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      Review: A Pianist Explores Mozart the Late Bloomer

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      Víkingur Ólafsson made his Carnegie Hall debut with a hypnotically unfurling program based on his recent album “Mozart and Contemporaries.”Mozart, the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson deadpanned from the stage at Zankel Hall on Tuesday evening, was a “late bloomer.” The audience chuckled at the thought of one of history’s great child prodigies, dead at 35, taking a long time to find his gifts.It was the rare occasion I’ve heard a laugh during a recital. Most musicians seem a bit lost when you hand them a microphone. Ólafsson grabs it near the base and manipulates it confidently, like a stand-up comic: wry and self-deprecating.At 38, he has appeared little in New York, and never before at any of Carnegie Hall’s spaces. It is as a recording artist that many here have known him, an identity he embraced on Tuesday, playing without alteration — and, other than an intermission, without pause, as if you were listening to the CD — the program of his most recent album, “Mozart and Contemporaries.”His late bloomer comment was a joke, but only partly — fitting for a concert that focused on Mozart’s artistic growth in the 1780s, his final full decade. Ólafsson’s aim was both to bring the master down to earth — interspersing him with pieces from around the same time, in a similar style, by Haydn, C.P.E. Bach, Domenico Cimarosa and Baldassare Galuppi — and to elevate him back to the heavens, bathing the audience in just shy of 90 minutes of aching beauty.Yes, there was some variety, but not so much. Ólafsson’s enemy here is the traditional piano recital, defined by vivid contrasts — of period, of mood. His touch is acute and pearly, his attack is hardly muted when warranted, and not nearly all of this music is slow or mellow. Even so, “Mozart and Contemporaries” came off as an unbroken, unfurling, hypnotically broad, almost dreamlike silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.For the listener — particularly to the live version, its peaks and valleys smoother than on the recording — the feeling eventually approached that of an insect encased in amber: surrounded by beauty, even trapped by it. So much sublimity is hard to take.Which doesn’t mean it isn’t sublime — in the essayistic bursts of a Bach rondo or in the wintry-field longing of Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor (K. 397); the delicacy of that composer’s K. 494 Rondo or the dash of another, K. 485; an alert rendition of Haydn’s B minor Sonata; intimate movements from Galuppi and Cimarosa; and a clear, keen interpretation of Mozart’s “Sonata Facile” in C (K. 545).Ólafsson’s lucidity was ideal for the high spirits of the not even two minutes of Mozart’s K. 574 Gigue — but he also brought out its subtly sophisticated, world-spanning harmonies, the sense of bounding over an immense distance. (He said after intermission that the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen told him this is a “cosmic” gigue.)The second half was dominated by three expansive adagios, starting with Ólafsson’s arrangement of the slow movement from the String Quintet in G minor (K. 516). A movement from Galuppi’s Sonata in C minor (evoking, like so much of Scarlatti, the strum of a Spanish guitar) led into the intensity of Mozart’s Sonata in the same key (K. 457) — the obsessiveness of its finale, the snow-globe tenderness of its Adagio. Then came the brooding, singing Adagio in B minor (K. 540), and Liszt’s ivory-pristine transcription of the “Ave Verum Corpus.”“It’s very hard to play something after ‘Ave Verum,’” Ólafsson said, quieting the applause by sitting back down at the piano bench. And then, with perfect timing: “But it’s not impossible.”He did the slow movement from J.S. Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4, pealing yet contained, and superb.Víkingur ÓlafssonPerformed on Tuesday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Two Years Later, a Beethoven Cycle Reaches Its Finale

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      Delayed by the pandemic in 2020, then again in January, the Philadelphia Orchestra brought a long-awaited Ninth Symphony to Carnegie Hall.The Philadelphia Orchestra’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies was supposed to come to Carnegie Hall in spring 2020. It should go without saying: It didn’t.But that series of concerts belongs to the lucky class of canceled performances that have found their way back to the stage. The journey, however, has been a mirror of our continued pandemic uncertainty. Although the cycle started last fall when the Fifth Symphony opened Carnegie’s season, it was delayed once again in January when the Omicron variant pushed off Beethoven’s Ninth — and its full-choir “Ode to Joy.”So only on Monday did the cycle reach its conclusion, with the Philadelphians’ music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, at the podium for the First Symphony and the mighty Ninth, alongside a world premiere inspired by it, Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Pachamama Meets an Ode.”In New York, Nézet-Séguin has taken on something like the role of resident conductor, even to the point of exhaustion; the performance on Monday came exactly a week before he leads a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is also the music director.And because the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Beethoven concerts were an addition to its others planned at Carnegie this season, it has become the hall’s de facto house band. The ensemble was just there two weeks ago, with departures from the standard repertory (and Beethoven) that Zachary Woolfe applauded in The New York Times, while wagering that “nothing the Philadelphians do at Carnegie this season will be more impressive.”At the very least, there won’t be much competition from Monday’s appearance. Beethoven’s extremes — the consummate Classicism of the First, and the controlled excess of the Ninth — were absorbing but imperfect in this reading. But it was nevertheless a moving program, in large part because of Frank’s premiere.At their best, Beethoven cycles that fold in new commissions offer a conversation between past and present. Frank’s is quite literally a dialogue, however imagined, with the composer she calls “Great Man.” And who better to contend with Beethoven? As a composer with hearing loss, Frank has written about perceiving him as a kindred spirit. The world-spanning background that inspires her practice — as the American daughter of a father with Lithuanian-Jewish heritage and a Peruvian mother of Chinese and Indigenous descent — provides a nuanced perspective, and check, on the brother-embracing aspirations of the “Ode to Joy.”Her new work is a fantastical encounter between Beethoven and a contemporaneous Cusco School painter, tracing the climate crisis of today to the exploitation of natural resources and the global expansion of European powers in Beethoven’s time. In the piece’s 10 minutes, the text, written by Frank, invokes colonialism, animal extinction and images like a river “on oily fire.”Nézet-Séguin, right, conducted a program that included a pairing of Beethoven’s Ninth and a Gabriela Lena Frank premiere inspired by it.Chris LeeUsing the same orchestration as Beethoven’s Ninth, minus its four vocal soloists, “Pachamama” is big, and deploys the emotive force of the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem. Distinct textures do break the waves of sound: chromatic chattering in the strings, and dissonant humming in the choir — a nod, Frank notes, to Indigenous South American vocal music. The words are set straightforwardly, transformed only in the end to elongate the questions “What of odes?” and “What of joy?” Then a horn lingers indefinitely, a looming punctuation mark and a subtle bridge to the first bar of the Beethoven.The two symphonies here demonstrated the Great Man’s enormous transformation in the 24 years between their premieres, but also how much of his late style was gestating in his youth.His First is transparently indebted to Mozart and Haydn, until it isn’t. That moment, the Menuetto, is where Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation found its footing. Before, the strings — too many of them — were still mired in the introduction’s flowing phrases. But their articulation came sharply into focus with the Menuetto, a kind of artistic coming-of-age, with flashes of the Beethoven to come.Nézet-Séguin is a gifted Mozart conductor, and his treatment of the finale — witty and nimble — could have been the overture to one of that composer’s operas. It was dampened only by the inflated orchestra; Beethoven can benefit from fewer instruments, for balance, clarity and, above all, energy.Outsize scale was more problematic in the Ninth. Nézet-Séguin took a long view of the work, beginning in mysterious quiet, as if descending into the symphony from a great height, and building toward relentless grandeur in the “Ode to Joy” finale. But 25 minutes is a long time to sustain a climax, and the effect wore off long before the ending came.The orchestra was at its best in the second movement, in which the strings maintained a fleet lightness that allowed for pronounced contrasts and, crucially, made room for the winds and brasses, drowned out elsewhere. Later, the players were sensitive accompanists to the vocal soloists, though the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green needed no help commanding the stage with his booming entrance.Green pulled back to mix, beautifully, with his fellow soloists. His voice was a surprising complement to the more slender brightness of the tenor Matthew Polenzani, and together, they wove rich textures with the soprano Angel Blue and the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb. The Philadelphia Symphonic Choir was more difficult to follow. If you listened closely, you could make out an “alle Menschen” here and there, but the group’s sound was for the most part cloudy, as if coming from backstage, blending into the orchestra when it should have been heard above it.Even the best performance of this symphony, though, would have been haunted by the Frank, which rendered Beethoven’s ecstatic finale a tad delusional, and his naïve optimism difficult to stomach — a reminder of how this work’s universal message has been dangerously put to universal use, and of its Enlightenment hopes yet to be realized, nearly 200 years later. In the fermata rest of the Ninth’s final bar, Frank’s horn still resonated in the mind, still asking: What of odes? What of joy?Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Monday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, and returning there on April 8 and 21; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Scrappy and Invaluable, a Unique Music Ensemble Returns

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      The Boston Modern Orchestra Project turned 25 last year, but celebrated on Friday at Symphony Hall with a characteristic mix of rarities.BOSTON — It has been a theme of this troubled time: If the pandemic has ruined your big birthday party, simply celebrate a year (or two) later.The Boston Modern Orchestra Project — BMOP, universally — turned 25 last April. But this unique, invaluable ensemble, which under its founding conductor Gil Rose offers performances and crucial recordings of contemporary scores and long-ignored, often American music from the past 100 years, only got the chance to make merry earlier on Friday, with a sprawling free concert here at Symphony Hall.The program was an endearingly eccentric if thoughtful one, starring the organist Paul Jacobs in Stephen Paulus’s sensitively scored, rather bewitching Grand Concerto for organ and orchestra (2004) and Joseph Jongen’s entertainingly vast Symphonie Concertante (1926) for the same forces. Those were paired with an organ work rewritten for orchestra — Elgar’s 1922 arrangement of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C minor — and an orchestral work that would later be rewritten for organ: Messiaen’s early, lovely “L’Ascension” (1933).If it was not exactly a quintessential BMOP concert — one might have expected Aaron Copland or Lou Harrison instead of Jongen, and certainly a living composer, if expectations were something Rose bothered himself with — it was still characteristically creative, often excellent and always committed. It was a happy reminder of what a potent force this band of freelancers has become in music that few other groups dare touch.Even so, this was not just a cause for celebration, but also for reflection — not least on the financial and infrastructural inequities that are shaping our musical emergence from the pandemic.Two years ago, it was widely predicted that some smaller ensembles would fold in the face of public health restrictions, and perhaps even some larger ones. Although individual musicians have struggled desperately, and some have left their chosen profession, economic assistance programs largely forestalled that ultimate outcome at the institutional level, though the effects will be felt everywhere for years.Major orchestras have been able to get back on their feet relatively quickly, if unsteadily: On Friday afternoon, I heard Herbert Blomstedt conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose resources have allowed it to maintain a basically full schedule this season.Smaller ensembles have been forced, or have chosen, to take more time. Employing freelancers who encounter frequent exposure to the virus as they travel for work, these groups face the costs of underwriting testing; the difficulties of finding replacements at short notice; and the risks of cancellation — if, that is, their habitual venues are available for rent at all. Symphony Hall aside, many larger halls that once were in regular use in Boston are under the control of universities, which have imposed stringent restrictions on outside groups in the name of protecting students.Rose in the Granoff Music Center at Tufts University in 2015. “When I started this thing, everybody thought it was about new music, but it was always about an orchestra model,” he said of BMOP. “I’m glad that I don’t rely on a ‘Nutcracker’ or a ‘Messiah.’”Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times“The big institutions just have a different reality,” Rose said in an interview a few days before the concert, noting that he has been able to avoid laying off any of his five staff members.“I said to a lot of freelancers that it was going to be really hard on the players the first year, and the second year was going to be hard on the organizations,” he added. “In the first year, nobody was really producing that much, but they were getting government aid and foundations were stepping up, so you were getting more income than you normally would, and not spending as much. Now that’s all stopped, it feels like reality is coming.”BMOP has always been a distinctive ensemble, conceived in lean opposition to the subscription season model, and remarkably competent at raising funds. Although it has never been short of critical acclaim, it has rarely drawn large audiences — though Friday was a gladdening, if not a lucrative, exception.“When I started this thing, everybody thought it was about new music, but it was always about an orchestra model,” Rose said, nodding to the “project” part of BMOP’s name. “I’m glad that I don’t rely on a ‘Nutcracker’ or a ‘Messiah.’”What BMOP has come to rely on instead is its award-winning catalog of recordings. Rose’s eclectic tastes had been documented in 69 recordings on his own BMOP/sound label before March 2020, including the three commissions — Lisa Bielawa’s “In medias res,” Andrew Norman’s “Play” and Lei Liang’s “A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams,” the last two winners of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award — that the orchestra will perform at its Carnegie Hall debut in spring 2023.Rather than experimenting with streaming or community concerts, Rose spent the pandemic clearing a huge backlog of audio files that had built up over more than a decade — releasing 16 more recordings, and in June restarting sessions at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Mass.BMOP’s albums are a mix of forgotten gems and impressive new music, with a valiant focus on Boston composers and a giddy stylistic diversity, encompassing Charles Wuorinen and Matthew Aucoin. A press into a broader diversity is coming: Rose’s next big project, a five-year effort to present and record operas by the Black composers Anthony Davis, Nkeiru Okoye, William Grant Still, Ulysses Kay and Jonathan Bailey Holland, was, he said, in the works long before the reckoning with racism that has swept the music industry since the death of George Floyd.BMOP turned 25 last April, but only got the chance to celebrate on Friday with a free concert at Symphony Hall.Sam BrewerThat’s for the future; on Friday, the focus was on the past. If Jongen needed a little more tonal depth and lyrical bloom for his Symphonie Concertante to really shine, that made Paulus’s Grand Concerto benefit by comparison. The attractive work was his third concerto for organ, and it proves him a master of the genre; Jacobs’s smart registrations at Symphony Hall’s famed but rarely heard Aeolian-Skinner suggested that there have not been many composers with similar facility at blending the organ into the orchestral palette while also giving the instrument space to shine.It was exactly the kind of insight in which BMOP specializes, a chance to grapple with music that other ensembles leave to wither. Long may this group continue. More

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      Review: Another Week, Another Philharmonic Podium Candidate

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the latest potential music director to lead the orchestra, in a program of Zibuokle Martinaityte, Strauss and Tchaikovsky.Jakub Hrusa and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, two of the world’s most respected rising maestros, keep ending up in close proximity. In 2017 they were simultaneously named the principal guest conductors of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. (Rouvali was elevated to that ensemble’s top post two years later.)When Rouvali made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in fall 2019, it was a week before Hrusa appeared there. And now they have returned to the orchestra, once again in tandem: Hrusa, 40, last week, and Rouvali, 36, on Thursday.Their appearances — and those of other Philharmonic guest conductors this season — are being closely watched since the announcement in September that Jaap van Zweden would be stepping down as music director in 2024. These two young, talented artists are among the prominent candidates to succeed him.Hrusa’s recent concert was, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times, “rich with novelty and spirited throughout.” Rouvali’s was, too — if not in its main offering, Tchaikovsky’s all too often played Fifth Symphony. But the program on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center began with the American premiere of a recent work by Zibuokle Martinaityte, and continued with a rare account of the full set of Strauss’s six Op. 68 songs, the “Brentano-Lieder.”Martinaityte’s dense, moody “Saudade” (2019) begins with a ceaselessly rocking motif and a quality of awakening, which is swiftly obscured by strange oscillations in the cellos and oozy, sliding dissonances in the violins.A passage of grumbling darkness becomes almost palpable, as in the unsettlingly visceral music of Ash Fure, before gradually expanding into a wailing full-orchestra crescendo. That climax comes about halfway through the 17-minute piece, which loses some urgency after, with droning tidal motions continuing to rise and fall, even if the colors in Martinaityte’s orchestral writing remain intriguingly agitated.Making her Philharmonic debut in the Strauss songs, the soprano Golda Schultz was — as in “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Metropolitan Opera last month — serene and confident, her voice silky and immaculate. You got a sense of why these pieces are not often performed as a group; a voice light and agile enough for the middle four songs can struggle with the grander ones that frame them.And Schultz, whose slender instrument sweetly penetrates but doesn’t exactly bloom, was not in her element for the rapturous opening “An die Nacht.” But with Rouvali softening the orchestra into intimacy, she brought characterful wit and zestful German to “Ich wollt ein Sträusslein binden” and “Säus’le, liebe Myrte!” and Zerbinetta-esque dexterity to “Amor.”The closing “Lied der Frauen” wants tone a bit more majestic, but Schultz attacked it with gusto and brought gentle ambivalence to the end. And in “Als mir dein Lied erklang,” she was superb, singing with the combination of purity and humanity that characterizes the best Strauss ingénues.Throughout the evening, Rouvali stepped around the podium with a kind of cheery calm, like a genial general directing troop movements. He kept a precise beat, his left hand often clenched but for a pinpointing index finger.His Tchaikovsky was logical, restrained and orderly — and also relaxed and natural in its phrasing, as opposed to the mannered, manicured style that van Zweden often brings to the standard repertory. But the straightforwardness of this Fifth sometimes tipped into plainness, as when the strings in the first movement covered rebellious passages in the winds. It was a brisk account, neither particularly grand nor intense.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Leslie Parnas, Celebrated Cellist and Musical Diplomat, Dies at 90

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      His success at a competition in Moscow in 1962 earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.Leslie Parnas, a renowned cellist and teacher whose second-place award at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War helped propel him to a storied career, died on Feb. 1 at a rehabilitation facility in Venice, Fla. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his eldest son, Marcel, said.Mr. Parnas, who hailed from a family of musicians in St. Louis, was 30 when he won the silver medal at the second Tchaikovsky competition in 1962, the first time it included a cello category. His success in Moscow, where he performed for Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.He was the only American cellist to win a top award that year — the other winners were Russian — and his success came only four years after the pianist Van Cliburn clinched the gold medal at the first Tchaikovsky competition, which was viewed as an American triumph.Mr. Parnas, known for his lyrical playing, returned regularly to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s for concerts before large crowds. He studied Russian, offered advice to aspiring performers there and lobbied Soviet officials to send musicians to study in the United States. He later served as a juror for the Tchaikovsky competition.“When I play music,” he told The New York Times in 1978 during a visit to Leningrad, “it is not only an example of emotional freedom, but it is also a message for peace and for the right of each individual to express himself.”Mr. Parnas received the silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow from the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.via Parnas FamilyLeslie Parnas was born on Nov. 11, 1931, the son of Eli Parnas, who worked at a paper box factory and played the clarinet, and Etta (Engel) Parnas, a piano teacher.He began studying cello at a young age and made his debut at 14 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, playing Édouard Lalo’s cello concerto at a children’s concert. Two years later he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with the renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. He graduated in 1951.After a stint in the U.S. Navy Band, he returned to Missouri to serve as principal cellist in the St. Louis Symphony, a position he held from 1954 to 1962. From the outset, his talents were on display. When a soloist was late for a performance of the Brahms double concerto for violin and cello, Mr. Parnas stepped in at the last minute, dazzling the audience.He also caught the attention of the eminent cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, who presented him an award at an international cello competition in Paris in 1957.It was the beginning of a long friendship. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Casals collaborated in a variety of venues, including the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont and Mr. Casals’s festival in Puerto Rico.Mr. Casals, one of the most revered musicians of the 20th century, could be an intimidating figure. But he had a rapport with Mr. Parnas. During a class in 1961, Mr. Casals chastised Mr. Parnas for playing with too much vibrato. Without missing a beat, Mr. Parnas offered to sell him some.“None of us would ever have dared say something like that,” said Jaime Laredo, a violinist and conductor who often played with Mr. Parnas. “Leslie could get away with things like that. They had a mutual respect.”When Mr. Casals died in 1973, Mr. Parnas was a pallbearer at his funeral.The renowned musician Pablo Casals became a friend of Mr. Parnas, who was a pallbearer at his funeral.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesMr. Parnas honed a soaring sound in repertoire that ranged from Brahms to Shostakovich. He won praise for a 1964 recording of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, with Mr. Laredo and the pianist Rudolf Serkin.He could be headstrong, changing tempos on a whim and instructing colleagues to play quietly during his solos.“He was a very instinctive player,” Mr. Laredo said. “He wasn’t that particular about following the score to the nth degree. He just played naturally.”He made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1965, playing Schumann’s cello concerto. In his review, the Times music critic Howard Klein called him a “fiery and romantic cellist.”“Mr. Parnas did not play so much as he sang the work,” Mr. Klein wrote. “The daring way he dug into those high position passages added a gambler’s excitement.”Mr. Parnas became a fixture on the chamber music scene, including at Marlboro, where he performed for many years. He joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1969 as a founding member, helping cement its reputation as a magnet for top artists. From 1975 to 1984 he was artistic director of Kneisel Hall, a chamber music festival and school in Blue Hill, Maine.Ida Kavafian, a violinist and violist who played alongside Mr. Parnas in the early days of the Chamber Music Society, said his expressiveness was striking.“It was the kind of sound that would just wrap you up, envelop you, and you felt it was all around you,” she said. “It was an experience.”As his performance career waned, Mr. Parnas focused on teaching, including at Boston University, where he served as an adjunct associate professor of music from 1963 to 2013.Agnes Kim, a cellist who studied with him from 2004 to 2008, said he spoke often about the importance of not letting technique interfere with musical expression.“He was a legendary teacher, but to me he was never that faraway, mystical person,” she said. “He was just so friendly, so humble. He always had his playful grin every time I went to the classroom.”Along with his son Marcel, Mr. Parnas is survived by another son, Jean-Pierre, and four grandchildren, two of whom are professional musicians. He married Ingeburg Rathmann in 1961; she died of breast cancer in 2009.Marcel Parnas said that his father continued playing his 1698 Matteo Goffriller cello almost every day until late in life, and that he was especially fond of Bach’s cello suites.“For him, music was everything,” he said. “That was the way he lived: to play the cello.” More

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      His Conducting Wasn’t Always Pleasant. But It Was the Truth.

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      Michael Gielen’s precise, intellectually charged work made him one of the most stimulating maestros of the 20th century. Now a set of 88 CDs offers the deepest insight yet.Read the reviews that the German conductor Michael Gielen received during his career, and you find a running theme.“He looks like an academician,” Raymond Ericson reported in The New York Times after Gielen’s New York Philharmonic debut in 1971. “His baton technique is not flamboyant; it is clear and precise.”A year later, the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, of a concert with the National Orchestra of Belgium at Carnegie Hall, that his Mahler “was almost painfully literal.”“A sensuous approach is exactly what the unsentimental Mr. Gielen is unprepared to give,” he added.Eleven years after that, Donal Henahan complained of a Carnegie visit with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Gielen led for six seasons in an initially confrontational, eventually admired tenure: “Even Bruckner wants to sing and dance at times. This rather schoolmasterish performance denied him that pleasure.”These were meant as barbs. But Gielen gloried in the critical discomfort, in defying the expectations of a culture industry he thought had its priorities all wrong. When a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter asked in 1982 if he was too cerebral an artist for his own good, Gielen said, “If I compare what I do to what I hear of certain less intellectual colleagues, then I must say I agree myself. Nothing is more horrible than stupid music-making.”Nobody could possibly accuse Gielen, who died in 2019, of that. One might now think him narrow in his doctrinaire modernist focus; or see him as misguided, even elitist, in forcing listeners to hear what he thought good for them; or not share the ever more pessimistic leftism that informed his work.But Gielen raised fundamental questions in his conducting. He interrogated music for what it had said at its creation, and asked what it had to say to the present. He insisted that old and new works said similar things in different accents, and he thought audiences lazy if they could not hear that. He believed it dishonest to settle for easy answers: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so troubled him in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that he spliced Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw” between its slow movement and its “Ode to Joy” finale, a choice that expressed his lifelong commitment to shattering complacency.“Art offers the opportunity to encounter the truth,” Gielen wrote in 1981 to Cincinnati subscribers who were rebelling against his rule. “And that’s not always pleasant.”Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw”Gunter Reich, speaker; Stuttgart Radio Symphony (SWR Music)Even if Gielen mellowed a little over the years, pleasant would be the wrong word to describe the recently completed “Michael Gielen Edition” from SWR Music: 88 CDs that cover five decades of recordings and offer the deepest insight yet into this conductor’s work, from Bach to Zimmermann.Many have been available before; some are new to disc; other important releases must be found elsewhere. But there is more than enough in its 10 volumes to confirm Gielen as one of the most stimulating conductors of the 20th century.He made the bulk of these recordings with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, the radio ensemble that he led from 1986 to 1999 — and worked with until just before its demise in 2016 — in part with the intention of using its practically unlimited rehearsal time to make an archive of recordings as close as possible to his intentions.Those intentions were often provocative, in the best sense. With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could, which had immense payoffs in Mahler, even in Beethoven. His Haydn does not chuckle as freely as it might; his Mozart is robust, not prettified; his Bruckner has little interest in storming the heavens he denied, though it does plumb the depths he saw all around him.But relaxation or enjoyment could more properly be found “eating well, or taking a good shower,” than in engaging with music, Gielen told The Times in 1982. His recordings were made for the head more than for the heart. Gielen’s was conducting to think with, and he is worth thinking with still.Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Music and politics were combined from the start for him. Born in Dresden in 1927 to Josef Gielen, a theater and opera director, and Rose Steuermann, a soprano noted for her Schoenberg, Michael and his family fled the Nazis, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1940.Surrounded in Argentina by refugees who had no sympathy for the style of the conductors who stayed behind to serve the Third Reich, Gielen, a répétiteur and budding conductor at the Teatro Colón, gravitated toward the textual literalism of his two antifascist idols, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini. He shunned what he called the “gigantomania” of Wilhelm Furtwängler, under whom he would uncomfortably play continuo for Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in 1950.Back in Europe, Gielen focused on opera during the first half of his career, though not exclusively so. He was a staff conductor at the Vienna State Opera, then had spells leading the Royal Swedish Opera and the Netherlands Opera, before eventually triumphing as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, then the most aesthetically ambitious house in Germany, from 1977 to 1987.Lamentably little of Gielen’s operatic legacy survives. But working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, he built Frankfurt into a crucible of Regietheater — or “director’s theater,” in which the director’s vision tends to dominate — hoping to restore something like the original shock of pieces that he thought had become bland under the weight of performance traditions.With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could.Manfred Roth/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesFor Gielen, there were two ways to do something similar in the concert hall. One was to come up with programming that radicalized the old and contextualized the new. So he made a montage out of Webern’s “Six Pieces” and Schubert’s “Rosamunde”; put Schoenberg’s more classically-inclined works next to Mozart’s more Romantic ones; and stuck Schoenberg’s Expressionist monologue “Erwartung” before Beethoven’s “Eroica.”Gielen’s other method remains bracingly apparent on record: an interpretive technique that prized restraint. Other musicians working at the same time explored period instruments as a way to recover the shock of the worn, but he thought that path illusory (even if he invited Nikolaus Harnoncourt to conduct in Frankfurt). “Putting on a wig doesn’t make me an 18th-century man,” he wrote in his memoirs.Instead, Gielen tried to clarify structures through a careful analysis of tempo relationships, and to expose details, though not so many as to muddy the overarching form. Critics often suggested that he aimed for an “objective” interpretation, but he knew that there were many ways to expose the truths he found in a work. The three accounts of Mahler’s Sixth that are available on SWR, from 1971, 1999 and 2013, take 74, 84 and 94 minutes: the earliest brisk, streamlined; the middle one the dark heart of his essential complete Mahler survey; the last unbearably slow and heavy, consumed from the start with a desperate nihilism.Gielen thought he would be remembered as an exponent of the Second Viennese School and of contemporary music, and the two SWR sets dedicated to that work are exemplary. There is anguish in his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also a forlorn lyricism; like much of Gielen’s conducting, these sit somewhere between the clinical angularity of Pierre Boulez and the warm intensity of Hans Rosbaud, Gielen’s predecessor in Baden-Baden. The six-disc volume of post-World War II music — one CD, dedicated to Jorge E. López’s astonishing “Dome Peak” and “Breath — Hammer — Lightning,” comes with a health warning for its extremes of volume — is a despairingly intense affair. Ligeti’s Requiem, which Gielen premiered in 1965, practically smokes with rage.Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)But Gielen’s approach generated equally fascinating, complicated results in other music, too. His taste for detail fully convinces in late Romanticism, where his repertoire was particularly broad. Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead” comes off as a colossal masterpiece; Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” is given expansive treatment, a Klimt glittering blindingly; Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama” has never sounded so glorious.Gielen’s ability to seem as if he was getting out of the way of the music he conducted lets these kinds of scores stand in full bloom, with the effect of demonstrating exactly why later composers reacted so strongly against them — including Gielen himself, in his few, stark works.Elsewhere, Gielen felt it necessary to stamp out overkill in Romanticism where it was unwarranted — above all in his Beethoven, which still has unusual energy, even if many conductors have since come around to Gielen’s once-unusual insistence on trying to keep up with the composer’s controversial metronome markings.That energy is not at all benign; for Gielen, the violence in Beethoven’s scores is as much a part of their humanity as their idealism is. While the “Eroica” was for him a genuinely revolutionary piece that built a “new social existence” around individual dignity in its finale — he recorded it repeatedly, and enthrallingly — the Fifth Symphony he believed a “terrible awakening.” The relentless C major hammering of its finale evoked not triumph or freedom, Gielen wrote, but “affirmation without contradiction, and with it the trampling of any opposition, imperial terror.” If his 1997 recording does not fully convince — it sounds empty, even barren — you suspect it’s not supposed to.Beethoven’s Fifth SymphonySWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Complexity where others found simplicity; enigmas where there might seem to be answers. For Gielen, there was no escape. “You see me helpless before the confusing picture of the last century,” he wrote near the end of his autobiography.All that was left was to think about music. That always had more truths to offer. More

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      Review: An Audition Season Begins at the Philharmonic

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      Jakub Hrusa is the first of several guest conductors appearing with the orchestra in the coming weeks as it searches for its next music director.It’s audition season at the New York Philharmonic.Well, not officially. But ever since the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, announced that he would step down in 2024, every guest conductor’s appearance has carried the weight of speculation. When an outsider takes the podium these days, it’s hard to get through the concert without thinking: Could this be our future?And, for the next six weeks, the Philharmonic’s calendar is filled with nothing but guests.It began Thursday with Jakub Hrusa, a conductor with an ear for rarities and the skill to make persuasive cases for them. Next up are Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a charismatic and promising young talent; Manfred Honeck, a master of the standard repertory; Herbert Blomstedt, an elder statesman who, now in his mid-90s, is unlikely to be a music director again; and Gustavo Dudamel, who is being given substantial real estate with a Schumann festival in March. (That’s an awful lot of Y chromosomes, though other notable appearances in recent months have included Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young and Susanna Mälkki.)Hrusa last led the Philharmonic in 2019 — as it happens, at the end of another stretch of guest programs. Beyond bringing out a dynamic sound often absent from van Zweden’s indelicate style, Hrusa had a subtle gift then of giving the audience something it would enjoy but not necessarily ask for: Dvorak, say, but the underrated Sixth Symphony.That happened again with this week’s concerts at Alice Tully Hall. (I attended the one on Friday.) The evening had the surface-level same-old of dead European dudes — Central Europeans, to be exact — but was rich with novelty and spirited throughout, enough to inspire applause in the middle of a symphony. Two of the three works had never been played by the Philharmonic, and the centerpiece concerto, featuring the pianist Yuja Wang, hadn’t been on a subscription program since the 1980s.Even among those rarities were names you should but don’t see here often: Zoltan Kodaly and Bohuslav Martinu.Kodaly was represented by his Concerto for Orchestra, which premiered in 1941 — ahead of the more famous work of the same name by his Hungarian compatriot Bela Bartok. The piece harkens back to Bach, in its “Brandenburgs”-like treatment of the ensemble and contrapuntal writing, but with a folk flavor.Under Hrusa’s baton it had the feel of a festive opener, and the Philharmonic players responded accordingly: a big sound delivered at a breakneck pace, yet crisply articulated (which helps at Tully, whose acoustics tend to punish grandeur with muddle). The score is not without its swerves, though, and Hrusa navigated them by dropping to a whisper in an instant for lyrical, chamber-size passages and making space for intriguing sonorities that arose from, for example, the doubling of cello pizzicato in the bassoon.Martinu’s Symphony No. 1, from 1942, was comparatively quiet — at least at first, because Hrusa took a long, almost theatrical view of the piece, building toward a climax and threading the four discrete movements. With a soft approach, his opening, of upward chromatic scales passed around the orchestra, was a garden of strangely beautiful flowers in bloom.Those scales recur later, but Hrusa didn’t overemphasize them. Rather, they arose gracefully amid the work’s shifting character: the unsteady and rapidly escalating second movement, with strings given fleeting fragments of a phrase that could just as easily soar, the shards of a Dvorak melody; the thick textures of the darker third movement; and the dancing finale, in which even dolce passages sprint as if sprung.Yuja Wang performed Liszt’s First Piano Concerto wearing chunky white sunglasses — doctor’s orders, but readily accepted by an audience familiar with her blend of glamour and thoughtful artistry.Chris LeeIt was heartening to see that nearly all of the audience had stayed after intermission for the Martinu, given that the evening’s clearer selling point had come earlier: Wang playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat.Wang has Liszt’s storied star power as a performer: easily able to command a stage and entertainingly showy, yet sensitive and never excessively emotive. Her glamour is so established, she came out wearing chunky sunglasses — doctor’s orders as she recovers from a recent procedure — and the audience simply greeted it, with cheers, as a fashion statement.She played the opening with muscularity and precision, matched by the orchestra’s vigorous reading of the first movement’s theme. But later, in a nocturne-like solo, Wang exquisitely flipped the piece’s scale to that of an intimate recital. She made the concerto sound better than it actually is.In the spirit of Liszt, she returned with an encore of crowd-pleasing, breathless athleticism: the Toccatina from Kapustin’s Opus 40 Concert Etudes. But then she came back — still virtuosic, yet expressive and absolutely lovely — for Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” (Op. 67, No. 2). As she played, Hrusa listened from the conductor’s podium, his eyes closed and his head nodding in bliss, a stand-in for all of us there.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Without a Note of Beethoven, an Orchestra Shines

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      At Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave pride of place to a once-forgotten Florence Price symphony, alongside new works and a classic.The vast majority of the music the Philadelphia Orchestra is playing in its eight concerts at Carnegie Hall this season is by Beethoven.Under its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, this ensemble plays the master with warmth and verve. And alongside the nine classic symphonies, it is presenting contemporary works written in response, a tried-and-true technique to scooch in the new with the old, spoonful-of-sugar style. They’ve been worthy performances.But even though three of the concerts are yet to come — Beethoven’s First and Ninth on Feb. 21, then his “Missa Solemnis” and a John Williams gala in April — I reckon that nothing the Philadelphians do at Carnegie this season will be more impressive than Tuesday’s performance.There was not a note of Beethoven. Nor, for that matter, any piece that could be considered a standard audience draw. The closest thing to a chestnut, Samuel Barber’s 1947 soprano monologue “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” bloomed in the fresh company of two new works and Florence Price’s once-forgotten Symphony No. 1.When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the Price in 1933, it was the first work by a Black woman to be played by a major orchestra. While women and composers of color are now better represented on programs, it is still all too rare for them (or for anything but a canonical piece) to have the anchor position at a concert’s end.So it was a progressive, even inspiring statement for Philadelphia — which released a recording of Price’s First and Third symphonies last year — to close with the First. And the players gave it the same vitality and subtlety they’ve brought to Beethoven.The opening bassoon line was here less a solo showpiece than a mellow song nestled modestly within the textures of the strings. In that bassoon call — along with the blending of folk-style melodies and classical sweep, and a dancing finale — Price’s symphony bears the unmistakable influence of Dvorak’s “New World.” But it is very much its own piece, with an arresting vacillation between raging force and abrupt lyrical oases in the first movement and a wind whistle echoing through the vibrant Juba dance in the third.Price clearly knew she had a good tune in the slow second movement, a hymnlike refrain for brass chorale that she milks for all it’s worth. But the many repetitions, with delicate African drumming underneath, take on the shining dignity of prayer. And the ending, with rapid calligraphy in the winds winding around the theme, rises to ecstasy, punctuated by bells.Sounding lush yet focused and committed, Nézet-Séguin’s orchestra even highlights a quality I hadn’t particularly associated with Price: humor, in her dances and in the way a clarinet suddenly squiggles out of that slow hymn, like a giggle in church.The concert opened with a new suite by Matthew Aucoin adapted from his opera “Eurydice,” which played at the Metropolitan Opera last fall. At the Met, Aucoin’s score swamped a winsome story, but in an 18-minute instrumental digest, it was easier to appreciate his music’s dense, raucous extravagance, the way he whips an orchestra from mists into oceans, then makes pummeling percussion chase it into a gallop. Ricardo Morales, the Philadelphians’ principal clarinet, played his doleful solo with airily glowing tone, a letter from another world.There was grandeur, too, in Valerie Coleman’s “This Is Not a Small Voice,” her new setting of a poetic paean to Black pride by Sonia Sanchez that weaves from rumination to bold declaration. The soprano Angel Blue was keen, her tone as rich yet light as whipped cream, in a difficult solo part, which demands crisp speak-singing articulation and delves into velvety depths before soaring upward to glistening high notes. Blue was also superb — sweet and gentle, but always lively — in the nostalgic Barber.In its inspired alignment of old and new, the concert recalled last week’s program at the New York Philharmonic, which also closed with a rediscovered symphony by a Black composer. When it comes to broadening the sounds that echo through our opera houses and concert halls, change can be frustratingly slow. But to hear, within a few days, two of the country’s most venerable orchestras play symphonies by Julius Eastman and Florence Price did give the sense of watching the tectonic plates of the repertory shift in real time.Philadelphia OrchestraAppears next at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, on Feb. 21. More