both “An die ferne Geliebte” and “Schwanengesang.”Yet “Die Taubenpost” also ends by describing the bird as “the messenger of faithfulness.” Longing can be painful, yes; this recital’s poems suggested as much. But Uchida and Padmore also made a subtle argument that it can also be — with a clue in the first song’s cry of “O Hoffnung!” — hopeful.Mitsuko Uchida and Mark PadmorePerformed on Sunday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Conductor Is the Star

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      In a program without soloist vehicles, the focus was on Herbert Blomstedt, a 94-year-old elder statesman of classical music.It’s probably safe to say that Herbert Blomstedt will not be the New York Philharmonic’s next music director.When Jaap van Zweden leaves the orchestra in spring 2024, Blomstedt will be nearly 96. Who would want to take on the burden of an orchestra at that age? Which is not to say that he couldn’t: Blomstedt maintains a dauntingly busy schedule, with a varied repertory of long, heavy lifts that includes Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony — named, fittingly, “The Inextinguishable.”On Thursday at Alice Tully Hall, he paired the Nielsen with another symphonic testament to what that composer would call “the spirit of life”: Beethoven’s Fifth. In a time when each guest conductor’s appearance at the Philharmonic — and the orchestra is in a six-week stretch of them — feels like an audition, there was a certain relief, even joy, in hearing a concert purely for its own sake.Beethoven demonstrated through his music, though, that alongside joy is a duty to face and engage with political reality. In recent days, cultural institutions around the world have been forced to confront their relationships with artists who have ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, following his invasion of Ukraine.With reckoning has come solidarity. The Metropolitan Opera opened Monday’s performance with the Ukrainian national anthem, and on Thursday, Blomstedt led the Philharmonic in a grand treatment of it. Gestures like this are rousing reminders that we can never truly separate art and politics, but are they enough? Imagine if, in addition to a program insert dedicating the concert “to the strength, courage and resilience of those resisting Russia’s invasion,” the Philharmonic had offered a vehicle for aid to Ukraine.Otherwise the statement comes and goes, as it did on Thursday. The audience and musicians, who had been standing for the anthem, took their seats, and, with little pause, Blomstedt gave the downbeat for the Nielsen — a choice made all the more jarring because the Fourth opens as if in media res. From that moment, in a program of just two symphonies and no star soloist, the focus was on Blomstedt.He might bristle at that. Famously modest, he wields authority at the podium with minimal means, leading symphonic accounts that are notable less for what they say than what they don’t. “The Inextinguishable,” written in the shadow of World War I and reflecting it in dueling timpani sets, can easily be milked for drama. But Blomstedt follows the score closely, faithfully, with the trust that it will speak for itself.This approach occasionally leaves me wanting more — accustomed as I am to the bloated grandeur of stereotypical 20th-century performance practice or the leaner, speedier sound of historically informed styles — but it is most often clarifying. Blomstedt’s reading of the Nielsen, controlled but unmannered, was one of sublime balance. The second movement’s wind choir interlude had the gentle movement and harmony of a morning walk among trees and bird song. Later, there was a shock in the starkness of strings bowed heavily in unison. The finale built slowly, and seemed to end as openly as the symphony had begun: the closing measure’s crescendo not a sweep so much as a shine with lingering radiance.In the Nielsen, the Philharmonic players were willing partners in their guest’s vision. Yet old habits emerged in the Beethoven. It’s a work, Blomstedt wryly noted in a recent interview, that he has been hearing for nearly a century. But this orchestra has been playing it much longer — since its first concert, in 1842 — and most recently has been trained to give it a hellfire treatment under van Zweden’s baton.For the most part, though, Blomstedt kept its force in check, in an interpretation free from excess. He never made too much of a fermata — especially in the famous four-note opening motif — and subtly rejected notions of fate knocking at the door, relishing instead the symphony’s exploration of motivic obsession. If this is a work often described as a journey from darkness to light, Blomstedt embraced life-affirming optimism from the start; passages suggesting adversity were met with insistent dignity.It would be easy to link this concert to current events. Indeed, that program insert encouraged the audience to do so, with a paragraph about the music’s “tribute to the fortitude of the human spirit in the face of the fiercest adversity.” But part of Beethoven’s enduring appeal is his triumph in making the personal universal, and that’s what Blomstedt’s conducting reflected: the ability of music, at its best, to speak to any time or place.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      A Conductor Brings Nearly a Century of Experience to Beethoven

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      Herbert Blomstedt, 94 and leading the New York Philharmonic this week, discusses the famous opening of the Fifth Symphony.Herbert Blomstedt just keeps on going. The Illinois-born, Swedish conductor is 94, and he maintains a schedule that musicians half his age might blanch at.At the start of February, Blomstedt was in San Francisco, where he was the music director from 1985 to 1995. A week later, Cleveland. Then Boston, conducting Mozart and a new edition of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony that is dedicated to Blomstedt himself. Next week, he repeats that program in Chicago.This week, Blomstedt leads the New York Philharmonic in two symphonies that testify to the strength of the human will: Nielsen’s Fourth and Beethoven’s Fifth.Blomstedt’s service to Scandinavian music has long been lauded, and his recordings of works by Berwald, Nielsen, Sibelius and Stenhammar still repay repeated listening. If his Beethoven has been a little less prominent, that is only because its virtues are not of the flashy or radical kind.Although slightly different in tempos and textures as a result of Blomstedt’s adoption of the new editions of Beethoven’s scores that came out in the 1990s, both symphony cycles he has recorded — with the Staatskapelle Dresden from 1975 to 1980 and the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Germany, from 2014 to 2017 — remain beacons of good taste, with a distinctive spiritual power shining through the music. In both sets, that’s particularly true of the Fifth, which may be less brutally violent than under other conductors but has a merciful empathy to its relative restraint.Asked to choose a page from the Fifth’s score, Blomstedt went for the first, which announces the four-note motif that dominates the symphony’s passage from darkness to light. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The opening page of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, whose first four notes make up one of the most famous motifs in all of music.Bärenreiter-Verlag, KasselThis is probably the most famous opening in all of music. But is it deceptively difficult to conduct?It’s very difficult. We are all haunted by this saying of Anton Schindler’s, that fate is knocking on the door. Of course, we cannot knock on the door so fast, so it becomes [singing slowly] “baaam-baaam-baaam baaaaaam.” That’s obviously not what Beethoven wanted. On the top of the page it says “Allegro con brio.” If the first bar is like that, it’s not con brio at all; it’s allegro comodo or allegro pesante or something like that.It’s also strange that there are no staccato dots there. Some of my colleagues are very conscientious; they play it [singing smoothly] “duhduhduh duhhh” because there are no dots. So that’s also another subject that can get heated.The new Bärenreiter score now has a metronome mark, in parentheses, because he wrote the marking some years later. The marking is quite shocking for those who were used to listening to Wilhelm Furtwängler or his followers, who are about twice as slow.Then, the second fermata is longer than the first one, tied over to an extra bar. The question is, why is that? So, there are many things to discuss.What are you aiming for yourself, then?The first point about the tempo is that in earlier editions of the symphonies, there were no metronome marks, so that authorized slow tempos. Of course, there were books; you could go to the musicological literature in the library and find out. Now, it is right at the top of the page, even if it is in parentheses. It’s part of the composition. And that makes a difference.When I was young — and it’s almost a hundred years ago now — the attitude toward the scores of Classical composers was much more casual than it is today. It cannot go so far that we are put in a straitjacket; that does not help the music very much. We know that Beethoven was himself very differentiated in tempos. He might start in one tempo, and after a few bars there was another tempo. Schindler reports on this; in that case, he’s quite a reliable source.Before I started conducting, I was a musicologist, so I’m trained to think like this. I’m sure Beethoven wanted the tempo as it stands. I heard so many crazy theories about what he meant with this. Some say that his metronome was going too slow, but I don’t believe that, because you can check the metronome by looking at your watch. Since the new editions have come, I’m convinced that he meant the metronome markings as they stand.Of course, I’m not alone in that. With a couple of exceptions, I think the markings are ideal. You just have to change yourself and not do what you find from tradition. You had heard Furtwängler or Bruno Walter do it, so that must be right. No, it is not right. The right thing is what he wrote.What we think Beethoven actually wanted has changed dramatically over the course of your career, with new research and shifting tastes. How do you reconcile that?That’s normal. I don’t have to apologize for that. My first ideals were what I heard Furtwängler do. I heard him many times, in rehearsal and in concerts. It shaped my musical world; it was magic. But, little by little, I discovered that there are other ways to interpret Beethoven’s music that are at least equally motivated in what he wrote.It’s not easy for a conductor, or any musician who has the task of interpreting this music, to get onto Beethoven’s wavelength, because you have so many memories, so many ideas about the music from what you have heard. You have to free yourself of that if you are looking forward. It requires that you change your mind, but I think that is what we must do. Once you are accustomed to that, you discover new expressions in the music that perhaps were not so evident a hundred years ago.What about the fermata over the last of the four notes in the motif?From a musicological standpoint, the fermata shows that the tempo does not exist anymore. What really says how long a fermata is, in this case, is how long the bow is. When the bow is at the end, you have to stop, unless you want to do two bows, which some people do. I think that misses the point, because to hold the fermata with a single down bow requires great control of muscles. If you do two, you don’t have to have that tension in your arm; it’s too easy.Why do you think Beethoven remains such an obsession for so many of us?One could write a whole book about that, but one thing to me is characteristic. We know that Beethoven was a sufferer, but he never expresses his suffering in his music, like Mahler does. You can hear it in every bar of Mahler — I’m suffering, I’m suffering, I’m suffering — and it’s wonderful, the way he does it.Beethoven was another type of person. He doesn’t put his emotions on display, and that makes it more objective. It can represent the suffering of everyone, not only his, but mine, the suffering of the whole society. The suffering of today, in Ukraine for instance. It could symbolize anything. That helps it to outlive the personal situation of the composer, or the personal situation of the interpreter. It’s something that we go through, as humans. More

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      Review: Beethoven Returns for the Age of Black Lives Matter

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      Heartbeat Opera’s powerful take on “Fidelio,” as an indictment of mass incarceration, has been revived and revised for a post-2020 world.Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” is hardly a fixed text. He wrote several possible overtures for it and reworked the score substantially over the course of a decade. But its meaning never changed: the heroism to be found in devotion, love and freedom in the face of injustice.In 2018, the daring and imaginative Heartbeat Opera — an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies — took the malleable history of “Fidelio” one step further, adapting the work as a moving indictment of mass incarceration.That production has now been revised for a revival that opened at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last weekend, ahead of a tour that continues through the end of the month. Already inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this “Fidelio” is now permeated with it, and the adaptation is even more powerful.Bannister, left, as Stan, an imprisoned Black Lives Matter activist, and Griffin as Leah, his wife, who plots to free him.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesIn Beethoven’s original singspiel — a music theater form in which sung numbers are set up by spoken scenes — a woman named Leonore disguises herself as a man, Fidelio, to infiltrate the prison where her husband, Florestan, is being held for political reasons. She aims to free him from execution while exposing the crimes of his captor, Pizarro.Ethan Heard, a founder of Heartbeat, adapted “Fidelio” for the company and collaborated with the playwright Marcus Scott on the new book. Their revision tells the story of a Black Lives Matter activist named Stan — sung by Curtis Bannister, a tenor of impressive stamina — who has been imprisoned for nearly a year, and whose wife, Leah, given an affectingly agonized lower range by the soprano Kelly Griffin, is at a breaking point as she struggles to free him.She gets a job as a guard at the prison; her strategy to reach Stan in solitary confinement (much as in Beethoven’s original) is to ingratiate herself with a senior guard (here Roc, sung with both charm and dramatic complexity by the bass-baritone Derrell Acon) and court his daughter (here Marcy, smooth-voiced yet strong in the soprano Victoria Lawal’s portrayal). In this telling, there is no need for the cross-dressing: Marcy and Leah are both queer. And, crucially, all of these characters are Black, a fact that looms before guiding the awakenings of Marcy and her father as they face their complicity in a racist system that, Leah says, is designed to punish “people whose only mistake was being poor and Black.”Corey McKern, who plays a Trump-like Pizarro, with Acon, a senior prison guard.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe spoken text is in English throughout, while the arias remain in their original German — a testament to the timelessness of Beethoven, though the production’s surtitles take some liberties with the translation. (As an excuse for briefly letting the prisoners out into the sun, Roc sings that it’s the king’s name day, but the titles say that it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day.)Radically transformed, too, is the score, arranged by Daniel Schlosberg for two pianos, two horns, two cellos and percussion, with the multitasking (and nearly scene-stealing) Schlosberg onstage, conducting from the keyboard. Expressive cellos reveal the characters’ thoughts, and the horns add an aura of muscularity and honor. The most substantial interventions are in the percussion, with drum hits deployed to dramatic effect and a whiplike slap adding terror to Pizarro’s murder-plotting “Ha, welch’ ein Augenblick.”The soprano Victoria Lawal as Marcy, who awakens to her complicity in a racist system of mass incarceration.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNot all the changes from 2018 were necessary, or wise. Starting with the venue: This production originated in a black box space at Baruch Performing Arts Center, which fit the chamber scale of the music and emphasized the cinder-block claustrophobia of Reid Thompson’s set. At the Met, the show floats on an expansive stage and struggles with poor acoustics.And the text has lost some of its grace, with pandering references to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and President Donald J. Trump’s infamous call for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” A casualty of these lapses is the baritone Corey McKern’s Pizarro, who is something of a Trump stand-in, a caricature among nuanced, human characters.You could almost forgive that at “O welche Lust,” the famous prisoners’ chorus, still the emotional high point of the production and now a coup de théâtre. For the stirring number, Leah unlocks a chest — a metaphor for the prison gates — to release a white screen, on which a video is projected, featuring 100 incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles. The camera often lingers on individual faces, to an effect not unlike that of Barry Jenkins’s filmmaking, the way his sustained close-ups invite intimacy and, above all, sympathy.A hundred incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles, recorded and projected onstage, sing the famous prisoners’ chorus “O welche Lust.”Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFor curious audience members, Heartbeat has shared letters from some of the participants. They range from endearing — Michael “Black” Powell II’s “German was hard!!” — to profound, such as this from Douglass Elliott: “Most of us are victims of our circumstances who when faced with adversities chose the wrong direction with our actions. This choir makes us feel that ‘normal’ feeling for a short time every week. We are accepted as humans, not looked at as numbers.”Beethoven’s triumphant finale could have been an insult to the contemporary reality Heartbeat’s production aims to conjure. So after Stan is freed and Pizarro defeated, Leah awakes at the same desk where, in the opening, she has had a frustrating phone call with a lawyer. This twist, that it was all a dream, is of course a tired trope, but what follows isn’t.After a moment of despair — her happiness felt so real — she stands, steps to a spotlight at center stage and holds up her phone, assuming the pose of her husband’s activism, with which the production began. An ambivalent closing scene, it is an honest reflection of our time: of the mixed successes of Black Lives Matter, yes, and of the only possible way forward.FidelioPerformed at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Manhattan, and touring through Feb. 27; heartbeatopera.org. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Tries Out Another Temporary Home

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      After opening its season at Alice Tully Hall, the orchestra found more congenial surroundings at the Rose Theater.Maybe it was the surge of adrenaline that the New York Philharmonic felt at finally returning to live concerts at Lincoln Center after a year and a half. Maybe sizing down symphonic power for a temporary venue — Alice Tully Hall, with just over a third of the seats of the orchestra’s usual theater across the street — was a work in progress on opening night.Whatever the reason, the Philharmonic’s clenched, loud performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 last week left me jangled and headachy. From my seat close to the action — maybe that was part of the problem, too — the performance seemed in line with the worst impulses of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, who announced just before the season that he would leave his post in 2024.That bullied, blatant Beethoven swept up even a normally suave soloist, Daniil Trifonov, who huffed and pounded. It didn’t bode well for the remainder of this season, much of which will be held at Tully as the Philharmonic’s home, David Geffen Hall, undergoes renovations.Not so fast. On Thursday — the orchestra’s nerves perhaps settled, and now at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, another temporary home much smaller than Geffen, but airier in feel than Tully — a different Beethoven piano concerto, the Third, was superb.Yes, I know: Another week, another Beethoven concerto. But it’s slightly easier to forgive unimaginative programming when the performance is as spirited and full-bodied as it was with Yefim Bronfman as soloist.Beloved by this orchestra, particularly in this composer, Bronfman built imperceptibly through the first movement to organ-like grandeur in his cadenza. Then his tone receded into pearly dreaminess before ending in a shivery trill. His serene poise at the start of the Largo (later recalled in his encore, Chopin’s Nocturne No. 8 in D flat) was matched by silky strings. The Rondo finale had dash all around, but Bronfman never seemed to be putting phrases in italics or boldface; this was easygoing playing, in the best sense.The concerto followed Hannah Kendall’s “Kanashibari” (2013), which has a few ethereal moments before falling into a long stretch of John Adams-esque chugging strings and brassy fanfares, with the odd slap of wood. But the orchestra played it with focus and polish.Opening with a contemporary work of seven or eight minutes that’s swamped by the subsequent hour of Beethoven and Haydn, the program was in the classic mode of an ensemble that’s profoundly cautious yet wants to appear progressive.A slight complication is that while Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto is frequent fodder for the Philharmonic, Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G (“Oxford”) isn’t. It’s standard repertory, sure, but not for this orchestra, which until trying it out this summer hadn’t played it in almost 20 years.Van Zweden leading Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G (“Oxford”).Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIt made you, as performances of his symphonies often do, want to hear them all the time. Particularly when they gleam like the “Oxford” did on Thursday, the phrases at the start sculpted but not overly managed. Perhaps, going for crispness, van Zweden occasionally erred on the side of curtness, and the final movement sometimes tipped into feeling more driven than witty. But the playing was largely rich and good-humored: balanced and gentle in the second movement, then graceful and patient, and with even a hint of mystery, in the third.Based on first impressions, it seems that, of the Philharmonic’s two main residences this season, the intimate yet spacious Rose Theater might give the orchestra and its sound more room to breathe.New York PhilharmonicProgram repeats Friday and Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Even the Tuning Up Gets an Ovation as Tanglewood Reopens

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      The mood was festive as the Boston Symphony returned to its summer home for its first in-person performances since March 2020.LENOX, Mass. — If you were brave enough, there was a time last summer when you could still turn into the drive of Tanglewood, the idyllic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra here. There were the usual local teenagers to direct you to your parking space, one pointing the way every few yards; the usual state troopers, patrol cars idling, there to tip a hat; the usual flowers, lining the path through the pristine white gates.But the familiarity stopped there. Walking through the grounds, kept open and manicured even in the absence of performances, the loneliness was overwhelming. No volunteers, overeager to help. No ice creams. No parents fretting, wondering how far from the stage to set up, safe to settle their infant when the time came. Nothing to see, the Koussevitzky Music Shed boarded up, disconsolate; no music to hear, only the birds.Well, music is coming home.The Boston Symphony opened its shortened, little-short-of-miraculous summer season here with a concert on Saturday night, the orchestra’s first in-person performance since the dark, fearful nights of March 2020, and its first with its music director, Andris Nelsons, since the January prior.Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony in a Beethoven program on Saturday night.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe program was made to please, and please it did, but the atmosphere would have been festive regardless. There were standing ovations for the orchestra, standing ovations for the conductor, standing ovations for Mark Volpe, the orchestra’s just-retired president and chief executive. The players, not normally given to outward expressions of emotion, stomped their feet when their leader, Tamara Smirnova, found the right key on the piano to invite them to tune.The authorities had set attendance at half the norm, but the rolling grounds hummed with chatter, lawn chairs crammed close; the front rows of the Shed felt full, three-foot distancing or not. There would be no intermission, though the concert still lasted nearly two hours; there would be no “Ode to Joy,” with singing still banned. I saw a single mask, amid thousands of faces.By Sunday afternoon, when a second concert took place, it all felt oddly normal: students wandering in and out of the Shed, hearing a piece then leaving to practice, or not; spectators darting for cover as the rain came down, giving up on their defenses against the bugs; the whole place glowing, despite the gloom, with the bright green tarps that were on offer at the door, some protecting bottoms from the mud, others shielding picnics from the rain. Priorities.“Reconnect, Restore, Rejoice,” the front of the program book declared. Nelsons, in his halting, earnest way, spoke from the stage of how the pandemic — seemingly thought of in the past tense, even as the world counts over four million lives lost — reminded us of “how much we need art, how much we need culture,” and of music being “comfort for our souls.”The whole place glowed and felt like normal, our critic says, with people worried about typical things, like rain and bugs.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThere would be no revolutions here, and no memorials either, just a restoration of the ancien régime: an orchestra playing what it has long played, and playing it pretty well. Beethoven it would have to be, and the Fifth Symphony, too — the Beethoven of triumph over disaster, of the human spirit, indomitable.Near enough, at least. Surely it will take time for players, even of this quality, to form a collective again, to fill out their sound, to find the attack and the togetherness that mark the best ensembles. An improvement from Saturday night was already audible on Sunday, in a peppy run-through of Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony.Before that, there were slack moments in the Beethoven, bars when balances were set aside in pursuit of sheer exuberance, passages that were allowed to drift by a conductor who has seemed to grow more standoffish as an interpreter since his arrival in Boston in 2014.But the effect was still potent, surprisingly not so much for the impact of the whole, but for glimmers of the players set free: the clarinet of William R. Hudgins, so mellow, such a balm; the flute of Elizabeth Rowe, so unusual in its woodiness; the trumpet of Thomas Rolfs, so rousing at full stretch.Nelsons conducts Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with Emanuel Ax at the piano.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe same fine subtleties appealed in the work of the soloists on offer, too, neither of them ostentatious. Emanuel Ax is nobody’s idea of a spotlight-hugging pianist, preferring to share it or give it away wholesale, but what a delight it was to hear such discretion in his “Emperor” Concerto — such care taken over the voicing of a chord, such sensitivity in the way his right hand shaped phrases in response to the orchestra. Baiba Skride took much the same approach to the Sibelius Violin Concerto, an affecting account of deep, even forlorn introspection, much of it played inward, toward the violas on her left.Comfort for the soul, indeed.The question remains, however, whether this orchestra will decide to attempt more, even as salaries recover from 37 percent cuts and losses of more than $50 million in revenue cast a shadow over the budget. It has brought in a new president and chief executive, Gail Samuel, from the ambitious Los Angeles Philharmonic; an encouraging amount of its streaming energy over the past year was spent exploring music that it has for too long ignored; and the Symphony Hall season will offer new works by Julia Adolphe, Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin.But that season looks dreary compared with those being offered by similarly tradition-bound orchestras elsewhere. It speaks volumes that scant time was dedicated here to anything contemporary, even if Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers” made its mark, throbbing with frantic energy while seeming to run on the spot, with its brief response to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.The Boston Symphony returns, then — and continues merely to abide. More

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      Beethoven Is More Intimate Than Ever in New Poems

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      Ruth Padel tells the great composer’s life story, more profoundly than most biographies, in “Beethoven Variations.”Though much is known about Beethoven, whole swaths of his life remain elusive. His deafness, for one thing. He started experiencing hearing loss before he was 30. But how extensive was the initial problem? How quickly did it worsen? It’s not clear.His most revealing words on the subject come in a letter he wrote (though never sent) to his brothers in 1802, while seeking isolation and resting his ears in Heiligenstadt, on the outskirts of Vienna. In the Heiligenstadt Testament, as it became known, his fear comes through poignantly. But what did it feel like to go deaf? What sensations did he experience? What did music sound like to him?The British poet Ruth Padel tries to fathom this mystery, and other long-mythologized strands of the composer’s life story, in “Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life,” recently published in the United States. Padel’s imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I’ve read.Padel’s imagery and imagination took our critic deeper into Beethoven than many biographies he had read.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesIn one of the first poems, “On Not Needing Other People,” Padel describes the 13-year-old Beethoven visiting the Breunings, a rich, cultured family that befriended him. Most books on the composer present this episode as an opportunity for the young Beethoven to enjoy some familial companionship — one of the sons became a lifelong friend — and develop career skills by teaching piano to some of the children.But Padel dwells on how different, how apart, Beethoven must have felt, even while savoring the family’s attention. The mother told her children to let their young visitor alone when he slipped into, as Padel puts it, “the solitude she calls raptus” and displayed his “surly way of shouldering people off,” his “fits of reverie, lost/in a re-tuning of the spheres.” As Padel perceives it, Beethoven early on drifted into states that prefigured how deafness would increasingly isolate him:This boy has no idea that before he’s thirtysome inflamed wet muddle of labyrinth and cochlea,thin as a cicada wing, will clog his earswith a whistling buzz, then glue them into silence.In “Moonlight Sonata,” Padel, in an imaginative leap, describes that famous piano work as music of loss — not just of love, but of hearing: “Bass clef/High treble only once/and in despair.” For Beethoven, she continues, this is the new “shocked calm of Is it true.” Is this “what it sounds like, going deaf?”In a poem about Beethoven’s five-month stay in Heiligenstadt, Padel recounts her own visit there — with views of the Danube canal and vineyards in bud — as she follows his steps into a cobbled yard: “God invents curious/torture for his favourites. He’s thirty-one./Fate has swung a wrecking ball.” Beethoven has walked into a place “of zero sum,” she writes, where “he must cast himself as victim or as hero.”Though he “cannot hear the driving rain,” he is sketching a funeral march — a symphony — taking him down a new path. In “Eroica” Padel arrestingly describes that path:You are havoc on the brink, a jackhammershattering the night and soaring past world-sorrow.Against everything that can happento you or anyone, you pitch experimentand the next new key, ever more remote.Most traditional biographers are reticent about guessing how Beethoven’s deafness affected his composing. Padel, though, suggests — daringly but compellingly — that Beethoven’s isolating deafness contributed to his greatness. “What we forget,” she writes, “makes us who we are” — perhaps for Beethoven that eventually included the actual sound of music. Describing what she felt as she examined the manuscript of the late Op. 131 String Quartet, Padel asks, “Does being deaf break the chains?”“Could he,” she writes, “have written this otherwise?”Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record. And she describes Beethoven’s music vibrantly, as in her acute phrases on the sublime slow movement of the Op. 132 String Quartet: “Cloud iridescence”; “Wave-shadow like mourning ribbon”; “Quiet as a wreath of sleep/for anyone in sorrow.”A writer and teacher, Padel has also explored ancient Greek culture, the contemporary issues of refugees and homelessness, and science. (Darwin was her great-great-grandfather, and her book “Darwin: A Life in Poems” was published in 2009.) The Beethoven poems are informed by her lifelong immersion in music, starting from her youth, when her father, a psychoanalyst and cellist, conscripted her into a family ensemble; she played the viola.This Beethoven book is not her first poetic biography. “Darwin: A Life in Poems,” about her great-great-grandfather, was published in 2009.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesThe book originated through her work over the past decade with the Endellion String Quartet, to whom it is dedicated. Padel first worked with the Endellion on performances of pieces by Haydn and Schubert, in which she wrote poems and read them between the movements. Asked to collaborate on a Beethoven program that included the Op. 131 Quartet, she wrote seven poems to be interspersed between that visionary work’s seven movements. As the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, in 2020, approached, she went further and wrote what is, in effect, a poetic biography.Naturally, some of the poems will speak more immediately to those with knowledge of the events and characters of Beethoven’s life. So Padel helpfully includes “Life-Notes: A Coda,” some 30 pages of short biographical bits linked to the four sections of poems (49 in all). Even these entries have poetic elegance. Explaining that Beethoven’s alcoholic, abusive father put his young son to work playing viola, she explains why the instrument appealed to her, and may have suited Beethoven: “It does not have the brilliance of the violin or power of the cello, but when playing it you hear everything going on around you, all the relationships and harmonies, from inside. It is a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Padel’s viola. Beethoven also played that instrument, which Padel describes as “a writer’s instrument, inward and between.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesVisiting the house in Bonn, Germany, in which Beethoven was born, Padel imagines “your mother/carrying the shopping,” “your father staggering home drunk/up these stairs” to “wake you in the middle of the night.” In “Meeting Mozart,” she describes the 16-year-old Beethoven after a three-week winter journey to Vienna, “burning” to be taught by the master.Many biographers struggle to deal with this meeting between two of the titans of music history. Padel puts herself in the mind of the young Beethoven, to whom Mozart “looks like a fat little bird./Bug eyes, fidgety,/tapping his toes.” Beethoven’s performance of a Mozart sonata fails to impress its composer, who suddenly urges Beethoven to improvise.“And at last he’s caught,” Padel writes. It’s a thrilling moment in her telling.Then the news comes that his adored mother is gravely ill and Beethoven is “snatched away”:She waits till you returnto drown in the coughed-up dregsof her own lungs.There are poems about Beethoven’s hapless infatuations for unattainable women from the upper ranks of Viennese society; about his sexual activities (“Brothels? Probably. Everyone did.”); and, especially, about his long, contorted legal battle to gain custody of his young nephew Karl from his widowed sister-in-law. His obsession with being a substitute father causes a long dry spell in his composing:You’re not working. You’re a mountain kingwaylaid in your own black corridors.The final poem, “Musica Humana,” begins with a description of a postmortem examination of Beethoven’s inner ears, the auditory canal “covered in glutinous scales/shining throughout the autopsy.” Other biographies report on this, but not with such gruesomely poetic imagery. And “how he died,” Padel marvels, “lifting his fist/as if it held a bird he would release into the storm.”I thought back to an early poem about Beethoven’s bullying father:your response to challenge ever after will be attack.You will need no one. Only the relationshipof sound and key. You improvise. More

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      Tanglewood Is Back This Summer, With Beethoven and Yo-Yo Ma

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      Closed last year, the Boston Symphony’s warm-weather home in the Berkshires will host an abbreviated six-week season.There won’t be the traditional, grand closing-night performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its stage full of singers. In fact, to reduce the risk of aerosol transmission of the coronavirus, there will be no vocal music at all at Tanglewood this summer.But there will still be a lot of Beethoven, along with crowd-pleasing tributes to the composer John Williams and familiar guests like Emanuel Ax, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma.Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s warm-weather home in the Berkshires, announced in March that after remaining closed last year because of the pandemic, it would open this summer for a six-week season — about half the usual length — with limited crowds and distancing requirements. On Thursday, the orchestra filled in the programming: heavy on appearances by its music director, Andris Nelsons, and with a focus on Beethoven, whose 250th birthday last year was muted because of widespread concert cancellations.Nelsons will lead eight orchestral programs, including a Beethoven opener on July 10 featuring the “Emperor” Piano Concerto, with Ax as soloist, and the Fifth Symphony. On July 23, the Boston Pops will honor Williams, who turns 90 next year and is the Pops’ laureate conductor; the following evening, Mutter gives the premiere of his Violin Concerto No. 2, and on Aug. 13 Williams shares the podium for a night of film music. On July 30, the violinist Leonidas Kavakos does Beethoven trios with Ax and Ma, who also plays with the Boston Symphony under Karina Canellakis on Aug. 8. (Details are available at bso.org.)Throughout the summer, performances will last no longer than 80 minutes, without intermissions, and all concerts will take place in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, which is open on the sides. The space, which usually holds thousands, will have a reduced capacity, as will the lawn that surrounds it — a favorite spot for picnicking. Tanglewood is waiting to announce what might go forward in late summer of its well-loved series of pop performers like James Taylor.Students at the Tanglewood Music Center, the orchestra’s prestigious summer academy, will play chamber concerts on Sunday mornings and Monday afternoons, and programs are planned for the Tanglewood Learning Institute, a series of lectures, talks and master classes that began with great fanfare in 2019. The orchestra will host a two-day version of its annual Festival of Contemporary Music, July 25-26.The Knights, a chamber orchestra, will be joined on July 9 by the jazz and classical pianist Aaron Diehl for Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and selections from Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite.” Among the Boston Symphony’s guest conductors will be Thomas Adès (the orchestra’s artistic partner), Alan Gilbert, Anna Rakitina and Herbert Blomstedt; soloists include the pianists Daniil Trifonov, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Kirill Gerstein, and the violinists Baiba Skride and Lisa Batiashvili.The Tanglewood season is part of the nationwide thawing planned for this summer of a performing arts scene that has been largely frozen for over a year. The Public Theater has announced that its venerable Shakespeare in the Park will go forward, as will Santa Fe Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York. On Thursday, the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado said it would move forward with a nearly two-month season.But as they reopen, institutions are reckoning with sharp losses. As it celebrated the return of Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony said its current operating budget was $57.7 million, down from its prepandemic budget of over $100 million. The orchestra estimated that it has lost over $50 million in revenue in the last year. More