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      What Gustavo Dudamel’s Recordings Reveal About His Conducting

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      Seven years ago, not long after Jaap van Zweden had been proclaimed the music director of the New York Philharmonic, I listened to every commercial recording of his that I could lay my hands on, to get a better sense of his conducting. I do not remember it exactly as a fun experience, when I have to remember it at all, nor one that flattered him that much.Now that the Philharmonic’s next music director has been named, it’s Gustavo Dudamel’s turn.This time, the exercise is a different proposition, and thankfully nowhere near as enervating. Van Zweden was hardly a household name when the Philharmonic hired him, and even avid collectors could have been excused for not staying abreast of his latest releases. Dudamel is a Hollywood-starred celebrity who enjoys a longstanding relationship with the Deutsche Grammophon label. On May 19, he leads Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in his first Philharmonic appearances since his appointment, which takes effect in 2026.The Philharmonic has high hopes for Dudamel, 42, but it probably has not hired him first and foremost to commit agenda-setting Beethoven and Brahms to disc, though he will make records anyway. It expects him to be a grander figure, a talisman who will gladden the jaded and enthuse audiences the orchestra has yet to enthuse.His conducting has always been somewhat overshadowed by the blinding hype that surrounds his vision of music-making as a transformative social force. Claims that he is the “savior of classical music” are no longer as common as they once were, but other clichés have endured since he shot to stardom in the mid-2000s: that he stands musically for impetuous exuberance, say, or for perpetual youth. He still has to say, as he did to The New York Times in February, that he is “not a young conductor anymore.”Dudamel himself has often suggested that he never was one. When he was 26, Bob Simon of “60 Minutes” asked if he was too young to be a conductor; he replied that he had been conducting since he was 12, adding that he still had a lot to learn. “I’m not so old. I’m 30,” he told the critic Mark Swed in 2011. “But I feel old.” Likewise, plenty of critics have, over the years, described Dudamel’s approach as that of a much more senior musician; Alex Ross of The New Yorker has lately suggested that “he was, in a way, too mature from the start.”Perhaps, then, it is best to listen to Dudamel’s recordings not only to hear a prodigy on the rise, but also for what he quickly became: a musician of significant experience who has had access to a starry cast of mentors for much of his career, and has been working with the finest orchestras in the world for nearly two decades now. On that basis, his discography ought to draw a warmer endorsement than it reasonably can.Dudamel’s photos on buttons from Venezuela, where his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra is based.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesThat’s not to say it’s bad. Most of Dudamel’s recordings are perfectly listenable, and some are impressive, like his set of the Ives symphonies with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he has led since 2009. Few of them anger or appall, though they tend not to support the supposed Dudamel of all-star energy; some of his readings are frankly rather staid. On the whole, he comes off as a very capable musician, but one who, as of yet, has not acquired the flair for details and the brilliance of imagination that marks a conductor as extraordinary.Ives, Symphony No. 2: FinaleLos Angeles Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon)IT’S HARD NOW to recall fully the superheated hysteria that Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela generated when they started mamboing through the concert halls of Europe and North America in their yellow, red and blue jackets. I was still a teenager when I unsuspectingly attended their near-mythical concert at the London Proms in 2007; a grown adult snatched one of those jackets out of my hands as the players hurled them into the euphoric crowd. That same year, one critic called Dudamel and the Bolívars “the greatest show on Earth.”El Sistema, the education program from which the Bolívars emerged, later found itself caught in the darkening of Venezuelan politics; it took the fatal shooting of a young violist from the program, Armando Cañizales, during protests, for Dudamel to publicly oppose the regime of President Nicolás Maduro in 2017. He remains the music director of the Bolívars, who aged out of their youth orchestra billing long ago, and, last November he finally felt able to visit his homeland again after a long absence. In August, he will conduct the Bolívars for the first time in six years at the Edinburgh Festival. He sounds at his freest with this ensemble, which he calls “my family,” and their records together give a good, basic sense of his musical personality.Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5: FinaleSimón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (Deutsche Grammophon)At the heart of Dudamel’s ethos is joy in musicianship, and nowhere is that more apparent than in “Fiesta,” his infectious recording of Latin American music. Early on, he thrived on heightening the emotional content of a score, which explains the tempo extremes that make his Tchaikovsky — one release of “Francesca da Rimini” and the Fifth Symphony, the other of Shakespearean fantasies — so thrillingly explosive when he finally gets to the quick stuff. That trait he has since moderated, although a recent Los Angeles Philharmonic account of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony suggests that he has not wholly abandoned it.Other elements of Dudamel’s style are present and correct. He likes to emphasize the melodic shape of a work more than its harmonic grounding; a “Tristan” Prelude and Liebestod on an iffy Wagner collection is therefore pretty, but slack. There’s a certain rhythmic fluffiness, too, a reluctance to grant rhythms a precise character. That means a fervent “Rite of Spring” falls short of being properly barbaric, and the same issue weighs down the entirely different repertoire of his 2017 New Year’s Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, whose waltzes and polkas are often charming, but equally often lead-footed.A lot of this has to do with the sound that Dudamel prefers, or at least grew up with. The Bolívars were a colossal orchestra, a visual as well as a musical spectacle, and their tonal mass was blunt, overpowering. It’s no surprise that their conductor favors a full sound. That’s not necessarily a problem; what is, though, is that his sound, as microphones catch it, can seem flat.Sometimes that doesn’t matter so much: There is a patient Bruckner Ninth that satisfies despite its longueurs with the Gothenburg Symphony, which hosted Dudamel for an apprenticeship as its principal conductor from 2007 to 2012. But there isn’t enough tonal differentiation to enliven his Mussorgsky from Vienna or his Strauss with the Berlin Philharmonic, and the same issue creeps into some of his Mahler, including a Fifth Symphony with the Berliners that is more cautious and altogether less entertaining than the sweeping Fifth, with an endearingly drawn-out Adagietto, that he and the Bolívars set down in 2006. A Third from Berlin is similar: lucid, but not much more.Beethoven, Symphony No. 7: FinaleSimón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (Deutsche Grammophon)Then there is Dudamel’s Beethoven. His first recording with the Bolívars paired an unstable Fifth with a driving, bracing Seventh that is still astonishing to hear; alas, a subsequent “Eroica” is not; nor is a self-published cycle of the symphonies that dates to concerts in Venezuela in 2015. Slow and not entirely steady, this is such back-to-the-future Beethoven that it might have felt conservative two or three generations ago. I wouldn’t mind that if more of those readings were like his gratifying Fourth, and had the formal security and dramatic tension that this aesthetic demands.Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2012.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesIF THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC indeed became “the most important orchestra in America” during Dudamel’s tenure there, as the New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe wrote in 2017, that success has been only partially audible on record. The dismal economic realities of the streaming age are such that not even Dudamel, for all his fame, gets the chance to tinker with his interpretations in a studio as earlier generations of conductors could.Nor has Dudamel been able to preserve completely the loyalty to new music that he and his players have shown in performance. His recordings of Andrew Norman’s “Sustain” and Thomas Adès’s “Dante” ballet are hugely valuable, though I have heard Adès conduct parts of his score more audaciously. If nothing else, Dudamel’s Los Angeles discography matters as testimony to his support for John Adams: As well as pioneering accounts of “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” and “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?,” there is a wonderfully spirited “Slonimsky’s Earbox.”Brahms, Symphony No. 4: First MovementLos Angeles Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon)Caveats duly lamented, there is still enough to go on here. Dudamel’s early years at Walt Disney Concert Hall are well documented. Highlights include the exhilarating but soft-focused Bartok “Concerto for Orchestra” of his debut in January 2007, and an ambitiously mighty Brahms Fourth that won a Grammy Award. Most of the concert relays from that time are routine, though, and the uneven Mahler First from his inaugural gala in 2009 is worth hearing mostly as a baseline for the improvement in his later Los Angeles Mahler recordings. The warm, compassionate Ninth from 2012 could do with more snap and bite, but a tightly controlled Eighth from 2019 is effective.What remains odd, however, is that records that should have been easy home runs are not. It took five years for Deutsche Grammophon to release Dudamel’s “Nutcracker” after concerts in 2013, and although it is agreeable enough on a first listen, on a second it becomes clear why: rhythmic timidity, along with colors that are a few shades duller than fairy-light bright. For every touching moment in Dudamel’s 2019 homage to his friend John Williams, similar reservations lurk. When Williams conducts the “Imperial March,” he can both scare you with the Empire’s fully-operational battle power, as with the Berlin Philharmonic, and mock its vainglory, as with the Vienna Philharmonic. Dudamel makes no comment on it at all.It’s these kinds of things that make you wonder. The New York Philharmonic has hailed Dudamel as Leonard Bernstein resurrected, as the man who will return the orchestra to the stature that it has, in truth, enjoyed only periodically in its history. But whatever else Bernstein was, he was a distinctive conductor. Who knows? Maybe Dudamel can become one, too. But he has work to do. More

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      Thomas Stacy, Master of the English Horn, Dies at 84

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      Through his decades with the New York Philharmonic and his busy touring schedule, he helped make an unfamiliar instrument much less so.Thomas Stacy sometimes told the story of how, when he was a boy growing up in Arkansas, an Italian who had been dead for about 80 years changed his life.He’d been studying piano with his mother, but when he heard a piece of music by the composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini, his focus shifted to a different instrument and he determined to make a career of it.“I was fascinated by the sound of the oboe on a record we had of the overture to Rossini’s opera ‘The Silken Ladder,’” Mr. Stacy recalled in a 1996 interview with The Associated Press. “I knew then that I wanted to be a musician.”If the oboe was a somewhat unusual selection for a young musician, Mr. Stacy soon made the even more unconventional choice to specialize in the English horn, a confusingly named instrument that is not in fact a horn but rather a double-reed instrument, an alto member of the oboe family.In the ensuing decades he became one of the finest English horn virtuosos in the United States; he played with the New York Philharmonic for almost 40 years, appeared as a guest soloist all over the country and beyond, and contributed to countless recordings. Numerous composers wrote works specifically for him, and he became something of an ambassador for his uncommon instrument — performing all-English-horn programs, leading an annual summer seminar and encouraging an expansion of the repertory.Mr. Stacy died on April 30 in hospice care in Southampton, N.Y. He was 84. His son Barton Stacy said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Stacy was also an expert on the oboe d’amore, a Baroque-era instrument with a mezzo-soprano range. At some recitals he would switch among English horn, oboe d’amore and traditional oboe. Whatever he was playing, critics praised his tone and his dexterity.“Mellifluous melancholy is the English horn’s main orchestral stock in trade,” John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 1988, reviewing a recital at Trinity Lutheran Church in Reseda, Calif., where Mr. Stacy played the other two instruments as well, “but Stacy demonstrated a much wider range of expression and sound. He could make the horn sing with almost human suavity, or stutter with martial brilliance, all supported by the booming acoustic of the Trinity sanctuary.”As for why he chose the English horn as his main instrument, Mr. Stacy had a simple answer.“It is most like the human voice,” he said in the 1996 interview, “and has the most expressive potential in a more expressive range than other instruments.”Mr. Stacy in concert with the pianist Hélène Grimaud at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007. He performed all over the country and beyond, as well as contributing to countless recordings. Richard Termine for The New York TimesThomas Jefferson Stacy was born on Aug. 15, 1938, in Little Rock, Ark. His father, also named Thomas, was a farmer and cotton broker, and his mother, Nora Lee (Conditt) Stacy, was a homemaker and church organist.He grew up in Augusta, Ark., a small city northeast of Little Rock, and started his musical training on the piano, violin and clarinet before settling on the oboe and then zeroing in on the English horn. When he was 14, he sold his motorcycle in order to buy one.“It wasn’t a Harley or anything,” he told The New York Times in 1999, “just a small, lightweight motorcycle.”He largely taught himself to play the oboe and English horn, using a book that showed the fingerings. He was 17 and still a junior in high school when the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., gave him a full scholarship.“I started out on oboe at Eastman,” he said, “but I also played English horn in some of the performing groups. It was already my preference. It fits my musical persona like a glove.”While at Eastman he met a fellow student, Marie Elizabeth Mann. They married in 1960, the same year that both graduated and that Mr. Stacy joined the New Orleans Philharmonic. He later played with the San Antonio Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra before joining the New York Philharmonic in 1972.He appeared as soloist with the Philharmonic more than 70 times before leaving in the fall of 2010. By then a number of works had been written specifically with him in mind, including Ned Rorem’s Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra, which had its world premiere at Avery Fisher Hall in Manhattan in 1994. Alex Ross, reviewing the performance in The Times, found parts of the work “curiously fragmentary and unfocused.” But, he added, “Mr. Stacy tied these disparate impressions together with a rich tone and dazzling technique.”In addition to his wife and his son Barton, Mr. Stacy, who lived in Hampton Bays, N.Y., is survived by another son, Phillip, and two grandchildren.In the 1996 interview, Mr. Stacy talked about how a musician of his caliber stayed sharp.“The better you are, the harder it is to improve,” he said, “and that’s what I think about most, how to improve. It’s like chipping golf balls to the green with an 8-iron. You must practice the starting and stopping of notes so they sound good.” More

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      Review: Yunchan Lim, Teenage Piano Star, Arrives in New York

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      The 19-year-old musician made his New York Philharmonic debut with a powerful yet poetic performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto.“He plays like a dream,” we say about musicians we like, meaning simply that they’re very good.But when I say that Yunchan Lim, the 19-year-old pianist who made a galvanizing debut with the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, played like a dream, I mean something more literal.I mean that there was, in his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, the juxtaposition of precise clarity and expansive reverie; the vivid scenes and bursts of wit; the sense of contrasting yet organically developing moods; the endless and persuasive bendings of time — the qualities that tend to characterize nighttime wanderings of the mind.This dreamy concert was among Lim’s first major professional performances outside his native South Korea, though he is already world-famous for this concerto. His blazing account of it secured his victory last June as the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition’s youngest-ever winner, and the video of that appearance has been viewed millions of times on YouTube.That is, of course, hardly a guarantee of quality; there are many overhyped artists who go viral. But Lim’s preternaturally poised and poetic, tautly exciting Rachmaninoff deserved the clicks.He was not scheduled to join the Philharmonic this season; this weekend was supposed to bring Shostakovich’s mighty “Leningrad” Symphony. But when the conductor Tugan Sokhiev canceled in December — pretty much the last minute in the glacially planned world of classical music — a new program was brought in with Lim and, on the podium, James Gaffigan.Next season, Lim will do solo Chopin on Carnegie Hall’s main stage, but catching him now was a coup for the Philharmonic. On Wednesday, he played the Rachmaninoff concerto, one of the most difficult and popular in the repertoire, with clean, confident technique; silkily smooth tone; and rare relish in passages of sprightly humor. (Who knew this piece was so funny?)Lim’s playing had a quietly, calmly penetrating lucidity that made his sound especially simpatico with the winds, as in his subtle interplay in the first movement with the oboe and, in the finale, with the flute.But he was unafraid of power. In his hands, the great, pounding first-movement cadenza was granitic, though never sludgy. And at the highest reaches of the piano, he had pinging intensity. By the end of the piece, his upper body was jackknifing toward the keys at flourishes, with his left foot stomping.Especially given the acoustics of the renovated Geffen Hall — which don’t immediately place soloists in sonic boldface, rather integrating them into the ensemble — this was very much a duet with a Philharmonic that played under Gaffigan with transparency, warmth and restraint.Some of the best moments were the quietest ones: In the third movement, the passage in which the piano plays as the strings lightly tap with their bows gave the effect of a snow globe, air full of swirling ice crystals. All in all, this was the kind of performance that made me want to hear how it develops over the course of a weekend, as these players and Lim get even more comfortable with each other.Oh, and the concert had a first half, too: an instrumental arrangement of Valentin Silvestrov’s tender choral “Prayer for Ukraine” and a rare, excellent rendition of Prokofiev’s Third Symphony, from the late 1920s.For New York opera lovers, there was some poignancy to hearing this symphony, since Prokofiev drew its musical material from his memorably extreme “The Fiery Angel,” the Metropolitan Opera premiere of which was canceled (and not rescheduled) during the pandemic. Gaffigan — throughout the concert, drawing out playing that was controlled and urgent but also delicate and natural — emphasized the eerily seductive beauties of this grand, colorful, astringent score, with all its subdued sourness and shivery anxiety.The Prokofiev alone would have made Wednesday’s program a highlight of the Philharmonic’s season, but it’s understandable if many in the audience will think immediately of Lim when they recall this concert. If certain of his phrases in the Rachmaninoff could have relaxed just a shade more, his encores — yes, plural — were pure eloquent serenity.The second, a Lyadov prelude, was lovely. But the first, Liszt’s arrangement for piano of “Pace non trovo,” one of his songs to Petrarch texts, was more than that: wistful yet fresh, altogether elegant.He played it like a dream.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: After 55 Years, the Helsinki Philharmonic Returns to Carnegie Hall

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      The conductor Susanna Mälkki brought her orchestra to New York in something of a farewell to her tenure in Finland.Until Tuesday, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra hadn’t been to Carnegie Hall since 1968.Its chief conductor at the time was Jorma Panula, who was at the podium for that visit. Now, 55 years later, the group is led by one of his former students: Susanna Mälkki.Her tenure in Helsinki, where she has been the chief conductor since 2016, ends this season. And the classical music world is watching to see what comes next. A maestro at the height of her powers, she was until recently the principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, so an obvious possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel when he leaves to lead the New York Philharmonic in three years.In Los Angeles, Mälkki’s repertoire has been varied: a lot of well-shepherded contemporary music, but also insightfully transparent interpretations of the classics. Her work in Helsinki has been similar, though you wouldn’t know it from her Carnegie program, a thoroughly Finnish evening of works by Sibelius, that country’s most treasured composer, and Kaija Saariaho, its finest living one.Sibelius — at whose namesake school Mälkki studied with Panula — was represented not just by two planned works, but also by two encores: “Valse Triste” and, after Mälkki asked the audience to indulge a bit of patriotism, “Finlandia.”That piece is too famous for its own good and is often played with ineffective sentimentality. But under Mälkki’s baton, and with this orchestra — Sibelius’s sound world etched in its bones — “Finlandia” was newly disarming, modestly dignified in its touching harmonies and iron-willed fanfares.It was a delivery reminiscent of the program’s opener, “Lemminkäinen’s Return,” the fourth legend from Sibelius’s “Lemminkäinen Suite,” based on the “Kalevala,” Finland’s national epic. A brief finale to a long work, the “Return” is all climax, but Mälkki maintained a level head, unleashing a bit of fiery folk aggression here and there, but for the most part emphasizing color and letting it bloom with grandeur that was assured rather than insistent.Saariaho’s flute concerto “L’Aile du Songe,” from 2001, was a quietly personal touch of programming: Mälkki, who like Saariaho lives in Paris, is a friend and eminent interpreter of her music. And for the Carnegie performance, Mälkki was joined by another previous collaborator, the flutist Claire Chase, in the solo part. (Those two recently brought Felipe Lara’s excellent Double Concerto, which had premiered in Helsinki, to the New York Philharmonic.)The flute — human, elemental — has been one of Saariaho’s favored instruments, for which she has written some of her most dreamily poetic music. Here, it sings in brief phrases above suspended textures that aren’t melodies per se, but that build to broadly expressed gestures.In the second movement, the soloist vocalizes alongside notated playing, which Chase dispatched with her trademark theatricality. She and the Finns were satisfyingly united in their treatment of some of the work’s most exquisite details: downward glissandos that evoke a quickly passing, or perhaps dying, flare of sound; a celestial slow fade that ascends yet ebbs, in the end, to inaudibility.Part of that character, of course, comes from Mälkki’s conducting, which was at its wisest in Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The first movement’s pulsating motif rose and fell like breath, richly built from the lower voices upward and giving way to warm calls from the horns. An organic spirit permeated the reading, with momentum that was neither propulsive nor slack but simply natural, patient. When Dalia Stasevska led this piece with the New York Philharmonic earlier this year, it took on a hard-edged, assertive nationalism; here, its Finnish pride was more reverential, and awe inspired.Mälkki picked up the pace for the finale, resisting extravagant Romanticism and allowing the scale of the music to speak for itself. This was typical of a conductor who has risen to the top of her field on artistry alone, without the shameless bids for celebrity of her peers.We will see whether Mälkki’s stature, after Helsinki, translates to a new music directorship or a more self-driven freelance career. Regardless, any orchestra would be lucky to have her at its podium.Helsinki Philharmonic OrchestraPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Matthias Pintscher to Lead Kansas City Symphony

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      He will take the podium in 2024, with a mandate to help draw new audiences to classical music.The German-born composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher didn’t know what to expect when he traveled to Missouri in March to lead a series of performances with the Kansas City Symphony. He had never been to the city, nor had he worked with its orchestra.But after a few days of rehearsing and performing works by Ravel, Ligeti and Scriabin, Pintscher felt a deep connection with the ensemble. “There was magic,” he said in an interview. “A willingness to really give the best.”The orchestra was impressed, too: On Tuesday, it announced that Pintscher, 52, had agreed to serve as its next music director, beginning with a five-year term in 2024. He will succeed Michael Stern, who has been the orchestra’s leader since 2005, and lead the orchestra for 10 weeks each season.Danny Beckley, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, offered Pintscher the job only a couple of days after his March visit. He described Pintscher’s relationship with the orchestra as “electric” and said he hoped Pintscher could help to get more people into the concert hall.“We are committed to making orchestral music more appealing to a far wider audience, and I think Matthias can really help make that happen,” Beckley said in a statement.Pintscher, who lives in New York City, rose to prominence as a composer, writing a range of music, for orchestra and chamber ensembles, as well as solo pieces for piano and voice. His compositions are often evocative and mysterious, showcasing the ability of instruments like the clarinet and the double bass to whisper.He has also won accolades as a conductor, serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, a new music group, as well as the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra in Switzerland. (His tenure at the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which he has led for a decade, ends this season.) He is a member of the composition faculty at Juilliard.In Kansas City, he said, he felt a sense of belonging. He recalled chatting with a stranger at a supermarket; after he introduced himself, she immediately bought tickets to a concert.“It was such a warm welcome, by the city, the locals, the public, the musicians,” he said. “It was a happy arrival.” More

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      Boston’s Mayor, Michelle Wu, Trades City Hall for Symphony Hall

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      Michelle Wu, a lifelong pianist, has played to prepare for mayoral debates. Last weekend, she joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra onstage.BOSTON — There are things that a big-city mayor just has to do. Cut a ribbon here. Plant a tree there. Throw out the first pitch. Play Mozart with the local symphony orchestra.Hang on a second.Plenty of politicians might say that they support the arts, but Michelle Wu, a Democrat who became the first woman and the first person of color to be elected mayor of Boston, in November 2021, is one of the few who will court embarrassment to prove it.At the free “Concert for the City” on Sunday afternoon, put on by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its sister ensemble, the Boston Pops, Wu took the stage before a nearly full house at Symphony Hall here to perform as the soloist in the dreamy slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21. She may not quite be ready for a world tour, but with the Symphony and its music director, Andris Nelsons, in support, she captured more of the composer’s characteristic elegance than an amateur might. And she barely missed a note.“I think Michelle did it so wonderfully,” Nelsons said during a news conference after the performance.While political figures, including Edward M. Kennedy, the former Massachusetts senator, and Thomas M. Menino, the former Boston mayor, have from time to time stood on the podium while the Pops has played such staples as “Sleigh Ride” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the Symphony’s archivist said that Wu, 38, was almost certainly the first officeholder in the orchestra’s more than 140-year history to take the far greater risk of stepping into the spotlight as a soloist.Some players in the ensemble — which had rehearsed with her on Saturday, before giving a ferociously intense reading that night of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 to end its subscription season — stayed onstage to watch, even though they had no music to play.Wu played Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 with the orchestra as part of Boston’s “Concert for the City.”Robert Torres“I have been playing piano since long, long before I ever thought about politics, and my parents are probably more than skeptical still about the politics thing,” Wu said at the news conference, adding with a laugh, “This is probably the proudest that they’ve ever been of me, and it took getting elected to mayor to be able to do this.”For the Boston Symphony, the performance was a chance to showcase its quickly strengthening commitment to community engagement. For Wu, it was a platform to promote her policies as the city’s arts institutions steadily right themselves after the pandemic, including her insistence that every child in a Boston public school should have access to an instrument. But it was also an occasion to reflect on the deeper connections that she — as a pianist who trained from age 4 and, as The Boston Globe reported, keeps an upright in her City Hall office — sees between music and politics broadly.Classical artists often talk in platitudes about music being a universal language that can transcend borders, but for Wu, who grew up in Chicago as the first child of immigrants from Taiwan and who also learned the violin, the commonplaces were a reality.“I remember very vaguely when I was young, we would go drive really far so my mom would sing in a community chorus concert,” Wu said in an interview. “My mom has a gorgeous voice, so much of my function learning piano growing up was to be her accompanist.”Music offered Wu’s parents continuity amid change, as they learned English and adapted to a new culture. She remembered seeing that her mother had transliterated the words in her score for Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” into Chinese, so that she could pronounce them correctly.“My parents were in a very modest situation,” Wu said. “We were initially receiving benefits and as my dad’s career moved up, kind of moved more firmly into the middle class. But piano lessons were, I’m sure, at that time just a luxury splurge for them. But it was important because my parents were both musical, and again, it was their way to feel like the barriers maybe weren’t so high in this country.”As a high schooler, Wu played the solo part in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and she became a subscriber to the Boston Symphony while she was studying at Harvard University. Although she practiced hard for Sunday’s performance, she said, she had made a tradition of playing for herself the night before mayoral debates.“My go-to to really calm myself is Liszt’s ‘Un Sospiro,’” Wu said. “With the flowing of it, you can really lose yourself quickly. And then if it was that kind of day, it’d be a little Rachmaninoff.”Wu’s Boston Symphony appearance came about after she and her children attended a family and youth concert last year, and she played a few bars of Liszt backstage for that program’s conductor, Thomas Wilkins. The orchestra approached her about Sunday’s concert of short, mostly Boston-related works about a month and a half ago, offering her three Mozart pieces to choose from. She took a few weeks to think about it, she admitted.“Just as I try to be honest about the challenges that can come with being a working parent,” Wu said at the news conference, “in the hopes that that means we change our systems faster and encourage other people to believe that it’s possible to live their lives and give their fullest in every way, I hope that people will see that we can come to our positions — if you might be so fortunate to have a position of leadership or whatever platform you have — to bring your whole self to that.”Wu talks about the role that the arts can play in society with a conviction that many musical institutions are still working to acquire, describing them as, among other things, “a vehicle to talk about and address our biggest challenges in new and interesting ways,” such as climate change and race. These are beliefs that, she said, she might not hold with the same intensity if she had not played the piano.“I would imagine that even as someone who would not necessarily play but be a passionate audience member, there’s something about the feeling and the connection that you can’t put words to when all of it comes together,” Wu said in the interview. “The power of how people felt connected in Symphony Hall today, hanging on every note, delighted at each individual piece and the surprises and twists of every composition — that’s a model for how we want our community to be, day in and day out, in this city.” More

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      A 19-Year-Old Pianist Electrifies Audiences. But He’s Unimpressed.

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      Yunchan Lim’s victory at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year made him a sensation. He says the attention makes him uneasy.After six hours of sleep and a breakfast of milk and curry rice, Yunchan Lim, the South Korean pianist, was in a rehearsal studio at Lincoln Center on Tuesday morning working through a treacherous passage of Rachmaninoff.“A little bit faster,” Lim, in a black sweatshirt and sneakers, said casually to the conductor, James Gaffigan, as they prepared for Lim’s New York Philharmonic debut this week. Gaffigan laughed.“Usually pianists want the opposite!” the conductor said.Lim — shy, soft-spoken and bookish — stunned the music world last year when, at 18, he became the youngest winner in the history of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. His victory made him an immediate sensation; a video of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the finals has been viewed more than 11 million times on YouTube. (He will play that piece with the Philharmonic this week, under Gaffigan’s baton.)Still a college sophomore, Lim has inspired a devout following in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has become a symbol of pride in South Korea, where he has been described as classical music’s answer to K-pop. Like a pop star, his face has been printed on T-shirts.Lim at the Van Cliburn competition, playing with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.Richard Rodriguez/The Cliburn, via Associated Press“He’s a musician way beyond his years,” said the conductor Marin Alsop, who headed the Cliburn jury and led the Rachmaninoff performance. “Technically, he’s phenomenal, and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal. He’s incredibly musical and seems like a very old soul. It’s really quite something.”But Lim is uneasy with the attention. He does not believe he has any musical talent, he says, and would be content to spend his life alone in the mountains playing piano all day. (He limits his use of social media, he says, because he believes it is corrosive to creativity and because he wants to live as much as possible as his favorite composers did.)“A famous performer and an earnest performer — a true artist — are two different things,” he said in an interview this week at the Steinway factory in Queens, where he was shopping for a piano.Born in Siheung, a suburb of Seoul, Lim had a childhood filled with soccer, baseball and music. He began studying the piano at 7, when his parents enrolled him in a neighborhood music academy. He was drawn to the piano, he said, because he had grown up hearing Chopin and Liszt on recordings that his mother had purchased when she was pregnant. He was also taken by the majesty of the instrument.Lim was taken by the majesty of the instrument when he was young. “The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“Technically, he’s phenomenal,” Alsop said of Lim, “and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal.”Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.At 13, he enrolled in a prep school at Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. His teacher, the pianist Minsoo Sohn, was impressed by the sensitivity of his interpretations.“At first he was a little bit cautious, but I immediately noticed that he was a huge talent,” he said. “He’s very humble, a student of the score and he isn’t over expressive.”Sohn initially steered his student away from competitions, worried about the pressure. But when the pandemic delayed the Cliburn competition, which is held every four years, making it possible for Lim to qualify, Sohn suggested he give it a try, telling him to treat it as a performance, not a competition.“I thought the world needed to listen to what Yunchan could play in his teenage years,” Sohn said.When Lim arrived in Fort Worth for the competition, which took place over 17 days, he said he felt the spirit of Van Cliburn, the eminent pianist for whom the contest is named.Lim sometimes practiced as much as 20 hours a day, he said, sending recordings to Sohn, who was in South Korea, for guidance. He existed on a diet of Korean noodles and stews prepared by his mother, who had accompanied him, as well as midnight snacks of toasted English muffins with butter and strawberry jam made by his host family.“I knew it was like Russian roulette,” he said of the competition. “It could turn out well, or you could end up shooting yourself in the head. It was a lot of stress.”As he prepared to walk onstage to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, he said he thought of Carl Sagan’s idea of Earth as just a “pale blue dot” in the universe.“When the stage doors open and the audience applauds, when I nervously sit down at the piano and press the first key, that moment is like the Big Bang for me,” he said. “I’m nervous, but the image of the pale blue dot gives me courage. I just think of the moment as something occurring in that small little speck.”His Rachmaninoff won ovations, but he was dissatisfied with the performance, believing that he achieved only about 30 percent of what he had hoped to accomplish. Since the competition, he said he had been able to watch just the first three minutes of the YouTube video before growing dispirited.When he returned to South Korea after the Cliburn, he said he was unchanged. “I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” he said at a news conference with his teacher.“I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” Lim said at a news conference with his teacher.Ayesha Malik for The New York TimesLim, who is still enrolled at Korean National University of Arts, plans to transfer this fall to the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where Sohn now teaches.As a student, his international career has taken off, with a recital at Wigmore Hall in London in January and an appearance with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in February. This summer, he will reunite with Alsop to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto at the Bravo! Vail festival in Colorado and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. Next year, he will make his Carnegie Hall debut with an all-Chopin program.The New York Philharmonic booked him soon after Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, saw YouTube videos of his performances at the Cliburn — a Beethoven concerto as well as the Rachmaninoff.“I was blown away by how fluent he was in both styles,” Borda said. “He was just brilliant.”Ahead of his debut in New York, Lim has been fine-tuning his interpretation of the Rachmaninoff. In preparing the concerto’s somber opening notes, he said, he imagines the “angel of death” or cloaked figures singing a Gregorian chant, following his teacher’s advice.This performance is especially meaningful, he said. On his commute to and from middle school, he often played a 1978 recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto by Vladimir Horowitz and the Philharmonic. He said he had listened to the recording at least 1,000 times.Lim said he felt nervous to follow in the footsteps of Horowitz, one of his idols, and that he would always consider himself a student, no matter how successful his career might be. He said artists should not be judged by the number of YouTube views they received, but by the authenticity of their work.“It’s a bit hard to define myself as an artist,” he said. “I’m like the universe before the Big Bang. I’m still in the learning phase.”“I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities,” he added, “just like the universe.”Jin Yu Young contributed research from Seoul. More

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      Grace Bumbry, Barrier-Shattering Opera Diva, Is Dead at 86

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      A flamboyant mezzo-soprano (who could also sing meaty soprano roles), she overcame racial prejudice to become one of opera’s first, and biggest, Black stars.Grace Bumbry, a barrier-shattering mezzo-soprano whose vast vocal range and transcendent stage presence made her a towering figure in opera and one of its first, and biggest, Black stars, died on Sunday in Vienna. She was 86.Her death, following a stroke in October, was confirmed in a statement by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was long a mainstay, performing more than 200 times over two decades.Growing up in St. Louis in an era of segregation, Ms. Bumbry came of age at a time when African American singers were a rare sight on the opera stage, despite breakthroughs by luminaries like Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson.But with a fierce drive and an outsize charisma, Ms. Bumbry broke out internationally in 1960, at 23, when she sang Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Paris Opera.The following year, she landed in something of a national scandal in West Germany when Wieland Wagner, a grandson of Richard Wagner, cast her as Venus, the Roman goddess of love, in a modernized version of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the storied Bayreuth Festival.She was the first Black woman to perform at the festival, cast as a character typically portrayed as a Nordic ideal in an opera written by a composer known for his antisemitism and German nationalism. The festival — and newspapers — were flooded with letters asserting that the composer would “turn in his grave.”Ms. Bumbry was undeterred. Indeed, she was well prepared.“Everything that I had learned from my childhood was now being tested,” she recalled in an interview with St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “Because I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?”The audience did not share such misgivings: Ms. Bumbry was showered with 30 minutes of applause. German critics were equally enchanted, christening her “the Black Venus.” The Cologne-area newspaper Kölnische Rundschau credited her with an “artistic triumph,” and Die Welt called her a “big discovery.”Her landmark performance helped earn her a $250,000 contract (the equivalent of more than $2.5 million now) with the opera impresario Sol Hurok.Ms. Bumbry performed at the White House in 1962, invited by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, on the advice of European friends who had seen her at Bayreuth.Cecil Stoughton/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumIt also won her another honor: a performance at the White House, in February 1962. On the advice of European friends who had seen Ms. Bumbry at Bayreuth, Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, invited her to sing at a state dinner attended by President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other Washington power brokers.Suddenly, she was a star.“If there is a more exciting new voice than Grace Bumbry’s skyrocketing over the horizon I have not heard it,” Claudia Cassidy wrote in The Chicago Tribune in a review of a recording of her arias the same year. “This is a glorious voice, by grace of the gods given its chance to be heard in its fullest beauty.”Of her Carnegie Hall debut in November 1962, Alan Rich of The New York Times gave a qualified review, but allowed that “Miss Bumbry has a gorgeous, clear, ringing voice and a great deal of control over it.”“She can swoop without the slightest effort from a brilliant high to a beautiful resonant chest tone,” he wrote.Ms. Bumbry transcended not only racial perceptions but vocal categorizations as well. Originally a mezzo-soprano, she made a striking departure by taking on soprano parts, too, which gave her access to marquee roles in operas such as Richard Strauss’s “Salome” and Puccini’s “Tosca.”“She gloried in the fact that she was able to perform both roles in Verdi’s ‘Aïda,’” Fred Plotkin wrote in a 2013 appreciation for the website for WXQR, the New York public radio station. “She could be Tosca and Salome, but also Carmen and Eboli.”Ms. Bumbry appearing in the 1968 film of Bizet’s opera “Carmen.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMs. Bumbry displayed a broad range in her choice of roles. In 1985, she received raves for her performance as Bess in the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” despite her conflicted feelings about a folk opera set among the tenements of Charleston, S.C., and rife with unflattering Black stereotypes.“I thought it beneath me,” she said in an interview with Life magazine. “I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”Grace Melzia Bumbry was born on Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis, the youngest of three children of Benjamin Bumbry, a railroad freight handler, and Melzia Bumbry, a schoolteacher.A musical prodigy as a youth, she honed her skills in the choir at St. Louis Union Memorial Church and by performing Chopin on the piano at ladies’ tea parties. At 16, she saw a performance by Ms. Anderson, who would become a mentor, and was inspired to enter a singing contest on a local radio station. She took top prize, which included a $1,000 war bond and a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. She was nonetheless denied admission because of her race.“The reality was wounding,” Ms. Bumbry said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “But when it happened, I also thought, I’m the winner. Nothing can change that. My talent is superior.”Ms. Bumbry sang the national anthem at the Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington in 2009. She was an honoree that year.Alex Brandon/Associated PressEmbarrassed, the radio contest organizers arranged for her to appear on “Talent Scouts,” a national radio and television program hosted by Arthur Godfrey. After hearing her heart-rending performance of “O Don Fatale,” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” the avuncular Mr. Godfrey informed the audience, “Her name will be one of the most famous names in music one day.”The exposure helped put her on a path to Boston University, and later, Northwestern University, where she fell under the tutelage of the German opera luminary Lotte Lehmann, who became another valuable mentor as Ms. Bumbry moved toward her debut in Paris.As her star continued to rise over the years, Ms. Bumbry was never afraid to inhabit the prima donna role offstage as well as on, outfitting herself in Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta and tooling around in a Lamborghini.After marrying the tenor Erwin Jaeckel in 1963, she settled in a villa in Lugano, Switzerland. The couple divorced in 1972. Ms. Bumbry left no immediate survivors.Beyond her prodigious vocal skills, Ms. Bumbry brought a famous sultriness to her roles, a reputation she put to good use for a 1970 performance of “Salome” at the Royal Opera House in London.She leaked word to the press that for the racy “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she would strip off all seven veils, down to her “jewels and perfume,” as she put it — although the jewels, it turned out, were sufficient enough to serve as a “modest bikini,” as The New York Times noted.It hardly mattered. “In the history of Covent Garden,” Ms. Bumbry said in a 1985 interview with People magazine, “they never sold so many binoculars.” More