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      At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Displays Its Heritage and Uncertain Future

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      The orchestra is in a period of transition, but one thing that remains consistent is the enduring quality of its summer home.Ah, Tanglewood. What a pleasure it remains to spend a weekend here: to stroll the green lawns, to sniff the flowers, to guess the music that some earnest young student is learning, as the sound of that laboring drifts through the trees from a practice room. And what a reminder a few days spent in the Berkshires can be of the fundamental, enduring quality of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which enjoys Tanglewood its summer home.Visitors last Friday through Sunday might have recalled the grand old heritage that this ensemble calls its own, as they found an old wooden seat in the Shed or listened as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra was played with almost proprietary command, nearly eight decades after this orchestra gave the work its premiere.They might have admired the group’s enduring prestige, too, as one distinguished musician after another graced the stage. Anne-Sophie Mutter reprised a violin concerto written for her by John Williams, who was in the audience to hear it and took the podium for a couple of encores. Seong-Jin Cho, among our more urbane young pianists, offered some delightfully vivacious Mozart in partnership with the conductor Susanna Mälkki, who amply demonstrated there and in her thrillingly exact Bartók why her star burns ever brighter. Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony’s music director, was supposed to accompany Yo-Yo Ma in a Shostakovich concerto, but a positive Covid test and a cancellation by the cellist led the orchestra to place a call to Renée Fleming instead. The empress of the sopranos obliged.Renée Fleming, left, stepped in to perform Strauss songs after the cellist Yo-Yo Ma tested positive for Covid-19.Hilary ScottAs a display of professionalism, of power, of permanence, all of that was clarifying, even formidable. And you could have been forgiven for needing that demonstration, given the Boston Symphony’s dysfunction of late.After the retirement of Mark Volpe, who served as the orchestra’s president and chief executive for 23 years until 2021 and amassed an endowment of around half a billion dollars, the Boston Symphony turned for inspiration to Gail Samuel, the chief operating officer of the daring Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she had worked for nearly three decades. Hints of a progressive Californian spirit were soon in evidence, as composers started appearing onstage at Symphony Hall in Boston to introduce their works, and the atmosphere began to feel more engaged. But Samuel lasted a mere 18 months, stepping down in January for reasons that are still not clear. Nelsons, conspicuously, offered no public comment when her departure was announced; much of the senior staff had already left in alarmingly short order and are yet to be replaced.Filling out those ranks will be one of the tasks that falls to Chad Smith, who, in a peculiar case of déjà vu, will start work as the orchestra’s next president and chief executive in mid-September, after more than 20 years at, yes, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Smith, who for a long time was the adventurous Philharmonic’s programming guru, is hugely respected, and his hiring is cause for excitement, if some trepidation. Whether the Los Angeles model, or anything like it, can be applied to an institution that takes such pride in its past remains to be seen, although the Samuel debacle offers a clue; whatever else the Boston Symphony may be, it is not an organization known for its agility.But this is not the only problem that Smith needs to solve. The orchestra itself, which recently signed a three-year labor agreement that will add flexibility to its concert schedule, has not had a leader on paper since 2019, when Malcolm Lowe retired as concertmaster; in practice, the matter has been unstable for longer than that. Auditions to fill a chair that, since 1920, has been occupied only by Lowe, Joseph Silverstein and Richard Burgin, reached a final stage this season, when several violinists competed for the post in concert, including Alexander Velinzon and Elita Kang, internal candidates who have admirably held the fort while the first associate concertmaster, Tamara Smirnova, has been away. Incredibly, the search remains ongoing. So, too, the slackness that can sometimes be detected in the first violins.In addition, Elizabeth Rowe, the principal flutist whose distinctive, ever-so-slightly melancholy tone has defined the sound of the modern Boston Symphony, has announced that she will leave her position next year. She sued the orchestra in 2018 to secure pay equal to that of the oboist who sits to her left, John Ferrillo. She has drawn on the experience of that lawsuit, which was settled in 2019, to fashion a new career as a career coach and gender equality advocate. She returned from a period of leave with these concerts, and her immaculate, expressive playing was so exquisite that it brought back to mind the view of Ferrillo, as it was quoted in legal filings, that she is “the finest orchestral flutist in North America.” She should be celebrated, and will be missed.Susanna Mälkki, left, led the Boston Symphony in a concert that featured the pianist Seong-Jin Cho.Hilary ScottThese issues speak not only to a lack of leadership, but to the Boston Symphony’s struggle to chart a course from its storied history to an unclear future. It is finding its way, slowly. Four years ago, I wrote that it seemed complacent, “content simply to abide” while equally traditionalist ensembles were starting to experiment. Happily, it would be wrong to level the same charge now.Since its return after the pandemic, the orchestra has tried to connect with a wider swath of Bostonians, enlisting Mayor Michelle Wu in the cause, and its artistic concerns have become more varied and more connected to our time. There was a three-week festival in March that, although miserably attended, posed important social questions about race and gender. The two concerts I heard, which included a brilliantly raucous staging of Julia Wolfe’s “Her Story” with the singers of the Lorelei Ensemble, were bolder than anything I had previously witnessed at Symphony Hall. Even the ensemble’s standard repertoire concerts are no longer so beholden to the standards: In January, Karina Canellakis led a fiery account of the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra just a few days after Alan Gilbert had found a way to get Stenhammar’s glorious Serenade onto a program.Where does Nelsons fit into this? Oddly, the Boston Symphony seems to be at its most creative when its music director is away. He continues to do his duty by new music: For Sunday’s concert at Tanglewood, he programmed Julia Adolphe’s “Makeshift Castle” for the third time in a year or so, granting beautifully evocative detail to its memories of a childhood sunset, and on Friday he was a sincere advocate for Williams’s wistful Violin Concerto No. 2, which Mutter played with her trademark commitment. Nelsons remains an enviable accompanist, too, drawing a strong roster of soloists to his side; Fleming can rarely have received such sensitive support as she did in her six Strauss songs here, which ended with a touching “Morgen.”But over the course of a subscription season, Nelsons is frustratingly inconsistent. His readings can come off as run-throughs rather than proper interpretations, and for every score that he conducts in a manner befitting his stature — a mighty, tensile Mahler Sixth in October, for instance, or his searing double bill of Britten’s Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony in May — there is another that exasperates. He was in typical form last weekend: perfectly satisfactory in Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” on Sunday, when he seemed to celebrate the intense virtuosity of his principal players, but desperately sluggish in works by Strauss and Ravel on Friday.His contract is likely to be extended, but as of today it has not been renewed past the end of the 2024-25 season. In classical music, that is no time at all. Count it as another decision that Smith has to make. More

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      Boston Symphony Picks Chad Smith of L.A. Philharmonic as New Leader

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      The departure of Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, is another loss for that orchestra, whose maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, is also leaving.Chad Smith, a veteran arts leader who has helped turn the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the most innovative orchestras in the United States, will leave his post this fall to become president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, both ensembles announced on Monday.Smith, 51, who has been the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive since 2019, said in an interview that the pandemic had made him rethink his priorities.“I really have thought a lot about my journey here, and I’m ready for a change,” he said. “Change is also healthy for everyone.”Smith’s departure is a significant loss for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is still reeling from the announcement in February that its superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would leave in 2026 to become the next music director of the New York Philharmonic.Smith said that his move was unrelated to that of Dudamel, with whom he has worked closely in promoting contemporary music and expanding the orchestra’s youth education programs. He said that he felt it was the right moment now that the worst of the pandemic appears to be over and audiences are once again returning to concert halls.“My decision was my own, and I know that Gustavo’s decision was his own,” he said. “It will provide the opportunity for the organization in L.A. to have a new artistic and executive leadership team to really move into the future.”Smith will take the helm of the Boston Symphony at a time of tumult and division.The orchestra has in recent years built a reputation for artistic and financial success, winning Grammy Awards and amassing an endowment of $484 million. But after the retirement in 2021 of the orchestra’s longtime leader, Mark Volpe, the organization entered a chaotic period.A long list of senior leaders and staff have departed, including Volpe’s successor, Gail Samuel, the orchestra’s first female president and chief executive, who abruptly resigned in December, just 18 months into her tenure. (Samuel also came from the Los Angeles Philharmonic.)The turmoil has alarmed the Boston Symphony’s musicians, staff, board and patrons. The orchestra’s leaders, including the board chair, Barbara W. Hostetter, a philanthropist, have declined to speak publicly about the problems. In a statement on Monday, she praised Smith’s appointment, saying that it would “usher in a new era of many exciting opportunities.”Smith said he was not intimidated by the troubles in Boston, adding, “The B.S.O. is going through things that all organizations go through at certain times.” He said he would work to bring stability to the orchestra and to help it rethink its identity and mission.“There are a lot of questions you have to ask,” he said. “Who do we want to be? What are those things that are absolutely essential? And where can we can continue to grow and expand and think differently about who we are and how we connect with audiences in our communities?”Smith said that he would work to bring more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the orchestra, which is less diverse than some of its peers. And he said that he was eager to keep Andris Nelsons, the music director in Boston since 2014, whose contract expires in 2025, calling him an “extraordinary musician.”The challenges in Boston are familiar to Smith, who has spent 21 years at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, previously serving as its chief operating officer and vice president of artistic planning, developing a reputation for innovative programming and for forging ties to contemporary composers. He became chief executive in 2019 after the abrupt resignation of Simon Woods, who had been in the job for less than two years.Like the Boston Symphony, the Philharmonic has been known for its artistic and financial success. Both institutions have benefited from having robust, and highly lucrative, outdoor summer offerings: the Hollywood Bowl in California, and Tanglewood in Massachusetts.The loss of Smith will create a void in Los Angeles, where the orchestra is in the beginning stages of a search for a successor to Dudamel. Thomas L. Beckmen, the chair of the orchestra’s board, said in a statement that the Philharmonic was “confident our next leader will carry forward our values and vision and inspire the L.A. Phil to even greater heights.”Dudamel expressed his gratitude to Smith in a statement, noting that the “only constant in life is change” and pledging in his remaining years to “give everything I can to the L.A. Phil and our wonderful audiences.”Smith’s move to Boston will be a homecoming of sorts. He studied European history at Tufts University and has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in vocal performance from the New England Conservatory, and often attended Boston Symphony concerts while Seiji Ozawa was music director.He recalled a memorial concert for the composer Aaron Copland. “I still get chills thinking about that,” Smith said. “It’s something I come back to very often about why I love the orchestral world and the orchestral music.” More

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      Boston’s Mayor, Michelle Wu, Trades City Hall for Symphony Hall

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      Michelle Wu, a lifelong pianist, has played to prepare for mayoral debates. Last weekend, she joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra onstage.BOSTON — There are things that a big-city mayor just has to do. Cut a ribbon here. Plant a tree there. Throw out the first pitch. Play Mozart with the local symphony orchestra.Hang on a second.Plenty of politicians might say that they support the arts, but Michelle Wu, a Democrat who became the first woman and the first person of color to be elected mayor of Boston, in November 2021, is one of the few who will court embarrassment to prove it.At the free “Concert for the City” on Sunday afternoon, put on by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its sister ensemble, the Boston Pops, Wu took the stage before a nearly full house at Symphony Hall here to perform as the soloist in the dreamy slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. She may not quite be ready for a world tour, but with the Symphony and its music director, Andris Nelsons, in support, she captured more of the composer’s characteristic elegance than an amateur might. And she barely missed a note.“I think Michelle did it so wonderfully,” Nelsons said during a news conference after the performance.While political figures, including Edward M. Kennedy, the former Massachusetts senator, and Thomas M. Menino, the former Boston mayor, have from time to time stood on the podium while the Pops has played such staples as “Sleigh Ride” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the Symphony’s archivist said that Wu, 38, was almost certainly the first officeholder in the orchestra’s more than 140-year history to take the far greater risk of stepping into the spotlight as a soloist.Some players in the ensemble — which had rehearsed with her on Saturday, before giving a ferociously intense reading that night of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 to end its subscription season — stayed onstage to watch, even though they had no music to play.Wu played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 with the orchestra as part of Boston’s “Concert for the City.”Robert Torres“I have been playing piano since long, long before I ever thought about politics, and my parents are probably more than skeptical still about the politics thing,” Wu said at the news conference, adding with a laugh, “This is probably the proudest that they’ve ever been of me, and it took getting elected to mayor to be able to do this.”For the Boston Symphony, the performance was a chance to showcase its quickly strengthening commitment to community engagement. For Wu, it was a platform to promote her policies as the city’s arts institutions steadily right themselves after the pandemic, including her insistence that every child in a Boston public school should have access to an instrument. But it was also an occasion to reflect on the deeper connections that she — as a pianist who trained from age 4 and, as The Boston Globe reported, keeps an upright in her City Hall office — sees between music and politics broadly.Classical artists often talk in platitudes about music being a universal language that can transcend borders, but for Wu, who grew up in Chicago as the first child of immigrants from Taiwan and who also learned the violin, the commonplaces were a reality.“I remember very vaguely when I was young, we would go drive really far so my mom would sing in a community chorus concert,” Wu said in an interview. “My mom has a gorgeous voice, so much of my function learning piano growing up was to be her accompanist.”Music offered Wu’s parents continuity amid change, as they learned English and adapted to a new culture. She remembered seeing that her mother had transliterated the words in her score for Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” into Chinese, so that she could pronounce them correctly.“My parents were in a very modest situation,” Wu said. “We were initially receiving benefits and as my dad’s career moved up, kind of moved more firmly into the middle class. But piano lessons were, I’m sure, at that time just a luxury splurge for them. But it was important because my parents were both musical, and again, it was their way to feel like the barriers maybe weren’t so high in this country.”As a high schooler, Wu played the solo part in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and she became a subscriber to the Boston Symphony while she was studying at Harvard University. Although she practiced hard for Sunday’s performance, she said, she had made a tradition of playing for herself the night before mayoral debates.“My go-to to really calm myself is Liszt’s ‘Un Sospiro,’” Wu said. “With the flowing of it, you can really lose yourself quickly. And then if it was that kind of day, it’d be a little Rachmaninoff.”Wu’s Boston Symphony appearance came about after she and her children attended a family and youth concert last year, and she played a few bars of Liszt backstage for that program’s conductor, Thomas Wilkins. The orchestra approached her about Sunday’s concert of short, mostly Boston-related works about a month and a half ago, offering her three Mozart pieces to choose from. She took a few weeks to think about it, she admitted.“Just as I try to be honest about the challenges that can come with being a working parent,” Wu said at the news conference, “in the hopes that that means we change our systems faster and encourage other people to believe that it’s possible to live their lives and give their fullest in every way, I hope that people will see that we can come to our positions — if you might be so fortunate to have a position of leadership or whatever platform you have — to bring your whole self to that.”Wu talks about the role that the arts can play in society with a conviction that many musical institutions are still working to acquire, describing them as, among other things, “a vehicle to talk about and address our biggest challenges in new and interesting ways,” such as climate change and race. These are beliefs that, she said, she might not hold with the same intensity if she had not played the piano.“I would imagine that even as someone who would not necessarily play but be a passionate audience member, there’s something about the feeling and the connection that you can’t put words to when all of it comes together,” Wu said in the interview. “The power of how people felt connected in Symphony Hall today, hanging on every note, delighted at each individual piece and the surprises and twists of every composition — that’s a model for how we want our community to be, day in and day out, in this city.” More

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      The Boston Symphony Finds Surprises and Strengths in New Music

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

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      For the Conductor Charles Munch, Virtuosity Meant Taking Risks

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      When Charles Munch started work as the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1949, he gave a speech.There wasn’t much he could say, in truth. His English was poor, though he had just sacrificed an umlaut in his surname in deference to American spelling. An Alsatian sometimes known in Germany as Karl, and in France always as Charles, he had served the Kaiser on the Somme in the First World War, then defended French culture in resistance to the Nazis in the Second. If he bothered to hold a rehearsal at all, he spoke to his musicians in a variety of languages, or let his gestures, flamboyant yet intentional, do the talking.Munch wanted to make one thing clear to the Bostonians, though: He was not their former music director, Serge Koussevitzky. The orchestra’s players had toiled under him, an autocrat whose shadow lingered over Munch, too. Even after Munch died in 1968 — while touring the United States with the Orchestre de Paris, which he had formed a year before — his New York Times obituary labored over the comparison with his predecessor, describing his task as having been “on a par with trying to follow Thomas Alva Edison as an inventor or Magellan as a navigator.”Yet Munch had no interest in being Koussevitzky’s kind of maestro; once a Stradivarius-wielding concertmaster himself, he saw no artistic or human point in making a musician miserable. As Time reported in a cover story in December 1949, he spent his first weeks in Boston telling his players that they could rest easier. In his introductory remarks, he told them that “there will be joy.”Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3, finaleBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1959 (Sony)For him, “beauty, joy and goodness” were the calling of an artist. As such, music, as he said in 1954, could offer “reconciliation with life itself.” Munch was shy and private when his baton was not slicing through sound; his biographer, D. Kern Holoman, has argued that conducting gave him relief from sadness of all sorts, whether the grief of enduring two wars between the cultures that claimed him, or the anguish of an unhappy marriage. (Holoman taught at the University of California, Davis, until 2017, when he left over rape allegations.)Conducting may have given Munch relief, but perhaps not deliverance. His interpretations could be as extreme as his times, at one moment outlandishly swift or brutally violent, contemplative or uncommonly tender the next, giddy fun at the last. The critic Virgil Thomson wrote of his approach to Franck’s Symphony that “he plays it very slow and very fast, very soft and very loud, reins it in and whips it up, gives it (and us) a huge workout.” That description fits more broadly; Munch was the rare conductor who welcomed imprecisions, even coarseness of tone, in his pursuit of outright spontaneity. An objectivist he was not.All this and more is clear from Munch’s enthralling discography. His Boston recordings for the RCA label were collated in an 86-disc Sony set in 2016; it has sold out, but most of the contents are still on streaming platforms. Warner and Eloquence have since separately boxed their catalogs of his pre- and post-Boston releases, giving a sense of Munch from his first sessions, with the pianist Alfred Cortot in Saint-Saëns in 1935, to his last, with the Orchestre de Paris in Ravel in 1968.Schubert: Symphony No. 9, finaleBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1958 (Sony)Munch was a different musician under studio conditions than he was live, Holoman writes, and he controlled his most explosive tendencies in the hope of making records that would last. Even his two incendiary Boston readings of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” his trademark piece, come nowhere close to the maelstrom he inflamed onstage. He dared one of the world’s most proficient orchestras to play beyond itself in concert; some of his finest releases — his Schubert Ninth, his Mendelssohn Third — are, conversely, those in which he builds tension by refusing to let go as blatantly as he might in front of an audience.Even so, sample Munch’s recordings — more than the Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel in which he was justly celebrated — and it is hard to disagree with the verdict of the Times critic Howard Taubman, who wrote of a 1950 concert: “Whether the music is illuminated or driven, it is never just respectable or indifferent. It is alive; it is the natural outgrowth of the conductor’s point of view.”MUNCH WAS BORN in Strasbourg, which was then in Germany, on Sept. 26, 1891, into a dynasty of musicians. His father, Ernest, mounted a Bach revival leading the church choir of Saint-Guillaume; his brother, Fritz, was a conductor and conservatory director; his uncle Eugène was an organist who taught Albert Schweitzer, whose friendship and spirituality influenced Charles throughout his life.Charles learned all kinds of instruments, like a little Bach might, but settled on the violin and was playing under his father’s baton by his early teens. He went to Paris in 1912 to study with Lucien Capet, a famed quartet violinist, but returned home to his family days before Germany invaded Belgium. Conscripted into the German army with two brothers, he was injured as an artilleryman at Verdun; he subsequently embraced pacifism and took succor in music.The common critique of Munch as a mature conductor was that his volatility ill fit works in the Haydn-to-Brahms tradition, but he had a strong training in the Romantic school of German conducting. After playing as the concertmaster of the Strasbourg orchestra from 1919 to 1924, he spent a year under Hermann Abendroth in Cologne, then held the same post at the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig for six seasons, working for Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter. His return to Paris in 1932 to start his podium career — with Brahms’s First — was made possible by the wealth of the Nestlé heiress Geneviève Maury, his new wife.At first, Munch was renowned for supporting new music, and during World War II, he made his allegiances clear by protecting and promoting French composers. At the helm of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, France’s leading ensemble, Munch told his players in September 1940 that it was through art that they could “continue the fight.” One of his most intimate friends, the pianist Nicole Henriot, would have her hand crushed by the Gestapo; Munch joined the Resistance, helped those he could, and tried to avoid compromising situations.Munch leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony at Symphony Hall in 1964.BSO ArchivesResearch on the culture of wartime France by Jane F. Fulcher, Leslie A. Sprout and other scholars has suggested that while the Nazis visited horrors on Jewish artists, neither the occupiers nor their Vichy collaborators — nor their Resistance opponents — sought to curtail concert life. Most musicians in the Resistance carried on as if the occupation did not exist; French music, except that by Jews, was not banned. Careful still to tend to proud Parisian traditions in the Germanic classics, Munch spent much of the war showcasing contemporary scores, such as politically ambiguous new works like Honegger’s Second Symphony and pieces that had been written in Nazi camps, including Jean Martinon’s “Stalag IX.”Munch and the Société became so busy, they reached a strikingly high standard. Their wartime recordings, now in the Warner box, are remarkable for their calm, even in “La Mer” or “La Valse.” After their liberation, they let loose for Decca; the Eloquence set superbly reproduces the orchestra’s distinctive postwar timbre, as well as Munch’s intensity of expression. There is crisp Beethoven, heartbreaking Tchaikovsky, delicate yet eager Ravel. An account of Berlioz’s “Le Corsaire,” from May 1948, is so exhilarating, it is little surprise that the authorities were reluctant to let Munch leave.Berlioz: “Le Corsaire”Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1948 (Eloquence)BUT LEAVE MUNCH DID. On an initial visit to the United States that started near the end of 1946, he enjoyed the New York Philharmonic yet found the Boston Symphony to be “the culmination of all orchestras,” as he told The Boston Globe. He led that ensemble in only seven concerts before he signed a contract to become its permanent conductor, in March 1948. Despite a brutal schedule that included the first tour by an American orchestra in the Soviet Union, in 1956, he stayed through 1962.While George Szell was giving the Cleveland Orchestra a focused power, and Eugene Ormandy sought glitter and gold in Philadelphia, Munch brightened Boston’s formerly dark hues, bringing its strident brass and cutting winds to the fore — most prominently the quivering principal flute of Doriot Anthony Dwyer, who became the only woman in the orchestra after Munch hired her in 1952.Debussy: “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune”Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1956 (Sony)Critics heard the transparent, though dry, results as typically French, but the ensemble’s fervor — its blare, some said — under Munch was his own, removed from the grace that his mentor, Pierre Monteux, drew from the same players. If Thomson had warned the Symphony in 1944 that “its form is perfect, but it does not communicate,” after a decade of Munch, the reverse might have been more true.The cliché about Munch’s Boston Symphony was that it was all but a Parisian ensemble in exile. “When I was living in New York in the ’50s,” Michael Steinberg of The Globe wrote in 1964, “I used to imagine Symphony Hall as the scene of a more or less perpetual performance of the Berlioz ‘Symphonie Fantastique,’ relieved now and again by ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ and ‘La Mer.’” That slur notwithstanding, Munch’s advocacy was unwavering and proud: His Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel were references for a generation.Although the beauties of Munch’s Boston-era recordings of French music are great, some of them stray intriguingly from the norm. He rarely treated Debussy or Ravel as scores only to paint with prettily: For all their gorgeous interplay of voices, there is often a bite to them, as if Munch were deliberately placing them in a lineage that ran back to Berlioz and forward to Roussel and Honegger, and later Dutilleux. Once or twice, his own loneliness breaks through; he draws out “Le Jardin Féerique,” at the end of “Ma Mère l’Oye,” until it is tear-inducingly poignant.Still, Munch’s tastes were broad, and he could be as fascinating beyond the French repertory. As a matter of principle and proclivity, he kept up Koussevitzky’s loyalty to new music, ardently recording Piston, Martinu and other works that he premiered. He largely avoided Germany after the war, but the most performed composers in his first decade in Boston were Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms. Little of his hard-driven Mozart and already-outdated Bach survive, but his Brahms was strong, and his Beethoven full of ideas.Beethoven: “Coriolan” OvertureBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1956 (Sony)Some of those ideas work, and some do not, but that’s the reminder that Munch offers today: Virtuosity is empty without the thrill of interpretive risk. “He was without peer in the things he did best and, even in the things he did worst, never less than interesting,” the critic Martin Bernheimer wrote after his death. “There are few like him left.” More

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      Gail Samuel Leaves Boston Symphony Less Than 2 Years Into Tenure

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      Gail Samuel took the helm of one of America’s most storied orchestras in 2021, and was the first woman to lead the institution.Gail Samuel, who took the helm of the storied Boston Symphony Orchestra last year as its first female president and chief executive, has resigned from her post just 18 months into her tenure, the orchestra said on Friday.The orchestra announced that its board of trustees had accepted Samuel’s resignation, effective Jan. 3, and that Jeffrey D. Dunn — a member of its advisory board — would step in as the interim leader once she departs. Neither the institution nor Samuel immediately offered a reason.Samuel took over in June 2021, following the 23-year tenure of Mark Volpe — a leader in the classical music field who maintained a robust endowment and preserved the orchestra’s reputation as one of the most important in the United States. She came from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she worked for nearly three decades, most recently as its chief operating officer.She joined the Boston Symphony at a time when its health was battered by the pandemic — its wealth wounded by lost revenues and its recovery uncertain as audiences timidly and slowly return to live performances.“This is a difficult time for everyone, and I think every organization is going to be thinking about how to come out of this,” Samuel told The New York Times last year. “It’s a long path, but there’s also an opportunity to think about things differently.”In a statement, Barbara Hostetter, the chair of the Boston Symphony’s board of trustees, said: “At a time when stabilizing the institution was of paramount priority, Gail was a steadying force. She also led the B.S.O. through a vital turning point of generational change, setting in motion a creative vision that reflects the B.S.O.’s commitment to diversity.”The Boston Symphony declined to comment further on Samuel’s departure. In a statement, Samuel said: “It was an honor to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the world’s most celebrated orchestras, particularly during such a significant time in history.“When I arrived at the B.S.O., I was dedicated to reopening Tanglewood and Symphony Hall, and to increasing creativity at the B.S.O. by welcoming artists to our stages more broadly representing the rich diversity that exists in our city,” she continued. “After navigating the profoundly complicated reopening matters and having successfully laid the groundwork for continued evolution at the B.S.O., I have decided to step down. The end of the season and Holiday Pops performances offer a natural time with limited disruption.”Dunn was, until his retirement in 2021, the executive chairman, president and chief executive of Sesame Workshop, which produces “Sesame Street.” He said in a statement, “I am honored to lend my executive experience to this incredible organization and look forward to collaborating with music director Andris Nelsons as the organization continues on its important path of cultural progress and financial stability.” More

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      Amid Global Turmoil, Salzburg Festival Plans a Summer of Reflection

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      “Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” the festival’s artistic director said.With the pandemic still lingering and the war in Ukraine raging on, the Salzburg Festival in Austria announced plans on Friday for a summer season that would seek to offer space for reflection.The festival, classical music’s most storied annual event, will stage two operas based on works by William Shakespeare: “Macbeth” and “Falstaff,” both by Verdi. There are also plans for more offbeat repertoire, including Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Greek Passion,” which tells the story of a Greek village staging a Passion play, in a production led by the conductor Maxime Pascal.“Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview, quoting from “Hamlet.” “Therefore, we have constructed a festival giving artists the opportunity to address these issues directly and indirectly.”The festival will feature more than 200 events — a mix of operas, spoken drama, orchestra concerts and recitals — over six weeks beginning July 20.The festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic, will perform several concerts, including “Ein Deutsches Requiem” (“A German Requiem”), an hourlong choral work by Brahms, under the conductor Christian Thielemann. Among other prominent orchestras making appearances are the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli will star in Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice”; the conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead a concert performance of Berlioz’s “Les Troyens,” featuring his ensemble, the Monteverdi Choir; and the soprano Renée Fleming and the pianist Evgeny Kissin team up for a recital of works by Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Duparc.Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a Salzburg regular, will take the baton for “Macbeth,” which opens in July, in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski. In August, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in a concert featuring works by Ligeti and Richard Strauss.The festival will again prominently feature the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia. He will take the baton for a concert presentation of Henry Purcell’s opera “The Indian Queen” with his new ensemble, Utopia. Currentzis will also lead Utopia in performances of Mozart’s Mass in C minor.Currentzis announced the formation of Utopia, which is backed by European benefactors, in August, after he faced a wave of criticism for his longtime association with the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna, which is sponsored by VTB Bank, a state-owned institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries. (Currentzis had been trying for several years to secure funding for Utopia.)While the pandemic has wreaked havoc across the performing arts, the Salzburg Festival, drawing on government subsidies and sponsorship deals, has managed to minimize the disruption.The festival never canceled a season during the pandemic. In 2020, it staged a robust program for limited audiences, before returning to relative normalcy in 2021.Even as turnout for many classical events around the world has been tepid since the return of live performance, the Salzburg Festival continues to attract an enthusiastic audience. Attendance was 96 percent last summer, the festival said. More

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      In His Twilight, a Conductor Revisits Where His Career Dawned

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      Michael Tilson Thomas, in the face of an aggressive brain cancer, returned to his roots to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.LENOX, Mass. — Michael Tilson Thomas had just brought the first movement of Copland’s Symphony No. 3 to a radiant close here at Tanglewood on Saturday night when applause broke out at the back of the Shed.And why not? Copland’s score is one of the works most associated with the Boston Symphony, and he wrote parts of it on these very grounds. It was music, Thomas has suggested, “that the world would come to accept as the sound of America.”The applause went on, until it sounded like just a single admirer was left clapping, insistently. Thomas turned, smiled, and joked, “I agree.”He always has agreed, and this great American maverick will to the end. The conductor, 77, underwent surgery last year to treat glioblastoma, a lethally aggressive brain cancer, and in March he announced that he was permanently reducing his activities. “I intend to stick around for a bit,” he said then; despite the odds, he has.So Thomas could have been forgiven reflectiveness, if not more, leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in concerts on Saturday and Sunday, Copland in one and Ives in the other. After all, for all his might and ideas as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, a tenure that lasted from 1995 to 2020 and defines his career, it was the Boston Symphony with which he made his way, and Tanglewood where that part of his life began.Thomas emerged as a Tanglewood fellow, arriving here for the first time in 1968 and winning the Koussevitzky Prize for an outstanding student conductor a year later. He was named the Boston Symphony’s assistant, associate, and principal guest conductor in turn — the latter a title he shared with Colin Davis — and until his departure in 1974, he drew note for programs that put the new in the context of the old, as well as for recordings that still sound fresh, lush and keen, including a glorious Piston Second and a pungent “Rite of Spring.” Four instrumentalists who played with Thomas then — the bassists Lawrence Wolfe and Joseph Hearne, the violinist Ikuko Mizuno and the violist Michael Zaretsky — played with him last weekend, too.But in a recent interview with The New York Times, Thomas said that he felt “calm and resigned” about his circumstances, and though the Tanglewood grounds seemed to flower for him with a special resplendence, there was little sense of a farewell to these performances, little sense of there being some grand valedictory message, even if there were those in the audience who stood to welcome him before he had conducted a note.There was just Michael Tilson Thomas, doing Michael Tilson Thomas things.And what things. Thomas is understandably not so excitable on the podium now, but he is anything but disengaged, and, standing throughout the concerts, his old theatricality still takes the odd bow. His right hand dominates, keeping a steady if revealing beat, and his interest in carefully shaping details is still there, as is his accuracy of gesture. Clarity appears to be his aim, and he spent a lot of his time dealing with balances in each of the four works he conducted: holding a hand up here, twinkling his fingers there, sprinkling experience into the routine.Since his days exploring the avant-garde as the conductor the Monday Evening Concerts in the 1960s, Thomas has considered the concert hall to be a place of inquiry and thought, of connections and contrasts, and the Shed was no different on these occasions. He still has things to say.Saturday’s concert could have been political if Thomas had wanted it to be, but he voiced nothing explicit. The program put Copland’s symphony, which was given with typically heartfelt commitment, in conversation with “Dubinushka,” a jaunty though trite little tribute that Rimsky-Korsakov based on a workers’ song and offered to the Russian revolutionaries of 1905, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which the composer wrote specifically for American audiences ahead of a tour in 1909.Thomas, left, conducting Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, with Alexander Malofeev as the soloist.Hilary ScottAlexander Malofeev, 20, was the soloist, which made the performance delayed compensation for a collaboration between him and Thomas that had been canceled in March, when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra declared that it would be “inappropriate” for the Moscow-born pianist to perform. Entirely innocent to begin with, Malofeev had condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine days earlier, calling it a “terrible and bloody decision” after another concert in Canada had been called off far in advance. Thomas, a devoted supporter of up-and-coming musicians in his founding of the New World Symphony and in other work, was clearly pleased that they could perform together here, beaming during the ovations.You could hear why: Malofeev is already a special pianist. Plenty of young artists use the Rachmaninoff to show off sparkling technical skills, and Malofeev had those in abundance. But he was interested in something more than that. The first movement was broad, dreamy, nightmarish, the left hand disrupting melodic lines; the cadenza was unsettlingly introspective. The second movement became a balm, the third a triumph, and if that finale was dangerously soaked in schmaltz, well, that’s Rachmaninoff for you. Thomas, to his credit, went where Malofeev took him, and brought the orchestra along, too.Sunday’s concert offered an opportunity for Thomas to make more of an interpretive statement with the season-ending performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a Tanglewood tradition. He did, in a sense, sticking to the way his Beethoven has been of late, steadier and heftier than the new norm.With the Tanglewood Festival Chorus on hand, along with a vocal quartet of Jacquelyn Stucker, Kelley O’Connor, Ben Bliss and Dashon Burton, this was stoic Beethoven, calm, confident and controlled, lyrical in the slow movement but tender rather than rapt — Beethoven of the here and now, in other words, and not of the beyond. Some hard-thwacked timpani aside, it was also firmly of the old school. With its forward woodwinds and its resolute strength of line — the fugue in the finale was downright stubborn — it almost reminded me of Otto Klemperer.Charles Ives’s “Psalm 90,” an ethereal yet cosmically dissonant prayer for soprano, tenor, chorus and organ, prefaced the Beethoven in a characteristically ear-dislocating bit of Thomas programming, though he left the choir director, James Burton, to conduct. Ives worked on it for years, and he eventually came to think of it as his farewell to composition; its ending is profoundly comforting.“So teach us to number our days,” its text reads in part, “that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”Perhaps there was a message, after all. More