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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

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      At 100, Luigi Nono Remains a Radical, Urgent Composer

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      In 1954, Arnold Schoenberg’s widow, Gertrud, and their daughter, Nuria, traveled from the United States to Europe for the first time since fleeing Nazism two decades earlier. They went to Hamburg, Germany, for the concert premiere of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” where Nuria met the young Italian composer Luigi Nono.They married each other the following year in Venice, uniting two families storied in art and invention. Nuria Schoenberg’s father was a revolutionary who broke with tonality and developed a new method of composition that would change the course of musical history; Nono’s father was an engineer and keen amateur musician, while his grandfather was a Venetian painter known for scenes of the poor — a background that foretold his own art of revolutionary politics, avant-gardism and technology.Nono, who was born 100 years ago and died in 1990, invited listeners to musical extremes, especially that of the dynamic pianississimo, or very, very soft. The score of “Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima” (1979-80), his sole work for string quartet, quotes words from the elusive German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, to be “sung” inwardly by the players: a political act of hope, of forging a whole from fragments, as much from silence as from notes.Nono’s enthusiasm for Schoenberg’s music burned stronger, and was less equivocal, than that of his Darmstadt School contemporaries, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. For them, Anton Webern, Schoenberg’s most radical pupil, was the truer prophet of new music.The Darmstadt School avant-gardists, especially Boulez and Stockhausen, continue to play key roles in music history. Yet since their deaths, their legacies have grown increasingly precarious, with repertory status remaining elusive, the passionate advocacy of a committed few notwithstanding. We ignore Nono at our peril, however: We miss out not only on a rich and varied body of work, but also on the opportunity to transform the ways in which we listen to music old and new, and to the world around us.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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      Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott Wrap Up a Partnership With Thanks

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      After 40 years of musical collaborations, this cellist and pianist have recorded their final album together, “Merci.”Of all the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s many, many collaborations, the one with the pianist Kathryn Stott has been among his most enduring.Ma and Stott have been giving recitals and making records for 40 years. But time passes on, and as Stott, 65, prepares to retire from public performances at the end of this year, they have marked the passing of their partnership with a tour and a last album, “Merci” — a beautiful and poignant adieu through music by Gabriel Fauré, Camille Saint-Saëns, Pauline Viardot, and Lili and Nadia Boulanger.Friends before they started playing together, Ma and Stott met in 1978 in rather unusual circumstances. Ma and his wife, Jill, were staying in London, where they sublet an apartment in Hampstead. “One especially hot day I was practicing — with almost no clothes on — when two people unexpectedly walked into the flat,” Ma, 69, has said. “It turned out that our landlord had failed to mention that he had a flatmate or to tell her that he had sublet his room! The flatmate was Kathy Stott. And that’s how a beautiful friendship began.”Yo-Yo Ma, right, and Kathryn Stott, left, wait backstage before their Nov. 9 concert in Paris. They have been performing together since the 1980s.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesSpeaking from Berlin recently, Ma and Stott discussed their new recording, the notion of lineage in music and their time together. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Kathy, this album seems to have several different layers to it.KATHRYN STOTT It really does. One of my all-time favorite composers is Fauré. It’s 100 years since he died. I don’t like celebrating people’s deaths, but you know, what can you do? So that was one little idea. And then Yo-Yo and I both have connections to Nadia Boulanger, so we were thinking also about our heritage, our teachers and all the links of the composers on the album. Every single composer on there is linked through a story, or being a teacher, or being introduced to another. And then our kind of “merci” to each other for these remarkable 40 years that we’ve had, being musical explorers and otherwise.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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      Review: The Philharmonic Gives a Master Class in Programming

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      The composer John Adams led the New York Philharmonic in a program of contemporary works that didn’t make a big deal of contemporary music.For a master class in orchestral programming, look to this week’s concerts at the New York Philharmonic.Blink, though, and you might miss them. The program, while the best-crafted of the season so far, opened on Thursday night at David Geffen Hall and repeats only once, on Saturday. Led by John Adams, our greatest living American composer, in his occasional capacity as a conductor, it is a rarity for this orchestra: an evening billed as ordinary yet featuring mostly contemporary work, with the sole “classic” just eight decades old.You could see the concert as parallel halves, each with a brief, spare 20th-century work (Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten” and Aaron Copland’s “Quiet City”) followed by a hefty modern portrait of California (Gabriella Smith’s new cello concerto, “Lost Coast,” and Adams’s “City Noir”).On a superficial level, you could also call it an evening of contemporary music. Of the four composers, three are alive: Adams, Pärt and the young, brilliant Smith. But even that doesn’t seem fitting for works that nod to centuries-old chant music and film noir.Regardless, these pieces have been assembled, as well as conducted, with thoughtfulness and care. And as an audience member, all you need to do is sit back and enjoy. This is contemporary sound to dispel clichéd fears of abrasive modernism while never cheaply pandering to mass appeal. It’s just fundamentally good music.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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      Review: Lise Davidsen Meets Puccini in ‘Tosca’ at the Met

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      The powerhouse soprano, already a company stalwart at 37, still seems to be figuring out a character whose moods change on a dime.Aficionados have sometimes criticized the Metropolitan Opera for waiting too long to engage singers with starry careers in Europe, like a sports team that acquires only veterans. Even the loudest complainers, though, would have to praise the Met’s early, deep investment in the powerhouse soprano Lise Davidsen, a generational talent from Norway.Davidsen, 37, made her house debut five years ago in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” The title role in Puccini’s “Tosca,” which she sang on Tuesday in a gala honoring the centenary of the composer’s death, is already her seventh part with the company.With a huge, marble-cool voice that she can pull back to a veiled shadow or unleash in a floodlight cry, Davidsen has been most memorable in works by Wagner and Strauss that have broad vocal lines for her to sail through.She has embodied the mythic longing of Ariadne in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and brought opulent purity to Eva in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Last season, venturing into Verdi with “La Forza del Destino,” she captured Leonora’s eternal woundedness.For saintly, long-suffering figures like Wagner’s Sieglinde and Elisabeth, she’s perfect. Davidsen is tall and statuesque — noble, yet modest. She’s not slow-moving onstage, but there’s something glacial about her. She seems most comfortable when she can settle into a character’s steady state for a few hours and just sing.Tosca is a different beast, and Davidsen still seems to be figuring her out. Puccini’s operas are nothing but endless, changeable business: pocketing letters, discovering keys, spying a knife. Every tiny response is illustrated in the music, and moods shift on a dime. His works require hair-trigger agility, even febrility.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 Curious Case of Nora Holt, a Pioneer of Black Classical Music and Jazz

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      “Fabulous is the word for Mrs. Nora Douglas Holt,” read the 1974 obituary in The Amsterdam News.And fabulous she was: A pioneer of the Black classical music scene in Chicago, Holt also became an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in Paris. Born into the middle-class, she moved back and forth between worlds: concert artist and blues singer, newspaper columnist and club hostess, erudite scholar and scandalous socialite.This fluidity led to friendships with two women who represented distinct versions of fame for Black women in the early 20th century: Josephine Baker, the working-class dancer from St. Louis, who became the toast of Paris; and the composer Florence Price, who transformed Chicago’s classical music scene, rising to national fame with her symphonies.Holt’s life didn’t follow familiar narratives. Hers was not a rags-to-riches story, like Baker’s; nor was it, like Price’s, a cathartic breakthrough for Black musicians in the white world of classical music. Instead, she had a kind of mutability, frequently changing her name and her place in culture, collapsing ideas about respectability and sexual liberation.Music was the through line in Holt’s life. She first made her name in classical music. For young, middle-class Black women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, classical music could open doors to salon culture, church leadership, jobs teaching music and civic engagement.In 1918, Holt, a pianist, became the first Black person in the United States, female or male, to earn a master’s degree in music, from Chicago Musical College. She also worked in the male-dominated fields of music criticism, scholarship and composition. Her music journalism, public lectures, recitals and community organizing became a blueprint for other Black women seeking to become leaders in Chicago’s classical musical scene.“Of course, men are supposed to have better business minds than women,” she wrote to a male colleague after founding a magazine, Music and Poetry, in 1921. “But I have made this thing go and the opportunities are yet unlimited.”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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      Grammy Nominations 2025: See the Full List of Nominees

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      Artists, albums and songs competing for trophies at the 67th annual ceremony were announced on Friday. The show will take place on Feb. 2 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.Beyoncé is the top nominee for the 67th annual Grammy Awards with 11 nods for her genre-crossing “Cowboy Carter.” The LP and its songs will vie for record, song and album of the year, as well as competitions in pop, rap, country and Americana categories.The superstar — who has already won more Grammys than any other artist — leads a pack of contenders that includes Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Post Malone (all with seven nods apiece), followed by Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift, who have six each.The ceremony, which is scheduled for Feb. 2, 2025 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, will recognize recordings released from Sept. 16, 2023 to Aug. 30, 2024.Here is a complete list of the nominations, which were announced on Friday by the Recording Academy.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