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    A 270-Year-Old Scottish Folk Fiddle Makes Its Carnegie Hall Debut

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    The ornately decorated fiddle belonged to the dance master who taught Robert Burns. At Carnegie, it will cap “Scotland’s Hoolie in New York.”Of course there will be bagpipes on Saturday, the eve of Tartan Day, when Carnegie Hall will host a lineup of stars. Among the luminaries of Scottish traditional music will be Julie Fowlis, who was featured in the soundtrack to Disney’s “Brave”; and Dougie MacLean, the singer-songwriter whose “Caledonia” has became an anthem for Scottish sports fans.The event, “Scotland’s Hoolie in New York,” will also be the Carnegie Hall debut of an aging celebrity who flew into New York on Tuesday, accompanied by a personal bodyguard, before taking up residence at a high-security location on the Upper East Side. This V.I.P., unannounced on the program, is likely to bring goosebumps to listeners during the final performance of Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne.”The surprise guest, considered a national treasure in Scotland, has never been seen wearing tartans. The dignitary in question is a 270-year-old folk fiddle, covered in what looks like full-body floral tattoos, which belonged to the dance master William Gregg. It was Gregg who taught a 17-year-old Burns dance steps. And it was Gregg whom the young poet sought out, as he later wrote, “to give my manners a brush.” While there is no direct evidence that Burns played this fiddle, its sound would have been on his mind when he composed the jigs, reels and gracefully tripping strathspeys that continue to resound in any space where Scottish music is celebrated.Reminiscent of Turkish or Persian art, the fiddle’s decorations remain something of a mystery. Kieran Dodds for The New York TimesToday, the instrument is among the most popular items on show at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, and it is a Scottish national treasure, said Suzanne Reid, the conservator for the National Trust for Scotland who accompanied the Gregg fiddle on its trans-Atlantic journey. She was nervously monitoring the humidity levels at Freeman’s Hindman auction house, where I was granted a brief private audience.“It is an integral part of Scottish identity,” the accordionist Gary Innes, who organized the Hoolie, said in an interview. “To have it played in the most famous concert hall built by a Scot” — Carnegie Hall’s construction was funded by the Scotland-born Andrew Carnegie — “is very special. It brings people together.” (Innes will also perform in the Hoolie with his folk-rock band Manran.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A Kronos Quartet Glow Up: New Players, Newly Lustrous Sound

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      The venerable quartet returned to Zankel Hall with a typically eclectic program and a newfound emotional intensity.The Kronos Quartet was at Zankel Hall on Friday with a typically eclectic program that included new works drawing on jazz, psychedelic rock and Nordic folk music. The vibrant performance was not only the ensemble’s return to a space it reliably fills with devoted fans; with the quartet’s ranks refreshed by three brilliant new players, it also felt like a comeback.In recent years, the aging ensemble — founded in 1973 by David Harrington, who continues to lead it as first violin — sometimes seemed to have had slid into an identity crisis. The Kronos brand was still strong: Ambitious commissions kept pushing the boundaries of quartet music, resulting in more than 1,000 new works and arrangements drawing on every imaginable style. In the run-up to its golden jubilee, the ensemble initiated a commissioning project, 50 for the Future, and made the sheet music to all 50 pieces available free online.But the quality of the playing had become inconsistent. And the spoken introductions the players offered at concerts felt perfunctory and tired. When the violinist John Sherba and the violist Hank Dutt, who had been in the lineup since 1978, retired last year, the quartet might have disbanded. Instead, Harrington brought in fresh talent and — judging by the music-making on Friday — strong personalities. The quartet’s middle voices now belong to the violinist Gabriela Díaz and the violist Ayane Kozasa, who join the composer and cellist Paul Wiancko, who came onboard in 2022.During the kaleidoscopic first half of the concert the two women asserted themselves as the quartet’s engines of emotional intensity and a newly lustrous, rich sound. This came through most powerfully in Aleksandra Vrebalov’s incantatory “Gold Came From Space,” which gradually grows in sonic density and expressive intent from tremulous whispers. Time and again, Kozasa’s viola stole the spotlight with its absorbing mixture of lyricism and throaty candor. She channeled Nina Simone’s tough-nosed tenderness in Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of “For All We Know” (composed by J. Fred Coots) and set the tone for Wiancko’s arrangement of Neil Young’s protest song “Ohio.”Two songs by Sun Ra, “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” (wittily arranged by Garchik) and “Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye,” in a psychedelic arrangement by Terry Riley and Sara Miyamoto, sparkled with experimental glee. That exploratory zest had always been a hallmark of Kronos. But the heart-on-sleeve directness the group brought to Viet Cuong’s stirring “Next Week’s Trees,” in which the quartet sometimes sounds like a giant harp, felt new.The second half was taken up by a single work, “Elja,” by Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjogersen. Maurseth, who joined the Kronos players for the performance, is a master on the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, a violin-like instrument with four extra resonating strings and a curved neck and carved scroll that evokes the bow of an ancient ship. For the 45-minute piece, which also featured recorded nature sounds, the Kronos players switched to hardanger versions of their own instruments. (The viola and cello fiddles were specially built for Kronos by the Norwegian luthier Ottar Kasa.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Cleveland Orchestra, It’s Beethoven (and Freedom) to the Rescue

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      When the star singer Asmik Grigorian dropped out of the orchestra’s performance at Carnegie Hall, Beethoven’s Fifth and his “Leonore” Overture No. 3 subbed in.The Cleveland Orchestra showed up at Carnegie Hall this week without a star. When the music director Franz Welser-Möst planned the ensemble’s two-night visit to New York, the opening concert, on Tuesday, was to be headlined by the soprano Asmik Grigorian. A volcanic presence on European stages who rarely makes it to the United States, Grigorian would have been a major box-office draw. Then came news that she was pulling out for unspecified personal reasons.Time to break out the emergency rations of Beethoven.The remaining rump of the Clevelanders’ program for Tuesday, the Suite from Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead,” based on Dostoyevsky’s account of life in a Russian prison colony, was joined by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and, for good measure, his “Leonore” Overture No. 3.A crowd-pleasing solution to a marketing headache? A repertory staple musicians can shine in without too much rehearsal? Not at all. The new program was “a chance to say something important about our world today,” Welser-Möst wrote in a program statement that referred, smartly but vaguely, to people’s “fight for freedom everywhere.”Without naming specifics, Welser-Möst explained that the Janacek was a testament to “human dignity” in “desolate circumstances.” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 traced a progression “from darkness to light,” he added, while the overture, written for Beethoven’s political prison break opera “Fidelio,” represented the “greatest music about freedom ever written.” Far from being a stop gap, the new program created what Welser-Möst called “a profound statement” that was sure to “resonate deeply” with New Yorkers. (No similar claims were made for Wednesday’s program, which consisted of Stravinsky’s “Pétrouchka” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.)The resulting concert on Tuesday was invigorating and full of ravishing playing, as was the performance the next night. But if there was any profound truth to be gleaned from the double helping of Beethoven served alongside Janacek’s dazzling suite, it was only that the Fifth and the “Leonore” overture provide ready-made templates for struggle narratives ending in triumph. Just whose struggle and what is being overcome — I’m guessing that Gaza, Ukraine and the state of American democracy are among them — remain open to interpretation.In fairness, the Cleveland Orchestra has never relied on provocative or politically minded programming to earn its devoted fan base and superlative-studded reviews. In his 23 years at the helm, Welser-Möst has fine-tuned this storied ensemble into an elegant, cohesive and keenly responsive engine. Other American orchestras have struggled to define their role in society as they fret over accusations that their branch of the arts is reactionary and socially irrelevant. The Cleveland Orchestra’s image may be conservative — a guardian of a particular European tradition — but it’s a well-defined luxury brand that delivers outstanding value.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seong-Jin Cho Tackles a Ravel Piano Marathon in New York

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      Performing in New York, Seong-Jin Cho presented a marathon survey of Ravel’s solo piano works and appeared in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience?These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s recent appearances in New York. Earlier this month, he played a marathon of Ravel’s complete solo piano works at Carnegie Hall, and on Thursday he joined the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. (The program continues through Saturday.)If these concerts share anything, it’s sheer athleticism. The Ravel survey makes for a three-hour evening of intense focus and finger work; the Prokofiev concerto probably crams the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes.The similarities end there, though. And it’s in the differences that Cho revealed the state of his artistry at 30, a decade on from his career-making first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition.There was a remarkable difference, too, between his readings of the Ravel works in concert and his recording of the same material, released on Deutsche Grammophon last month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. (A related album of his, of Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these wide-ranging pieces were freer and more expressive at Carnegie; it would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang, Side by Side

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      Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang appeared at Carnegie Hall with a unified approach to works by Schubert, John Adams, Rachmaninoff and more.When two pianists appear together in concert, the usual setup is for the curves of their instruments to hug in a yin-yang formation. The musicians face off across the expanse, some nine feet apart.But when Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang brought their starry duo tour to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening, just inches separated them. They sat side by side, their pianos splayed out in opposite directions like the wings of a butterfly, with the players in the middle.Olafsson and Wang didn’t look at each other much during the performance, and Wang, who was closer to the audience throughout, did feel like the dominant presence and sound in this duet. But their physical closeness registered in a consistently unified approach to their richly enjoyable program.There was balanced transparency in even the most fiery moments of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor. Olafsson and Wang’s rubato — their expressive flexibility with tempo — felt both spontaneously poetic and precisely shared in the passage when serenity takes over in the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” with the yearning melody that’s given to the alto saxophone in the work’s fully orchestrated version.Their styles were distinguishable, even if subtly. In sumptuously vibrating chords in the first movement of Schubert’s Fantasy, Olafsson’s touch was a little wetter and more muted, Wang’s percussive and as coolly etched as a polygraph. Cool, yes, but she could also be lyrical, as in the delicate beginning of Luciano Berio’s “Wasserklavier,” which opened the concert.Short, gentle, spare pieces by Berio, John Cage (the early “Experiences No. 1”) and Arvo Part (“Hymn to a Great City”) gave the program a meditative spine. Those were interspersed with three substantial anchors: the “Symphonic Dances,” which Rachmaninoff set for two pianos as he was writing the orchestral version; the Schubert Fantasy; and John Adams’s “Hallelujah Junction.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Carnegie Hall’s 2025-26 Season: What We’re Excited to Hear

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      Our critics choose a dozen highlights from the season, which heavily features the music of Arvo Pärt and includes series by several artists.Carnegie Hall announced its 2025-26 season on Wednesday, with much of it devoted to celebrating the 250th birthday of the United States through a citywide festival featuring genres including jazz, rock, hip-hop, musical theater and classical music.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the festival was meant to showcase “the sheer breadth and dynamism of America.”“Whether you look at film, Broadway, jazz or hip-hop, it’s all very vivid music-making,” he said. “It runs across the whole population.”The season will open in October with the conductor Daniel Harding leading the NYO-USA All-Stars, an ensemble affiliated with Carnegie, in works by Bernstein and Stravinsky. That performance will also include Yuja Wang leading Tchaikovsky’s grand Piano Concerto No. 1 from the keyboard.The composer Arvo Pärt, who turns 90 in September, will be honored at Carnegie all season, with his friends and collaborators leading performances of his works. Pärt, Gillinson said, “always has spoken in a language that everybody can engage with.”Carnegie’s season — some 170 performances — will also feature the conductor Marin Alsop, the pianist Lang Lang, the vocalist Isabel Leonard and the violinist Maxim Vengerov, who each will organize a series of Perspectives concerts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Czech Philharmonic Brings Musical Heritage to Carnegie Hall

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      Over three nights, the Czech Philharmonic presented Dvorak’s concertos and more, including a rare performance of Janacek’s “Glagolitic Mass.”You could be forgiven for thinking that there has been some kind of festival going on at Carnegie Hall.Recently, its calendar has been stuffed with appearances by some of the world’s top orchestras. The Berlin Philharmonic was quickly followed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra and, for most of this week, the Czech Philharmonic. This is the programming you would get at major European festivals like Salzburg and Lucerne.And in their festival-style juxtapositions, these concerts make comparisons irresistible. If the Berlin Philharmonic pairs showy gesture with technical perfection, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra has the polish of fine jewelry, then the Czech Philharmonic is more like a timeless treasure, impressive but easy to take for granted.The Czechs, under Semyon Bychkov, their chief conductor and music director, don’t always demand your attention or affection. At Carnegie, though, this orchestra was unpretentious, even unassuming, yet dignified and impeccably balanced. Above all, the Philharmonic was an excellent steward of its country’s musical heritage.In that regard, its visit was something like a festival: a celebration of the Year of Czech Music, an occasional event that began a century ago with the centennial of Bedrich Smetana’s birth. At Carnegie Hall, where musicians typically perform on a bare stage, members of the Philharmonic sat under banners, and in front of toadstool-shaped flower arrangements in the colors of the Czech flag. The president of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, flew in to attend Thursday’s concert. Bychkov conducted on his handsome walnut podium from the Rudolfinum hall in Prague.The Philharmonic’s programming had the feel of cultural diplomacy, from an ensemble with a mission to tend a flame. Over three evenings, it offered Dvorak’s three concertos, as well as symphonic and choral works by Smetana, Janacek and Mahler. (Mahler, who was born in Bohemia, isn’t typically discussed as a Czech composer; his sound was more a product of his Viennese education and maturity than his birthplace. And while he may be a name that sells tickets, I wish that someone like Josef Suk, who is thoroughly in this Czech lineage and chronically absent in New York, were represented instead.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Does the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä Deserve His Meteoric Rise?

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      The 28-year-old maestro, entrusted with two storied ensembles, visited Carnegie Hall with the superb Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.A raucously received performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Saturday was the latest exclamation point in the conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s meteoric rise. Mäkelä is just 28 and made his Carnegie debut a mere eight months ago with the Orchestre de Paris — one of the two very good ensembles he currently leads.He returned to the hall this week for a two-night stand with the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam — one of the two much-better-than-very-good ensembles he is set to take over in the coming years. (The news came in April that he would also be the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)Chicago and the Concertgebouw are more than excellent groups; they are cultural treasures, whose futures have been placed in the hands of a maestro who was widely unknown six years ago. It is safe to say that no conductor in modern history has been entrusted with so much at such a young age.Does he deserve it? With the physically extroverted Mäkelä bobbing, digging, punching and thwacking them on, the Concertgebouw’s musicians played superbly. By coincidence, the Berlin Philharmonic, another world-class ensemble, had visited Carnegie a few days before, and provided a useful comparison: Berlin’s kaleidoscopically colored, richly muscular force was distinct from the Concertgebouw’s blended and refined (though still sumptuous) elegance.It’s a luxurious sound, with full, liquid winds, discreetly burnished brasses and, best of all, sustained, velvety strings. Those strings had a beautifully restrained showcase joining Lisa Batiashvili in a hushed arrangement of a Bach chorale after her performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on Friday. And they were fevered yet lucid in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” on Saturday.Yet in some passages of the Schoenberg that were overstated, almost halting, you got a sense of Mäkelä’s shortcomings. He can be so deliberate, so obviously intent on creating precise rhythms and textures bar by bar, that some of the air can come out of the music. It all seems like it should be intense — he certainly looks intense — but you don’t always feel building energy or distinctive character over long spans. It’s a matter of moments over momentum.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Berlin Philharmonic Is the Best in the Business

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      In three concerts at Carnegie Hall led by Kirill Petrenko, this orchestra played with awe-inspiring force and finesse.Around the turn of the 20th century, Arnold Böcklin’s brooding painting “The Isle of the Dead” made for one of the most popular images in Europe. Freud and Lenin owned prints; after seeing a reproduction in 1907, Rachmaninoff was inspired to write a tone poem.Nabokov wrote that copies of the Böcklin hung “in every home in Berlin.” Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead,” which the Berlin Philharmonic played on Sunday at the start of an amazing three-concert stand at Carnegie Hall, was also once ubiquitous, but these days is programmed less frequently and has a whiff of old-fashioned character piece about it.Great orchestras — and no orchestra is greater than this one, which plays with force and finesse under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — of course illuminate the deathless classics of the repertoire, as the Philharmonic did on this trip with Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and Bruckner’s Fifth. But the best ensembles also reveal unexpected depths in pieces you might take less seriously.Petrenko conducted “The Isle of the Dead” with the same luminous seriousness he might bring to Wagner’s “Parsifal,” making it taut and ferocious, morose without heaviness. Building in strength near the start, the Philharmonic sounded billowing rather than crushing, like a gathering storm cloud. Solos — like the wind fragments that twist around each other, one by one — were played with poise but never look-at-me self-regard. A violin elegy near the end achieved wrenching intensity in what can sometimes be mere mood music.I’ve often thought that Korngold’s Violin Concerto — which came between the Rachmaninoff and Dvorak on Sunday and again, all three even more potent, on Tuesday — is a lot of shallow showboating. But the Philharmonic and Petrenko made it seem newly sophisticated.These players’ cohesion allowed them to create uncannily evocative atmospheres. The first movement of the concerto had a moonlit glow. In the third, a golden full-orchestra blast, balanced so that no section swamped the others, dissolved into a fairy tiptoe. Small details were moving in their artfulness, down to a tiny diminuendo passage in the violins in the first movement: a short, tender motif played a few times, each time softer. It was a simple effect, executed with utterly unified subtlety.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More