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      Review: Karina Canellakis Hushes the New York Philharmonic

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      Some of the most memorable moments in the orchestra’s program this week, led by Karina Canellakis, were extremely soft.The New York Philharmonic is capable of playing quietly; the orchestra just hasn’t always seemed to enjoy it. Particularly under their last music director, Jaap van Zweden, the musicians tended to approach soft dynamics unwillingly, as if they were waiting impatiently for the next explosion.So it was noteworthy that some of the most memorable passages in the Philharmonic’s excellent concert on Thursday evening at David Geffen Hall, conducted by Karina Canellakis, were the most delicate ones.There was the spooky haze at the start of Kaija Saariaho’s “Lumière et Pesanteur.” The somberly gentle woodwinds echoing the tune of a Bach chorale in Berg’s Violin Concerto. The hovering transcendence of the strings drawing to a nearly inaudible hush at the end of Messiaen’s “Les Offrandes Oubliées.” The haunting melody in a duo of flute and oboe that emerges from a mist in the third section of Debussy’s “La Mer.”The players didn’t seem like they wanted these moments to end as soon as possible; they reveled in them. That attests, of course, to the musicians themselves — and, perhaps, to their continued acclimation to the renovated Geffen Hall, in which even the most fragile sounds register clearly.But it also speaks to Canellakis’s leadership on the podium. Throughout the concert, she elicited playing of poise and patience, inspiring the ensemble to relax into phrases — which gave the music more organic energy than pressing relentlessly forward would have.For all the bits of breathtaking stillness in the performance, there were also forceful climaxes, but Canellakis arrived at them with naturalness. At the end of the first section of “La Mer,” the volume swiftly swells from pianissimo to fortissimo. While some performances land flat on the loudness, she drew out the speed ever so slightly, making the rise in dynamics feel like a thrilling wave rather than an abrupt boom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Issa Rae Cancels Kennedy Center Appearance After Trump’s Takeover

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      President Trump’s takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has prompted an outcry in the cultural community, with several artists resigning their posts or canceling engagements at the center.Mr. Trump made himself chairman of the center on Wednesday, a few days after he purged the board of Biden appointees. The new board, stacked with Trump loyalists, elected Mr. Trump chairman and fired the Kennedy Center’s longtime president, Deborah F. Rutter. The board named Richard Grenell, who was ambassador to Germany during the first Trump administration, interim president.The new leadership has moved swiftly to reshape the Kennedy Center’s upper ranks. In addition to Ms. Rutter, several other longtime staff members were fired on Wednesday, including top officials overseeing public relations and governance.Here’s a look at the stars who have resigned from the Kennedy Center or canceled shows in the wake of Mr. Trump’s takeover:Issa RaeMs. Rae, the actress, writer and comedian, announced on social media on Thursday that she was canceling an engagement next month at the Kennedy Center, “An Evening With Issa Rae.” She said that tickets would be refunded.“Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I’ve decided to cancel my appearance at this venue,” she wrote on Instagram.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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

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      In Hospitals and Hospices, ‘Music as Care’ Offers a New Kind of Comfort

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      A violinist plays for her father. A singer takes requests. In hospitals and hospices, bedside performers offer a new kind of care.In the five years my father was languishing in a nursing home in Hamburg, I often brought my violin to play by his bedside. I would prop up my copy of Bach with the help of a water bottle and read through sonatas and partitas I had learned as a teenager, when I was considering a career in music.My father’s reaction was hard to read. His gaze was unchangingly stoic during that final stage of his struggle with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Sometimes my mother saw him attempt to clap. After a halting reading of Bach’s majestic “Chaconne” that would have drawn scorn from the critic in me, we both clearly heard him say “thank you.”One day, a caregiver buttonholed me in the corridor and requested that I play in the day room where they wheeled residents for a change of scenery. As it was, she said, they could all hear me through the walls. She might have picked up on my hesitation: Playing in front of any kind of audience always triggered my anxiety.I agreed, mostly for my father’s sake. But on the appointed day, with my audience fanned out in their beds in various states of consciousness, I found myself playing freely. Nurses glided by on soundless sneakers, a lunch cart clattered in the distance; one woman let out sighs. Afterward, I realized that I had never entered into such a state of flow while playing in public. What had been intended as an act of care for the residents had also healed a tiny bit of the rift in my relationship with the violin.Vocke, Okundaye, Sean Brennan, Lara Bruckmann and Tamara Wellons practice before making their rounds at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesI shared this story on a brisk January morning in Baltimore in the old boardroom at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I sat in on a peer supervision session of professional bedside artists. These musicians, all faculty members at the Peabody Institute, are part of a nationwide trend to bring the arts into health care settings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A 311-Year-Old Stradivarius Violin Sells for $11.25 Million at Sotheby’s

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      The money from the sale of the violin, which was once owned by the 19th-century virtuoso Joseph Joachim, will benefit a scholarship program at the New England Conservatory.A 311-year-old Stradivarius violin sold for $11.25 million at Sotheby’s on Friday, in a closely watched auction that drew interest from investors, collectors and classical musicians.The violin was made by the famed Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari in 1714, during the so-called golden period of violin making. It was later owned by one of the greatest violinists of the 19th century, the Hungarian-born virtuoso Joseph Joachim, a close associate of Johannes Brahms.The Stradivarius was sold by the New England Conservatory, which plans to use the proceeds of the sale to endow a student scholarship program. The instrument was previously owned by an alumnus of the school, Si-Hon Ma, who died in 2009. His estate donated the instrument to the New England Conservatory in 2015 with a provision that it could one day be sold to finance student scholarships.“Now we really have the chance to have it benefit so many more students — generations of students to come,” said Andrea Kalyn, the president of the conservatory.Sotheby’s said the buyer wished to remain anonymous.Among violins sold publicly at auction, the current record is held by the so-called “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius, once owned by the granddaughter of Lord Byron, which sold in 2011 for $15.9 million.The instrument sold on Friday was one of several violins owned by Joachim, who premiered the Brahms violin concerto in 1879.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Daniel Barenboim Announces He Has Parkinson’s Disease

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      “I am planning to maintain as many of my professional commitments as possible,” the conductor said.Daniel Barenboim, the eminent conductor and pianist who stepped back from engagements in recent years citing health concerns, said Thursday that he has Parkinson’s disease.Announcing the diagnosis in a short news release, Barenboim, 82, said that he still planned to fulfill “as many of my professional commitments as possible,” including concerts with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble he founded in 1999 to bring Israeli and Arab musicians together.“If I am unable to perform, it is because my health does not allow me to,” Barenboim said, adding that he was adjusting to “navigating this new reality” and that his focus “is on receiving the best available care.”Three years ago, Barenboim announced that he was suffering from a “serious neurological condition” that was affecting his work. In January 2023, he resigned as general music director of the Berlin State Opera because of poor health.A spokeswoman for the Daniel Barenboim Foundation said that the conductor was unavailable for interview. His next scheduled performance is in August as part of a West-Eastern Divan Orchestra summer tour, the spokeswoman said, adding that Barenboim was continuing to teach at the Barenboim-Said Academy, a music school he established in Berlin that brings together students from across the Middle East.Born to Jewish parents in Argentina, Barenboim has been a titan of classical music for almost seven decades, first as a piano prodigy and later as a conductor and music director. He took over the leadership of the Berlin State Opera in 1992 and transformed into one of the world’s leading houses, and he also held music director positions at the Orchestre de Paris, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Teatro alla Scala, in Milan.Since the 1980s, Barenboim has also been an outspoken political figure, as much as a revered musical one — a rarity for a conductor. In 1989, just days after the Berlin Wall fell, Barenboim led the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert for East Germans. A decade later, along with the Palestinian scholar and writer Edward Said, he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the belief that music could lead Israelis and Arabs to mutual understanding.In his statement on Thursday, Barenboim said he considered the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra his “most important responsibility.”“It is essential for me to ensure the orchestra’s long-term stability and development,” he said. More

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      A Composer Turns Down the Tempo, and Turns Up the Complexity

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      Lisa Streich, an artist on the rise who has found success in Europe, is having a rare American showcase this week in New York.In the golden vastness of St. Mark’s Basilica after night had fallen, the voices seemed to hover in an endless haze. It was the closing concert of the Venice Music Biennale in October, and Lisa Streich’s “Stabat,” written for 32 singers divided into four choirs, blurred over half an hour into a soft yet never quite settled dream.Streich, 39, was represented in Venice not just by “Stabat,” but also by the premiere of “Orchestra of Black Butterflies,” a rigorous yet playful, pleasurable work for four musicians that unfolds like an off-kilter machine. That piece is now coming to New York, where it will be performed at the Miller Theater on Thursday by the piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire in a Composer Portrait devoted to Streich, a rare American showcase for an important rising artist.Born in Sweden and raised in a small town in northern Germany, Streich already has a formidable career in Europe. She was a composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival last summer. She has been commissioned by major institutions like the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which asked her to write a final scene to append to Hans Werner Henze’s one-act “Das Wundertheater.” Conductors as eminent as Alan Gilbert and Matthias Pintscher have led her scores. After hearing her work in Venice, I’m hooked.Streich’s music is often quiet and deliberate. The program note at Miller says that when she was a young composer, her goal was “to find the slowest tempo where a performer could still keep a solid pulse.” Her favorite? Thirty-seven beats per minute. Her pieces tend to fade into oblivion as they end; “Ishjarta,” her Berlin Philharmonic commission, ends with almost the entire orchestra playing an extremely soft pianissississimo.Even when her work skirts inaudibility, it’s complex. Streich has taken to using software to analyze recordings of choirs she finds on the internet. She focuses on gnarly harmonic moments and has compiled some of the results — divided into 14 categories, like “Gloria” and “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” — in “Book of Chords,” alongside her photographs and poetry.

      SPUN by Sarah SavietWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Eliot Gardiner’s Once and Future Orchestras Duel

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      Banished from his ensembles after striking a singer, John Eliot Gardiner has assembled a new group, with the same programming at the same venue.Marten Root, a flutist specializing in historical instruments, has played under the conductor John Eliot Gardiner for over 35 years, and considers him a profoundly intelligent and honest musician.Root, 68, has also had severe enough verbal disagreements with Gardiner, 81, that he twice temporarily quit working with him. The reasons were “incidents which happen if you’re a flute player in an orchestra,” Root said in a video interview. “You’re the top of the score. You’re always in the line of fire.”Both times, he returned. Playing under Gardiner, an eminent performer of Baroque music who has recorded every single Bach cantata, was “no easy job to do,” Root said, “but basically, I decided to go back to the orchestra twice, because it’s musically more than worth it.”In August last year, Gardiner struck the singer William Thomas following a performance of the opera “Les Troyens” in France. Gardiner apologized and announced that he was temporarily withdrawing from all conducting.Now, Gardiner has returned — but not with his old organization, Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, which didn’t want him back. Instead, Gardiner has just completed a tour with a new ensemble he founded, the Constellation Choir & Orchestra.The two groups almost collided recently, playing nearly identical concerts at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, on Dec. 7 and 14. Heard so closely together, the performances offered an unusual glimpse of what’s ahead for Gardiner’s once and future ensembles. Although the concerts looked similar on paper, they sounded strikingly different.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More