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      New York Philharmonic Appoints Gustavo Dudamel as Music Director

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      Dudamel, a charismatic 42-year-old conductor, will take up the Philharmonic’s podium in 2026, in a major coup for the orchestra.LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel, the charismatic conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose fiery baton and bouncy curls have made him one of classical music’s most recognizable figures, will leave his post in 2026 to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic, both orchestras announced on Tuesday.“What I see is an amazing orchestra in New York and a lot of potential for developing something important,” he said in an interview. “It’s like opening a new door and building a new house. It’s a beautiful time.”The appointment of Dudamel, 42, is a major coup for the New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, which was once led by giants including Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein. Just a decade ago, there were concerns about its future, given the languishing efforts to renovate its lackluster hall and questions about its artistic direction. Now its home, David Geffen Hall, has reopened after a $550 million renovation, and it has secured in Dudamel the rare maestro whose fame transcends classical music, even as he is sought by the world’s leading ensembles.His departure is a significant loss for Los Angeles, where since 2009 Dudamel has helped build a vast cultural empire and helped turn the orchestra into one of the most innovative and financially successful in the United States.He was lured east by Deborah Borda, the New York Philharmonic’s powerful president and chief executive, in an instance of classical music history repeating itself. She signed the 26-year-old Dudamel to the Los Angeles Philharmonic back when she led that ensemble, and helped make him a superstar in its relatively new Walt Disney Concert Hall. Now she hopes to repeat that success in New York.“It’s a wonderful match,” said Borda, who arranged the deal in one of her last big pieces of business before she steps down from her post at the end of June. “I’m joyous for our orchestra. I’m joyous for our city.”The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dudamel, one of the highest-paid artists in the industry, earned $2.8 million during a recent season in Los Angeles. In New York, he will be given the expanded title of music and artistic director, to match his current role. He will succeed Jaap van Zweden — first as music director designate in the 2025-26 season, then as the orchestra’s 27th music director in the 2026-27 season — with an initial contract for five years.Dudamel, who was born in Venezuela, will be the orchestra’s first Hispanic leader, in a city where Latinos make up about 29 percent of the population. His appointment comes as the Philharmonic has worked to connect with new audiences, especially young people and Black and Latino residents.Classical music audiences typically skew older, but Dudamel is a rare figure who has been able to galvanize traditionalists and newcomers alike. He has made nurturing a younger generation of artists and music fans a priority, building a youth orchestra in Los Angeles modeled on El Sistema — the Venezuelan-based movement, in which he trained, that weds teaching and social work.Dudamel at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, where his contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic will expire at the end of the 2025-26 season.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesAnd he is unique among modern conductors for his pop-culture celebrity. Dudamel has appeared in a Super Bowl halftime show and voiced Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour.” He inspired the wunderkind Latin American conductor played by Gael García Bernal on the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle” and made a cameo appearance on the show. (“Hear the Hair” was its parody of a classical music marketing campaign.) In addition to making recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, he has conducted on soundtracks of a recent “Star Wars” film and Steven Spielberg’s version of “West Side Story.” In 2019, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Dudamel now faces the difficult task of attempting to raise the New York Philharmonic’s standing in American cultural life while helping it navigate a series of challenges, including dwindling ticket revenues, shifting audience behavior since the pandemic and persistent questions about the relevance of classical music and live performance today.Dudamel said that as music and artistic director, he would champion new music and work to develop the orchestra’s sound, now that the musicians had a hall in which they could fully hear each other onstage.“There are no limits, especially in an orchestra with such a history,” he said. “I see an incredible infinite potential of building something unique for the world.”Dudamel, who has been the music director of the Paris Opera since 2021, and of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela since 1999, was a favorite for the podium in New York as soon as it became vacant. In the fall of 2021, van Zweden announced that he would step down at the end of the 2023-24 season after a six-year tenure.When Dudamel appeared at the Philharmonic last spring, for a two-program Schumann symphony cycle, some players, hoping to win him over, showed up to rehearsals bearing gifts and handwritten notes. Inside his dressing room, a group of musicians gave him a bottle of the Brooklyn-made Widow Jane bourbon, telling him the Philharmonic would welcome him if he could find a way to spend more time in New York.“Everything comes alive with him,” said Christopher Martin, the orchestra’s principal trumpet. “Everything is as natural as breathing.”Borda said that it was Dudamel’s long and fruitful relationship with the Philharmonic — he has led 26 concerts with the orchestra since his debut in 2007 — that had made him the choice of the musicians, board members and managers. She recounted meeting him secretly in various European cities over the past year, often flying in and out within 24 hours to avoid suspicion, as she tried to secure a deal. (Seeing him in Los Angeles, she said, “just didn’t feel kosher.”)In October, when Dudamel was in New York to perform at Carnegie Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she took him on a tour of the renovated hall during a rehearsal, taking a circuitous route to sneak him onto the third tier so that even the orchestra’s musicians would not know. The attempt at secrecy was foiled when they bumped into Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was preparing for a gala performance.The secrecy was broken on Tuesday afternoon when the New York Philharmonic’s musicians were summoned for an announcement shortly after a rehearsal with the guest conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Some worried that the news would be bad; only members of the orchestra committee knew what the meeting would be about.Judith LeClair, the New York Philharmonic’s principal bassoon, reacted to the news of Dudamel’s hiring on Tuesday.James Estrin/The New York TimesWith the players reunited onstage, Borda and her successor, Gary Ginstling, stepped onto the podium.“Our next music director will be,” Borda said, with a pause, “Gustavo Dudamel.”The musicians erupted into 20 seconds of applause, in a journey from wide-eyed surprise to whistles and cheers, genuine expressions of joy. Judith LeClair, the bassoonist, was the most animated of them, looking dumbfounded before holding a radiant smile through the rest of Borda’s speech.“The Philharmonic has had its ups and downs,” Borda told them. “And it had an amazing time in the ’60s, when we were golden,” she added, referring to Bernstein’s music directorship. “I really feel the promise of that again.”Afterward, members of the orchestra were visibly elated. The oboist Ryan Roberts, who grew up in Los Angeles, called his mother there: “Mom, guess who our new music director is.” She could be heard responding with Dudamel’s name, virtually screaming with excitement.The appointment of Dudamel is the latest chapter in a remarkable career. Born in the Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he grew up in a musical family: His mother was a voice teacher, and his father a trombonist who played in salsa bands. He enrolled in El Sistema as a child and studied violin and composition before pursuing conducting.He sometimes faced questions about his ties to Venezuelan leaders — he conducted at the funeral of President Hugo Chávez — but tried to remain above the political fray. But in 2017, after a young El Sistema-trained viola player was killed during a street protest, Dudamel issued a statement that said “enough is enough” and wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times accusing the government of flouting the Venezuelan constitution. President Nicolás Maduro canceled several overseas tours by Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra as punishment, and Dudamel did not return to Venezuela until a quiet trip late last year.Dudamel has been a champion of new music, collaborating in Los Angeles with composers including John Adams and Gabriela Ortiz. He has also joined forces with pop and jazz stars, such as Billie Eilish and Herbie Hancock. The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe wrote in 2017 that the Los Angeles Philharmonic was “the most important orchestra in America. Period.”At the New York Philharmonic, Dudamel will lead an organization that is smaller than his Los Angeles empire, and one that has struggled in recent decades with financial troubles. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, with its Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall as well as the Hollywood Bowl, garnered about $187 million in yearly revenue before the pandemic. The New York Philharmonic earned $86 million.Chad Smith, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, congratulated Dudamel on the move, praised his tenure there for leaving “indelible marks on classical music” and hinted at the orchestra’s next steps.“From our earliest days, the L.A. Phil has been a trailblazer, boldly embracing the new, welcoming the world’s greatest artists to our stages and redefining the role of an orchestra in our community,” he said in a statement. “The search for our next music director will be conducted with this same spirit as we define the future of our organization.”Dudamel broke the news on Tuesday to Los Angeles players after a rehearsal, telling them that he would always be an Angeleno.Dale Breidenthal, a violinist in the orchestra, said Dudamel’s departure was stunning for the ensemble. “We haven’t processed it,” she said on her way out from the rehearsal. Still, she added, New York needed his talents. “We are really excited for him,” she said.Dudamel said he did not expect to build a replica of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in New York. “It’s impossible,” he said. “They are completely different cultures.”Still, he said, he would like to explore the idea of creating a youth education program similar to his efforts in Los Angeles. “It will be very important that we really develop social action through music,” he said. “For artistic institutions in the world, it’s important to embrace and to build. It will be very beautiful.”Borda, who returned to New York in 2017 after 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, balanced the New York Philharmonic’s budget and built up its once-depleted endowment. She also helped bring to fruition the long-delayed renovation of Geffen Hall, working with Henry Timms, the president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, to push it through ahead of schedule during the pandemic shutdown.That renovation has helped to revitalize the orchestra; speaking with the players on Tuesday, Borda told them, “It’s really because of you that he’s coming” but added, “And I have to say, it doesn’t hurt to have a nicer hall.”Paid attendance so far this season has hovered around 88 percent, compared with 74 percent before the pandemic, though the revamped hall is somewhat smaller. But the ensemble is still grappling with a host of questions about its identity and vision.Borda offered Dudamel two gifts while wooing him. One, given early in the search, was a program book from a Philharmonic tour of Venezuela in 1958, with a cover designed by the artist Carlos Cruz-Diez.The other, which he received as the deal was being finalized, was a pencil that was used to compose music by an artist who will now be his predecessor: Leonard Bernstein.Dudamel said in the interview that he would always maintain a connection to Los Angeles.“I don’t feel that I’m leaving this place or that it will be goodbye forever,” he said. “All the time I have spent here and all the experience that I have built here, I will bring to New York to build something new. This is life. I don’t feel that it’s an end.”Joshua Barone contributed reporting from New York. More

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      David Geffen Hall Reopens, Hoping Its $550 Million Renovation Worked

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      When the New York Philharmonic opened its new home at Lincoln Center in 1962, it held a white-tie gala, broadcast live on national television, with tickets having sold for up to $250 apiece, or nearly $2,500 in today’s dollars.It was a glittering affair, but the hall’s poor acoustics — a critical problem for an art form that relies on unamplified instruments — ushered in decades of difficulties. After the last major attempt to fix its sound, with a gut renovation in 1976, the hall reopened with a black-tie gala and a burst of optimism. But its acoustic woes persisted.Now Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic are hoping that they have finally broken the acoustic curse of the hall, now called David Geffen Hall, which reopened on Saturday after a $550 million overhaul that preserved the building’s exterior but gutted and rebuilt its interior, making its auditorium more intimate and, they believe, better sounding.But this time they are taking a different approach to inaugurating the new hall. Geffen reopened to the public for the first time not with a pricey formal gala, but with a choose-what-you-pay concert, with some free tickets distributed at the hall’s new welcome center.And instead of opening with Beethoven (as the orchestra did in 1962) or Brahms (as in 1976), Geffen opened with the premiere of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles that pays tribute to the rich Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood that was razed to clear the land for Lincoln Center. The work, commissioned by Lincoln Center, was performed by Charles and his group, Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden.“It really is like a homecoming, but there are some different family members around this time, which is a great thing,” Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said in an interview.The reopening of the hall drew several elected officials, who saw it as a hopeful sign for a city still trying to recover from the damage wrought by the coronavirus. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York predicted that people would look back at the moment as more than the opening of a new concert hall: “They will say you got it done in the middle of a pandemic.”Senator Chuck Schumer was among the elected officials at the reopening of the hall, which was described as a hopeful moment for a pandemic-battered city. Christopher Lee for The New York TimesBoth Lincoln Center, which owns the hall, and the Philharmonic, its main tenant, see the new hall as an opportunity to become more accessible and welcoming. They are seeking both to lure back concertgoers and to reach a more diverse cross-section of New Yorkers, including Black and Latino residents, who have long been underrepresented at these events.“This is not your grandmother’s Philharmonic,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. “We are thinking of the totality of the artistic and human and social statement.”Instead of one big celebration, there will essentially be a month of festivities, part of an effort to showcase the hall’s versatility, to break through into the consciousness of media-saturated New Yorkers — and to avoid placing too much emphasis on a single high-pressure night that could yield quick-fire judgments on the renovation and the acoustics.Dozens of people lined up outside the hall on Saturday morning for a chance to get free tickets to “San Juan Hill.” Joanne Imohiosen, 83, who has been attending concerts since the Philharmonic came to Lincoln Center in 1962 and lives nearby, said she hoped the renovation would finally remedy the hall’s acoustic issues. “They should have figured it out by now,” said Imohiosen, who used to work as an assistant parks commissioner. “They’ve been fiddling with it for years.”After “San Juan Hill,” the Philharmonic will return with a couple of weeks of homecoming concerts pairing works by Debussy and Respighi with pieces by contemporary composers including Tania León, Caroline Shaw and Marcos Balter, whose multimedia work “Oyá” is billed as a fantasia of sound and light.There will be not one, but two galas — one featuring the Broadway stars Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Bernadette Peters, and another featuring a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A free open-house weekend will close out the month, with choirs, youth orchestras, Philharmonic players, hip-hop groups, dance troupes and others performing each day in different spaces in the hall.Much is riding on the success of the revamped Geffen Hall. The 180-year-old Philharmonic, which is still recovering from the tumult of the pandemic and grappling with longstanding box-office declines, is hoping that a more glamorous hall with better sound will lure new audiences.“The stakes are very high; everybody’s waiting and hoping that it’s going to work out,” said Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of Juilliard whose new book, “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” has sections tracing the trials and tribulations of the building. “$550 million is a lot of money. It’s a very big bet.”At the core of the Philharmonic’s strategy is a desire to make Geffen Hall not just a concert venue, but a welcoming gathering place. The new hall includes a coffee shop, an Afro-Caribbean restaurant and a welcome center next to the lobby. Small performances, talks and classes on music and wellness will take place inside a “sidewalk studio” visible from Broadway.The renovation, which equipped the main auditorium with a film screen, an amplified sound system and other technical improvements, gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to reimagine its programming. “San Juan Hill” and “Oyá” showcase the Philharmonic’s new abilities, mixing music with film, 3-D imagery, electronics and light.“The new hall can do things that we’re going to do as a 21st-century orchestra,” Ms. Borda said.A critical test of the new hall will be its audiences. The Philharmonic and Lincoln Center have worked over the past several years to attract more low-income residents to performances, and Lincoln Center has been handing out fliers at nearby public housing complexes advertising upcoming events at Geffen Hall. For the opening, they made a point of inviting former residents of the San Juan Hill neighborhood, as well as schools that serve large numbers of Black and Latino students.“This is a home for all New Yorkers,” Ms. Borda said. “We want to invite them in.”Throughout the hall’s history, politicians, architects, musicians and critics have at times declared past renovations successful, only to see acoustical issues resurface soon after.Mr. Polisi, the former Juilliard president, said that this time seemed different, given the crucial decision to reduce the size of the hall — it now seats 2,200 people, down from 2,738. He said if the Philharmonic had finally remedied the sound problems, it would allow the orchestra to focus on other priorities, including building closer ties to the community and finding a conductor to replace van Zweden, who steps down as music director in 2024.“If they’re a happy orchestra now and they’re able to feel comfortable in their home, that’s also going to be a very psychologically important element for the organization,” said Mr. Polisi, whose father, William Polisi, had been the principal bassoonist of the Philharmonic.As construction workers made finishing touches on the hall this week, unpacking furniture and installing metal detectors in the lobby, the Philharmonic’s players filed into the auditorium for rehearsals. The early reviews from the musicians have been largely positive: Many say that they can finally hear one another onstage and that the sound feels warmer.Ms. Borda and Mr. Timms said they were confident that the Philharmonic would finally have a hall to match its abilities, though they said they did not want to jinx the reopening. “The thing about curses,” Mr. Timms said, “is you never claim they’re broken. You let them speak for themselves.”Ms. Borda, who first began trying to revamp the hall in the 1990s, when she served a previous stint as the Philharmonic’s leader, said she had prepared an image of an atomic explosion to send to Mr. Timms if the renovation turned out to be a disaster.“If it’s really bad,” she joked, looking at Mr. Timms, “I’m sending you this first.”Adam Nagourney More

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      A Pioneering Orchestra Boss Had ‘Unfinished Business,’ So She Returned

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      Deborah Borda led the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s, and was frustrated by its subpar hall. After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, she “finally saw a path forward,” she said.When the musicians of the New York Philharmonic gathered inside what was still very much a construction site in mid-August to hear for the first time how they would sound after the $550 million renovation of their home, David Geffen Hall, Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, handed out roses to the arriving players.“This is a historic moment,” Borda, who had barely slept the night before, told them from the conductor’s podium. “Welcome to your new home.”It was a homecoming that Borda, 73, has been working toward for decades.She first led the Philharmonic in the 1990s, and left partly out of frustration that there was no will to rebuild its perennially troubled home, known then as Avery Fisher Hall, which had long been plagued by complaints about its look and, especially, its sound. She spent 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ushering the orchestra into the acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and signing Gustavo Dudamel as music director. Then, just as she began to consider a new chapter, perhaps teaching, she was lured back to New York five years ago: a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen had revived plans to remake the hall, but momentum seemed to be stalling.“It was unfinished business,” she said. “I had been dreaming about this since the 1990s. And then I finally saw a path forward.”So there was a lot on the line that afternoon in August, when she listened intently as the orchestra tuned up and then, under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden, played excerpts from Bruckner’s elegiac Seventh Symphony. She felt reassured.“It sounds terrific,” she told the small crowd in attendance, including leaders from Lincoln Center, board members, sound experts and construction workers.When Borda returned to New York in 2017, arts leaders had real concerns about the health of the Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the United States. It had top-flight musicians and a storied tradition — over the years it has been led by giants like Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein — but it ran deficits every year, its audience was aging and it faced competition from the many international ensembles that tour New York. When she arrived, its endowment fund had less money than when she been in charge in the 1990s.It was the Geffen gift — secured in 2015 by Katherine G. Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center, which owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord — that finally put a revamped hall within grasp. But there were still serious obstacles. Lincoln Center was going through a period of management churn as top executives came and went. The renovation plans under consideration were growing too expensive and hard to build, not to mention impractical (glass walls?) for an orchestra. Soon after Borda arrived, she and Lincoln Center officials announced they were going back to the drawing board.Undeterred, Borda kept working toward the ultimate goal. “She is a force of nature,” van Zweden said. “What she wants, she gets.”In 2019 Lincoln Center tapped Henry Timms, who formerly led the 92nd Street Y, as its president and chief executive. He returned stability to the organization, rethought the mission of the arts complex — which produces work on its own while serving as the landlord of independent constituent groups including the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet — and got the renovation project moving forward.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.He and Borda worked to turn the historically acrimonious relationship between Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic — which reached a low point in 2003, when the Philharmonic tried to leave and return to its old home, Carnegie Hall — into a collaborative one. That message was driven home by stickers and tote bags about the project that proclaimed, perhaps aspirationally, “Working in Concert.”Henry Timms brought stability back to Lincoln Center after a period of management tumult when he became its president and chief executive in 2019. That year he and Borda unveiled plans for the renovation of Geffen Hall, and surveyed the old hall. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms recalled meeting Borda at her home for coffee shortly before he took office, when they vowed together to finally finish the Geffen project.“It was a priority that I think we both signed up for,” he said. “But what we needed to do was make our relationship a priority.”“She could have stopped before this job and gone down in history, but she chose not to,” he said. “She went the other way and chased this final triumph.”Borda said the hard work and support of Timms and Farley at Lincoln Center, as well as the co-chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, had been critical. “They had the heart and the hunger and the vision to do this,” she said.Borda, whose mother was a lobbyist and whose father immigrated from Colombia and worked as a salesman, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was 4, and from the balcony she watched Leonard Bernstein conduct. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and when she was 12, the family moved to Boston, where they lived with Borda’s stepfather, a psychiatrist, and she played in a youth orchestra. She initially envisioned a career as a performer, studying violin and attending the Royal College of Music in London for graduate studies, and working as a freelance musician in New York. But she was drawn to management early on.In 1979, when she was 30, she landed her first major job, as general manager and artistic administrator of the San Francisco Symphony. Her appointment caught attention: She was one of the first women to lead a major orchestra in the United States. But because of her gender and sexual orientation — she is gay — she sometimes faced obstacles in the male-dominated classical field. She recalled the surprise she felt losing out on a job managing the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 1980s after being told that its maestro, Lorin Maazel, would be uncomfortable working with her because she was a woman.“It didn’t even occur to me that my gender and sexual orientation might be an impediment,” she said. “I never even thought of it.”After stints at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, she came to New York in 1991 for her first round as the Philharmonic’s chief. She balanced the orchestra’s budget and led efforts to attract more young people to concerts with innovations like short evening “rush-hour” concerts. But her tenure was also marked by feuds, including acrimonious negotiations with the orchestra’s musicians over a labor contract, and persistent tensions with Kurt Masur, who was then its music director.Borda with the music director Kurt Masur during her last stint running the New York Philharmonic, in 1991. Jack Manning/The New York TimesShe first tried to remedy some of the hall’s stubborn acoustic problems in 1992, when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic placed curved wooden reflectors around the stage — their shape inspired her to dub them “the bongos” — to help spread the sound. But the problems persisted.She left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999, in part, she said, because she did not believe cultural leaders in New York were committed to a full-scale renovation of the hall.“I didn’t think there was the heart or the vision to get it done at that time,” she said. “It was frustrating and that’s why I left.”She flourished in Los Angeles, leading the orchestra to new heights. She more than quintupled its endowment, earned the orchestra a reputation for creative programming, helped make Dudamel a superstar and started an ambitious youth orchestra program for the city’s underserved communities. Then, just when she was thinking about retiring from orchestra management to teach or start a think-tank, New York beckoned her back.She returned in 2017, energized by the opportunity to finally remake Geffen Hall. “It was sort of like a karmic circle,” she said. (She also wanted to be closer to her longtime partner, Coralie Toevs, who oversees development at the Metropolitan Opera; the two maintained a long-distance relationship when Borda was in Los Angeles.)Back in New York she worked to balance the budget, raising $50 million to help the orchestra stay solvent. She built up its endowment, which was valued at $195 million when she arrived, lower than it had been when she led the orchestra in the 1990s, and which is now valued at around $220 million. And she championed innovative programming: she commissioned works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote, and one work, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize.Then the pandemic hit. The orchestra canceled more than 100 concerts — losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue — and laid off 40 percent of its staff.“I genuinely thought we could go out of business,” she said.But Timms and Borda pressed ahead, seizing on the long pandemic shutdown period to accelerate the project, which was originally scheduled to take place over several seasons.Now Borda, having made good on her promise to usher another Philharmonic into another modern home, has announced plans to step down at the end of June, when she will hand the reins of the Philharmonic to Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, in Washington. (She will stay on as a special adviser to assist with fund-raising and other matters.)But she still has work to do: planning enticing seasons to lure concertgoers to a new hall.“A hall can’t just be a monument to itself,” she said.And a critical decision looms: before she departs, Borda hopes to name a successor to van Zweden, the music director, who will leave his post in 2024. A 12-person committee of Philharmonic staff, musicians and board members is sifting through candidates. Among the likely contenders are Dudamel; Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the former music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Susanna Malkki, the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic; and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Borda said she was looking for a leader who “clicks with the orchestra” and “clicks with New York.”On a recent day, as she led a tour of the hall for the Philharmonic’s board, her cellphone often sounded, filling the hall with her ringtone: “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s “Solomon.”Standing before a new digital wall in the lobby, she smiled, saying she was moved that the Philharmonic would finally have a home to match its artistic caliber.“It energizes me completely,” she said. “It’s like a dream.” More

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      New York Philharmonic Chooses Arts Veteran as Leader

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      Gary Ginstling, executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, will replace Deborah Borda as the orchestra’s president and chief executive next year.Come this fall, the New York Philharmonic will have a transformed home, when David Geffen Hall reopens after a $550 million renovation. In the not-so-distant future, the orchestra will also get a new music director to replace its departing conductor.On Friday, the orchestra announced another change: Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, will next year replace Deborah Borda, a revered, dynamic figure at the Philharmonic, as its president and chief executive.The appointment signals the start of a new era for the Philharmonic, America’s oldest symphony orchestra, which is working to attract new audiences as it recovers from the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic. While the orchestra seems to have weathered the worst of the crisis, the pandemic has brought fresh urgency to questions about changing audience habits and expanding into the digital sphere.Ginstling, who will join the Philharmonic this fall as executive director before succeeding Borda next year, said he wanted to seize on the momentum of the Geffen Hall renovation.“This is a singular moment in time when the orchestra is coming out of a really difficult period,” he said in an interview. “This new home is going to be really transformational for the musicians, for the public, for orchestras everywhere and for the city. There’s a chance for the Philharmonic to make the most of this moment and set itself up for long-term success.”The appointment marks a generational shift at the Philharmonic. Ginstling, 56, will take the reins from Borda, 72, who led the Philharmonic in the 1990s and returned in 2017 to shepherd the long-delayed renovation of Geffen Hall. The return of Borda, one of the nation’s most successful arts administrators, who in the interim helped transform the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the country’s premier ensembles — moving it into a new home, stabilizing its shaky finances and appointing Gustavo Dudamel as its music director — was considered a coup for the orchestra, which at the time was struggling with deficits and fund-raising troubles.Borda said that with the hall reopening and the orchestra on firmer financial footing after the long pandemic shutdown, she felt it was time to step aside. She will leave her post on June 30, 2023, but stay on as an adviser to Ginstling and the Philharmonic’s board, assisting with fund-raising and other matters.Deborah Borda at the Philharmonic’s opening concert of the season in September 2021 at Alice Tully Hall.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times“Those of us in my generation, we’ve done our best, but it’s time to really support and introduce a new generation of leadership who will bring new ideas about everything,” she said in an interview. “This was the right time.”Borda began working with the board last year to find a successor. They were looking for a leader who could help guide the institution in a time of momentous transitions. After interviewing five candidates, the Philharmonic in May offered the job to Ginstling, who has managed orchestras in Cleveland, Indianapolis and Washington D.C.“We wanted somebody who had the experience, but who was also young enough to have a long runway,” Peter W. May, co-chairman of the Philharmonic’s board, said in an interview. “He also impressed us in the way he’s done outreach in the community.”After joining the National Symphony Orchestra in 2017, Ginstling experimented with new ways of reaching audiences, including by holding concerts in a 6,000-seat arena designed for rock music. He was credited with helping drive up ticket sales, subscriptions and donations. He worked closely with Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony, whose contract there was recently extended through the end of the 2026-2027 season.In New York, Ginstling will face familiar challenges. Even before the pandemic, managing orchestras was difficult. Labor costs have risen. Ticket sales have declined as the old model of selling season subscriptions has died out. Robust fund-raising has become essential, as donations make up an ever larger share of orchestra budgets.The pandemic put new strains on the Philharmonic, which was forced to cancel its 2020-21 season, lay off staff and slash its musicians’ salaries by 25 percent. (The Philharmonic announced this week that it would soon reverse those cuts.)For all its devastation, the pandemic also brought an opportunity, allowing the orchestra to speed up the renovation schedule by a year and a half (the hall is now set to open on Oct. 7). Over the past year, the orchestra has been without a permanent home, roving among several different theaters, many of them smaller than Geffen.Ginstling, a clarinetist who has degrees from Yale, Juilliard and the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he would continue the Philharmonic’s efforts to present a diverse roster of composers and conductors.“If we are in a post-Covid world, and I’m not sure whether we are yet,” he said, “the biggest challenges are rebuilding audiences and then finding ways to connect with our communities and in new and different ways.”The Philharmonic is just beginning its search for a conductor to replace Jaap van Zweden, its maestro since 2018, who announced unexpectedly in September that he would step down at the end of the 2023-24 season. Conductors like Dudamel, Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, among others, have been mentioned as possible contenders, though the field remains open.It is unclear whether the search will conclude before the end of Borda’s tenure. She said she was proceeding “full steam ahead” and would continue to offer advice if it is needed.In a statement, van Zweden, who last year said he would leave the orchestra because the pandemic had made him rethink his life and priorities, praised Borda’s stewardship of the orchestra.“The future and security of this orchestra is very important to me, and I am grateful to Deborah for leading with me from a position of strength,” he said. “I really look forward to welcoming Gary and to working with him.”The appointment is something of a homecoming for Ginstling, who grew up in New Jersey, the son of a Juilliard-trained pianist and a tax lawyer. His parents subscribed to Philharmonic concerts and he attended concerts featuring giants like Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta. He took up the clarinet in elementary school and later studied with a Philharmonic player.“I’ve long had a deep love and passion for orchestras and orchestral music,” he said, “and that really started with the New York Philharmonic.” More

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      New York Philharmonic Agrees to Restore Pay for Musicians

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      After a stronger-than-expected season, the orchestra said it would reverse pay cuts imposed at the height of the pandemic.When the coronavirus pandemic erupted in 2020, battering the cultural sector and forcing the New York Philharmonic to cancel a season, the orchestra worked to cut costs, slashing its musicians’ pay by 25 percent.The Philharmonic promised at the time to reverse those cuts, which provided more than $20 million in savings, once its financial outlook brightened. And on Monday, the orchestra announced it would do so in September, much earlier than expected.The decision to restore pay is a milestone in the Philharmonic’s recovery, and it offered some hope that the worst of the pandemic, which cost the orchestra more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue, had passed.“There’s nothing more important than our musicians,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “It was just a very important act to make.”Borda said government grants and loans, an increase in donations and better-than-expected ticket sales during the 2021-22 season made the decision possible. The orchestra is on track to finish its season without missing a performance, and it just concluded a series of concerts in Europe, at a time when many ensembles have been unable to tour.“We’re in a different phase of life now,” she said.Geffen Hall, seen here in March, will reopen in fall.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe Philharmonic is at a pivotal moment. The $550 million renovation of its home, David Geffen Hall, is to be completed in the fall. And the orchestra is searching for a music director to replace its departing leader, Jaap van Zweden, who steps down in 2024.The pay cuts had been a source of distress among players as the Philharmonic prepared for its new chapter.In December 2020, the Philharmonic and its musicians agreed to a four-year contract that included 25 percent cuts to base pay, which was then around $2,900 per week, through August 2023. Under the deal, pay was set to gradually increase until the expiration of the contract in September 2024, though musicians would have been paid less at the end than they were before the pandemic.But as coronavirus cases fell last year and audiences returned, the Philharmonic’s fiscal outlook brightened. Ticket sales in the 2021-22 season have been better than expected: Attendance at subscription concerts was 90 percent, though the orchestra was playing in smaller halls with Geffen being renovated. Donations have been strong, rising by 11 percent to $31.5 million in 2020, the last year for which data is available. The Philharmonic also received grants and loans of more than $16 million from the federal government.In October, the Philharmonic began making payments to musicians to offset the pay cuts. But it was not until Monday that the orchestra vowed to fully restore musicians’ pay for the remainder of the contract.The trombonist Colin Williams, the head of the players’ negotiating committee, said the decision would help reassure musicians who have grappled with the uncertainties of the pandemic.“We’re feeling much more confident about our institution again — our place in it and our place in the city,” he said in an interview. “We somehow weathered this incredibly traumatic time and have come out of it stronger and more cohesive than we were before.”Borda said the Philharmonic still faced financial risks, including the possible emergence of new variants of the coronavirus. While the orchestra remains in what she called “a state of suspended fluidity,” she said it was important to stay focused on the future, including the opening of Geffen Hall, which she described as “light at the end of the tunnel.”“We improvise, we move forward,” she said. “We are placing our money on the fact that we are moving ahead.” More

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      The Philharmonic Plans Its Return to Geffen Hall, With Fanfare

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      The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its renovated home.For the past two years, the only sound coming out of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been the clamor of construction. That will change in October, when it reopens after a $550 million renovation.And the Philharmonic will announce its return there with fanfare: Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which is the first work of the orchestra’s 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts and events unveiled on Monday.Among the season’s highlights are a monthlong festival to inaugurate the hall; a series of premieres by composers, including Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw; concerts exploring issues like racism and climate change; and appearances by conductors who could replace the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, after he steps down in 2024.After losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue during the pandemic lockdown, and spending much of the past year without a permanent home during the Geffen Hall renovation, the Philharmonic hopes the coming season will restore a sense of normalcy and rebuild its audience.The renovated Geffen Hall will feature wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.Diamond Schmitt Architects“It’s a moment for us not only to reunite with people who have come before, but as we look to the future, to develop and nurture new audiences,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We can’t just expect people to come. We have to invite them.”The Philharmonic recently announced that the renovation is fully funded and on track to finish in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic. The new space will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.There will also be additions meant to draw people in, including a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public, and a studio looking out onto Broadway. The goal, Borda said, is for the hall to be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”The season begins Oct. 7 with a program called “Thank You Concert,” led by van Zweden, for an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas, and an open house weekend, will follow later that month.Opening festivities include the world premiere, performed at two free concerts, of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the trumpeter Etienne Charles, who is known for blending jazz with the music of his native Trinidad. Several other contemporary works will be featured, including the American premiere of a piece by Shaw; and the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter.Some of the new works were written specifically for the renovated hall. “The early weeks are designed to be an exploration,” Borda said.Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the renovated hall should be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”Tod Williams Billie Tsien ArchitectsAs the Philharmonic continues its search for a new music director, guest conductors will get more attention than usual.Several familiar names will take the podium, including Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. In March, another prominent contender, Susanna Mälkki, the outgoing chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, will conduct the New York premiere of a double concerto by Felipe Lara, featuring the flutist Claire Chase and the bassist Esperanza Spalding, in their Philharmonic debuts.Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s young principal conductor, is the only guest who will get two weeks of concerts, leading the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Yuja Wang, in January. The following week, he will shepherd the American premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” in a program that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”Given the dearth of female conductors among the largest American orchestras, some have argued that the Philharmonic should choose a woman as its next music director. Several rising conductors, many of them women, will make their debuts with the ensemble next season, including Karina Canellakis, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruth Reinhardt, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony; and Nathalie Stutzmann, who takes the podium of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season.Borda declined to comment on the music director search, except to say that the upcoming season was “obviously an opportunity to see some returning talent and some wonderful new talent as well.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who will play Ravel’s piano concerto in November, and Cynthia Millar, playing the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Sinfonie,” alongside the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in March.The season includes concert series designed to address modern issues, including “Liberation,” about social injustice; “Spirit,” about “humanity’s place in the cosmos”; and “Earth,” about the climate crisis.As part of “Liberation” in March, the Philharmonic will premiere a work by Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson. “Spirit,” that same month, will include Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” which the Philharmonic has not performed since 2008.“Earth” will close out the season in June, with the world premiere of Wolfe’s “unEarth,” a multimedia oratorio that explores forced migration, loss of nature and adaptation. John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” will get its New York premiere.Borda said that throughout the new season, the Philharmonic wants people to feel that “their lives have been touched and changed.”“If we accomplish that,” she added, “we could all be very proud.” More

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      Russian Conductor Will Not Appear With New York Philharmonic

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      Tugan Sokhiev, who resigned from two posts after facing pressure to condemn the invasion of Ukraine, will not perform with the orchestra because of the war.The Russian conductor Tugan Sokhiev, who recently resigned from two high-profile posts after facing pressure to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, will no longer lead a series of concerts with the New York Philharmonic because of the war, the orchestra announced on Friday.Sokhiev, who until this month was the music director of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Orchestre National du Capitole in Toulouse, France, had been scheduled to appear with the Philharmonic starting on March 31 for three concerts featuring the music of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. Instead, the concerts will be led by Anna Rakitina, a rising conductor who was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and Ukrainian father, in her Philharmonic debut.The Philharmonic described the change as a mutual decision, saying in a statement that it was made “out of regard for the current global situation.” The orchestra said Sokhiev would appear next season.In a statement, Sylvie Bouchard, Sokhiev’s manager, said, “The decision with the New York Philharmonic was made mutually and Tugan Sokhiev is looking forward to his future engagements with the orchestra.”The cancellation of Sokhiev’s appearance in New York comes as the Russian invasion continues to rattle the performing arts. In recent weeks some cultural institutions have put pressure on artists to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his attack on Ukraine.Sokhiev had faced demands from French officials earlier this month that he clarify his position on the war before appearing again with his Toulouse orchestra. In response to the demands, he resigned, and announced at the same time that he was also stepping down from the Bolshoi Theater, saying he felt he was being forced to pick between the two ensembles.“I am being asked to choose one cultural tradition over” another, Sokhiev said at the time. “I am being asked to choose one artist over the other.”Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview that the orchestra had a “wonderful relationship” with Sokhiev, who led a week of performances in New York in 2018.“We pray for peace,” she said. “We pray for peace for him.”Borda added that the Philharmonic was committed to presenting Russian musicians and works by Russian composers. But she said that the orchestra would not present artists if they had direct ties to Putin or his government.“These are very nuanced decisions,” she said. “One cannot make blanket decisions about this. It’s not black or white.”Rakitina is an assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a former Dudamel Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra next week.The program that Sokhiev was set to lead, which features the Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto alongside Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, will remain unchanged. More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Could Be the New York Philharmonic’s Future

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      As the orchestra searches for a new leader, this superstar conductor led the first of two programs pairing Schumann symphonies with new works.On Wednesday, when the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center hosted a news conference announcing that the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall had been fully funded and that it would reopen this fall, Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was not in town.This didn’t feel like a coincidence: As the project, decades in the making, finally materialized over the past few years, van Zweden has seemed like an afterthought, along for the ride.Who was in New York to lead the Philharmonic, hours after Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams feted the Geffen renovation as a cultural and civic milestone? Gustavo Dudamel, the 41-year-old superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starting a two-week cycle of Schumann’s four symphonies.The symbolism was unavoidable. Van Zweden — who said in September that he would be leaving in 2024, opening up one of the world’s most prestigious podiums — is already the past. Dudamel is the Philharmonic’s future.At least he could be. He made a solid case for the prospect on Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall, with spirited, unpretentious performances of Schumann’s First and Second symphonies, alongside a premiere by Gabriela Ortiz written to accompany them.The First Symphony (“Spring”) sounded particularly fresh — emphatic without being stiff or mannered, a balance that often eludes van Zweden. The slow second movement built intensity without seeming pressed, and a certain lack of depth in the orchestra’s sound felt here like welcome lightness, with viola and cello lines subtly emphasized to give spine to passages that luxuriated in lyricism.The Philharmonic is calling Dudamel’s festival “The Schumann Connection,” suggesting Robert Schumann’s ties to his wife, Clara — whose underappreciated music is being played in chamber concerts alongside the two orchestral programs. And to contemporary composers: Two have been commissioned to respond to the Schumanns.Ortiz’s “Clara,” 15 minutes long, in five sections played without pause, had its first performance on Wednesday. (Andreia Pinto Correia’s “Os Pássaros da Noite” (“The Birds of Night”) comes next week, between Robert Schumann’s Third and Fourth.)Robert Schumann’s first two symphonies were joined by the premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s “Clara.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOpening with a series of lingering chords, a kind of tolling ensemble bell, “Clara” is most memorable in long stretches of suspended eeriness, an apt evocation of floating between eras and continents, with the oboe making a melancholy keen.Recalling Holst and mid-20th-century film scores in its lush colors and noirish dissonances, the piece has at its center a raucous movement recalling Ortiz’s Mexican heritage and her modern sound world: “the unique vitality born out of the entrails of the land I come from,” she says in the program. That driving vibrancy then recedes, in quiet music gently perforated with a pricking constellation of high-pitched percussion. In the final moments, wind instruments are tonelessly blown through, conjuring the sigh of history itself.Dudamel’s interpretation of Schumann’s Second was punchier than his First, while feeling appealingly improvisatory in a first movement that keeps unexpectedly sidling into new material. Avoiding emotional indulgence in the third movement, this conductor made the music seem a bit impersonal, a play of sound — the winds lovingly passing around solos — rather than a poignant narrative. But the energy throughout felt honestly built, never overemphasized.The Philharmonic doesn’t play these days with old-school brilliance or majesty, or with the feverish edge that Leonard Bernstein brought to Schumann’s symphonies with this orchestra in his classic recordings.But with Dudamel — his tempos moderate, neither rushed at one extreme nor sentimentally milked at the other — the ensemble was genial and eager. And its sound was sometimes arresting, as when the strings floated downward in hazy scales at the end of the First Symphony’s Scherzo, or when the winds massed near the end of the Second to uncannily organ-like effect.Dudamel’s appointment to the Philharmonic’s podium is, of course, far from a sure thing. But it was Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, who nearly 20 years ago, in her previous position, grabbed him for Los Angeles when he was just emerging on the international scene. The New York Philharmonic, still nostalgic for the glamorous days of Bernstein, may well jump at the chance to hire one of the few present-day maestros to have achieved that kind of mainstream celebrity.One thing is clear: Displaying his lively approach to the standard repertory, coupled with an interest in living composers — particularly female ones of color — these programs are meant to show off Dudamel as the model of a 21st-century maestro.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; “The Schumann Connection” continues through March 20; nyphil.org. More