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      How TwoSet Violin Won Fame by Poking Fun at Classical Music

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      The violinists Eddy Chen and Brett Yang arrived in the suburbs of Bangkok recently on a mischievous mission. They had come to record hip-hop videos about Beethoven, Bach and other titans of music as if they were alive today.“They called me calloused, called me unfeeling,” Chen, dressed as Beethoven, with a gray wig and crimson scarf, rapped in one video. “Can’t let them know what I am concealing.”It was just another day in the life of Chen and Yang, better known as the comedy duo TwoSet Violin, who have millions of fans for the humor and whimsy they bring to the often very serious world of classical music. Over the past 11 years, they have galvanized a younger generation of musicians and helped dispel their field’s stuffy image.Filming crews working with Eddy Chen, left, dressed as Bach, and Brett Yang, dressed as Shostakovich.Chen and Yang have performed Pachelbel’s Canon in D with rubber chickens, hosted wild composer-themed games of charades and brutally taken down actors pretending to play the violin in movies. They have produced skits about showboating musicians, pushy parents and high-stakes auditions.Some of classical music’s biggest names have joined in on the fun. Hilary Hahn joined Chen and Yang to perform Paganini caprices while hula-hooping. Ray Chen played a game in which he and the duo imitated violinists like Jascha Heifetz and Anne-Sophie Mutter.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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      The Revolutionary Sound at the Heart of ‘The Nutcracker’

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      There comes a moment in “The Nutcracker,” a ballet full of fantasy of fantastical music, when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances to a tune you’ve probably heard before.Over plucked string instruments, a glassy, bell-like melody emerges from a celesta, evoking water drops and then more as those drops give way to flowing runs. It’s a transporting sound: mysterious and otherworldly, delicate and playful.This is the famous “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” a highlight of “The Nutcracker” and a holiday staple, born on the stage and heard today in commercials and on movie soundtracks around this time every year.Unmute to listen as Megan Fairchild dances the Sugarplum Fairy in New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.New York City BalletThe “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is so familiar that it’s difficult to imagine that when this music was new, in 1892, it was really new. And that’s because of the celesta.Only recently invented, the celesta was in its infancy when Tchaikovsky began to imagine how he might write for it. Since then, its sound has spread throughout classical music and into pop, often with the same magical effect you hear in “The Nutcracker.” More

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      The Classical Music Our Critics Can’t Stop Thinking About

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      Watch and listen to five recent highlights, including performances by Davóne Tines and Lise Davidsen, and a new album by Ethan Iverson.The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments.Davóne TinesAn installation view of “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” part of “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAndrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on Fifth Avenue, a Georgian homage on an immense, Gilded-Age scale, is currently the home of a more modest domestic scene: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s childhood living room.As part of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s triennial exhibition, “Making Home,” Tines has worked with the director Zack Winokur and the artist Hugh Hayden to create “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” an uncanny, poignant replica of the house of Tines’s grandparents, who raised him.‘Living Room, Orlean, Virginia’Sonic composition by Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur with Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, and John Hilton Tines Sr. Sound engineered by Al Carlson.The “Living Room” tableau, arranged on an enormous rocker, is a meditation on “home” as something soothing yet precarious for a musician like Tines, who spends much of his year on the road. On closer inspection, this installation, with its cozy arrangement of furniture, an upright piano and even a rug over carpeted flooring, has a dreaminess to it: Eerily, the photo frames are empty.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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      New York Philharmonic Looks to Philadelphia for Its Next Leader

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      Matías Tarnopolsky, who manages the Philadelphia Orchestra, will come to New York as the Philharmonic works to recover from a trying period.The New York Philharmonic announced on Monday that it had chosen a new president and chief executive: Matías Tarnopolsky, who currently leads the Philadelphia Orchestra.Tarnopolsky, 54, a veteran arts leader who oversaw the merger of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in 2021, said he saw potential for an “auspicious new chapter” in New York, pointing to the arrival in 2026 of the star maestro Gustavo Dudamel.“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help shape the future of the New York Philharmonic,” said Tarnopolsky, who begins an initial five-year contract in January. “I embrace it with all my heart.”Tarnopolsky will take the helm of the Philharmonic, America’s oldest symphony orchestra, at a critical time.The ensemble has been grappling with a series of challenges, including the sudden resignation in July of its previous chief executive, Gary Ginstling, after only a year on the job. Ginstling left amid friction with Dudamel, board members, staff and musicians. Since then, Deborah Borda, a veteran Philharmonic leader, has run the orchestra on an interim basis.Borda, who led the orchestra from 2017 to 2023, has worked to stabilize the organization. After months of tense negotiations, the administration reached a labor deal in September with musicians, offering 30 percent raises over three years. And last month, the orchestra, hoping to bring to an end a long-running issue, dismissed two players over accusations of sexual misconduct.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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      Puccini Died 100 Years Ago. So Did the Great Opera Tradition.

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      There’s a knock at the door.A poor young poet is struggling to write in his attic apartment when he is interrupted by the sickly seamstress who lives downstairs. Her candle has gone out; can he light it?Barely 15 minutes later, these two strangers are singing ecstatically about their love. Implausible, right? But when a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème” is working its hot magic, nothing could be more believable.And nothing could be more essentially operatic than such a scene, with the emotions compressed and heightened through music. Puccini, who died 100 years ago, on Nov. 29, 1924, proved himself again and again a master of moments like this: unleashing a Technicolor extravagance of feeling while at the same time conveying plain, simple truth.A painter assuring his jealous girlfriend that her eyes are the most beautiful in the world. A prince, pursued by a city desperate to know his name, promising that it will remain a secret. A teenage geisha convinced her husband will come back to her.Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was the Dickens of opera, able to manage the elusive combination of nearly universal accessibility and deep sophistication.A. Dupont/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs DivisionOnce you know these passages, just thinking about them can bring you to tears. Spoken, the texts would be generic, sentimental, even laughable. Set to Puccini’s music, they suggest the most sincere and profound experiences that humans are capable of. More

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      Yunchan Lim Plays Chopin With the New York Philharmonic

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      Performing with the New York Philharmonic and Kazuki Yamada, Lim played Chopin’s F minor Concerto with imperturbable calm and eloquence.David Geffen Hall is very nearly sold out for the New York Philharmonic’s performances this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So jump, if you can, at the vanishing chance to hear Yunchan Lim play Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F minor.In the spirit of the season, let’s give thanks for this 20-year-old pianist from South Korea. On Wednesday at Geffen Hall, Lim played in the spotlight as if he’d been doing it for decades, with such imperturbable calm and eloquence that it was hard to believe that two and a half years ago he was essentially unknown.It was June 2022 when he burst onto the international scene as the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition with a rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto that became a YouTube sensation. The two blockbuster Rachmaninoff concertos have been early calling cards for Lim, but this year has included a lot of Chopin, including an astonishing traversal of all 24 études at Carnegie Hall and on a new recording.Chopin, with his restrained refinement, is an even more natural fit for Lim than Romantic warhorses like Rachmaninoff. Lim’s playing never feels seething or sweaty; he seems like he has all the time in the world, without ever giving a sense of showboating or indulgence.In the first movement of the concerto on Wednesday, he was dreamily flexible in his phrasing without ever losing the music’s pulse. The slow central Larghetto was achingly poised, its 10 minutes framed by two perfect notes, both A flats: the first deep and softly buttery, the last a pinprick of starlight.This movement is an opera aria without voices and, like a great bel canto singer, Lim understands that coloratura ornaments mustn’t distract from, but actually emphasize, the long, sustained central line of the music. In the finale, he exuded graciousness, attentive to details of touch, as in a passage whose texture moved swiftly from silvery to steely without ever losing smoothness.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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      Does the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä Deserve His Meteoric Rise?

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      The 28-year-old maestro, entrusted with two storied ensembles, visited Carnegie Hall with the superb Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.A raucously received performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Saturday was the latest exclamation point in the conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s meteoric rise. Mäkelä is just 28 and made his Carnegie debut a mere eight months ago with the Orchestre de Paris — one of the two very good ensembles he currently leads.He returned to the hall this week for a two-night stand with the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam — one of the two much-better-than-very-good ensembles he is set to take over in the coming years. (The news came in April that he would also be the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)Chicago and the Concertgebouw are more than excellent groups; they are cultural treasures, whose futures have been placed in the hands of a maestro who was widely unknown six years ago. It is safe to say that no conductor in modern history has been entrusted with so much at such a young age.Does he deserve it? With the physically extroverted Mäkelä bobbing, digging, punching and thwacking them on, the Concertgebouw’s musicians played superbly. By coincidence, the Berlin Philharmonic, another world-class ensemble, had visited Carnegie a few days before, and provided a useful comparison: Berlin’s kaleidoscopically colored, richly muscular force was distinct from the Concertgebouw’s blended and refined (though still sumptuous) elegance.It’s a luxurious sound, with full, liquid winds, discreetly burnished brasses and, best of all, sustained, velvety strings. Those strings had a beautifully restrained showcase joining Lisa Batiashvili in a hushed arrangement of a Bach chorale after her performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on Friday. And they were fevered yet lucid in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” on Saturday.Yet in some passages of the Schoenberg that were overstated, almost halting, you got a sense of Mäkelä’s shortcomings. He can be so deliberate, so obviously intent on creating precise rhythms and textures bar by bar, that some of the air can come out of the music. It all seems like it should be intense — he certainly looks intense — but you don’t always feel building energy or distinctive character over long spans. It’s a matter of moments over momentum.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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      The Berlin Philharmonic Is the Best in the Business

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      In three concerts at Carnegie Hall led by Kirill Petrenko, this orchestra played with awe-inspiring force and finesse.Around the turn of the 20th century, Arnold Böcklin’s brooding painting “The Isle of the Dead” made for one of the most popular images in Europe. Freud and Lenin owned prints; after seeing a reproduction in 1907, Rachmaninoff was inspired to write a tone poem.Nabokov wrote that copies of the Böcklin hung “in every home in Berlin.” Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead,” which the Berlin Philharmonic played on Sunday at the start of an amazing three-concert stand at Carnegie Hall, was also once ubiquitous, but these days is programmed less frequently and has a whiff of old-fashioned character piece about it.Great orchestras — and no orchestra is greater than this one, which plays with force and finesse under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — of course illuminate the deathless classics of the repertoire, as the Philharmonic did on this trip with Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony and Bruckner’s Fifth. But the best ensembles also reveal unexpected depths in pieces you might take less seriously.Petrenko conducted “The Isle of the Dead” with the same luminous seriousness he might bring to Wagner’s “Parsifal,” making it taut and ferocious, morose without heaviness. Building in strength near the start, the Philharmonic sounded billowing rather than crushing, like a gathering storm cloud. Solos — like the wind fragments that twist around each other, one by one — were played with poise but never look-at-me self-regard. A violin elegy near the end achieved wrenching intensity in what can sometimes be mere mood music.I’ve often thought that Korngold’s Violin Concerto — which came between the Rachmaninoff and Dvorak on Sunday and again, all three even more potent, on Tuesday — is a lot of shallow showboating. But the Philharmonic and Petrenko made it seem newly sophisticated.These players’ cohesion allowed them to create uncannily evocative atmospheres. The first movement of the concerto had a moonlit glow. In the third, a golden full-orchestra blast, balanced so that no section swamped the others, dissolved into a fairy tiptoe. Small details were moving in their artfulness, down to a tiny diminuendo passage in the violins in the first movement: a short, tender motif played a few times, each time softer. It was a simple effect, executed with utterly unified subtlety.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