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      Review: A Composer’s ‘Lear’ Freshens a Shakespeare Evening

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      The Met Orchestra’s season-ending concert at Carnegie Hall featured the premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s “Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches).”The Metropolitan Opera orchestra’s uneven, season-ending concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday had a sleepily evergreen theme: Shakespeare.Two standards inspired by the classic pair of star-crossed lovers — Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Fantasy Overture and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story” — dominated the program, alongside a brisk account of the final act from Verdi’s “Otello.”But the freshest part of the evening was the shortest: the new, 11-minute “Heath (‘King Lear’ Sketches),” by Matthew Aucoin.Aucoin’s opera “Eurydice,” presented at the Met in 2021, musically overwhelmed a fragile text. With this bit of “Lear,” on the other hand, he has found a subject grand enough to match his sensibility.Yet Aucoin’s restraint in handling these huge forces is one of the most notable things about “Heath,” whose four sections, played without pause, exude a confident, brooding reserve. With tolling bells, grim chords and an uneasy melody, the opening immediately brings to mind Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” another tale of a king gone mad.This first section, “The Divided Kingdom,” shows Aucoin’s talent for creating orchestral textures that are simultaneously granitic and flickering, like fast-shifting storm clouds. Sharp snaps of snare drum punctuate a gradual increase in forcefulness to a bleak, expansive landscape of solemn brasses and a droning in the strings, which melts into an almost Tchaikovskian Romantic sweep.A slightly faster second section, named after Lear’s Fool, is pierced by the hard, maniacal playfulness of flutes — hinting at the scores for Kurosawa’s filmed Shakespeare adaptations — before a brief, spare interlude inspired by the blinded Gloucester’s raw regret. The fourth part, “With a Dead March” (the play’s indication for the final mass exit), builds in dense, steady waves before suddenly receding to a subtle, discomfiting yet elegant ending of rustling percussion.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, deserves credit for consistently leading this richly gifted composer’s works with both organizations over the past few years. (Aucoin is currently working on an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” planned for the Met.)Despite being clear and energetic on the podium, Nézet-Séguin couldn’t quite whip up the crisp brilliance needed to make the over-familiar Bernstein and Tchaikovsky pieces on the program newly memorable. Neither was slow, exactly, but they nevertheless felt a bit tired and hectically blurred, with hiccups in the horns and trumpets at the end of a long season. The Tchaikovsky lacked the passionate opulence that is this score’s reason for being.The “Otello” finale was originally intended as a vehicle for the veteran soprano Renée Fleming, a superb Desdemona in her day who delivered a tender performance of the opera’s “Ave Maria” during the Met’s livestreamed “At-Home Gala” in April 2020.When she withdrew a few months ago, Fleming was replaced by Angel Blue, a rising star who sang a warm “La Traviata” in March and will be featured by the company in three major roles next season. Blue’s voice and presence are sweet, sincere and straightforward; on Thursday, her upper register was particularly shining (other than an ascent to a slightly off soft A flat at the end of the “Ave Maria”).But there wasn’t the fullness to her tone that would have made her lower music really penetrate. The tenor Russell Thomas was smoothly stentorian if bland as Otello; perhaps, without the journey of the first three acts, this half-hour excerpt is fated to come across as anticlimactic. These are talented singers, but the programming did them no favors.Met OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      The Conductor Claudio Abbado Saw Orchestras as Collectives

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      A collection of 257 CDs and eight DVDs released by Deutsche Grammophon offers the breadth of Abbado’s approach, and its legacy.Claudio Abbado lit a cigar and looked uneasy, as he often did.The Italian conductor, who died in 2014 but would have turned 90 on June 26, was at a meal with the actor Maximilian Schell, in a scene captured in a 1996 documentary. Schell, who was typecast playing Nazis for much of his Academy Award-winning career but worked with Abbado on Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw,” among other things, was telling everyone at the table that conducting must naturally give a musician a sense of power.Abbado smiled, quizzical. Power has nothing to do with music, insisted the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra on which Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan had once imposed their interpretive will. “For me,” Abbado added, “power is always linked with dictatorship.”But not all power is political, Schell said; for instance, what might Abbado call the power of music over people? “Love, or respect, or understanding, or tolerance,” the conductor replied. “Remember that, for thinking people, music is one of the most important things in life. It’s part of life itself. That has nothing to do with power.”The pianist Martha Argerich, left, with Abbado in 1968.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIf Abbado’s life had a theme, it was this question of power: of what power means in music, where it comes from, and to what ends. Few of his peers enjoyed such a vita — before Berlin, he held posts at the Teatro Alla Scala, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera — yet were so ambivalent about authority and attention. Shy, quiet, stubborn, he took bows timidly, avoided publicity and denied that he had anything so ignoble as a career. “For me, conducting is not a game,” he told The New York Times in 1973.Berg: ‘Wozzeck,’ Act III interludeVienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 1987Politically a man of the left, Abbado as a musician was most comfortable among equals, if even that; he was a sublime accompanist to the pianists Martha Argerich and Maurizio Pollini, as well as to any number of singers. The film in which he spoke with Schell, “The Silence That Follows the Music,” portrayed him as an embodiment of democracy, an exemplary figure to lead the Berlin Philharmonic after the fall of the Wall and the death of Karajan in 1989, symbols of tyranny and ego alike. If Karajan, as critics described him, saw orchestras as single entities and denied their members any individuality that might impinge on his own, Abbado increasingly saw them, over the course of his life, as more of a collective, in which the players might freely share the spirit of chamber music.Achieving that ideal was no simple task with orchestras of long traditions and routines, though Abbado remade the Philharmonic in his image, and lastingly so. Striving to fulfill that promise led him not only to embrace the energy of youth orchestras, but also to support and found ensembles of like mind: the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra Mozart. The most extravagant was the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, a coterie of colleagues and admirers with whom he gave critically sanctified summer performances from 2003 until just before his death. “All the musicians in the orchestra,” he said in 2007, offering his highest praise to a group that included several noted soloists and sometimes entire string quartets, “they are listening to each other.”But what kinds of interpretations did Abbado’s approach engender? And how will they endure?Many certainly will last, on the evidence of a comprehensive collection of his recordings for the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips labels that the Universal Music Group released earlier this year. Complete with a hardback hagiography and a price tag that, at some retailers, has drifted into four figures despite the easy prior availability of its contents, it compiles 257 CDs and eight DVDs. The breadth is extraordinary — what other conductor was as adept as Abbado in Rossini as well as in Webern and Ligeti? — yet it still excludes records he made for EMI, RCA and Sony, as well as most of his vaunted Mahler from Lucerne.Schubert: Symphony No. 3, finaleChamber Orchestra of Europe, 1987Slide a sleeve out of the box, and chances are that you will select a confirmed classic — the joyful distinction of his Schubert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, or the formidable La Scala “Simon Boccanegra” and “Macbeth” that are the best of his Verdi. You might happen upon a less celebrated gem, like his early Stravinsky or his late Pergolesi, his “Fierrabras” or his “Khovanshchina.” Far from every disc is faultless, though the worst to be said about all but the weakest of them — his Haydn is dismayingly fussy, some of his Mozart wan — is that they are anonymous, refined but bland. But that was the risk that Abbado took in the name of beauty.BORN INTO A richly musical and bravely antifascist Milanese family in 1933, Abbado spent his youth watching the leading conductors of the day as they passed through La Scala. He trained as a pianist, making a couple of recordings, but his fascination was always with the magic men of the podium. Denied entry to observe rehearsals at the Musikverein in Vienna when he was a student there, from 1956 to ’58, he sang his way into them instead, joining the basses of a choir that performed Bach with Hermann Scherchen, and Mahler with Josef Krips.In 1958, Abbado triumphed at Tanglewood in the United States, then, after three years spent teaching chamber music in Parma, won a year as an assistant at the New York Philharmonic. “He is a talented conductor and one of temperament,” the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote after his Lincoln Center debut in 1964. If his basic approach was evident from the start — “he seems to allow his players a freedom to enjoy themselves and yet provides an unobtrusive discipline,” one reviewer noted in 1967 — it was surely made possible by the quality of the ensembles he was quickly blessed to work with. “Now I can choose only the best orchestras,” Abbado said while still not yet 40.And how he used them. The earliest sessions in the Universal box date from February 1966, when Abbado and the London Symphony excerpted Prokofiev ballets with enjoyable flair. There are moments, in the decade or so of recordings that followed, in which his awareness of the past seems to weigh a touch too heavily — a stolid Beethoven Seven from Vienna, a morose Brahms Three from Dresden — but the impression on the whole is of a young conductor of rare intelligence.Scriabin: ‘The Poem of Ecstasy’Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1971All the Abbado hallmarks grace the ear, such as the immaculate balances of his crushing Tchaikovsky “Pathétique” and the poetic elegance of his first Brahms Second in Berlin, although it is striking how the incision that marks his fledgling readings of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” and “Italian” Symphonies and Berg’s “Three Pieces for Orchestra” would be sanded down in equally successful later accounts. At his best, Abbado was already considerable: His Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, from 1970 to ’71, are not just some of the finest recordings he made, festivals of color composed with the eye of a master, but count among the choicest in the history of that orchestra.Abbado remained acutely conscious of conducting history, symbolically wearing a watch given to him by Erich Kleiber, a fellow champion of Berg. When he appeared on the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs” in 1980, he selected favorite recordings by Pierre Monteux, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and his one idol, Furtwängler, whose rare ability to generate tension he admired. But Abbado came to sound little like any of these predecessors, and took from none of them an aesthetic agenda to promote as his own. He barely spoke in detail about his artistic principles at all; “he tells you about a piece by conducting it,” one of his producers said in 1994.Given that Abbado was a slightly elusive interpreter, any generalities to be offered about him are necessarily weak. But even after he started trialing new sonorities and scales of ensemble with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the early 1980s — developing an immediacy of communication that encouraged a taste for details in him that could become a little much — there were clear traits that ran through his recordings: a warm lucidity, a smooth, long line and an ability to bring out the lyricism in a work, however dense, that critics reductively called Italianate.Debussy: ‘La Damoiselle Élue’London Symphony Orchestra, 1986With the London Symphony, there is tender, precisely shaded Ravel, a survey of cultivated Mendelssohn, exquisite Debussy, fiery Prokofiev and touching Strauss. The Chicago Symphony, too, often gave him its best, including some of his more persuasive Mahler, in whose music he was not as reliable, or at least not as distinctive, as his lifelong fidelity to the composer might suggest.Abbado leading the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001.Riccardo Musacchio/EPA, via ShutterstockThe recordings from Vienna and Berlin are more variable. Typically, the more distant a piece is from the most commonplace repertoire, the more impressive the results, though there are exceptions: chiefly, a magnificent Brahms cycle from around the start of his tenure in Berlin, audibly in the lineage of his predecessors, if gentler.There is a gorgeous “Pelléas et Mélisande” and a sweeping “Gurrelieder” from Vienna, but there are also unusual choral works by Schubert and Schumann, endearingly done, plus unmissable Berg and Boulez. Both orchestras supply Beethoven cycles. The Vienna is patchy, the Berlin livelier but finicky, the shrunken ensemble blanched of tone. Abbado’s Berlin era is better approached through other routes: a ravishing Hindemith disc; charming Mozart and Strauss with Christine Schäfer; a moving, if dimly recorded, Mahler Third along with a profoundly humane Sixth, taken from his first return to the Philharmonie since his departure in 2002, after treatment for cancer.Mahler: Symphony No. 6, finaleBerlin Philharmonic, 2004Illness left Abbado unable to conduct more than sporadically, mostly at Lucerne and with the Orchestra Mozart, which he founded in Bologna in 2004; experimentation decorates his late recordings with that ensemble, including with period-instrument practice, though more affectingly in his concerto collaborations with friends such as the flutist Jacques Zoon and the hornist Alessio Allegrini than in his Mozart, Schubert and Schumann symphonies.“You never arrive in a lifetime,” Abbado had told The Times in 1973. Perhaps it was apt that his last recording was of an unfinished symphony, Bruckner’s Ninth, in a farewell Lucerne account that, in its final bars, seems almost to glow with compassion. He died five months later. More

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      ‘It Has It All’: Taking on a Strange, Immense Piano Concerto

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      The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit discuss Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto, a rarity they are performing in San Francisco.There are piano concertos, and then there is Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto.Completed and premiered in 1904 by the Berlin Philharmonic with the composer, a virtuoso of Lisztian ability, at the piano, the piece retains a near mystical reputation. It is so difficult that only the most commanding of pianists dare take on its 75 minutes and five movements. In the last and oddest of them, a male chorus implores listeners to draw close to Allah, singing from the text of an early 19th-century version of “Aladdin” by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger.If the concerto is performed more often than it used to be, it is still enough of an anomaly in the repertoire that performances are a significant event, one of which is its San Francisco Symphony premiere this week, with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit, joined by the men of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.In a joint interview, Salonen and Levit spoke about the concerto and Busoni’s confounding stature today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Levit said that the Busoni concerto is so difficult, it can “widen your curse words repertoire.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesMy first question is, why?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN May I propose a counter-question? Why not? Last time we performed together, which was many years ago, we had a little chat over dinner about what to do next. We both happen to love the Busoni, and we thought, OK, let’s do it. These are decisions that are easily made over dinner, and then when you get to it, you realize what you’ve done. Still, I’m very happy, and the more I study the piece the more I like it, which is actually a very good sign, because it’s not always like that. Some of the ideas, especially harmonic ideas, are incredible.I can’t make up my mind whether it is a parody, or deadly serious, or what.IGOR LEVIT I think it’s both. It’s highly celebratory. I mean, the roof flies off the building, right? In the “All’Italiana,” it’s very satirical. It’s incredibly beautiful, it’s funny, it’s solemn. It has it all.Busoni has always been one of those role models I never met, in a way like an idol figure, regarding the way he thought and especially wrote about music, his utopian idea about what free music actually is, his idea about what the creator’s job is, which is to set up your own rules and not follow the rules of others.As a composer, as a pianist, as a thinker, teacher, we are speaking here of one of the most incredible minds of at least the 20th century. He was this larger-than-life figure, and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.We hardly ever hear Busoni’s music now, and yet he was so significant historically.SALONEN He really was a trailblazer, and he predicted lots of things that are now commonplace in contemporary music, like microtonality. He even at some point was fantasizing about computers, before the concept even existed.As a Finnish musician, I must say that we are very grateful to him, because he spent a couple of years in Helsinki. He was a very, very strange bird in Helsinki cultural life. And he was an incredibly important influence to Sibelius, because Sibelius suffered from this kind of country boy complex compared to contemporaries like Richard Strauss.Busoni and Sibelius became really good friends. I’m absolutely sure that to have somebody like that as a conversation partner and drinking buddy — they did quite a bit of that apparently — was incredibly important. They even had a little club, a group of friends who called themselves Leskovites, because Busoni’s dog was called Lesko. There’s a bar in Helsinki where they hung out and developed the new music for the next century.LEVIT One of the most important teachers I had in my life was Matti Raekallio. Matti is from Helsinki. Matti’s thesis was on Busoni’s fingering. He introduced me to the concerto when I was 19. He introduced me to the “Fantasia Contrappuntistica.” He introduced me to the way Busoni would play the piano, which is a very positional kind of playing, and not a graphic kind of playing.For, let’s say, a normal piano player, who grew up with rules and who studied in Central Europe or wherever, there is no such thing as Ferruccio Busoni, all you know is Bach-Busoni. You might know two or three of his chorale preludes. That’s it. But you don’t get in touch with the actual man. It was Matti who opened this incredible door for me into the thinking of the man and to the music. So even I know Busoni through Finland.SALONEN It’s funny: The first time I ever heard anything by Busoni was when I was a composition student in Siena, Italy, with Donatoni back in the late ’70s. There was a concert when some Italian pianist played Busoni’s arrangement of Schoenberg’s Opus 11, three piano pieces. He arranged Schoenberg’s piano pieces for the piano. And I thought that was the silliest thing I’d ever heard in my life.Igor, is the concerto as hard as everyone says it is?LEVIT Yeah, this is a piece to widen your curse words repertoire.What are the hardest things in it?LEVIT There are moments in the second movement that, I mean, they’re just beyond what should be acceptable in terms of how much you have to work to achieve a certain result. Toward the end, there’s this rather long passage with incredibly difficult jumps, which are asymmetrical between the left hand and the right hand. This alone is kind of utopian, and it’s also written such that no one in the audience will actually hear what you’re doing, because the orchestra is so massive.The cadenza and conclusion of the ‘All’Italiana’John Ogdon, piano; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Daniell Revenaugh, conductor (Warner)There is a spot in the “All’Italiana,” right after the cadenza, where the piano has these huge chords in left and right and they run toward each other. It’s sort of unachievable, and yet, so what? You constantly are aware of the fact that you as a pianist, are in the middle of playing something extraordinary.Busoni “was this larger-than-life figure,” Levit said, “and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesIt doesn’t strike me as an easy piece to conduct, either. The balances, for one thing.SALONEN Well, it’s massive, and as Igor said, there are moments that if you don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out, the piano will be drowned.LEVIT [Laughing] Please don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out.SALONEN But there are moments in Brahms’s piano concertos where the piano kind of sinks into the orchestra, and I think part of the expression is that zoom-in, zoom-out thing. It would be very boring if you had 75 minutes of the piano being completely on the surface at every moment. And in this case, the piano has different roles.What is the finale there for?SALONEN I have seen many incomprehensible, weird texts in my life that composers have used, but this one is right up there. I think he was planning to write a music-dramatic work based on the text by this Danish guy. He never got further than setting the final chorus, and then that found its way into the Piano Concerto.The story of this text is so funny, because the playwright was Danish, and he wrote the text in German, but his German was not great. He went and read it out loud to Goethe, and he read it out of the Danish version and translated it into German on the fly. I’m trying to imagine Goethe just sitting there listening to this guy go through this endless play, in bad German. And then various editors went through three or four rounds to fix the grammar, and finally, there is a version that is grammatically acceptable. However, Busoni liked the first version with all the wrong cases and wrong articles.LEVIT Of course he did.SALONEN And there’s something really fabulous about that. It’s basically the boulders in the cave where Aladdin takes the lamp back to. The boulders are very grateful, and they praise Allah for the beauty of nature. And a lot of it is completely incomprehensible.LEVIT But then again we’re speaking about Busoni, who was one of the great internationalists. You’re talking about this universally educated and universally interested guy. So it’s all incomprehensible and odd and weird, and yet not surprising whatsoever.SALONEN So, we’re fans.LEVIT Exactly. More

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      For Riccardo Muti, a Grand Sort-of-Finale in Chicago

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      The concert had ended, and Riccardo Muti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony, was walking out of Orchestra Hall when he saw a banner in the lobby and stopped in his tracks.“Muti Conducts the Grand Finale of the 2022-23 Season,” it read. This was in May, with just a month of programs to go — culminating in performances of Beethoven’s mighty “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25, which will mark the end of Muti’s 13-year directorship.So when Muti, 81, began railing about the banner to his tiny entourage, it seemed like he must be joking: There could hardly be a grander finale to his acclaimed tenure. But it quickly became obvious that his anger was real.“I told them not to write ‘grand finale,’” he said, grimacing. “It’s a finale? And then I’m back in September?”The next morning, the offending banner was gone. His frustration was mostly silly, of course. The orchestra was just being factual in ginning up a little excitement at a climactic moment in the six-decade career of one of the most eminent figures in classical music.But Muti had a point. Since his successor has not yet been named, he will be continuing as a kind of shadow music director next season, and possibly longer. Leaving — yet not entirely leaving — on a high note, with the adoration of Chicago’s musicians and audiences, he has been sensitive that his farewell will seem like a grand anticlimax when he returns, just three months from now, for the fall opening concerts and a trip to Carnegie Hall.“‘He’s here again,’ they will say,” Muti speculated in an interview. “‘He’s back!’ It’s too much.”“I don’t blame him,” said Helen Zell, the former chair of the orchestra’s board, who endowed Muti’s music director position. “Just as courting him was a big, long process, the exit is just as challenging.”Between the complicated beginning and ending, though, Muti’s time in Chicago has been widely reckoned an enormous success. His performances of a broad swath of repertoire — his signature Italian operas in concert, Beethoven symphonies, world premieres, rarities of the past, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Florence Price, Philip Glass — have been pristine yet intense, powerful yet graceful.Muti, who was born in Naples and raised in Puglia, is European to the core. Here, he conducts in 2021 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he was music director for 20 years./EPA, via ShutterstockMuti leading the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day 2021; he will conduct the orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring./EPA, via Shutterstock“He took the great Chicago Symphony Orchestra and made it even greater,” Jeff Alexander, the orchestra’s president, said. “The sound now is really spectacular — in a more mellifluous, mellow, lyrical way.”His departure is about more than inevitable turnover at an important ensemble, said Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario. It’s a milestone as the generation of leaders born before the end of World War II passes — and, with it, the old-school conception of the commanding, protecting maestro.“Muti will leave Chicago, and that’s it,” Audi said. “It’s the beginning of the end.”Muti was born, as he loves to tell people, in Naples and raised in Puglia. His longest-held position was nearly 20 years at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and his most lasting affiliation has been with the Vienna Philharmonic, which names no chief conductor. (He will lead that orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring.) He is European to the core.Yet perhaps his most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. When he arrived in Philadelphia, he was an upstart in his 30s, taking over after four decades of Eugene Ormandy.Ormandy had built an ensemble that was thick and lush, particularly in its famous strings, and he bathed every work in a uniform butteriness: The composer served the sound. Muti aimed to reverse that dynamic, creating distinct styles for Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky — adding a flexibility that took the group, as the violinist Barbara Govatos said, “from the Cadillac of orchestras to the Ferrari.”He surprised the still-enamored musicians when he left in the early 1990s, partly because of the difficulty balancing his work with La Scala and partly because plans for a new hall in Philadelphia were stagnating. As he focused on Milan, Muti said he had no interest in another music director position in America, with all the attendant extramusical responsibilities.The New York Philharmonic nevertheless thought — twice — that it was on the verge of hiring him. Chicago ended up luckier after Daniel Barenboim announced in 2004 that he was leaving. Watching Muti conduct in Paris early the next year, Deborah Rutter, then president in Chicago, told a colleague, “If we can do it, this is the one it should be.”“There is a sort of electrical current to the energy he brings to his music-making,” Rutter said recently. “And that sort of hyper-focused energy is something I would describe as being very Chicago-like.”Muti’s relationship with La Scala was foundering, but he hadn’t appeared with the Chicago Symphony since the 1970s. He and Rutter agreed he would come in 2006, but he canceled, which was crushing. She lured him back with dates the next fall, along with a European tour.“I was too tired to travel, to start a new adventure,” Muti said. “But when I came back here, immediately it was something that happened between me and the orchestra.”Perhaps Muti’s most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. Lelli & MasottiThe critic Andrew Patner, describing those 2007 performances, wrote, “By the second date, the Italian maestro almost seemed like an old friend.” After the tour, Muti received a box of handwritten letters from the players, a personal touch that helped seal the deal.“There was an ecstatic reception he had when he was in Chicago, from the press and the public,” said Zarin Mehta, then the president of the New York Philharmonic. “He was treated with total respect in New York, but not with the ecstatic admiration he gets in Chicago.”Barenboim had relaxed the ensemble’s sound from the muscular, stentorian days of Georg Solti, but it still had a resolute Germanic style. Under Muti, the orchestra has still been able to produce, say, a Beethoven’s Fifth of blistering force, but he generally wanted something more Italianate.“I found a great orchestra,” he said, “but not balanced. Everyone was speaking about the brass. The strings were a little too — not harsh, but hard. No perfume. And the woodwinds, they had good players, but no one spoke about the woodwinds. And there is another thing: I needed them to sing.”The diet he prescribed was heavy on Schubert and, of course, opera, particularly his beloved Verdi, prepared with unsparing attention to detail. “Otello,” in 2011, was ferociously dramatic; “Macbeth” (2013), a brooding march. “Falstaff” (2016) was witty, more delicate than slapstick; “Aida” (2019), coolly elegant; “Un Ballo in Maschera” (2022), meticulously sumptuous.“The relentless thing he will not back down on is the refinement — of line, of attack, of phrasing,” said James Smelser, a hornist. “He doesn’t make mistakes. There’s always clarity, preparedness, consistency.”Muti has proved enthusiastic about performing in the community, including events at juvenile detention facilities. He embraced a fellowship program seeking to increase the racial diversity of the players’ ranks. And after years of resisting, he even began to drop some of his complaints about appearing at endless donor events.There were troubles. In 2019, a musicians’ strike lasted nearly seven weeks; in an unusual move for a music director, Muti publicly sided with the players, and appeared with them on the picket line. During the pandemic, he agreed to stay on an extra year, but the pause in performances — which meant a pause in appearances by potential candidates — stalled the search for his successor.Since relations between him and the orchestra are far warmer than they were with Barenboim at the end of his tenure — when Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez agreed to take on responsibilities in the interregnum, before Muti was hired — it makes sense for him to help fill the coming gap.“I’ve worked in a few other places,” said Alexander, the orchestra’s president, “where it’s much more common that the music director disappears, or they come back once every three or five years. Early in our discussions with Maestro Muti about the end of his term, we said we wanted to keep seeing him for a number of weeks each season, which I think he was happy to hear.”But while Muti will finish the musician hiring and tenure processes he has started, it’s not yet clear who will oversee new auditions. He seems intent on maintaining some flexibility, partly in case he should want to scale back his commitment after his successor is announced: He said that he has told the orchestra’s administration — who knows how much in jest? — “If you choose somebody that really I don’t like, then I don’t know if I come back.”It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems. “Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHis replacement is the least of it. It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems: the decline in music education, players and conductors too lazy to properly prepare or respect the letter of the score, what he views as the increasing distance between classical music and mainstream society.“Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”But his melancholy melts away when he’s on the podium, particularly in rehearsals that he leads with a kind of merry rigor, laughter snapping into a crisp downbeat. There was an endearing, oddball quality to the program he led near the end of May, telescoping between the intimate and the grand.A Mozart divertimento was followed by William Kraft’s raucous Timpani Concerto No. 1. After intermission came one of Respighi’s lively and tender “Ancient Airs and Dances” suites, before his “Pines of Rome,” a Muti party piece that also closed his first concert as music director — in front of some 25,000 people in Millennium Park.When you think of “Pines,” you usually think of bombast. But the loudness comes very near the end; much of the piece is actually quite subtle, and the way to make the finale really potent is to handle the earlier stuff with atmospheric transparency.Muti now stretches those earlier passages into a hazily dreamlike, almost out of time quality, building only slowly to triumph. In the first performance, a Thursday evening, the pianist treated a diaphanous cadenza with too much flamboyance; Muti, visibly displeased on the podium, took him aside later, and the following afternoon, the passage was properly light and watery. Any exaggeration turns this piece into kitsch; even the brassy conclusion, under Muti’s baton, is shockingly elegant and clear.“At the end of ‘Pines of Rome,’” Smelser, the hornist, said, “most conductors are flailing around. The sheer volume, it’s out of control. But he’s never out of control, and he doesn’t want us to be out of control.”“The orchestra knows exactly what I want,” Muti said. “Many times, I don’t even conduct — or it seems that I don’t conduct. It’s been 13 years of wonderful musical experiences, and friendly. In 13 years, I haven’t had a second of fight with them. It’s been always like this.” More

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      Sono Fest! Freely Dips Into Jazz and Classical Music

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      In its opening days, Ethan Iverson’s Sono Fest! in Brooklyn was already showing promise.Update: Ethan Iverson announced on Monday that the rest of Sono Fest! would not proceed as scheduled because the owner of the Soapbox Gallery, responsible for running the theater, had tested positive for Covid-19.This past week, I did something with a classical music concert that I have often enjoyed at jazz clubs: I hung back to hear the same program again when it returned for a second set.It was opening night of the inaugural Sono Fest!, founded and programmed by the jazz pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, and running through June 23 at Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn. (The space, in addition to hosting audiences in its 60-seat space, is also offering ticketed livestreams of the events.) Iverson was wrapping up a concert with the violinist Miranda Cuckson when he casually noted that anyone who wanted to hear the same pieces again could remain for the next gig.Their performance — of works for violin and piano by Peter Lieberson, Louise Talma and George Walker — had been among the best chamber music shows I’d heard all season. (Another delight: Iverson’s jaunty and lyrical Piano Sonata, which he’d performed alone.) Rapport between players sometimes develops as a night progresses, so why not stick around?That decision paid dividends quickly — particularly during Talma’s Sonata (1962), a choice rarity that pairs mid-20th-century harmonic modernism with forceful rhythmic drive. In the first set, Cuckson had devoted a range of expressive talents to the violin writing: carefully shading some drier moments of muted playing, and later deploying her silvery sound to underline the singing qualities embedded in an otherwise complex idiom.Cuckson and Iverson had been enviably coordinated during the furious passages in the earlier set — if sometimes a touch stiffly so. Later, though, they achieved a give and take that was something else: At select junctures, she powered slightly ahead of his beat, allowing an almost-rushed climactic phrase in the violin to decay dramatically over his rhythmically precise piano.Afterward, Iverson told the audience that they were experiencing “the deep set.” Those of us who had sat through knew just how right he was.“The truth of the matter is, I love it all,” Iverson said. “And I think we all should love it all. I’m really trying to dig deep.”Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesPermission to linger and experience multiple sets is just one aspect of Iverson’s merging of jazz and classical traditions at his new festival. Last Wednesday, as skies darkened in New York because of Canadian wildfires, he played mostly jazz standards — including, pointedly, Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” — with Chris Potter, the storied tenor saxophone player. (I caught that performance the next day on video.)On Thursday, you can catch multiple sets by Aaron Diehl, a first-call jazz pianist who also plays the music of Gershwin with symphony orchestras (and the music of Philip Glass on recordings). Other nights trend more toward more traditional chamber fare. But rarely too traditional: On Tuesday, the vocalist Judith Berkson — who sings adaptations of Schumann as well as her own electroacoustic pieces — will bring her visionary practice to the Soapbox.In an interview between sets last week, Iverson said of his festival’s organizing principles: “The truth of the matter is, I love it all. And I think we all should love it all. I’m really trying to dig deep.”After mentioning that the composers represented on his program with Cuckson were all American, Iverson noted, “There’s syncopation in the Walker and the Talma,” adding that in the latter case, the extent of the rhythmic exuberance makes him think of Harlem Stride piano legend James P. Johnson.Johnson, as it happens, gets a tip of the hat in Iverson’s Piano Sonata, which he premiered last year at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he teaches.That piece is structured like a sonata in the model of Haydn and other classical forebears, but first-movement explosion of rhythm in the bass receives the indication “a la James P. Johnson” in the score. And it’s not the sonata’s only jazz-world nod: After a snatch of Mozartean melody in the second movement, Iverson revels in descending licks redolent of the soul jazz tradition, marked “a la Bobby Timmons.”This is no less referential than another charming classical piece of Iverson’s, “Concerto to Scale,” which he premiered with the American Composers Orchestra in 2018. But to its credit, the sonata is less jokey — and thus more secure — when dealing with its layered source materials. To my ear, that makes it a new advance in his engagement with fully notated writing.Playing the sonata last week, both times, Iverson dived right into his own crunchy, chromatic figures with a ferocity that was absent in video from the New England Conservatory premiere, in which he was “a little bit nervous,” he said.But at Soapbox, “I was certainly warmed up,” he said, having played the Talma piece before his sonata. Always, though, he has been confident in the work, which he has tinkered with and recorded for his next release on the Blue Note label, scheduled for 2024.In terms of the sonata’s spirit, he said: “I do think when people who don’t swim in the world every day hand in formal composition, they often are too serious. I’d actually rather be rambunctious.”“I feel James P. with me,” he added. “I feel Erroll Garner with me. And I feel Ralph Shapey.”The language Iverson uses when discussing his upcoming compositional premieres — including more sonatas, as well as orchestral arrangements of Ellington — enjoys a reprise whenever he discusses the balance of the Sono Fest! programming. In both cases, he is looking for new paths. And for Iverson, all routes move within what he calls “this very American phenomenon.”Before hopping back onstage for his second set last week, he observed: “It’s not happening in Germany or England. There’s still something I like so much about all of this: these are American composers I’m playing. Scott Joplin is part of it. And Henry Mancini is part of it. There’s a whole thing, there, that’s our language. If you really love it all, there’s incredible room still, to find a way.” More

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      What Happens When A.I. Enters the Concert Hall

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      Artificial intelligence is not new to classical music. But its recent, rapid developments have composers worried, and intrigued.When the composer and vocalist Jen Wang took the stage at the Monk Space in Los Angeles to perform Alvin Lucier’s “The Duke of York” (1971) earlier this year, she sang with a digital rendition of her voice, synthesized by artificial intelligence.It was the first time she had done that. “I thought it was going to be really disorienting,” Wang said in an interview, “but it felt like I was collaborating with this instrument that was me and was not me.”Isaac Io Schankler, a composer and music professor at Cal Poly Pomona, conceived the performance and joined Wang onstage to monitor and manipulate Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder, or R.A.V.E., the neural audio synthesis algorithm that modeled Wang’s voice.R.A.V.E. is an example of machine learning, a specific category of artificial intelligence technology that musicians have experimented with since the 1990s — but that now is defined by rapid development, the arrival of publicly available, A.I.-powered music tools and the dominating influence of high-profile initiatives by large tech companies.Dr. Schankler ultimately used R.A.V.E in that performance of “The Duke Of York,” though, because its ability to augment an individual performer’s sound, they said, “seemed thematically resonant with the piece.” For it to work, the duo needed to train it on a personalized corpus of recordings. “I sang and spoke for three hours straight,” Wang recalled. “I sang every song I could think of.”Antoine Caillon developed R.A.V.E. in 2021, during his graduate studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by the composer Pierre Boulez in Paris. “R.A.V.E.’s goal is to reconstruct its input,” he said. “The model compresses the audio signal it receives and tries to extract the sound’s salient features in order to resynthesize it properly.”Wang felt comfortable performing with the software because, no matter the sounds it produced in the moment, she could hear herself in R.A.V.E.’s synthesized voice. “The gestures were surprising, and the textures were surprising,” she said, “but the timbre was incredibly familiar.” And, because R.A.V.E. is compatible with common electronic music software, Dr. Schankler was able to adjust the program in real time, they said, to “create this halo of other versions of Jen’s voice around her.”Tina Tallon, a composer and professor of A.I. and the arts at the University of Florida, said that musicians have used various A.I.-related technologies since the mid-20th century.“There are rule-based systems, which is what artificial intelligence used to be in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,” she said, “and then there is machine learning, which became more popular and more practical in the ’90s, and involves ingesting large amounts of data to infer how a system functions.”Today, developments in A.I. that were once contained to specialized applications impinge on virtually every corner of life, and already impact the way people make music. Dr. Caillon, in addition to developing R.A.V.E., has contributed to the Google-led projects SingSong, which generates accompaniments for recorded vocal melodies, and MusicLM, another text-to-music generator. Innovations in other areas are driving new music technologies, too: WavTool, a recently released, A.I.-powered music production platform, fully integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4 to enable users to create music via text prompts.For Dr. Tallon, the difference in scale between individual composers’ customized use of A.I. and these new, broad-reaching technologies represents a cause for concern.“We are looking at different types of datasets that are compiled for different reasons,” she said. “Tools like MusicLM are trained on datasets that are compiled by pulling from thousands of hours of labeled audio from YouTube and other places on the internet.”“When I design a tool for my own personal use,” Dr. Tallon continued, “I’m looking at data related to my sonic priorities. But public-facing technologies use datasets that focus on, for instance, aesthetic ideals that align more closely with Western classical systems of organizing pitches and rhythms.”Concerns over bias in music-related A.I. tools do not stop at aesthetics. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, a music professor at Brown University, also worries about how these technologies can reproduce social hierarchies.“There is a very specific racial discourse that I’m very concerned about,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that hip-hop artistry is forming the testing ground for understanding how A.I. affects artists and their artistry given the centuries-long story of co-optation and theft of Black expressive forms by those in power.”The popularity of recent A.I.-generated songs that mimicked artists like Drake, the Weeknd, Travis Scott and others have animated Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo’s fears. “What I’m most concerned about with A.I. Drake and A.I. Travis Scott is that their music is highly listenable,” she said, “and calls into question any need for an artist once they’ve articulated a distinct ‘voice.’”For Dr. Schankler, there are key differences between using R.A.V.E. to synthesize new versions of a collaborator’s voice and using A.I. to anonymously imitate a living musician. “I don’t find it super interesting to copy someone’s voice exactly, because that person already exists,” they said. “I’m more interested in the new sonic possibilities of this technology. And what I like about R.A.V.E. is that I can work with a small dataset that is created by one person who gives their permission and participates in the process.”The composer Robert Laidlow also uses A.I. in his work to contemplate the technology’s fraught implications. “Silicon,” which premiered last October with the BBC Philharmonic under Vimbayi Kaziboni, employs multiple tools to explore themes drawn from the technology’s transformative and disruptive potential.Laidlow described “Silicon” as “about technology as much as it uses technology,” adding: “The overriding aesthetic of each movement of this piece are the questions, ‘What does it mean for an orchestra to use this technology?’ and ‘What would be the point of an orchestra if we had a technology that can emulate it in every way?’”The work’s entirely acoustic first movement features a mixture of Laidlow’s original music and ideas he adapted from the output, he said, of a “symbolic, generative A.I. that was trained on notated material from composers all throughout history.” The second movement features an A.I.-powered digital instrument, performed by the orchestra’s pianist, that, “sometimes mimics the orchestra and sometimes makes uncanny, weird sounds.”In the last movement, the orchestra is accompanied with sounds generated by a neural synthesis program called PRiSM-SampleRNN, which is akin to R.A.V.E. and was trained on a large archive of BBC Philharmonic radio broadcasts. Laidlow describes the resulting audio as, “featuring synthesized orchestral music, voices of phantom presenters and the sounds the artificial intelligence has learned from audiences.”The size of “Silicon” contrasts with the intimacy of Dr. Schankler and Wang’s performance of “The Duke of York.” But both instances illustrate A.I.’s potential to expand musical practices and human expression. And, importantly, by employing small, curated datasets tailored to individual collaborators, these projects attempt to obviate ethical concerns many have identified in larger-scale technologies.George E. Lewis, a music professor at Columbia University, has designed and performed alongside interactive A.I. music programs for four decades, focusing primarily on the technology’s capacity to participate in live performance. “I keep talking about real-time dialogue,” he said. “Music is so communal, it’s so personal, it’s so dialogic, it’s communitarian.”He is hopeful that people will continue to explore interactivity and spontaneity. “It seems the current generation of A.I. music programs have been designed for a culturally specific way of thinking about music,” Lewis said. “Imagine if the culture favored improvisation.”As a composer, Lewis is continuing to explore this topic, including his recent work “Forager,” for chamber ensemble and A.I., which was created during a 2022 residency at PRiSM. The piece marks the latest update to “Voyager,” a piece that he developed in 1985 and described as a, “virtual improvising pianist.” “Forager” enhances the software’s responsiveness to its human co-performers with new programming that enables what he called, “a more holistic recognition” of musical materials.The differences among Dr. Schankler’s use of R.A.V.E., Robert Laidlow’s orchestral work “Silicon” and Lewis’s interactive “Forager” underscore the nuances with which composers and experimental musicians are approaching A.I. This culture celebrates technology as means to customize musical ideas and computer-generated sounds to suit specific performers and a given moment. Still, these artistic aims stand at odds with the foreboding prompted by others like Dr. Tallon and Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo.Individual musicians can do their part to counter those worries by using A.I. ethically and generatively. But even so, as Laidlow observed, being truly individual — which is to say independent — is difficult.“There is a fundamental problem of resources in this field,” Laidlow said. “It is almost impossible to create something computationally powerful without the assistance of a huge, technologically advanced institute or corporation.” More

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      A Russian Pianist Speaks Out Against the War From Home

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      Polina Osetinskaya, a critic of the invasion who has stayed in Moscow even as the government cracks down on dissent, will play a Baroque program in New York.When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the pianist Polina Osetinskaya, who lives in Moscow, was distraught. She took to social media to describe a sense of “horror, shame and disgust,” and expressed solidarity with Ukraine, where she had often performed.But unlike many artists, activists and intellectuals, Osetinskaya, 47, decided to remain in Russia, where she lives with her three children, even as the Kremlin cracked down on free expression and made clear that any contradiction of the government’s statements on the invasion could be treated as a crime. She has faced consequences for her views — some concerts at state-run halls have been canceled, while others have been interrupted by the authorities.Osetinskaya, who was born in Moscow, says her international career has also suffered because of her Russian identity. She lost some overseas engagements after the invasion, she says, because presenters were nervous about featuring Russian citizens. As a result, she says that she often feels caught in the middle: seen suspiciously both inside and outside her country.Osetinskaya will perform a program of Bach, Handel, Purcell and Rameau at the 92nd Street Y in New York on Saturday, part of a five-city tour organized by the Cherry Orchard Festival, which promotes global cultural exchange. The program explores Baroque masterpieces featured in movies like “The Godfather” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”In between concerts and rehearsals this week, she discussed her opposition to the war, the role of music in healing and her decision to remain in Moscow. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You’ve made the difficult decision to stay in Russia even as you criticize the war. Why have you continued to speak out?This is a huge tragedy that is happening in my soul every day. Some of my friends tell me, “Take this war out of your heart, it’s not your problem.” I think it’s our problem. A lot of us, in the beginning, didn’t think it would turn out this way. Being Russian now is kind of like being crucified in the eyes of a lot of people. But I know that there are Russians who are truly against the war and against what is happening.I want people to know that there are a lot of people like this in Russia. And they’ve been put in prison for their views, or for their likes on Facebook. And they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost their freedom just for openly expressing their opinions. I want people to know that there are a lot of good Russians, if I may say so.“I was born in 1975 and remember the repression that was in the Soviet Union. And I have a feeling like I’m back in this time.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesAre you concerned about your own safety?I was born in 1975 and remember the repression that was in the Soviet Union. And I have a feeling like I’m back in this time. And that’s what makes me so sad. We have so many opportunities to grow, to be a part of a world community, and instead we’re still repeating our own story, and it’s not the best pages of our story.Right now, I’m playing private concerts in Moscow because big halls are closed for me. I truly hope that I won’t be put in jail for my views and opinions. Every time I talk openly about my feelings, I’m being watched. All I need now is to be able to work, to feed my children, and not to be afraid that I might be a political prisoner.In March, the authorities in Moscow interrupted a concert in which you and several other artists were playing works by Shostakovich and Mieczysław Weinberg.The police ran into the concert hall in the middle of the performance, and they said they got a call that there was a bomb inside. And they asked everyone to to leave. And everybody stepped out onto the rainy street, and the police went inside with the bomb-sniffing dogs. And the audience stayed with me — there under the rain — and nobody left. And when finally the police hadn’t found any bombs, obviously, we got back to the hall and we continued the concert.How did that experience make you feel?At that moment, I was completely broken because I had the feeling that I had been struggling for months for the possibility to play, and it was interrupted. But I remembered the people who have been thanking me for not leaving Russia. People write me letters telling me that they don’t feel abandoned because I’m here. Many of the artists have left.Did you have any hesitations about speaking out when the war first started?On the first day of the war, I woke up at 7 a.m. because I was making my children breakfast and taking them to school. And I opened my eyes and I saw a post on Facebook by my friend that said, “Oh God, No! No!” I immediately understood what was going on. I just couldn’t believe it was happening. I never had the idea that I could keep silent. I had to scream.What do you hope audiences will take away from your tour in the United States this week?Baroque music very much suits our time because it has so much drama, so much tragedy, so much power, so much consolation at the same time. It sounds like it was written just now. The music that I am playing makes us look into ourselves, feel empathy to anyone who is suffering right now, including ourselves, and gives us hope. That’s what we need probably most right now. When the war started, this program made so much sense. I want as many people as possible to hear this music.Do you think your words and music can have an impact?I feel a little bit useless. I have no power to stop the war. I have no power to do anything to change things. But playing music and touching the keyboard — that’s the only thing I can do to solve my own pain and to solve other people’s pain.It’s dangerous to say this right now, but I have to say that I love Russia. I can separate Russia — my country, my homeland, the beautiful people who live there — from the government and from the people who are making decisions. I can tell one from the other, but it seems to me that nobody else can.Life is not just black and white like my keyboard. It has a lot of colors and it has a lot of shades. We should remember people’s feelings and souls. More

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      Review: New York Philharmonic Journeys From Ocean to Desert

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      The orchestra’s final program of the season featured the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert.”Ostensibly, the New York Philharmonic’s final two programs of the season were about the earth. But they served more to illustrate the challenge composers face in translating the climate crisis to music.Last week at David Geffen Hall, Julia Wolfe’s new multimedia oratorio, “unEarth,” took an explicitly activist stance, lashing out at ecological violence and offering a path to recovery. On Thursday, John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” in its New York premiere, addressed the natural world more humbly — mourning, perhaps, the desertification of environments, but also evoking, marveling at and bowing down to forces larger than ourselves.The approach you prefer can be a matter of taste; I find observation more persuasive. Take this week. As smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted to New York, you could read that the city’s air quality was the worst on record, and understand the severity, but a step outside would reveal even more: a burning in your eyes and throat, an unrecognizable view of streets and parks obscured by an orange haze.That is the difference between “unEarth” and “Become Desert,” between declaring an emergency and bringing it to your feet. Interestingly, Wolfe and Adams have worked in both modes; her earlier oratorios have tended toward the poetic, and his “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which premiered in April, had the blunt rhetoric of a protest sign. These are two of the finest composers of our time, each with a Pulitzer Prize. But they are still figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis without making artistic missteps.And composers aren’t alone. The Philharmonic, too, had mixed success with its “Earth” concerts, which were both conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Wolfe’s work shared the billing with, for some reason, a seemingly unrehearsed account of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. Thursday’s program was an improvement, tracing a more considered path from the ocean to the desert.Representing the ocean was Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes From ‘Peter Grimes,’” brief movements that do double duty as poetic depictions of water, and as representations of the opera’s underlying drama. On Thursday, they were mainly illustrative of the renovated Geffen Hall’s acoustics, which in their bright dryness rewarded the lithe angularity of “Sunday Morning” but punished the violent muddle of “Storm.”Between the climactic ending of the “Interludes” and the monumentality of “Become Desert,” it was easy to overlook the small, Debussyan beauty of Toru Takemitsu’s “I Hear the Water Dreaming,” featuring the Philharmonic’s principal flute, Robert Langevin, as the soloist. He had a warm, lulling tone but played — like the concertmaster, Frank Huang, in the Sibelius last week — with the selfless stage presence of a section leader rather than an assertive star.“Become Desert” is the third installment of a trilogy that began with “Become River,” a 2010 chamber work of icy harmonic shards trickling into a flow that grows grander, and deeper, as if to lead directly into “Become Ocean” (2013), which won the Pulitzer. A masterpiece of scale and form, it immerses its listeners into a world that moves unpredictably in grand swells and ebbs. “Desert,” from 2018, continues in that enveloping vein, a musical equivalent of a camera placed on the ground to witness an expansive landscape as the day breaks and recedes, then returns — a glimpse into a repetitive yet ever-changing environment. The earth emerges, in all three, as awesome in every sense of the word.The Seattle Symphony, under Ludovic Morlot, has recorded the entire trilogy. In that account, you get a sense of Adams’s deference to his subject, rendered in stereoscopic clarity: textures that move like shadows; stretches of seeming stasis that evolve organically, demanding patience and distance to truly perceive; an unchanging pace of life marked in the score with a tempo of 45 beats per minute, described by Adams as “timeless.” At the opening, percussion instruments chime on every beat, but scattered, which with a haze of sustained harmonics dissolve any sense of a downbeat.But at Geffen Hall, van Zweden’s baton sliced through the air more quickly, shaving a few minutes from the score’s typical duration and dispelling its magic, and delicacy, along the way. Its 4/4 time signature all too apparent, the music was less immersive than propulsive.It was an unfortunate New York introduction to a work that ranks among Adams’s most ingeniously reverential. As written, the slowly evaporating final section recalls the poignant dissolving strings at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. On Thursday, though, it just felt like a march to a finish line painted intrusively on the earth.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More