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Review: The Berlin Philharmonic Gives a Master Class at Carnegie
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Clara Schumann and Florence Price Get Their Due at Carnegie Hall
Two works by these composers have been marginalized in classical music, but they were never forgotten, as their histories show.Two composers marginalized by history will take center stage at Carnegie Hall this week.On Friday, the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which is making its Carnegie debut with Beatrice Rana as the soloist 187 years after its premiere.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia ensemble’s music director, called the concert, which sandwiches those two pieces between classics by Ravel, an example of varying artistic perspectives. “A work of art is a viewpoint from an artist,” he said in an interview. “And if you have only one part of society that always gets their viewpoint heard, we constantly hear one viewpoint. It’s so important to have different viewpoints.”As a result of rediscoveries and shifting approaches to programming, works by Schumann and Price have migrated to classical music’s mainstream in recent years, with attention from major orchestras, especially Philadelphia, and recordings on prestige labels like Deutsche Grammophon. But they were never truly forgotten, as their histories show.Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minorIn 1835, the piano concerto by Schumann (then Clara Wieck, not yet married to the composer Robert Schumann) premiered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. She was just 16, but already famous as a composer and virtuosic performer. The work earned ovations, and later, the Viennese demanded three performances in one season. But after Robert Schumann’s journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, among others, reviewed it as a “lady’s” composition, she shelved it.The concerto’s second edition didn’t come about until 1970, according to Nancy B. Reich’s biography “Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.” (The pianist Michael Ponti is believed to have made the first recording in 1971.) Decades of work by musicians and musicologists culminated in Schumann’s widely celebrated 200th birthday in 2019. But despite new recordings by Ragna Schirmer and Isata Kanneh-Mason, who recently debuted the concerto with the Baltimore Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, continue to ignore it.Some artists have shrugged off the concerto, which Schumann completed when she was 15, as the work of a teenager. But it has had a long-ranging influence on some of the most beloved piano concertos that came after it.“It was written at a pivotal point in the history of the genre,” Joe Davies wrote in “Clara Schumann Studies,” published by Cambridge University Press last year. “It invites a powerful reimagining of what the concerto can be and do. Stylistically and expressively, she put her own stamp on the genre.”In an interview, Rana, who called the concerto “a genius work in many ways,” said: “I think that it’s very, very underestimated — the intellectual value of this concerto in the history of music.” Schumann’s nontraditional, through-composed form, seamless without breaks between movements, Reich has noted, bears the influence of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. Rana called it as revolutionary as concertos by Liszt and Robert Schumann, both of which it predates by over a decade.Yannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie in a program featuring Florence Price’s music in February.Steve J. ShermanThe concerto’s powerful march opening, deceptively simple in its orchestral unison, contains the five-note motif that unites the themes across its three movements. In its transformative second movement Romanze, a tacit orchestra listens to the piano sing an exquisite love duet with a solo cello — an instrument that both Robert Schumann and Brahms featured in their concerto’s solo movements. Its final, longest movement displays the full breadth of Clara’s pianistic prowess and personality.Alexander Stefaniak, the author of “Becoming Clara Schumann,” writes that Robert emulated her form and improvisatory style; Robert also inverted Clara’s piano entrance in his piano concerto (also in A minor). Based on that, you could consider her reach extending to Grieg’s and Rachmaninoff’s first concertos, which echo Robert Schumann’s. Brahms might even have been inspired by her third movement Polonaise in his First Concerto’s third-movement Hungarian dance.“You can see she was a great virtuoso because what she writes is very challenging for the piano,” Rana said.At Carnegie, Nézet-Séguin intentionally avoided the cliché of programming Schumann with her husband’s work. For him, she and Price stand on their own. As composers, they had “the self-confidence to believe in what they wanted to bring to the world,” he said. “They are works that have no equivalent.”Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minorPrice’s Third Symphony is a work rooted in the traditions of symphonic Romanticism and classical Black composition, simultaneously adding to and expanding the expectations of orchestral technique. “A cross-section of Negro life and psychology” is how she described it in a letter to Sergei Koussevitsky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, in 1941. That was a year after the symphony’s premiere, with Valter Poole and the Michigan W.P.A. Symphony, which was positively received in the Detroit press and even earned a mention in Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated column, “My Day.”Price’s music, Nézet-Séguin said, is “like a great wine that really ages very well.” He and the Philadelphia Orchestra released a Grammy Award-winning recording of her First and Third Symphonies last year. Since then, he added, “We keep exploring all the finesse and the detail and the language.”Philadelphia’s recording of the Third is the most high-profile, though not the first. (That was by Apo Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic, released in 2001.) The album comes after decades of artists championing Price’s work, including luminaries like Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, as well as present-day virtuosos like Michelle Cann, Samantha Ege and Randall Goosby, whose live recording of the violin concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra will be released on the Decca label next year.Rae Linda Brown, in her book “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price,” described the Third Symphony as a reflection of “a maturity of style and a new attitude toward Black musical materials.” Rather than applying African American music idioms through melody and harmony alone, Price incorporates conventions of form, texture, rhythm and timbre, an approach she also used in her Concerto in One Movement (1934), Violin Concerto No. 1 (1939) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952). Her percussion section calls for snare drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestral bells, castanets, wood blocks and sand blocks, to name a few; and she expands the brasses and woodwinds beyond the sets of twos from her earlier works. The first and final movements feature more contrapuntal motion and tonal ambiguity.Nézet-Séguin said that during a rehearsal, a Philadelphia Orchestra member mentioned that Price probably played a lot of Bach, and that the third movement Juba-Allegro’s melody seemed to be a reference to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. That speaks to another core aspect of her style: her use of the African American musical procedure of signifyin(g), in which older works and forms are referred to and transformed in new, unexpected directions.The juba dance movement of Price’s Third features asymmetrical phrasing, rhythmic complexity and interaction between sections. The cool trio section, with habanera rhythms and a muted trumpet, and her use of a modified jazz progression for the main theme, reflects a creative palette that crosses time, region and culture.UNLIKE SCHUMANN’S CONCERTO, Price’s symphony is not making its Carnegie Hall debut. But it has been performed there only once before — by the Gateway Music Festival Orchestra this year. By contrast, according to the hall’s archives, the Ravel works on Friday’s program, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “Boléro,” have been performed there 48 and 114 times.“We’ve had too much of the white European male for too long,” Nézet-Séguin said, adding that it was time to aim “for a certain kind of balance in terms of what we see on our concert stage.”Nézet-Séguin is an established Price champion by now; he and the Philadelphians brought her works to five European cities this summer alone. And Rana can say the same about Schumann, having toured the concerto with Nézet-Séguin, and having prepared a recording to be released in February.“The only way to give dignity to a piece is to listen to it,” Rana said. “It needs to be played. It needs to be heard.”Sarah Fritz, a musicologist who is writing a book about Clara Schumann, teaches at the Westminster Conservatory of Music at Rider University.A. Kori Hill is a musicologist, freelance writer and staff member of the nonprofit ArtsWave. She lives in Cincinnati. More
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Review: Gustavo Dudamel Comes to Town, Megawatt Appeal on Display
Dudamel led his Los Angeles Philharmonic in two concerts at Carnegie Hall that included a scorching New York premiere by Gabriela Ortiz.Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Gustavo Dudamel defied expectations.Dudamel is the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — one of the country’s top orchestras — a collaborator of choice for pop artists like Billie Eilish and the voice of Wolfgang Amadeus Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour.”But at Carnegie, this celebrity conductor refused to take a solo bow, choosing instead to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Los Angeles players and absorb one standing ovation after another as part of their rank. The only thing that made him pop — besides, of course, his megawatt charisma, corkscrew curls and elegantly powerful restraint on the podium — was his white dress shirt amid a sea of black.Dudamel’s personal appeal and his ability to fire a city’s — and donors’ — enthusiasm for classical music have landed him on wish lists for the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic if he doesn’t renew his contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which ends in 2026. (Jaap van Zweden, New York’s maestro, is leaving in 2024.)On Tuesday night, Dudamel conducted the New York premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s blazing violin concerto “Altar de Cuerda,” with the stupendous soloist María Dueñas, and Mahler’s First Symphony. The next night, he and his players unveiled two more local premieres — Ortiz’s brief “Kauyumari” and, with the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, Arturo Márquez’s “Fandango,” along with Copland’s Third Symphony.The new pieces brought undeniable pizazz to Dudamel’s tightly conceived programs, in which passing similarities among the works encouraged listeners to draw connections.“Altar de Cuerda,” or “String Altar” — the seventh of Ortiz’s “Altar” pieces — set a high bar that was unsurpassed over the two nights. It begins with a scorching statement in the violin, with whacks of triangle and crotales (spooky sounding cymbals) that rise off the stage like puffs of smoke in a roiling brew. At a few points, the woodwind and brass musicians played tuned crystal cups that conjured ritualistic magic.Little of what Ortiz wrote for the solo violinist is classically beautiful, yet Dueñas was wholly captivating. Her tone was scratchy and possessed in fiendish runs, leaps and double and triple stops. She could also produce brilliance and high-frequency top notes that pinged like artificial sound effects. Low-pitched trills had a guttural quality, and she slashed at the violin so furiously she could have drawn blood from its strings.Dueñas, the soloist in Ortiz’s “Altar de Cuerda,” was wholly captivating.Chris LeeFor the cadenza, Dueñas played a series of repeated figures in a free tempo, like an actor teasing out the subtleties of a line with different inflections. The emotions, though, weren’t merely joy and sadness; there was also worry, self-consciousness, maybe even shame.Remarkably, Dueñas is just 19 years old.Dudamel expertly controlled the coiled tension of “Altar de Cuerda,” a feat he repeated with the Ortiz piece that opened the second night’s program. He clearly connects with her compositions; he organized the irrepressible energy of “Kauyumari” into a churning engine of sound, and its fanfares presaged the arrival of Copland’s symphony — with its interpolation of “Fanfare for the Common Man” — after intermission.Where “Kauyumari” draws on a Mexican creation story, Márquez’s “Fandango” draws on that country’s music, turning the orchestra into a lively rhythm section that allowed Meyers’s violin to sing with a silky tone, even if her passagework could be difficult to hear.The Mahler and Copland symphonies, the evenings’ longest pieces, took pride of place after intermission on their programs. Each begins with the falling interval of a fourth in the woodwinds, supported by strings, but the effect couldn’t be more different. In the Mahler, there’s traditionally an eerie evocation, a world of frost gently warming to life. Dudamel’s rendition felt plain; he seemed much more at ease with the hopeful yearning of Copland’s open octaves — upright, columnar, blindingly bright.In both symphonies, Dudamel subverted tradition. Conductors tend to emphasize the grotesque elements of Mahler’s First, but Dudamel aligned himself with the flute’s fluttery bird song over the clarinet’s bizarre, intriguing cuckoo calls and the heroic horns over the blaring, nasally trumpets. In the Copland, you would never have recognized the second movement’s almost twee character in Dudamel’s insistent, spirited treatment of its delicately interlocking motivic cells.Ultimately, he brought the pieces closer together — making the Mahler a little more human in its warm, unrushed spaciousness, and the Copland a little more mysterious.Coming out for an encore on Wednesday, Dudamel held up his index finger, as if to say, “OK, we’ll do one more,” and the audience roared. After a brief, whirring, mischievous selection from Copland’s ballet “Billy the Kid,” Dudamel exited, this time for good, and the lights went up.It was the kind of tease that leaves audiences wanting more. And with the question of the New York Philharmonic hanging in the air, it remains to be seen how much more New Yorkers will get.Los Angeles PhilharmonicPerformed on Tuesday and Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More
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Review: A Conductor Takes a Victory Lap With Her Orchestra
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has returned to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, now as a guest, for a tour that stopped at Carnegie Hall.When Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a rapidly rising young Lithuanian conductor, announced last year that she would step down from her post as the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director, her statement had the euphemistic wording of a breakup.“This is a deeply personal decision,” she said at the time, “reflecting my desire to step away from the organizational and administrative responsibilities of being a music director at this particular moment in my life and focusing more on my purely musical activities.”But she was being honest: An outlier in classical music, at 36 she would rather dedicate time to her own interests and her growing family than be tied to an orchestra. When I met her in January, as she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen” in Munich as part of a year dedicated to various iterations of that opera, she said lightheartedly, “I’m not sure the big orchestras will be interested in having me if I say I’ll do only ‘Vixen’ for the whole season.”If more proof of Gražinytė-Tyla’s sincerity were needed, she has also delivered on the final part of her statement that “we shall continue to make music together in the coming years.” She is touring with the Birmingham, England, ensemble, now as its principal guest conductor. One of their stops was at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night: a program that was something of a victory lap not only for her six-season tenure with these players, but also for the group’s pandemic-delayed centennial celebrations from 2020.Among those celebrations was a series of commissions that included Thomas Adès’s “The Exterminating Angel” Symphony, a four-movement adaptation of his 2016 opera that had its New York premiere on Saturday.“The Exterminating Angel” is one of the great operas of our time — a work of wicked humor and dark beauty that befits both the 1962 Luis Buñuel film that inspired it and the overwhelming dread and instability we try to live with today. (Now, its story of surreal, indefinite imprisonment in a single room comes off as prescient and all too familiar.) The sound world Adès conjures throughout is dramaturgically airtight: shifting harmonies, the eeriness of an ondes Martenot, dense forces of cosmic immensity.It’s a lot to take in, and there have been few opportunities; “The Exterminating Angel” is an expensive production, with a sprawling principal cast and an orchestra of Wagnerian heft. Adès conducted the American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 2017, and given the house’s unreliable continued support of contemporary work, however successful, it’s difficult to imagine a revival any time soon.Thankfully, Adès has made further music from the score: the solo piano Berceuse, written for Kirill Gerstein, and this symphony, which cleverly echoes the opera without excerpting it. Gone is the eerie ondes Martenot, though it lives on in swinging glissandos in the strings; still intact, however, is the opera’s excess and horror, made all the more unsettling by the orchestra’s coolly crisp, virtually objective delivery on Saturday.The first movement, “Entrances,” nods at the grotesquerie and layered textures of the opening scene; “March,” from an interlude between Acts I and II, could just as easily be called “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Firing Squad,” with martial terrors reminiscent of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. The grim lyricism of Adès’s love songs and lullabies returns with another Berceuse, followed by the finale, “Waltzes,” a rhapsodic assemblage that evolves into a relentless danse macabre analogue to the opera itself.Had the symphony not come after an intermission, it would have been a whiplash response to the work that opened the program: Elgar’s sparely orchestrated and often quiet Cello Concerto in E minor, featuring Sheku Kanneh-Mason as the soloist. He’s an expressive musician, who defaults to a wide, emotive vibrato — especially in his encore, a harmonious arrangement of Bach’s “Komm, süsser Tod” for five cellists. Gražinytė-Tyla deferred to him as the concerto’s narrator, with modest accompaniment and rarely blooming grandeur.And a compelling narrator he was. Kanneh-Mason plays with the seeming spontaneity that can come only from extreme discipline, but also a freedom that occasionally slides into flawed intonation. And in a work as plain-spoken as the Elgar, his elevated articulation was more Shakespeare than, say, the Chekhov it should have been. But all that could be forgiven for the sheer charisma of his performance.The most traditional showcase of the Birmingham ensemble’s sound under Gražinytė-Tyla was in Debussy’s “La Mer,” which closed the evening in a transparent interpretation that revealed the piece’s rich, subtly maximal orchestration. Gražinytė-Tyla’s reading wasn’t the most volatile, but it was revealing in its clarity, balancing texture upon texture below a gracefully buoyant melody in the brasses or winds.Players in every section of the orchestra responded to her gestures — sometimes efficiently small, sometimes evocative of a swerve or plunge — with lived-in ease. Gražinytė-Tyla might not be attached to them full time, but neither is she fully detached. Whatever she has decided to do, to reconcile her own interests with that of this orchestra, it’s working.City of Birmingham Symphony OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More
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Review: Igor Levit Takes on a Shostakovich Kaleidoscope
The pianist returned to Carnegie Hall with the first complete performance of the 24 Preludes and Fugues there.The pianist Igor Levit presents compelling ideas with a remarkable ease.On his most recent album, “Tristan,” he casually posits a connection between the well-known grandness of Wagner and the less-recognized grandeur of the 20th-century modernist Hans Werner Henze. Outside the concert hall, Levit has mastered the art of social media — both as a musician and a passionately political civilian — and conducted sustained, substantive conversations with journalists, whether for his book “House Concert” (whose English translation comes out in the United States in January) or the recent documentary “Igor Levit — No Fear” (out now in Europe).Given his multifaceted public profile, it can be possible to lose sight of his artistry. But on Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall, Levit brought the focus back to the piano.He played just one work: Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. That music, though — inspired by Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and written in the early 1950s, during one of Shostakovich’s frequent bouts of official Soviet censure — is a marathon, a two-and-a-half-hour kaleidoscope of melodic and harmonic invention. Until Tuesday, it had never been performed in its entirety at Carnegie.Levit released a recording of the Preludes and Fugues with Sony Classical in 2021, so the evening also provided an opportunity to hear him continue a conversation with Shostakovich. On Tuesday, that dialogue was rich in risk taking, and rewarding. From the first prelude, in C, Levit’s daring tempo — much slower than on his album — made clear that he was not on autopilot, but taking advantage of the Stern Auditorium’s resonance to consider the music anew.But if the first pair seemed to signal a gentler interpretation more broadly, Levit dispelled the notion with a flashy, upbeat second prelude. Live, as on disc, he proved as fleet as Keith Jarrett (whose recording of the work came out in 1992) or Tatiana Nikolayeva (who gave it its public premiere in 1952). Yet Levit produced his devilish speed with even articulation, bringing to mind Glenn Gould’s mature Bach. And the second fugue made clear that Levit would push into louder dynamics, too.Throughout the evening’s first half, Levit offered contrast after contrast. Using Carnegie’s acoustics, he emphasized Shostakovich’s prismatic writing, as when the cautiously eerie beginning of the fourth prelude was juxtaposed with a hazy, enveloping account of its partner fugue.And Levit made connections within this mammoth work. The dotted-note patterns of the sixth prelude sounded more joyous here than on Levit’s starker recording, and suggested an affinity with the more obviously lighthearted 11th prelude. Elsewhere, a forceful bass voice in the eighth fugue served as a preview of the climactic wallops in the ninth and 12th fugues.After intermission, Levit’s account of the final 12 preludes and fugues did not move along with the same thrills. That might have been by design — a decision to slacken the pace of interpretive variation so that big moments could come across even more powerfully. Or it could have been that work’s immensity was taking its toll, since Levit frequently stretched his right arm and wrist, as though he were trying to wring out pain.Whatever the cause, some stretches felt underdramatized. Still, Levit saved enough power for the big moments — especially the 15th prelude and fugue.Officially in the key of D flat, it’s more a flirtation with crunchy, 12-tone modernism. Some artists treat every musical reference in Shostakovich as an opportunity for a broad joke, but Levit’s unalloyed sincerity as a performer steers him away from that — which paid off marvelously here as he unfurled a prelude and fugue that sang out even while rumbling and barreling along.After the conclusion of the 15th fugue, someone in the audience let out an admiring, brisk “bravo.” Then more applause rippled out from the Carnegie crowd, which up until then had been respectfully silent.There was pleasant laughter — and then even more forceful applause, which Levit gratefully acknowledged before continuing. This truly spontaneous ovation was another reminder of Levit’s power as a musician: He turned a moment of atonal imitation into the pinnacle of the evening.Igor LevitPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More
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In New York, Masks Will Not Be Required at the Opera or Ballet
Many arts groups, worried about alienating older patrons, have maintained strict rules. Now “the time has come to move on,” one leader said.Masks are no longer required in New York City schools, gyms, taxis and most theaters. But a night at the opera or the ballet still involves putting on a proper face covering.That will soon change. Several of the city’s leading performing arts organizations — including the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and New York City Ballet — announced on Monday that masks would now be optional, citing demands from audience members and a recent decline in coronavirus cases.“The time has come to move on,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.The Met, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic will end mask requirements on Oct. 24, along with Film at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. The David H. Koch Theater, home to City Ballet, will follow on Nov. 1. Two venues on the Lincoln Center campus, the Mitzi E. Newhouse and Claire Tow theaters, will maintain their mandates.The decision is a milestone for classical, dance and opera institutions, which had been among the most resistant to relaxing mask rules — wary of alienating older patrons, who represent a large share of ticket buyers. As coronavirus infections have declined and masks have vanished from many other settings, arts groups are feeling pressure from audiences to make a change.At the Met, for example, only about a quarter of ticket buyers said in a survey last month that they would feel uncomfortable attending a performance if masks were optional. Over the summer, that number had been close to 70 percent.“People’s attitudes are changing,” Gelb said. He hoped that relaxing the rules would help make the Met more accessible to “younger audiences who really don’t want to wear a mask.” With the elimination of the mandate, the company will also reopen its bars, many of which have remained closed during the pandemic.Proof of vaccination, as well as masks, were required to gain entry to many venues starting last year, when arts organizations returned to the stage after a long shutdown. Over the summer, however, as hospitalizations and deaths declined, many groups began to ease their rules. Broadway theaters (with a few exceptions) dropped the vaccine requirement on May 1, and the mask mandate on July 1.While most classical, opera and dance groups eliminated the vaccine requirement this fall, many kept in place strict mask mandates on the advice of medical advisers. The question of masks posed a challenge for many groups; they risked alienating some ticket buyers, no matter how they proceeded.At the Met, stage managers have delivered announcements from the stage before each performance reminding audiences to keep masks on for the duration of opera. At Carnegie Hall, ushers have checked each row and called out people who were not wearing masks.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the hall kept mask rules in place this fall because of lingering concerns about the virus among some medical advisers and audience members. But it decided to make a change after medical advisers said it could operate safely without masks, and after complaints from the audience were growing.“Ushers were finding it actually quite difficult because a lot of people were very annoyed having to still wear masks when in most of their lives they’re no longer doing so,” Gillinson said in an interview.By eliminating the mask rules, arts leaders hope they can help restore a sense of normalcy at a time when many groups are struggling to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic. While live performance is flourishing once again in New York and across the United States, audiences have been slow to return.Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview that the mask rules could change if the virus emerged as a deadly threat once again.“This is an ever-evolving situation,” she said. “We will stay on top of whatever the current medical protocol dictates.”But for now, she said, it is time to change focus.“We feel it’s important that we do our part to help the city return to a much more normal state of affairs,” she said, “and to encourage people to come back into the city and to reinvigorate the economy.” More
