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      Review: Lawrence Brownlee Makes Room for Black Composers

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      Often seen onstage as a star of bel canto opera, this tenor crafted a recital of works by Robert Owens, Margaret Bonds and their successors.“Wow, I need to take you all wherever I go,” the tenor Lawrence Brownlee told the audience when his return to the stage was met with raucous applause after the intermission of his concert at Zankel Hall on Thursday.It seemed, even, like every blistering high note, well-turned melisma and swooning falsetto note was greeted with hums of approval and the occasional shout of “C’mon!” Brownlee gave a lot of himself, and the audience was there to receive it.Thursday’s program, “Rising,” performed with the pianist Kevin J. Miller, was, Brownlee said, conceived during the uncertainty of the pandemic. It was hard to tell what the future might hold, he said, but in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, he sensed that allies were “beginning to make space” for Black voices.Brownlee wanted to make room, too. As an opera star, he regularly spreads the gospel of Strauss, Debussy and Mozart, but he also wanted to champion the music of Black composers such as Robert Owens, Margaret Bonds and their successors.That’s what he did at Zankel: With a coruscating tenor densely packed with vibration and lightly worn confidence, Brownlee engraved his voice on a vast collection of pieces with a sure sense of how they should sound.“Rising” traces an ancestral link among Black composers by focusing on the common inspiration of Harlem Renaissance-era poetry. The program’s first half featured song cycles by Owens (“Desire” and “Silver Rain”) and Bonds (“Songs of the Seasons”), as well as recent pieces from Jeremiah Evans. The second half included new commissions from Damien Sneed, Shawn E. Okpebholo, Brandon Spencer, Jasmine Barnes and Joel Thompson, plus Carlos Simon’s “Vocalise.”Brownlee’s singing doesn’t sparkle so much as it sparks. It’s very much a coloratura instrument rather than a lyric one — a voice built more for dexterity than warmth — with a narrow spectrum of brilliant colors. Song repertoire rewards a softer touch, and it took some time on Thursday for Brownlee to round off the cutting edge of his sound. Perhaps after years of laser-precision bel canto, Brownlee has cultivated an elegant propriety, staying true to rhythm and seldom straying from a polished, ringing tone.As such, the subtleties in his singing only deviated minutely from his essentially brilliant timbre — a touch of duskiness here in “Juliet,” an echo of wistfulness there in “Night Song,” both by Owens. Bass-clarinet tones, warm yet reedy, emerged in Bonds’s “Winter Moon.” With an opera singer’s theatricality, he held the stage in the romantic expansiveness of Owens’s “In time of silver rain” and ended the program’s first half with a victorious high C.Miller’s playing was kinetic, especially in Owens’s vivid writing — efficiently obstinate in “Desire,” with a lovely pitter-patter of raindrops in “In time of silver rain.” He seemed to relish putting a little dirt into the opening of Evans’s “Southern Mansion.”Among the new pieces, Barnes’s “Invocation,” which turns Claude McKay’s poetic address to an “Ancestral Spirit” into an incantatory refrain, drew intense applause. Spencer showed a wonderful sense of prosody and storytelling in “I Know My Soul,” and Thompson sounded an exultant, if sometimes strident, call to celebration in “My People.”There is a compelling will to melody and mood, reminiscent of Owens, in the work of Sneed and Okpebholo. Okpebholo’s “Romance” — a sensual, desultory evening come to life from a blissful McKay poem — unwound in an aimless but seductive way. Miller and Brownlee brought out the piece’s mingling of desire and vulnerability.Brownlee had an enchanting way of cascading through the highly pitched melody of Sneed’s “Beauty That Is Never Old.” And his “To America” was a gut punch. “How would you have us, as we are?” begins James Weldon Johnson’s poem. “Rising or falling? Men or things?”The title of Brownlee’s program provides an answer — rising, always rising — but his encores made that point, too. Crossing himself before launching into two spirituals arranged by Sneed, Brownlee was positively infectious as he took his voice high and leaned into gospel-style runs: joyful, and sure of his place in the world.Lawrence BrownleePerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      ‘It Needs You’: The Human Side to Boulez’s Demanding Music

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      Matthias Pintscher speaks about Boulez’s “Dérive 2,” which the composer’s old ensemble performs in New York this weekend.Pierre Boulez, one of the most commanding musicians of the past century, must have been asked countless times, before his death in 2016, what he thought his legacy might be.It was a mark of his stature that he had so much to choose from. Perhaps his work as a conductor, one of rare clarifying power? Perhaps his visionary inspiration as an institution builder, in his native France and elsewhere? Perhaps his polemical writings? But when pushed, he would often point to his formidable, intricately constructed compositions.“Performances are transient, you know,” Boulez said in an interview in 1999. “That’s just something which happened, and you are happy sometimes. But, I mean, that’s not the main fact in my life. I would like that my works survive myself, that’s all.”Will they? And with what impact?Boulez can no longer promote them himself after all, and some of his most illustrious champions — Daniel Barenboim, Maurizio Pollini — are sadly starting to pass from the stage. Yet there are still artists tending the Boulezian flame, chief among them the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Parisian new-music group that Boulez founded in 1976, and its music director, the composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher. Together, they will perform one of Boulez’s late, monumental works, the 45-minute, 11-instrumentalist “Dérive 2,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. It will be just the third time that a Boulez piece has been performed at Carnegie Hall since his death.Pintscher, 52, first met Boulez in the late 1990s, and they later became close friends. Describing his mentor as “the most curious, alert, giving and generous man,” Pintscher spoke in a recent phone interview about interpreting Boulez’s works and how best to think about their influence. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Boulez conducted an earlier version of “Dérive 2” at Carnegie Hall 20 years ago this week, but this is still music that many listeners — even new-music devotees — struggle to get to grips with. How would you describe it?You are absolutely right, because “Dérive 2” is maybe one of the most austere of the big, major works, in comparison with “Répons,” or “Sur Incises” in particular. I think it’s an absolutely significant score in terms of how it’s put together, the architecture, and his idea of constantly building and extending and letting music just grow by itself. You know, like you plant a seed and just watch how it goes, and a twig becomes a branch, and becomes a tree, and the tree then stands very, very solid.The time has come to revisit the text with all these Boulez scores, especially with the Ensemble, where we still have members that have played this piece with Pierre. There’s always like, yeah, but Pierre did that slightly faster or slower, or he waited there, and it’s interesting because — I mean, we’re talking about very subtle differences — the scores tell something different, and I find it absolutely fascinating to now not be a copy of Boulez, but to really get back to the text.It’s quite funny that Boulez, who as a conductor had such a reputation for fidelity to text, may not have been entirely faithful to his own scores.I mean, it’s like what people always ask myself also, “Do you love playing your works? Doesn’t it feel good, or what does it do to you?” I personally interpret my own works exactly in the same way as a Bruckner symphony, or a Schubert symphony, or a piece by Boulez. When I’m asked to perform a work of myself that goes way back, more than a handful of years or even more than 10 years, I really have to sit down and learn the score. With Pierre it was the same.Of course we had conversations about “Dérive 2.” He was making jokes like: Woah, tonight “Dérive 2,” oof, buckle up, roll up your sleeves. He said this in his most charming and witty way. But yes, it’s a big piece, it’s a long piece, it is very demanding, it is very challenging. It’s like Ravel: Everything is wonderfully logical, but once you abandon that and you forget about the structure and how it has been built, you can really immerse yourself in the energy and the flow of that music.You conduct a huge amount of new music. Does Boulez — and more broadly the Darmstadt School-era composers like Nono and Stockhausen, who shot to prominence in the 1950s — still have a definable influence on composition today, especially on young composers?That’s a big question, huh? I think we have to understand that the significance, the legacy of a composer cannot be measured by the statistics of how many performances a composer or a certain piece has at a certain time. It’s like those works are landmarks for their time — as is the “Goldberg” Variations. I don’t know how many times the “Goldberg” Variations are being performed worldwide, daily.It’s a reference. It adds to the roots of music history, as we understand that the very late Brahms becomes the early Schoenberg, the very late Schubert becomes the very early Bruckner, and the very late Stravinsky becomes Pierre Boulez. If you look at “Threni,” for example, by Stravinsky, there is some sort of transition to where Boulez picks it up, and I think those links in music history are fascinating and important.He created these monuments; they’re cathedrals. “Répons” is an absolute masterwork. It’s very hard to program because it requires an ideal space, very heavy electronics and it’s extremely difficult to play. It’s not just a piece that you put on. So I think we have to understand that it can’t be measured by how many times a piece is being performed. The material that we had in Paris last week was material No. 61. There’s 61 sets — probably more! — of “Dérive 2.” That tells us something.Might we say that this is a transitional period, and it’s too early still to tell — that Boulez’s compositional legacy is still unclear, even if his significance is obvious?I can’t really tell. Maybe you’re right and it’s too early. But as I said, I think those scores are manifests and documents of a certain time, a time of change.There’s so much talent out there. I’m teaching at Juilliard, and those young artists, yes, they’re really troubled by the question, “How can I find my voice?” And in terms of finding your own basic voice, it’s a basic requirement to study the “Brandenburg” Concertos, to study “L’Orfeo” by Monteverdi, to look at the G major Schubert Sonata, look at Schoenberg — and look at Boulez. Like it or not, it is a reference, it is a major key holder in music history. I personally find the music mesmerizing, I find it beautiful, but maybe because I’ve lived for it so long.They’re demanding because you have to use the ear, you cannot just beat what you see and think that does justice to the piece. It requires the human experience, and maybe now that I’m 52, I only start to really realize what it means to play his works with the space that they need — with all the respect that I have for what I see in the text, it also needs to be translated into a human reality.And that’s why those works are major, and that’s why they’re like a Beethoven symphony, or that Schubert G major piano sonata, because it needs you. It needs the individual, the human to find the right context for it. You cannot just play them through, and think that’s it. There’s more; there’s layers. More

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      The Unsinkable Marilyn Maye

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      Turning the corner of 54th Street in a New York City taxi, the peerless nightclub singer Marilyn Maye is reminded of an early moment in her career. Sixty years ago, while performing on national television, she was also singing at a nightclub. “This was on Broadway,” she says, quickly adding, “on Broadway, I mean, in Kansas City.” (She still lives there. “The closets,” she explains.)But there was no advertising or publicity pointing tourists toward her show. So she found out from local hotel concierges which cabdrivers worked at the airport, and did a free concert for 20 of them. “I told them: When somebody gets off a plane and says, ‘Where is this Kansas City singer?’ — now you know!”“That was enterprising,” she twinkles.Still enterprising and still twinkling at nearly 95, Marilyn Maye is the last of a great generation of American Songbook singers. She is both the endurance runner and the mystical Sphinx, a “consummate master of the stage,” the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis says, on the brink of her birthday and her solo debut at Carnegie Hall, where she will perform with the New York Pops, conducted by Steven Reineke, on March 24.Maye is famous for many things: She made 76 television appearances (the most of any singer) on “The Tonight Show,” and was a friend and favorite of Ella Fitzgerald’s. She works nonstop all over the country, and has had hit runs with birthday concerts, including 10 sold-out nights at 54 Below in Manhattan called “94, Of Course, There’s More.”Michael Feinstein, the singer and founder of the Great American Songbook Foundation, calls her “more than an entertainer and a great musician — she is a life force that awakens something in other people.” For her fans, Carnegie Hall marks a long-awaited opportunity to see her celebrated in high style after eight decades of commitment to the strange, confounding world of cabaret singing, which has as many casualties as queens.Maye on the stage of Carnegie Hall, where she will perform with the New York Pops on March 24.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWhat really astounds her colleagues, though, is not only that she has survived and remains committed, but that Maye’s humor, spirit and above all her voice are in the best shape of her career. Shining octogenarians in saloon singing, like the great Mabel Mercer, were seated and largely speaking their songs; Maye never sits down, and her delivery has never been as effortless.One secret may be her equanimity: Carnegie Hall will be the most important night of her life … and just another gig in a year, like all her years, jammed with travel, devoted audiences, parties, mentoring, master classes and a steady rush of concerts on any and all-sized stages. She is omnipresent: a photograph of last year’s edition of “Broadway Bares,” the annual midnight benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, reveals her smiling in the front row.Another secret might lie, perhaps, in her eclectic approach: Maye sings jazz, but she acts jazz too. She enters a song, her life experience coloring every phrase. One admirer, the actress Tyne Daly, calls Maye’s “an evolved technique” that is “emotionally smart.” “She’s totally in the room,” Daly says, “and to tell the story, she uses everything she knows, so far.”A typical Maye set list — she is famous for putting it together at the last moment — might begin with “Look for the Silver Lining,” a song introduced by the 1920s star Marilyn Miller, for whom Maye was named by her stage-struck mother. It will then often curve into a long set of medleys — she is known in the trade as “Medley Maye” — in which, say, six songs about smiling, from the 1928 “When You’re Smiling” to James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face,” might intertwine.“It’s got to be happy, happy, happy in the beginning,” she says. “Don’t get into heavy ballads on your third tune.”The voice that stitches the set together has superb intonation (inspired by the singer Jo Stafford), with a velvet cushion at the bottom, elastic rhythm and bluesiness she can call on at will. In a set, she almost always sings two signature songs about adulterous love affairs, “Guess Who I Saw Today” and “Fifty Percent.” And she often climaxes with two hymns to survival, Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” and Jerry Herman’s “It’s Today,” punctuated with high kicks.Onstage, she favors a huge glittering brooch, shell-shaped curvaceous rhinestone earrings and trademark elastic cuff bracelets. She holds her microphone stand with ease or slides it behind her to stroll — “Never turn your back,” she insists — and knows exactly where her bass player, drummer and the pianist are.Even offstage, she seems ready for the spotlight. “She stayed in my house at different times,” says her frequent designer Bob Mackie, “and she gets out of bed in the morning, and you go, ‘Did you just have your hair done?’”Her many rules of the cabaret art form, which she proudly teaches any chance she gets, include these: wear big lashes, never sit and never close your eyes. (If you require water, take sparing sips from a wine glass: “It has to have a long stem.”)She describes her work philosophy this way: “They came to have fun. They’re giving up their evening, and their money, to be entertained. You’re not the star. They’re the star.”‘I Was Never a Child’Maye has long fascinated me as the most accomplished figure in our shared and perilous profession. I am not sure that cabaret singing is as dangerous as driving nitroglycerin trucks, but it is a demanding, often dispiriting vocation, leaving one at the mercy of nightclub owners and changing crowds and fickle pianists.Is Maye a jazz singer? A show-tunes singer? She doesn’t draw a firm distinction. “The lyric is the phrasing, see. It’s the story,” she says. Her current accompanist, Tedd Firth, has this answer: “Is she improvising? A little bit. But does she swing as hard as any singer I’ve ever worked with? Absolutely. The crucial thing is that her understanding of the music is a first-generation understanding. She was singing this music when it was still new.”Not long ago, Maye and I met at a rehearsal studio near Lincoln Center, where she was working with two protégés. Each stood at attention in a small practice room, accompanied by a quartet, facing Maye, who gestured to her sheet music like a doctor explaining the results of an MRI, pointing out shadings and shadows that might be significant.Maye carefully watching a student, Susie Clausen, perform for the first time at a New York club.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesWhen one student, Susie Clausen, practiced a spoken greeting — “I’m so glad you are enjoying the show” — Maye stopped her short. “Don’t say that! Just say you are glad they are here. Don’t assume they are enjoying it.” She added a classic Mayeism: “If you don’t take yourself seriously, others will.”For someone who began singing at age 3, Maye regards herself as a late bloomer. Born in Wichita, Kan., on April 10, 1928, she won an amateur talent contest in Topeka at age 9, for which she earned $3 and 13 weeks on the radio. When her parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Des Moines, Iowa, and at 13 was singing big band at dance ballrooms; her mother kept a little book “so we could remember what age we had said I was to different clubs and agents.”“I was never a child,” she says frankly. “That’s why I am one now.”Maye honed her craft in Kansas City, working five nights a week for 11 years at the Colony nightclub, the place on Broadway. Demos recorded at that time got the attention of Steve Allen, who put her on his prime-time television variety show.Maye with the television show host Steve Allen in 1961.ABC Photo Archives/Disney Entertainment, via Getty ImagesThis led to two career developments: the unfailing support of Johnny Carson and attention from RCA Records, for whom she recorded seven albums. As an RCA “commitment singer” introducing show tunes before their cast albums were released, Maye had her biggest radio hit with the title song of “Cabaret.”She received a 1966 Grammy nomination for best new artist; Tom Jones won. Music styles were changing: “I never got into rock ’n’ roll,” she says. “The Beatles hit when my first albums were released. That’s what went wrong with my career. Goddamn Beatles.”Maye has been married three times and had a fourth long-term partner. Her first marriage, to a hard drinker and a gambler, lasted a year. Her second (“I don’t know if he died or if I divorced him”) was to a dancer with whom she had a daughter. Her third husband, who adopted her child, was a genius pianist, she says, but “very abusive.”“I had to leave him, but I didn’t want to leave his fingers,” she recalls. Their daughter, Kristi Tucker, a singer herself, agrees that “it was a beautiful collaboration,” but often unhappy. “What she has been through in her life,” Tucker says, “she needed to be strong.”It is no accident that pianists and husbands flow together for her. “My pianist has always been the most important man in my life, above lovers, husbands, anybody,” she ruminates.Billy Stritch, her pianist of 40 years, accompanied her on her triumphant return to New York. She’d been doing musicals out of town, playing the leads in shows like “Mame” and “Hello, Dolly.” (Never appearing on Broadway in New York remains a regret.) But Stritch and her lawyer, Mark Sendroff, insisted that, after 14 years away, she perform at the now closed Metropolitan Room in 2006.She blew the roof off, winning a whole new audience at 78. “Once she sold out one time, she’d go back, eight shows, three times a year,” Stritch says. “There was no turning back. She was off and running. It began a fantastic third act.”‘Because It’s Fun’How has Maye kept on going, singing so well? I talked to voice teachers and doctors, and heard about “vocal folds” and “breath support” and “agility,” and the likelihood that she has a strict exercise and warm-up regimen.She doesn’t: “She loves to go out to dinner and have her one drink” — an apple martini — “after the show,” reports Mackie.Mackie credits her playfulness, how she once left behind her false eyelashes on the chandelier when staying at his home. I’ve seen it, too. She does little kicks walking down a staircase, not because it helps her avoid tripping, but, she brightly says, “because it’s fun.”A classic Mayeism: “If you don’t take yourself seriously, others will.”Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesPeople who love and admire Maye think she might have become a bigger star sooner. Put that question to her, however, and the playfulness — the twinkle — momentarily slips away.“I am 95 f-ing years old,” she tells me, confidently surveying Carnegie Hall from its stage. “I don’t have time to be a larger star. I don’t have time to be any more than this night.” She stares at the empty seats, soon to be full, and gently hums.Perhaps she became the kind of star she was fated to be. Or, maybe, she has become something better. There remains an unequaled intensity of intimacy when you are singing in a nightclub to a rapt audience. Carnegie Hall won’t make Marilyn Maye bigger; she’ll make Carnegie Hall smaller. More

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      The Vienna Philharmonic Tends the Classics With a Perfect Partner

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      Christian Thielemann led the storied orchestra in three concerts at Carnegie Hall, including a revelatory performance of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony.”Sometimes in a concert-going life, preconceived notions are upended, leading to thrilling surprises.Before the Vienna Philharmonic’s three concerts over the weekend at Carnegie Hall, I was primed for this storied orchestra’s dashing Mendelssohn, formidable Brahms and majestic Bruckner.But I had been prepared to reach those works, on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, after the hurdle of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” on Friday.“An Alpine Symphony” is something of an ugly duckling in the orchestral repertory — or, given its scale, an ugly elephant. Lasting some 50 minutes, it is Strauss’s final and biggest tone poem, a wall mural in sound depicting a dramatic mountain hike, and requiring both celesta and organ, wind and thunder machines — and cowbell for good measure — as well as woodwind and brass forces that put even Bruckner to shame.The piece gets a bad rap for its indulgent size and fitfully episodic structure, the way it can seem to be spinning its wheels for long stretches between bloated climaxes. It’s considered more than acceptable for people who know a lot about classical music — people who are in classical music — to roll their eyes at it.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.And it’s true: From most orchestras, under most conductors, on most nights, it comes off bombastic, limp and long.Not here. On the podium for the three concerts this weekend was Christian Thielemann, a maestro whose Strauss is able to convert even skeptics. People still talk about the focused splendor he brought to another huge, hard-to-wrangle Strauss score, “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” at the Metropolitan Opera more than 20 years ago.Now 63, Thielemann spends much of his career in the German-speaking world, focusing on a tiny group of eminent ensembles like this one and a small circle of canonical scores. In recent years, he has been almost absent from New York stages; his last visit to Carnegie Hall, with his Staatskapelle Dresden, was in 2013.Believe the hype: Thielemann, whose last appearance at Carnegie Hall was in 2013, gave an enlightening account of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” on Friday.Jennifer TaylorOn Friday, his “Alpine Symphony” was a reminder that the fuss that surrounds him is not hype. Above all, Thielemann conveyed a sense of unaffected fluidity — achieved, paradoxically, by firm control over a score that can sag.The soft but grand dawn opening felt not portentous but natural, building to a sunrise that was shining without blare. Throughout, Thielemann refused to dwell on the climaxes, be they mountaintop vistas or thundering storms, blurring the boundaries between the episodes into an ever-shifting, gorgeously disorienting whole.Sometimes sumptuous, sometimes frosty, sometimes glistening, Vienna’s strings were perhaps at their most impressive when it came to maintaining tension even as a barely audible foundation of the orchestral textures. This helped ensure that material that often feels like filler was continually mesmerizing.More relaxed passages had the poised intimacy of Strauss’s salon-style opera “Ariadne auf Naxos.” And, toward the end, the orchestra luxuriated in the wandering chromatic music that demonstrates Strauss’s debt to Schoenberg, whose “Verklärte Nacht” opened the concert with the same sense of unforced flow that Thielemann brought to “An Alpine Symphony.”That easy flow, though, managed to convey the opposite of ease, making this score sound more mysterious and thorny, and more engrossing, than I’d ever heard it. This was a truly persuasive performance.So was the rendition of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony on Sunday. As in the Strauss, Thielemann conveyed a sense of continuity, of great arches, that pressed intensity through the work’s endless, hypnotic repetitions. (And, as in the Strauss, the strings in particular never let up.) At the start of the Adagio, the melody was properly broad without losing the line, and the Finale was a medieval edifice, looming through fog and in sunshine.The careful control from Thielemann that gave tautness to “An Alpine Symphony” and the Bruckner took away a certain bucolic character in Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture and Symphony No. 3, which had a weight, even a severity, on Saturday that brought them in line with Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 after intermission.Scattered through the weekend were some quirks — moments of uneasy intonation and tiny flaws, including a hiccup on the opening chord of the Bruckner symphony. But these issues felt tiny next to all the breathtaking things this orchestra does: ends of phrases so elegantly rounded they almost make you sigh; the uncanny matching of tone and texture between horn and strings in the Bruckner Adagio; the silkiness of the start of the Brahms symphony’s finale; and effortlessly idiomatic moments like a delightfully squealing, squelching chord in “An Alpine Symphony.”And there are aspects of sound in which the Viennese remain distinctively themselves: their winds woodsier — darker, somehow damper and more moodily blended, like a forest floor — than you hear from other orchestras, and the brasses in ensemble closer to a bronze shield than a golden spear.A year ago, the Philharmonic’s annual New York visit was not so focused on the music-making. In the lead-up to those concerts in late February, the orchestra and Carnegie came under scrutiny for the decision to collaborate with the conductor Valery Gergiev, a prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. It was only after the invasion of Ukraine began, the day before the first performance, that the orchestra and hall dropped their defenses of Gergiev and replaced him.It was an irruption of politics into an ensemble whose brand has been defined by insulation from all that. Beyond the standard-repertory programs this weekend, the encores, as usual, came from the nostalgic dream world of the Philharmonic’s waltz- and polka-filled New Year’s concerts, which do their best to pretend that the past 150 years never happened.This orchestra is devoted to tending the fire of tradition; in this task, it has in Thielemann perhaps the perfect partner. More

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      Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      We choose highlights from events featuring Mitsuko Uchida and Franz Welser-Möst as Perspectives artists, and the composer Tania León in residence.The threats facing democracy will be a central focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter announced on Tuesday, with a festival devoted to the flourishing cultural scene in Germany between the two world wars.From January to May, Carnegie will host “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” an exploration of creative expression during the fragile democracy in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The festival will feature ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s performing works by composers of the time, including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.“We’re seeing the challenges to democracy more and more clearly, and it’s all the more reason we have to treasure it,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “We want people to ask questions and contemplate why democracy matters, and what the threats are in our day.”The 2023-24 season, which begins in October, will feature some 170 performances, beginning with two concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its outgoing music director, Riccardo Muti. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the conductor Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, will each organize a series of Perspectives concerts.The composer Tania León, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2021, will lead a season-long residency; in January, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will offer the New York premiere of a new piece by her.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Here are a dozen highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZEnglish Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, Oct. 25You can safely bet on a few things whenever the conductor John Eliot Gardiner comes to town: agile, historically informed performance; obsessively precise articulation; and virtually ideal readings of beloved repertoire. In early 2020, he led his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in just about as good a Beethoven symphony cycle as you could imagine. And now he brings the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir to Carnegie for Bach’s Mass in B minor and, on Oct. 26, Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.” JOSHUA BARONEThe mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre will appear at Weill Recital Hall with the lutenist Thomas Dunford.Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLea Desandre and Thomas Dunford, Nov. 2These two artists — Desandre, a clarinet-mellow mezzo-soprano who can burst with bright agility, and Dunford, an eloquent lutenist — are among the brightest lights of a young generation of early-music specialists. They join in Weill Recital Hall, ideally intimate for this repertory, for “Lettera Amorosa,” a program of love-focused Baroque works by Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and Handel, alongside names like Tarquinio Merula (his songs exquisite) and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (a specialist in music for lute). ZACHARY WOOLFEAmerican Composers Orchestra, Nov. 9This essential organization has brought music by George Lewis to Carnegie’s various spaces before — the most notable instance being his Virtual Concerto (for a “computer-driven” piano soloist) back in 2004. The orchestra will continue its productive relationship with the composer to perform one of his latest orchestral works. No title for the piece is available yet; the same goes for a few other new works on the bill (including those from the likes of Guillermo Klein and Augusta Read Thomas). We do have one title: “Out of whose womb came the ice,” by the up-and-coming composer Nina C. Young, whose premiere was co-commissioned by Carnegie. SETH COLTER WALLSStaatskapelle Berlin, Nov. 30When the Staatskapelle Berlin and its longtime music director, Daniel Barenboim, last appeared at Carnegie, in 2017, it was an epic nine-performance stand that paired Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies. A lot has happened since then; most recently, in January, Barenboim stepped down from the orchestra’s podium because of health problems. So their return will be poignant: just two nights, and the four symphonies of Brahms, a composer Barenboim performed as a pianist in this space in 1962. ZACHARY WOOLFEEnglish Concert, Dec. 10The British soprano Lucy Crowe’s expertise and imagination in Baroque music gives her the freedom to turn da capo arias into feats of feeling. That exhilarating sense of spontaneity uplifted the English Concert’s performance of Handel’s “Serse” at Carnegie last year, and it will be exciting to hear Crowe apply her gifts to more dramatic material when she takes the title role in “Rodelinda.” OUSSAMA ZAHRThe pianist Daniil Trifonov will appear on Carnegie’s main stage to perform Beethoven’s mighty “Hammerklavier” Sonata.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesDaniil Trifonov, Dec. 12Arguably the mightiest of the under-40 generation of superstar pianists meets the mightiest of repertoire in this recital, as Daniil Trifonov takes on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata. It’s a banner year for youngish soloists in ambitious repertoire, in fact: Vikingur Olafsson plays the “Goldberg” Variations (Feb. 7); Beatrice Rana does the Liszt Sonata (Feb. 28); and Seong-Jin Cho journeys through the second book of the same composer’s “Années de Pèlerinage” (May 17). DAVID ALLENMet Orchestra, Feb. 1Yannick Nézet-Séguin has decided not to share next season. Rather than engage a guest conductor, he helms all three of the Met Orchestra’s concerts himself, embracing opportunities to bask in the tonal floodgates of Lise Davidsen’s soprano in Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder” and, later, the heavenliness of Lisette Oropesa’s Mozart arias (June 11), and the intense standoff of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with Elina Garanca and Christian Van Horn (June 14). OUSSAMA ZAHRYunchan Lim, Feb. 21This precociously mature pianist, still in his teens, played Liszt’s deliriously difficult “Transcendental Études” on the way to becoming the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year. He’ll reprise the Liszt as part of his recital introduction on Carnegie’s main stage. By this point, another pianist, the spectacularly creative Igor Levit, needs no introduction at this point to this hall’s audience; on Jan. 20, he’ll play two symphony transcriptions (Liszt’s of Beethoven’s Third and Ronald Stevenson’s of Mahler’s 10th) alongside Hindemith’s Suite “1922,” raucous and very Roaring Twenties. ZACHARY WOOLFEVienna Philharmonic, March 1Most of the five concerts in Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series — Jan. 20 and 21 with the Cleveland Orchestra, March 1-3 with Vienna — are emblematic of his thoughtful, idiosyncratic, ultimately endearing approach to programming, but the March 1 performance looks especially constructive, full of connections and contrasts to draw: Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for Wind Orchestra, Strauss’s Symphonic Fantasy from “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra and, as if to bid farewell to a whole world of music, Ravel’s “La Valse.” DAVID ALLENJason Moran will return to Carnegie with a tribute to the pioneering jazz musician James Reese Europe.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesJason Moran, March 9In addition to being an elite improvising pianist, Jason Moran is a keen programmer; his Carnegie survey of Black American music from the Great Migration was a well-attended success. You can all but bank on the same when Moran brings his latest concert concept to Zankel Hall. This time, the focus will be on the music of the early 20th-century American original James Reese Europe. You might expect some of the same expert arrangements heard on Moran’s latest album, “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield.” But prepare also for some surprises; this restless innovator rarely does anything the same way twice. SETH COLTER WALLSEnsemble Modern, April 12Much of the festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice” is more confusing than informative. This period in history produced so much excellent and overlooked music; why are we seeing Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler (among other head-scratchers)? At least there are engagements like that of Ensemble Modern, which will perform works including a lithe but still barbed smaller arrangement of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” led by HK Gruber, one of our greatest living Weill interpreters. The group returns April 13 as part of León’s residency, playing her “Indígena” and “Rítmicas” alongside pieces by Conlon Nancarrow and others. JOSHUA BARONEDanish String Quartet, April 18A highlight of Carnegie’s spring months in recent seasons has been the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project, which juxtaposes Schubert quartets with premieres. Coming this April: a new work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. And, for the fourth installment next year, the group is adding the cellist Johannes Rostamo to perform Schubert’s endlessly moving, even sublime String Quintet in C, paired with a commission from Thomas Adès. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      Review: Mitsuko Uchida Revisits Beethoven’s Final Sonatas

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      One of our wisest pianists appeared at Carnegie Hall with some of the wisest music written for her instrument.One thing die-hard classical music fans like to do during a concert’s intermission is compare notes — about the performance at hand, about what else has been going on around town and about what’s coming up.It was during one of those conversations recently that I asked a friend whether he was planning to see the pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s recital of late Beethoven sonatas at Carnegie Hall. He said no, he didn’t need to hear her in that repertoire.Understandable, to a point. She has toured this music before, and recorded it, marvelously, in 2006. But Uchida, 74, is an artist who returns to the familiar, especially the works of Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, as part of a lifelong argument for the benefits of repeated examination. “The great composers always change,” she once said in an interview. “And as you change, they change.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.At Carnegie on Friday, in her recital of Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas, Uchida did behave like a different artist from the one who recorded these works nearly two decades ago. I don’t believe that age is inherently necessary or helpful in music — Igor Levit had a handle on Beethoven’s late style in his 20s — but what was reflected onstage was the unaffected wisdom and clarity that comes with decades of interpretive rigor and commitment.Uchida’s recording of these pieces is insistently lyrical, borderline Schubertian. The sonatas were, in her reading at the time, intimate, private musings that were made public but didn’t seem as if they needed to be. On Friday, however, her sound was often comparatively bright and extreme — the sforzandos true explosions, the pianissimos exquisitely soft-spoken. Each sonata unfurled with improvisatory freedom, absolutely alive, its heart showing more than its head. Yet because of Uchida’s technique, her pedalwork and precision, the scores were also transparently multidimensional. You could hear, with awe-inspiring ease, every line threaded through the fugue of the Op. 110’s finale. Then and now, her playing was persuasive; Beethoven’s music can withstand, even demand, both approaches.In her Op. 109, the Sonata No. 30 in E, the lilting vivace opening crested and fell in force — more a wave than a ripple, but, in its alluringly long line, still beating from the same source. This work, and the two others on the program, can be difficult to voice, to tease a melody from tangled rhythms and tricky fingerings; on Friday, Uchida lent just the right amount of weight to each finger to emphasize the counterpoint, revealing the architecture of the score, without distracting from the singing melodies it supports.At times, particularly in the Op. 110 Sonata in A flat, her sound approached that of lieder by Schubert, who seemed to trade places with Bach as the arioso alternated with an intricate, three-part fugue. In Uchida’s hands, that finale — in Beethovenian fashion, a journey from profound despair to euphoric heights — achieved a kind of holy grandeur.She reached even higher in her account of the Op. 111 in C minor. In the closing Arietta — after the straightforward theme and the initial variations on it, including one that famously swings like a glimpse of music’s jazzier future — with a lot of score left to go, she seemed to depart from everything that had come before. Her trills twinkling, her playing more personal than performative, she followed Beethoven’s leap to the cosmos and remained with him to the whispered final measure.Afterward, Uchida repeatedly returned to the stage to bow but never to encore; how could she? In her trademark way, every time she faced the audience she looked a bit surprised, then grateful — as if, after sharing all she had, she was the one who should be thanking us.Mitsuko UchidaPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. Uchida returns there for a master class on Wednesday and a concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on March 9. More

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      A Ukrainian Orchestra on a Mission to Promote Its Country’s Culture

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      Members of the touring Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine have watched the devastation of war from a distance.The Ukrainian violinist Solomia Onyskiv arrived in the United States last month on a mission.With the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country approaching, she worried that the world was quickly forgetting the suffering there. She had come with 65 other musicians from the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine to lead a 40-concert tour aimed at promoting Ukrainian culture.“We are almost in a state of panic now,” Onyskiv said. “We worry deeply about the future of our country because this war won’t stop. Russia won’t stop. And if we don’t stand up, if the world doesn’t stand up, there will be more suffering.”On Wednesday, Onyskiv and her colleagues will get one of their most visible platforms yet: the stage of Carnegie Hall, where they will perform a program that includes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, as well as the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych’s Chamber Symphony No. 3.The concert is a milestone, but also a bittersweet moment for many of the musicians: They have spent much of the past year on tour, away from family and friends, watching the destruction of war from afar. Some have struggled to keep their focus as they embark on their cultural mission, checking constantly for news of Russian attacks and reading stories about Ukrainians who have been killed.Michailo Sosnovsky, the orchestra’s principal flute, who is featured in the Stankovych piece, said he worried about the safety of his wife and five children, who live in Lviv, and the safety of friends, including some musicians, who serve in the military. He speaks with his family by video every day, but gets anxious if they do not respond quickly to his messages.“I think about my family every minute of every day,” said Sosnovsky, who has played in the orchestra for two decades. “It’s a very difficult situation. But we must stay and do our part to help our country from here.”Members of the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine performing at the Lviv National Philharmonic hall last year. Adri Salido/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesThe Lviv orchestra, established in 1902, is among many Ukrainian cultural groups that have gone abroad since the invasion in efforts to highlight the country’s cultural identity. The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, an ensemble of refugees who fled the war and musicians who stayed behind, toured Europe and the United States last summer. The United Ukrainian Ballet, made up of refugee dancers, has toured widely and made its U.S. debut this month; and the Shchedryk Children’s Choir, which is based in Kyiv, was featured at Carnegie in December.Over the past year, the Lviv musicians have toured in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Austria and other countries. Their visit to the United States began last month in Vero Beach, Fla., and will conclude next month at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Earlier this month, the orchestra performed four concerts at Radio City Music Hall, playing music from “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” After the Carnegie concert, the tour will continue in New Jersey, as well as at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx.The tour was mostly planned before the war, but the continuing devastation has added poignancy and meaning. In some cities, the musicians have been greeted with prolonged applause and shouts of “Glory to Ukraine!”Theodore Kuchar, the ensemble’s principal conductor, said the orchestra had been encouraged by moments like that. He recalled a recent performance in Miami in which many audience members were wearing Ukrainian flags and shouting “Bravo!” before the orchestra had started playing.“The orchestra hadn’t even tuned,” he said, “and you would have thought that you were you were there five seconds before the end of the Super Bowl with the score tied.”Kuchar, who is Ukrainian American, said that while the tour had been eagerly anticipated, many musicians felt guilty for being away from the country during such a difficult time.“I’ve not met a single person who privately doesn’t say to me, ‘Maestro, we’re so fortunate to be here, but our hearts are back there,’” he said.Kuchar said the emotional toll of the war was present as the musicians work to build support for Ukraine’s cause.“There’s nobody in this orchestra that does not know somebody who has either lost a finger, an arm, a leg or their life,” he said. “Everybody has been affected.”The Carnegie performance was added last spring. The hall’s leaders heard about the tour and thought that hosting the orchestra would help show solidarity with Ukraine. The actor Liev Schreiber, who has Ukrainian roots and has been involved in efforts to raise money for Ukraine over the past year, hosts the program.“We hope the performance will be a powerful opportunity to showcase the musicians’ artistry, their personal resilience and to remind everyone of the cultural richness that is an integral part of Ukraine,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director.The violinist Vladyslava Luchenko, a soloist on the tour, said audience members’ enthusiasm had given the musicians hope. She described music as the “best way to reach people’s souls and hearts.”“We have to use music to fight for good, for freedom, for human values,” she said. “We have to think about what we can bring, and not what we have lost.”Luchenko, who is from Kyiv but lives in Switzerland, recalled losing friends in Ukraine to Russian missile attacks. She said that performing during the war was a “double emotional load.”“You open your heart and feel all the pain so much more,” she said. “It has been a challenging but beautiful journey.” More

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      Review: An Orchestra Falters in Schubert’s ‘Great’ Symphony

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      Bernard Labadie and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s returned to Carnegie Hall in a program that also included a Mozart piano concerto with Emanuel Ax.Despite Schubert’s best efforts, his “Great” Symphony never received a performance in his lifetime. Initially considered overlong and unplayable, it took Mendelssohn, who gave its premiere, and Schumann, who wrote passionately of its glories, to bring it to light more than a decade after Schubert’s death. Now it’s a repertory staple.The Orchestra of St. Luke’s and its principal conductor, Bernard Labadie, closed their first concert of the season together with the symphony at Carnegie Hall on Thursday — pulling off the hourlong work only intermittently. A sense of occasion flickered in and out.Schumann praised the symphony’s “heavenly length,” and its extended stretches of repeated material do give it an expansive air — not unlike the landscape of Gastein, Austria, where it was written. At Carnegie, Labadie and his forces made emphatic use of recapitulations and musical echoes, giving them a swell of renewed vigor or, when called for, a more diaphanous quality.Woodwind chorales, led by penetrating oboes whose silky tone occasionally turned rough-hewn, were handsome, and the brasses played with a captivatingly neat style — clear and stringlike, but also rousing when required. The cello section took its higher-lying solo in the second movement with breadth and transparency. Elsewhere, the strings anchored a bristling Scherzo, driving the music with buzzing figures and arpeggiated leaps, but thinned out toward the end of the symphony.Problems with communication and balance emerged among the sections. When the strings and woodwinds handed off phrases to one another, they seemed to be telling different stories instead of completing sentences. The strings often covered the beautiful divisi writing for winds or trombones. The beloved Trio lacked the sense of swirling, airborne, circular momentum — perhaps because of Labadie’s heavy downbeat — that makes the return to the opening bars of the third movement such a whirring delight.Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18 in B flat, with Emanuel Ax as the soloist, opened the program. It’s obvious in retrospect that Labadie had calibrated his orchestra to the dimensions of the Schubert. The fullness of the players’ tone, the strength of their attack, the opacity of the texture — all of it weighed down the simple joviality of the Mozart.These two pieces share a similarly extroverted, convivial spirit offset by moments of startling intimacy. In the Mozart, that intimacy takes the form of a theme and variations in a minor key during the Andante. It almost feels like a concert aria of lightly expressed melancholy that needs time to unlace itself; Labadie instead kicked up high-key drama. When Ax rendered Mozart’s quick, broken octaves as a lovely murmur, the orchestra ignored him and plowed ahead. In the final movement, soloist and orchestra occasionally lost each other.Ax, who recorded the concerto in the 1980s, had the notes at his fingertips. He played broadly, confidently, showing the architecture of whole passages and thumping out Mozart’s grace notes with cheeky brazenness, even if individual phrases wanted for detail. Ax skimmed over scales, and there wasn’t much beauty to relish in his straightforward treatment of melodies that had the potential to sing.His encore, Liszt’s arrangement of the Schubert song “Ständchen,” was the opposite: a whisper of something private under the moonlight. He voiced the melody elegantly and applied suppleness to the chordal accompaniment.The Orchestra of St. Luke’s likewise found inspiration in its own final moments onstage. As the fourth movement of Schubert’s symphony came to an intense finish, its themes breaking through the prevailing texture, the players dug deep for a rooted sound that felt alert to the score’s momentousness — and to the music they were making together.Orchestra of St. Luke’sPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More