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      Review: Daniel Barenboim Misses His American Swan Song

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      The ailing conductor was to have led the Staatskapelle Berlin in Brahms’s symphonies at Carnegie Hall. Yannick Nézet-Séguin jumped in.On Jan. 20, 1957, a 14-year-old pianist named Daniel Barenboim made his Carnegie Hall debut, playing a Prokofiev concerto. In 1968, just 25, he appeared at the hall for the first time as a conductor.Some 150 Carnegie performances later, Barenboim, now 81 and one of the great musical figures of our time, was to have returned this week to conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin in Brahms’s four symphonies over two evenings, Thursday and Friday.But earlier this year, health issues forced him from the Staatskapelle’s podium, where he had reigned since the early 1990s. And while he had still hoped to travel to Carnegie with the orchestra as part of a four-city North American tour, those health problems ended up making the trip impossible. It would have been a poignant American swan song for Barenboim, bringing him not just to Carnegie but also to Chicago, where he led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 2006.In September, Christian Thielemann, 64, a master of Austro-German classics like Brahms’s symphonies, was named Barenboim’s replacement at the Staatskapelle, which is also the pit orchestra of the Berlin State Opera. But Thielemann couldn’t take on the tour.Instead, the ensemble looked to younger conductors: Giedre Slekyte for a performance in Toronto; Jakub Hrusa in Chicago; and, in New York and Philadelphia, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera (where he’s currently leading “Florencia en el Amazonas”) and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin has been Carnegie’s omnipresent man of late, appearing at the hall two dozen times since fall 2021 alone. And he’s been a dependable luxury substitute there, having jumped in for three dates with the Vienna Philharmonic at the dawn of the Russian war in Ukraine last year, when Valery Gergiev was forced off the programs under pressure.This was a shotgun wedding — “spontaneous,” as Nézet-Séguin put it in remarks from the podium at the end of the first Staatskapelle concert on Thursday, thanking the orchestra and sending good wishes to Barenboim. Nézet-Séguin hadn’t led the ensemble in 10 years, and it felt that way: sometimes excitingly volatile, sometimes unsettled.Brahms’s first and second symphonies were featured on the program, with the third and fourth to follow on Friday and in Philadelphia on Sunday. This orchestra is experienced in balancing Brahms’s winding, saturnine lines with his restless energy; the violins irradiate these scores, with a sound under pressure that’s slicing and white hot but never harsh.In the First Symphony, Nézet-Séguin nudged the ensemble toward slower slows and faster fasts, with high-wire, occasionally vague or nervous transitions between sections in the first movement. In the second movement, the strings glowed as they surrounded the wind solos. And while the soft initial statement of the brass chorale in the finale was seductively transparent, with each instrument’s layer audible in the sedimentary whole, that chorale’s restatement at the end was breathlessly sped through.The brighter-spirited Second Symphony felt more comfortably lived in, with a glistening, lightly frosted, even dreamlike sound in the first movement. The opening of the second was lovingly conducted, with a modest dignity to the theme and vigor in the rest.It would have been meaningful to be able to show our gratitude to Barenboim this week: for all the performances, for all the recordings, for all the sense he has conveyed that classical musicians can and should be vital parts of civic life.His albums, of course, will remain with us. Hopefully, so will the institutions he founded, like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a project he conceived with Edward Said and dedicated to breaking down barriers in the Middle East.We in New York are left thinking back to what will likely end up being his final Carnegie appearances: a triumphant Bruckner cycle with the Staatskapelle in 2017, nine concerts in which he paired those sprawling symphonies with Mozart piano concertos, conducted from the keyboard. This was the king in full, thrilling command, the way he would want to be remembered.Staatskapelle BerlinThe orchestra will play Brahms at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan on Friday and at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia on Sunday; philorch.org. More

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      Review: With Premieres, an Orchestra Keeps Facing Forward

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      The American Composers Orchestra, which occupies an essential place in the New York scene, presented an evening of several new works at Zankel Hall.Pity the American composer interested in writing orchestral music. Unless your last name is Glass, Reich or Adams, opportunities are destined to come few and far between.But one institution bucks this regrettable trend. The focus of the American Composers Orchestra is right there in its name: Its website specifies an intention to spotlight “the infinite variety of American orchestral music, reflecting gender, racial, ethnic, geographic, stylistic and age diversity.”On Thursday night at Zankel Hall in Manhattan, the orchestra did its mission proud. There was a significant amount of music from veterans of the American experimental scene: Augusta Read Thomas’s “Sun Dance — In memoriam Oliver Knussen” and George E. Lewis’s “Weathering.” Pieces by the younger composers Nina C. Young and Jack Hughes offered distinct ways of engaging the tradition of tonal writing, and Guillermo Klein’s “The Kingdom” offered some of the poised polystylism familiar from his work as a pianist and bandleader.With the exception of Thomas’s work, a local premiere, every piece on Thursday was being given its world premiere. All told, the program’s 70 minutes of playing were equal to the amount of new American orchestral music that you might catch in an especially ambitious month of, say, the New York Philharmonic’s season.Led by Vimbayi Kaziboni, the American Composers Orchestra gave an impressive account of the varied works, even if there were occasional hints that this program had tested the limited rehearsal time available for it — as in some blurred brass articulation in Thomas’s hard-riffing, six-minute tribute to Knussen. But overall, the ensemble’s sound was a pleasure to hear, across pieces that were all worth hearing.“Weathering,” a bustling, impassioned 15-minute work, continued Lewis’s sterling recent run of music for large forces. (How long until the Philharmonic, his local symphony, recognizes the merit of his orchestral catalog?) Speaking from the stage before the performance, he compared the title with the endurance required in the face of racist microaggressions. He advertised a noisy “weathering” chord that he said depicted this ritual annoyance. It was indeed noisy, and did indeed recur. But it was also not narrowly didactic: His packed yet considered orchestrations connote a generous spirit — even, or particularly, in moments of carefully chiseled chromatic density.Lewis’s “weathering” chord, then, cut a wry, playful figure whenever it appeared. And the balance of his writing was riveting, with different elements catching the ear in near simultaneity. One such moment of supple rhythmic patterning came from a pair of percussionists playing gongs that led to a wisp of luminous harp writing and droning in the woodwinds. Kaziboni shaped this hyperactive swirl with crucial attention to dynamics. At one juncture, he let the orchestra rip with a loud chord, then pared things back to cradle a crying articulation in the trumpets.Discussions of tonal contemporary music sometime fall into the cliché of calling any such works “lushly” melodic. So give Hughes credit: His motivic sense in “Three Ways of Getting There” on Thursday was robust and convincing. And yet his accompanying orchestration didn’t operate with any boring received wisdom. In the first movement, as an undulating-then-rising melodic figure was passed among the strings, there was also tartness that offered a clever way of scrambling expected codes for conventional melody. (Tuneful and finely textured, “Three Ways” makes you wonder what Hughes would do with an opera commission.)

      Los Guachos Cristal by Guillermo KleinAfter intermission, “The Kingdom” offered some of the characteristic complexity of Klein, a pianist-composer known for writing harmonically stacked material for his jazz ensemble, Los Guachos. Where his recordings spoil listeners with fine-drilled detail, some moments of Thursday’s performance had me wondering about intonation: Passages of polyphonic sourness could seem slightly overdone, even though I left wanting to hear the piece again.I had a similar reaction to Young’s “Out of whose womb came the ice,” a 28-minute monodrama for orchestra and baritone (Sidney Outlaw, sounding richly impassioned). Inspired by Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic exploration, it was full of spacious expanses and some stark, well judged dramatic pivots. Not all those were obviously loud in nature: At multiple junctures, Young skillfully depicted hope breaking down through a subtly unspooling, solo instrumental line, amid keening hazes of arid orchestration.But the text, by Young and David Tinervia, overindulged in nautical coordinates and other technical language. It also stinted on some of the concepts Young described more expansively in a program note — specifically, her interest in the crew’s “perception of the Endurance in relationship to their surroundings.” Her electronic elements, while well produced, tended to distract attention from the orchestral momentum. And R. Luke Dubois’s accompanying video design was likewise too often literal, depicting blocks of ice in various stages of melting.It’s unfortunate that Thursday’s program was a one-off performance. Still, Kaziboni and the players were skilled champions of the music. And the focused attention of a robust crowd of listeners was an indication that this group’s necessary interventions have a ready, supportive local audience.American Composers OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      The Kronos Quartet Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary

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      The group, which celebrated its birthday on Friday at Carnegie Hall, changed music with its open-eared and open-minded approach.Late one night in 1973, a young violinist named David Harrington was listening to the radio. He heard some music that was just a few years old: George Crumb’s “Black Angels,” a harsh and eerie, prayerful and screaming piece for amplified string quartet, full of grief and anger about the quagmire in Vietnam.“A lot of people my age,” Harrington recalled in a recent interview, “were desperately trying to find work that felt like it somehow related to what we were experiencing, what our country had been going through.”For him, “Black Angels” was it. “I thought, I don’t have any choice,” he said. “I have to play that piece.”Harrington got three friends together and, with the help of a Greco-Roman mythological dictionary to brainstorm a name, the Kronos Quartet was born with a vision, then rare, of focusing on new and recent compositions.Fifty years, and over 1,000 fresh works and arrangements later — an anniversary and achievement celebrated on Friday with a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall — the group has changed the music world.When Kronos formed, contemporary music was widely viewed as mathematically rigid and atonal: unlistenable audience poison. Buoyed by dramatic stage lighting, trendy clothes and passionate, eclectic performances and recordings, the quartet showed that a new approach to the new could fill halls and draw young crowds.Kronos proved that composers working in different idioms than standard-issue modernism — like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov — could become core string quartet material, as could world traditions and collaborators on nonwestern instruments. A quartet could adapt the music of far-afield artists like Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Astor Piazzolla and Sigur Rós, and could define the hard-edge soundtracks of films like “Requiem for a Dream.”Kronos and dozens of collaborators ended the quartet’s anniversary concert at Carnegie with a performance of Terry Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector.”Stephanie BergerThe group didn’t necessarily shy from modernism and its tough descendants — the likes of Schnittke and Zorn — but it did play that music in welcoming company on its programs, and with populist theatricality. At one 1987 show, a New York Times review noted, the modernist composer Elliott Carter sat next to Sting, which says it all.For all its variety, Kronos had a point of view, an aesthetic, a brand. Few if any ensembles of any size before it had been so flexible, open-eared and open-minded.“I can’t think of a more significant player in terms of contemporary music becoming seen as fun and enjoyable,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director. “It’s not a risk. It’s music you’ve never heard before, but you’re going to enjoy it.”Not everyone was convinced. Some sniffed that the group too often tipped into wan crossover. Some found the energy good-natured but the playing a little ragged. Some thought the showy lighting and sound were overwrought. Some rolled their eyes at an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” that was once a standby for Kronos encores.But playing Hendrix was a sincere gesture, the symbolic move of a quartet seizing the whole of music for its own and boldly crossing traditional genre — as well as racial, national, ethnic and gender — divides. This was, after all, the era of “Graceland,” Paul Simon’s blockbuster 1986 album, and some of Kronos’s defining recordings were in that globe-trotting spirit: “Pieces of Africa” (1992), the omnivorous “Caravan” (2000) and “Nuevo” (2002), which explored Mexican classical, folk and pop.Like the more traditionally minded Emerson String Quartet, also formed in the mid-1970s, Kronos was lucky to come of age during the CD boom — Emerson on the august label Deutsche Grammophon, Kronos on hip Nonesuch.The 1997 album “Early Music” was a surprising dip into medieval repertoire — but typical of Kronos in that it combined arrangements of Machaut, Pérotin and Hildegard with Cage, Schnittke, Pärt, Scandinavian fiddling and Tuvan chant, closing with a minute and a half of bells tolling at a monastery in France.This was a narrative approach to recording, rather than one of just stacking pieces, at a time when projects like that were hardly mainstream in the classical world.“What were thought of as these wacky ideas are very much normal now,” said Andrew Yee, the cellist of the Attacca Quartet. “Everyone — all the young quartets — has at least a small part of Kronos built into their DNA.”The Canadian Inuk vocalist and composer Tanya Tagaq, center, joined the quartet at the concert.Stephanie BergerFriday’s concert embodied the Kronos spirit, with a parade of collaborators from around the world, multimedia elements and sound effects, in works that often had an earnest, liberal political message. In one piece, the writer Ariel Aberg-Riger recited a plain-spoken account of the life of the conservationist Rachel Carson as the quartet underscored her. During another, the Canadian Inuk vocalist and composer Tanya Tagaq roared “You colonizer!” over and over.Laurie Anderson was her usual gnomically witty, poignant presence for part of “Landfall,” her 2012 work with the quartet about climate and loss. Roots Americana was on the program, as was one of Kronos’s Mexican arrangements, Indonesian sinden (a style of gamelan singing) and Bollywood. A longtime collaborator, the pipa virtuoso Wu Man, was featured in an excerpt from her “Two Chinese Paintings.”Dozens of musicians joined for the finale, Terry Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector” (1980). An initially minor-key, slightly melancholy, ultimately propulsive jam, it is a wistful counterpart to the composer’s “In C.” Most moving was the spectacle: Many of those onstage hadn’t yet been born when Kronos formed.Laurie Anderson joined Friday’s performance with part of her 2012 work “Landfall.”Stephanie BergerThe evening passed in something of a blur of activity, which is not unusual for the quartet. The group has done — and still does — so much that it can be easy to take it and its impact for granted.“One of our jobs,” Harrington said, “is to make it seem like music just falls out of the sky.”There is so much music, of so many kinds, that if one piece or album doesn’t appeal, the next very well might. “The Kronos does not guarantee profundity,” Bernard Holland wrote in The Times in 2006. “It just likes to keep the conversation going.”Early on, Kronos created a nonprofit arm that let the quartet raise money, sponsor ambitious initiatives and commission music on its own, rather than depending on composers and presenters. The group’s recently completed “50 for the Future” project commissioned dozens of new pieces designed for young players and made them available online for free.This is the work of a quartet with its legacy in mind, but there are no plans for Kronos to disband. An ensemble constantly chasing newness may be less beholden to a given set of players than a more traditional quartet. Harrington, of course, has been with the group from the beginning, and the violinist John Sherba and the violist Hank Dutt since the late ’70s. The cello chair, long held by Joan Jeanrenaud, has had some more turnover; Paul Wiancko, a generation younger than the others, joined earlier this year.At 74, Harrington demurs when retirement — “the R word,” as he called it in a short documentary screened at Carnegie — comes up. “There’s nothing else I’ve seen in life that would be half as interesting as this,” he said in the interview. “The idea of stepping away from it is impossible.”That said, he added: “I can imagine this group continuing on and on. I want it to be the most activist, energetic, energizing ensemble in the universe. If we can make it that way, I don’t think it should be restricted by my own lifetime.” More

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      Back-to-Back Premieres Defy a Season of Leaner Offerings

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      Institutions are cutting back, but in corners of the city there is still new music to be found, like song cycles by Ted Hearne and Paul Pinto.New York classical music institutions are in a period of economic challenges. This season, the Metropolitan Opera is dark more nights than in the past. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the historic Next Wave Festival is a shadow of its former self.Yet if you know where to look — at venues large and small — the city still has plenty to fill a calendar. Just on Thursday and Friday, for example, there were back-to-back premieres of ambitious song cycles by living composers.On Thursday, Paul Pinto’s “The Approach” — a multimedia, dramatic work written for the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble — was unveiled at Merkin Hall. And the next night, at Zankel Hall, Ted Hearne brought his “Dorothea,” built around poems by Dorothea Lasky, to New York for the first time.To my ear, Pinto’s music for Quince was the stunner of this pair. But after a slow start on Friday, Hearne’s cycle also flashed some of the refinement of his earlier works. He has been adept at using chamber music, rock and electronic instrumentation, and in the oratorio “The Source,” found poetry even in material from WikiLeaks. But the first half of “Dorothea” felt strangely static for a composer-performer of such successful eclecticism.This was due, in part, to an overreliance on the composer’s own singing voice, his tenor electronically altered. Past projects, like “Place” and “Outlanders,” have seen Hearne writing for multiple singers, not to mention multiple facets of himself. But the early portion of “Dorothea” was dominated by steady Auto-Tune style.The effect could be appropriately lovelorn, or weary, as guided by Lasky’s texts. But this digital sheen also eclipsed the contributions of the other artists onstage. Outside of a few choice moments, his fellow performers — like the electric guitarist Taylor Levine or the vocalist Eliza Bagg — could seem sidelined by the digital tweaking of Hearne’s voice.There was a breakthrough, however, with “Complainers,” the eighth of about a baker’s dozen songs, sung by Bagg. Hearne’s comparatively spare, effective setting showed off this vocalist’s luminous sound in Lasky’s sardonic poetry, beginning with the line “Some people don’t want to die/Because you can’t complain when you’re dead.”When Hearne returned as lead singer, in “Another World,” his vocals were less futzed-with, and for the better. He and the band channeled some of Depeche Mode’s booming goth glamour. From there, the balance of the evening did not merely suggest R&B grooves or rock energy from one moment to the next; instead, the songs claimed those textures more sturdily.Thursday’s performance, of the first three “episodes” of Pinto’s “The Approach,” was, at just over 40 minutes, about half as long as “Dorothea.” But it still felt like a full meal, and an inspired one.Conceived as an “episodic, magical-realist song cycle” that is also a “love story for and about the women of Quince,” Pinto’s narrative has a winking, fourth-wall-breaking quality. In his libretto, the Quince singers experience a meet-cute with a female sailor on the subway after a rehearsal. (The flirting commences with a stretch of mysterious, brazen blinking.)When not making use of Quince’s polyphonic skills, Pinto also gives each member of the quartet subjective space for solitary meditations similar to arias. His conceit carries traces of the comic-philosophic operas of Robert Ashley. The aesthetic tends toward the chatty, and is strewn with drone-style phrases. And Pinto comes by this influence honestly: As a vocalist, he has been a key part of recent revivals of Ashley’s stage works.But “The Approach” also displays Pinto’s own innovations. For one thing, his texts tend to move with blitzing speed. (The score specifies 220 words per minute at select frenetic junctures.) And although Ashley’s operas include stray pop-song interludes, Pinto pushes for more songfulness; in excerpts that Pinto has posted online, you can hear him reveling in the gleaming harmonic interplay made possible by Quince.

      The Approach Episode 2 lyric video from Paul Pinto on Vimeo.At Merkin Hall, “The Approach” was staged — modestly, yet stylishly. The Quince singers wore gowns that seemed to line up with the moody sobriquets of their respective characters. Kayleigh Butcher, a mezzo-soprano and Quince’s executive director, wore a dress of green and brown bordering on burnished-gold, a color pattern that seemed to fit her character’s designation as “The Sad One.” Lyric-quoting videos of Pinto’s design also helped the audience to keep track of the swift moving text.Quince’s sound, though, was appropriately the true star. And the group offered more in Thursday’s program: “her lover’s hand,” a satisfying, folk-inflected three-song suite from composer Annika Socolofsky. Pinto sang as well, preceding “The Approach” with “On Shaller Brown,” his arrangement of the much-adapted work song.

      He accompanied himself on piano, while singing with rich textural depth. At one point, video art on the screen behind him instructed audience members to imagine a big chorus joining him, before noting that such a large cohort was beyond this project’s budget.There was knowing laughter in the audience. Nothing, though, felt cheap about this ecstatic, richly rewarding show. Pinto’s music proved that tough times of leaner budgets don’t require reduced ambitions. More

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      Review: Years Late, a Young Pianist Finally Gets to Carnegie

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      Alexandre Kantorow made his Carnegie Hall recital debut after winning both the International Tchaikovsky Competition and the Gilmore Artist Award.The French pianist Alexandre Kantorow was supposed to make his Carnegie Hall recital debut on March 25, 2020, as a late replacement for the ailing Murray Perahia. We know what happened with that.When Kantorow, 26, finally made it to Carnegie on Sunday afternoon, it was again as a substitute for an eminent colleague, this time Maurizio Pollini. The symbolism of the rise of a new generation of performers was hard for me to miss, especially since after Kantorow’s recital, I walked to Alice Tully Hall to witness the Emerson String Quartet’s exquisite retirement concert.This wasn’t Kantorow’s first time playing at Carnegie; he performed two pieces at Zankel Hall in 2019, as one of the winners of that year’s International Tchaikovsky Competition. But Sunday’s very fine recital, on the hall’s main stage, was a wholly different kind of platform.And he arrived with expectations ratcheted up even higher than if he had merely (ha) won the Tchaikovsky. Last month, he received the elusive, prestigious $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given to a pianist every four years after a secretive selection process akin to the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants; Kantorow didn’t know he’d been under consideration until he found out he had won.The stereotype is that competitions mint quick-fingered but mindless virtuosos, while the Gilmore rewards more mature, idiosyncratic artists. To win both the Tchaikovsky and the Gilmore suggests Kantorow has technical security as well as something to say.That felt true on Sunday. A quick glance at the lineup made this seem a potentially tired program: Brahms, Bach, Liszt, Schubert. But Kantorow chose Brahms’s Sonata No. 1, an unwieldy thicket of notes that is hardly a recital chestnut.And the Bach was Brahms’s austerely grand transcription for left hand of the great Violin Chaconne in D Minor, rather than the more popular, gaudier Busoni transcription for both hands. The Liszt was a set of his renderings of Schubert songs, none omnipresent and one never before played at Carnegie. Only Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy” could be called a true standard.As in his recordings of the other two Brahms piano sonatas, Kantorow approached this one with a poetically heavy use of rubato, the expressive stretching and pressing of tempo from moment to moment.It was often beautiful; in the first movement, the section before the recapitulation of the theme gave the sense of emerging from fire into quiet, snowy night. And — or, depending on your preferences, but — it conveyed atmosphere better than structure.Kantorow brought a peppery spirit to the Scherzo that turned it into something of a danse macabre. Both this and the fourth movement were exceptionally, even a little drainingly fast — more Presto than Allegro — but never muddied.His account of Brahms’s Bach was rigorous yet rich, with well-judged ebbs and flows of intensity and amplitude. Of the five Liszt-Schubert transcriptions, most interesting was the one new to Carnegie: “Die Stadt,” a collision of the song’s moodiness with Lisztian extroversion, sprays of notes drizzling out of the gloom.It attests to Kantorow’s subtlety and focus that there was no applause between these pieces and the “Wanderer Fantasy,” which felt as if it had emerged from Schubert’s songs — the opening more modest and lyrical than the usual bombast. This was assured, eloquent playing, the lines clear and balanced in each hand even in the chaos near the end of the piece.There is intriguing tension between Kantorow’s lucid, pearly touch and the Romantic wildness of his music-making. The two sides were in memorable balance in his encores: transcriptions of “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila,” and the finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” They brought together suavity and showmanship.Alexandre KantorowPerformed on Sunday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Riccardo Muti Takes a Victory Lap With the Chicago Symphony

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      The orchestra’s former conductor — now its music director emeritus for life — opened Carnegie Hall’s season with a two-night engagement.When Riccardo Muti stepped down from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra last season, after 13 years as its conductor, the ensemble promptly turned around and named him music director emeritus for life.In a two-part season opener at Carnegie Hall this week, it was easy to hear why.Under Muti, the Chicago Symphony is all power and finesse with no unsightly edges. On Wednesday, in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” the orchestra’s playing, strong yet nimble, drew on reserves of unforced power and charm. The following night, in an Italian-themed collection of programmatic works by Mendelssohn, Strauss and Philip Glass, a certain politesse crept into an otherwise classy performance.There’s no better illustration of the orchestra’s might than the final movement of the Mussorgsky, “The Great Gate of Kyiv.” Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s delightful piano suite reaches its apotheosis here, and on Wednesday, Muti built a magnificent edifice out of it, with crashing cymbals, all-out brasses and majestic strings. Using an extreme economy of gesture, he barely had to move for the players to unleash torrents of stupendous, beautifully balanced sound.At the risk of cliché, the ensemble’s remarkable cohesion feels like a kind of Midwestern humility, focusing attention on the music instead of individual players. Tasteful instrumental solos, like that of the concertmaster Robert Chen in Strauss’s “Aus Italien,” didn’t disturb the musical fabric. Technical mastery emerged in what wasn’t there: The heavenly woodwinds were airborne without being breathy, and the guest principal harp, Julia Coronelli, conveyed beauty without pluck in the Strauss and in Glass’s “The Triumph of the Octagon.” Muti’s dynamic mapping avoided jolts or spikes; ardor and neatness coexisted.His “Pictures at an Exhibition” balanced theatricality and unity in the vividly drawn scenarios of Ravel’s orchestration. The first “Promenade,” in which Mussorgsky depicts himself wandering through the art show of his dearly departed friend, the painter Viktor Hartmann, had a gracious, wide-footed gait. Timothy McAllister’s satiny alto saxophone wafted like a mist through the wide stone halls of “The Old Castle.” “Tuileries” traded the unseemly lilt of whining children for a singsong quality. “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” lurched with delicious, brutal violence. Muti interpreted the score’s attacca markings (indicating that the movements should be played without pause) as seamless transitions instead of opportunities for surprise.Leonidas Kavakos, left, was the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on Wednesday night.Todd RosenbergThe orchestra’s plush power in the Tchaikovsky evoked the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, so it’s a shame that the evening’s soloist, Leonidas Kavakos, derailed the performance with curdled tone, sloppy passagework, cracked high notes and tuning issues. There were pretty turns of phrase in the second movement, and Kavakos could hide his unpolished sound in the guttural character of the third. For a performer of a normally high caliber, though, it was a shabby showing.Glass’s “The Triumph of the Octagon,” dedicated to Muti, opened the second night. It’s a 10-minute piece inspired by a photo of a 13th-century Italian castle that Glass saw hanging in the maestro’s studio at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, a memory from Muti’s childhood. The music gradually accumulated a mysterious timelessness with the shifting emphases of its time signatures and the delicate deployment of woodwind timbres.Muti avoided any inkling of stridency in the dashing opening of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, which rushed forward with grace and buoyancy. Melodies intertwined delicately in the Andante. The perpetual motion of the third movement felt unobstructed but also unhurried; the strings played all the way through phrases and left them hanging in the air, and the brasses were unafraid to assume a blanched color to maintain the movement’s particular tint.The elegant passion on display in the Mendelssohn hampered the players in the Strauss, his first tone poem, a piece that wraps together images of Italy with the swooning ecstasies they arouse. Still, some passages are recognizably pictorial, such as the third movement’s suggestion of the shores of Sorrento, with the dappling of the sun on the surface of the sea rendered in shimmery chromaticism. There, the orchestra was quite enchanting, but in the second movement, it lacked punch. Too often, Strauss’s impetuous reveries were flattened into a predictable sameness.A truer sense of romance and spontaneity could be found in the encores on both evenings. They were drawn from Italian opera, a specialty of Muti, who was the longtime music director of Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Following the adrenaline rush of “The Great Gate of Kyiv,” Muti struck up the intermezzo from Giordano’s “Fedora” with seductive vulnerability.On the second night, the overture to Verdi’s “Giovanna d’Arco” had everything the Strauss didn’t: crackling energy and a sense of reveling — not just in the music, but also in the ensemble itself. It provided a handsome, though still subtle, showcase for the winds to take a victory lap — and for Muti to do so too. More

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      The Met’s ‘Dead Man Walking’ Goes to Sing Sing

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      One by one, the inmates filed into a chapel at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y. — past a line of security officers, past a sign reading, “Open wide the door to Christ.” Under stained-glass windows, they formed a circle, introducing themselves to a crowd of visitors as composers, rappers, painters and poets. Then they began to sing.The inmates had gathered one recent afternoon for a rehearsal of “Dead Man Walking,” the death-row tale that opened the Metropolitan Opera season last week. Together, they formed a 14-member chorus that would accompany a group of Met singers for a one-night-only performance of the work before an audience of about 150 of their fellow inmates.“I feel like I’m at home,” said a chorus member, Joseph Striplin, 47, who is serving a life sentence for murder, as the men warmed up with scales and stretches. “I feel I’m alive.”Steven Osgood, the conductor, with Sister Helen Prejean. Osgood rehearsed with the inmates for more than five hours, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics.James Estrin/The New York Times“Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir about her experience trying to save the soul of a convicted murderer at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, has been staged more than 75 times around the world since its premiere in 2000.But the opera, with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Terrence McNally, had never been performed in a prison until last week at Sing Sing, which is home to more than 1,400 inmates.There were no costumes or props. Chorus members, who were dressed in prison-issued green pants, had to be counted and screened before entering the auditorium, lining up by cell block and building number. Arias were sometimes interrupted by the sound of security officers’ radios.Yet the opera, with its themes of sin and redemption — and of the pain endured by victims’ families — resonated with inmates.Michael Shane Hale, an inmate, with Jake Heggie, the composer of “Dead Man Walking” and DiDonato. Working on the opera, Hale said, “reminds you not to get lost in prison.”James Estrin/The New York TimesMichael Shane Hale, 51, a chorus member serving a sentence of 50 years to life for murder, said that he often thought of himself as a monster. In the 1990s, prosecutors sought the death penalty in his case. (New York suspended the practice in 2004.)Hale said the opera, which portrays the friendship between Sister Helen and Joseph De Rocher, a death-row prisoner, had taught him to see his own humanity.“We feel so powerless; we feel so invisible,” Hale said. “It reminds you not to get lost in prison.”Not everyone at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison about 30 miles north of New York City, was enamored. Some prisoners declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injection. Carnegie Hall, which helped to bring the opera to Sing Sing through the education initiative Musical Connections, said that about half of the 30 inmates in the program did not participate. (Musical Connections, which has offered instruction in performance, music theory and composition to inmates since 2009, is among similar projects nationwide that aim to help prisoners connect with society through culture.)In the prison chapel, Wendy Bryn Harmer (at the keyboard) warms up the inmate participants, including Bartholomew Crawford, front. Crawford said the opera offered hope: “It shows you’re not alone in this world.”James Estrin/The New York TimesBartholomew Crawford, 54, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for burglary, said he understood the concerns of his fellow inmates, but that, for him, the opera offered hope.“It shows you’re not alone in this world,” he said. “It shows you that in the darkest hour there’s light somewhere.”The idea for bringing “Dead Man Walking” to Sing Sing emerged several years ago when an inmate promised the renowned singer Joyce DiDonato, who plays Sister Helen in the Met’s production, that the men could sing the chorus parts.“This is not just theater,” said DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015. “This is a story that has real consequences.”An inmate in the choir at Sing Sing. Some prisoners in the Musical Connections program declined to take part in the opera because of concerns about its dark themes, including the portrayal of a prisoner’s death by lethal injectionJames Estrin/The New York TimesFor months, the men at Sing Sing worked on an abridged version of “Dead Man Walking.” Bryan Wagorn, a Met pianist, coached them via video chat and recorded individual chorus parts for them to study. (It took several weeks for the files to clear security.) He joined Manuel Bagorro, who manages Carnegie’s program, on visits to the prison.Paul Cortez, 43, who is serving a sentence of 25 years to life for murder, worked with Wagorn to learn the score and held Saturday night rehearsals with small groups of prisoners at Sing Sing. Some were initially hesitant, unsure if the opera advanced prisoners’ rights and fearing they “might be exploited,” he said, but eventually more people started showing up.“It was daunting at first,” said Cortez, who majored in theater in college. “I did not know how I was going to get the guys in shape. But they were so diligent. They took it seriously.”From left, Sister Helen; Wilson Chimborazo, an inmate who sings in the chorus; McKinny; Joseph Striplin, another inmate singing in the production; and DiDonato.James Estrin/The New York TimesLast month, DiDonato, joined by Sister Helen, 84, visited the prison to work through the music and to get to know the participants. They discussed life in prison, morality, shame and stigma, as well as Sister Helen’s efforts to abolish the death penalty. Some inmates, saying they were still consumed by guilt about their crimes, asked about seeking forgiveness.DiDonato and Sister Helen returned last week, two days after opening night at the Met, joined by singers and staff from the Met and Carnegie Hall, and by Heggie, who offered guidance on adapting the opera for a smaller stage and reviewed some of the inmates’ Musical Connections compositions.“We’ve got each other’s backs,” DiDonato said to everyone as rehearsal got underway. “This, now, is our circle.”DiDonato, who has been visiting Sing Sing since 2015, rehearsing in the chapel with inmates. “This is not just theater,” she said. “This is a story that has real consequences.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe Met singers introduced themselves, taking pains to remind the inmates that they were only pretending to be prison guards and police officers. (“Clemency!” a prisoner shouted, after the bass Raymond Aceto announced he was playing the role of a warden.)Sister Helen, standing among the inmates, said that there was love and trust in the room.“This is a sacred gathering,” she added. “There is no place on earth at this time that I’d rather be. We’re going to create beauty today, and you’re going to feel it.”For more than five hours, the men worked with the Met artists, under the conductor Steven Osgood, practicing rhythm, diction and dynamics in three sections that feature the chorus.They stomped their feet and clapped their hands in “He Will Gather Us Around,” a spiritual that opens the opera, which is typically performed by women and children. And they sang with fiery intensity as De Rocher confesses his murder, shortly before his execution.The Met singers and Sister Helen after the performance. Susan Graham, third from left, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who sings the role of De Rocher, offered encouragement, telling the inmates, “This is your moment to shine.” The soprano Latonia Moore, who performs as Sister Rose, complimented the speed with which they had learned a contemporary opera. “Bravo to you,” she said.And Susan Graham, the mezzo-soprano who plays De Rocher’s mother at the Met and originated the role of Sister Helen at the premiere of “Dead Man Walking” in 2000, told the inmates that she had not fully understood the meaning of the opera until that day.Then, around 6:30 p.m., an audience of inmates and corrections officials took their seats in the auditorium, adjacent to the chapel.“The most beautiful thing in the world is a human being that does something and is transformed,” Sister Helen said in introducing the opera. “Everybody’s worth more than the worst thing they ever did.”“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” DiDonato told the inmates after the performance. “It is embedded in my heart.”James Estrin/The New York TimesThe prisoners watched intensely, tapping their toes on the concrete floor and gasping when an irate De Rocher tells Sister Helen: “You’re not a nun. You’re the angel of death.” One man stood up to applaud a scene near the end when De Rocher and Sister Helen tell each other, “I love you,” shortly before he is killed. After the final rendition of “He Will Gather Us Around,” the audience offered a standing ovation.Chorus members were moved too, including Hale, who said that De Rocher’s confession “blew me away.” He hoped that the opera would inspire inmates to take responsibility for their crimes.“We have to deal with the life we have left and move forward,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing here. You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing.”A guard watches over the production. “You have murderers singing this piece at Sing Sing,” said the inmate Michael Shane Hale.James Estrin/The New York TimesDiDonato told the chorus members that they had created something indelible.“How you lifted your voices tonight — that spirits stays here,” she said. “It is embedded in my heart.”In their few remaining minutes together in the chapel, the prisoners and artists embraced and signed programs. Security officers wandered the pews, reminding the inmates that it was time to go back to their cells.As a guard motioned toward an exit, Cortez thanked DiDonato and the other artists, telling them, “I will never forget this moment.”Then he headed for the door. “Now,” he said, “back to reality.” More

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      Conducting Lessons: How Bradley Cooper Became Leonard Bernstein

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      On a late-spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.Listen to This ArticleListen to this story in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, “Maestro,” which has its North American premiere on Monday at the New York Film Festival.The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.“How many top Hollywood stars can be genuine or interested in that way?” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s then-president and chief executive. “We were really impressed.”Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductor’s box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernstein’s grave, a Jewish rite.Cooper as Bernstein.Jason McDonald/NetflixBernstein as Bernstein, in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York Times“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”Cooper’s time with the Philharmonic was the beginning of an intense five-year period in which he immersed himself in classical music to portray Bernstein, the most influential American maestro of the 20th century and a composer of renown, whose works include not just “West Side Story” but music for the concert hall.He attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Bernstein who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.Cooper has portrayed musicians before: He took piano, guitar and voice lessons for his role as Jackson Maine, a folksy rock star, in the 2018 film “A Star Is Born,” which he also directed.But “Maestro,” in theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20, posed a new challenge. Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure with an exuberant style at the podium. Cooper needed to learn not only to conduct, but also to captivate and seduce like a great maestro.Cooper watched archival footage of Bernstein conducting, and Nézet-Séguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone in which he conducted in Bernstein’s manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernstein’s performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.Nézet-Séguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was “feeling unprotected” and “naked emotionally” on the podium. “He wouldn’t settle for anything less than what he had in mind.”Cooper with Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Ely Cathedral, in England, where Nézet-Séguin coached Cooper for the film’s re-creation of a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra.NetflixCooper, who wrote “Maestro” with Josh Singer, declined to comment for this article because he belongs to the union representing striking actors, which has forbidden its members from promoting studio films. But in a discussion last year with Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional maestro Lydia Tár in “Tár” (2022), he described conducting as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.”He said that people often ask: “What does a conductor even do? Aren’t you just up there doing this?” He waved his arms.“My answer is it’s the absolute hardest thing you could possibly ever want to do,” he said. “It is impossible.”Cooper grew up near Philadelphia surrounded by music. He played the double bass and showed an interest in conducting, inspired by portrayals of mischievous maestros in “Looney Tunes” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. When he was 8, he asked Santa for a baton.“I was obsessed with conducting classical music,” he told Stephen Colbert on the “Late Show” last year. “You know you put your 10,000 hours in for something you never do? I did it for conducting.”Steven Spielberg, who had been planning to direct “Maestro,” was aware of Cooper’s obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that “he’d conduct whatever came out of their hi-fi system at home.”After a screening of “A Star Is Born,” Spielberg was so impressed that he decided to hand “Maestro” over to Cooper, with whom he shares a love of classical music.“It only took me 15 minutes to realize this brilliant actor is equaled only by his skills as a filmmaker,” said Spielberg, who produced the film, along with Cooper and Martin Scorsese.Cooper worked to win the trust of the Bernstein family, including his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who gave the film permission to use their father’s music. (“Maestro” beat out a rival Bernstein project by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal.)Jamie Bernstein said that Cooper seemed “keen to seek an essential authenticity about the story.” He asked questions about her relationship with her father, and he was adept at imitating his gestures, like placing his hand on his hip as he conducted.Cooper visited the family home in Fairfield, Conn., admiring a Steinway piano that Bernstein used to play and examining his belongings: a bathrobe, a blue-striped djellaba, a bottle of German cough syrup that he brought back from a foreign tour.“Channeling a supernova”: Cooper with Gustavo Dudamel at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.Kazu Hiro/Netflix“He was just like a sponge soaking up every detail about our family’s existence that he possibly could,” she said.Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernstein’s batons, to his children. (They defended him recently when he drew criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of Bernstein, who was Jewish.)At the gym, Cooper sometimes wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hunky Brute,” a nickname that Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonic’s brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)Bernstein’s musical career unfolds in the background in “Maestro”; much of the film focuses on his conflicted identity, including his marriage to the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and his dalliances with men.Cooper was eager to approach “Maestro” less as a biography and more as the story of a marriage, Spielberg recalled.While Cooper understood Bernstein’s genius, Spielberg said, he also had “an understanding of the complexities of Felicia’s love for this man, whom she would certainly have to share not only with the world but also with his hungry heart.”The film, shot largely on location, recreates several moments from Bernstein’s career, including his celebrated 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he filled in at the last minute for the ailing conductor Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall.At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, Cooper’s Bernstein is shown leading master classes and driving a sports car with the license plate MAESTRO1 across a pristine lawn as the real Bernstein had done. He visits his mentor, the Russian conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky, who suggests he change his surname to Burns to avoid discrimination.Cooper in the pit at the Metropolitan Opera where he observed Nézet-Séguin during a performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan OperaIn his conducting studies, Cooper spent the most time with Dudamel and Nézet-Séguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he traveled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors’ union.)Cooper stealthily watched Nézet-Séguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Later that year, for Bernstein’s 100th birthday, Nézet-Séguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin said he didn’t set out to give Cooper conducting lessons but to refine his portrayals. “I had to take what he already did as an actor,” he said, “and make it into a frame that was believable.”Nézet-Séguin, who also conducts the film’s soundtrack, helped him find the downbeat for Schumann’s “Manfred” overture, which opened the Carnegie program in 1943. And he assisted Cooper with dialogue for a rehearsal scene of “Candide,” during which he conducts with a cigarette in his mouth.Last fall, Cooper and Nézet-Séguin traveled to Ely Cathedral in England to recreate a 1973 performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, a climactic moment in the film.Cooper, who chose the music in “Maestro,” had studied the piece intensely, watching Bernstein’s performance as well as videos in which Nézet-Séguin dissected Bernstein’s gestures and explained how to count beats.“He would watch the videos,” Nézet-Séguin said, “and then text me and say, ‘Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?”Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nézet-Séguin, wearing a sweater that had belonged to Bernstein, coached Cooper as he rehearsed an eight-minute section of the piece with a recording.When the London Symphony Orchestra arrived, Cooper watched as Nézet-Séguin rehearsed in the style of Bernstein, who often broke the rules of conducting with his animated gestures. Sometimes, Cooper offered suggestions, such as adding tremolo in the strings.When Cooper took the podium, Nézet-Séguin provided occasional direction through an earpiece, advising him to hold onto a moment or let go.The musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were startled by Cooper’s transformation. “It was uncanny,” said Sarah Quinn, a violinist in the orchestra. “It was just kind of a double take.”Throughout his work on “Maestro,” Cooper maintained a connection to the New York Philharmonic, soliciting stories about Bernstein. Van Zweden, who worked with Bernstein in Amsterdam in the 1980s, told him how Bernstein had broken protocol and hugged Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, calling her “darling” and taking a sip of his drink at the same time.Cooper visited Geffen Hall last fall after its $550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonic’s next music director, embracing him and admiring a photo of Bernstein.Over the summer, Cooper invited a few Philharmonic staff members and musicians to his Greenwich Village townhouse for screenings of “Maestro.” The orchestra presented him with a gift: a replica of Bernstein’s Carnegie debut program.“From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernstein’s,” said Carter Brey, the orchestra’s principal cellist, who attended a screening.Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to “channeling a supernova.” He said in a recorded Zoom conversation with Jamie Bernstein last year that her father transmitted his soul through conducting.“The pilot light never went out with him, which is incredible given everything that he saw, experienced, understood, comprehended, bore witness to, even within his own self,” he said in the video. “What a person. What a spirit.”Audio produced by More