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      The Maestro Wore Blue: Bringing Pizazz to the Pit at the Met

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, dressed in a blazing sapphire jacket and trim black pants, stood before a mirror backstage on a recent afternoon and smiled.“Oh my God, it’s so good,” he said, waving his baton. “I love it so much.”There were three days until the opening of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and Nézet-Séguin, surrounded by a small team of tailors, designers and assistants, was offering feedback on his attire, which had been designed by the Met’s costume shop.His outfit was modeled on one worn onstage by a band leader in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. Could the golden braid that dangled from his right shoulder be fastened, so it did not create a distraction in the pit? Was the jacket comfortable enough to accommodate the sweeping gestures that the music demanded? And should there be more red, or maybe gold?The Met’s costume shop has designed outfits for Nézet-Séguin for eight productions, including this jacket for “Bohème.”“The more unusual elements,” he said, “the more fun for the audience.”Since the Met returned from the long pandemic shutdown, in the fall of 2021, Nézet-Séguin has been on a mission to challenge sartorial conventions, wearing eye-catching outfits designed by the Met’s costume shop in eight productions. There is limited space to make a statement; the designers focus on his back, since that is what most audience members will see.“We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” said Robert Bulla, the Met’s assistant head costumer. “Nothing too obnoxious, but something that occasionally catches the light.”A conductor’s look book: clockwise from top left, “Champion,” “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” “The Hours” and “Lohengrin.”Nézet-Séguin sports a black-and-white hooded jacket modeled on a vintage Everlast boxing robe for Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” an opera about the boxer Emile Griffith that had its Met premiere this month. (At the start of the second act, he enters the pit wearing the hood and boxing gloves, but removing both to conduct.)For “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the season in 2021, Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something special. The opera’s costume designer, Paul Tazewell, suggested this fireworks pattern.Rose Callahan/Metropolitan OperaHe wore a stained-glass pattern on his jacket for a 2021 revival of Puccini’s “Tosca,” which opens in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. And he switched from green to red to white shirts in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” this season, mimicking the look of the choristers, whose robes changed colors throughout the show.Nézet-Séguin said his outfits helped strengthen the bond between the pit and the stage.“You don’t want to ignore the orchestra,” he said. “If the conductor is there and seen, I think that helps the connection. It’s much more integrated.”At work in the costume shop. The jacket being constructed echoes one worn by a band leader onstage in the production.The costumes are also part of his efforts to make opera, which has long had a reputation for conservatism, more exciting and accessible.“We have to be more modern and approachable,” he said. “We want to welcome everybody.”While earlier music directors at the Met, all men, favored white tie and tails, Nézet-Séguin, who has held the post since 2018, has long had a more eclectic style, both in his clothes and appearance. He has bleached-blond hair and wears a diamond earring and several gold rings. He is fond of performing in clothes by designers like the Canadian Marie Saint Pierre and can be seen onstage in red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes.“The more unusual elements,” Nézet-Séguin said, “the more fun for the audience.”As the Met prepared to reopen its doors to the public after the pandemic shutdown in 2021, Nézet-Séguin felt it was time for a change.The Met was preparing to open the season with Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first work by a Black composer in the company’s history. Nézet-Séguin wanted to wear something to reflect the importance of the moment. The costume designer for “Fire,” Paul Tazewell, suggested a fireworks pattern, with flashes of red, indigo, teal and orange.“To be plain dressed — it just felt wrong to me,” Nézet-Séguin said.Beyond white tie and tails. “We want to get some attention but not be too distracting,” Robert Bulla, an assistant head costumer at the Met, said.Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThe designs often riff on an opera’s central themes. For Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” based on the 1998 novel and the 2002 film it inspired, he wore a floral pattern, a nod to the work’s many references to flowers.Comfort is a priority — the designers want to ensure that he feels unhindered, and they use lightweight and stretchable fabric for flexibility and to absorb sweat. The costume shop often produces several of each jacket so he can change into a fresh one between acts.Some operas are more challenging than others. The team struggled to come up with an idea for “Bohème” before recalling that the production includes a scene in which a band leader guides a procession of soldiers across the stage.Nézet-Séguin, who painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” sometimes adds his own touches.“It’s good to be breaking this mold of what everyone thinks classical music and opera is,” Bulla said. “Some people say it’s taken a long time to start this evolution process. But at least it’s evolving.”Nézet-Séguin sometimes adds his own touches. He painted his nails fuchsia for “Champion,” to match the purple robe worn onstage by Ryan Speedo Green, who plays Griffith. And he said he was eager for a day when the Met orchestra musicians would be allowed to dress with more variety. (The dress code demands tuxedos or long, flowing black clothes for evening performances.)“It’s baby steps,” he said. “When I make statements like this, mentalities can evolve. We have to think more creatively and ergonomically. This is only the beginning.” More

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      Les Arts Florissants Returns to New York, Endangered

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      William Christie’s early-music ensemble, once a staple at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, finds a new home in Carnegie Hall.The pair of concerts that William Christie and his ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, offered at Carnegie Hall this week made me a little sad.Not the concerts themselves: They were excellent, occasionally exquisite. What depressed me was the question of whether there’s a future in New York for this pathbreaking early-music group, founded in France four decades ago by Christie, an American.Its longtime bases when on tour in the city, Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, have jolted away from the kind of music programming that was until recently a core part of their identities — and the kind that Les Arts Florissants embodies. But this ensemble gives the lie to the suggestion, made by certain administrators, that presenting music of the past necessarily means sleepy renditions of the standards.Sure, Christie and Les Arts Florissants don’t do contemporary pieces. Their repertoire, with its founding specialty in the French Baroque of Lully, Rameau and Charpentier, doesn’t check fashionable boxes of diversity, equity and inclusion.But that doesn’t mean they are reactionary, dull, irrelevant or unworthy of being presented alongside the best of the present day. For decades, they have been fulfilling the task of any truly important cultural institution: opening up new worlds of beauty and excitement, both emotional and intellectual. Not merely rehashing what’s known, but introducing modern audiences to works and composers overlooked for centuries.Les Arts Florissants opera productions, in particular, have been deep and poignant — and very vibrant — excavations. But the organizations with the spaces and resources to put them on in America’s cultural capital no longer seem to think that’s a meaningful endeavor. That’s a loss for New York.So gratitude is due to Carnegie, one of the city’s few remaining major presenters of early music, for offering the ensemble a place to land — at least for the moment and in spare numbers. On Tuesday, Christie and the young violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte appeared upstairs, at Weill Recital Hall. And on Wednesday, Christie led slightly (but not much) beefier forces downstairs, at Zankel Hall.Christie and Langlois de Swarte gave a version of the violin-harpsichord program they recorded a few years ago, featuring sonatas from the early 18th century that demonstrate the influence that passionate, tumblingly virtuosic Italian music had on the austere, even severe dances of 17th-century France.The revelation of that album — and the best part of Tuesday’s recital — was the work of Jean Baptiste Senaillé, a favorite of the aristocracy in his day but now an obscurity. He was particularly adept at inflaming restrained French elegance with Italian intensity, as in the inexorably winding violin line of a G minor sonata’s prelude, exploding in arpeggios that lead to a fiery yet stylish gavotte.Langlois de Swarte, his tone clear but with an appealing hint of wiry bite, played with vivacity and wit. And the Adagio harpsichord introduction to a sonata in C minor showed off Christie’s magic touch, his phrasing noble yet gentle.Both this and Wednesday’s program were canny: short enough to do without an intermission, yet focused enough to feel immersive. So many programs these days valorize variety, but to spend a bit over an hour in a single sound world can be a profound experience.Better to be left wanting more. But I ever so slighted rued that, since it consisted mostly of selections of movements, Tuesday’s recital included only one full Senaillé sonata. (The recording boasted four, alongside two by his slightly younger contemporary, Jean-Marie Leclair.)On Wednesday, Christie led from the organ an ensemble of, at its most robust, nine male singers and seven players in a set of sacred works by Charpentier, whose opera “Les Arts Florissants” gave the group its name.This was, a little belatedly, music for the Lenten period, beginning with Charpentier’s beautiful, sober yet luscious set of 10 “Meditations for Lent” — a kind of proto-Passion that charts the story of the Stations of the Cross. Soloists sing some of the lines of biblical dialogue, with the narration given a hypnotic setting for groups of voices.In these meditations and three “lessons,” traditionally sung as part of evening services during Holy Week, the instrumentalists were superbly restrained. And, if none of the individual voices were particularly impressive, the choir achieved remarkable, moving effects of hovering gauziness and almost whispered sweetness; the sound was sometimes mellow, sometimes thrillingly emphatic. Precision of attack let even this modest-size group take on fearsome grandeur when singing of the ripping of the temple’s curtain as Jesus was crucified.The almost excruciating impact of tightly shifting harmonies matched the accounts of pain and torture in the texts. The hall lights were dimmed almost to darkness; the mood, unbroken by applause until the end, was rapt.It, like Tuesday’s recital, was a performance to be celebrated. But it was hard not to feel like these bite-size concerts were whetting the appetite for a full meal that may never come this way again. More

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      The Boston Symphony Finds Surprises and Strengths in New Music

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      Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra presented the New York premieres of works by Thierry Escaich and Thomas Adès.When orchestras come to Carnegie Hall, their programs typically tell you two things: who they are and what they can do.That was true earlier this season when the Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann offered authoritative Strauss and Bruckner. Or when the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko opened up the complex worlds of Mahler’s Seventh with coordinated virtuosity. Or when the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel found irrepressible dynamism in blazing scores by Gabriela Ortiz.And over two nights at Carnegie this week, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Andris Nelsons, told their story gradually, one piece at a time, in canonical works by Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and Mozart. It was only when they unveiled two New York premieres — Thierry Escaich’s “Les Chants de l’Aube,” with the cellist Gautier Capuçon, and Thomas Adès’s “Air,” with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter — that they tapped into something special all at once.Among American orchestras, the Boston Symphony’s sound is enviably rich. That opulence was readily apparent in the ceaseless flow of cantabile melodies in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. You could hear it too in the briefest articulations, such as the resonant pizzicatos of Ravel’s cheeky “Alborada del Gracioso,” which on Monday opened the first concert, or the sonorous orchestral stabs on the last page of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, which on Tuesday closed the second.The Rachmaninoff often felt like an hourlong showcase for the spacious, burnished tone of the orchestra’s violin section. Nelsons coaxed gorgeous, heart-in-your-throat playing from them in one long-breathed line after another. As if to balance that, the Sibelius symphony was rife with woodwind and brass chorales; the strings don’t even enter until the 18th measure. The ensemble’s new principal horn, Richard Sebring — a longtime Boston Symphony player who recently won the chair after an international search — anchored his section with a glowing, edgeless sound.Nelsons seemed to celebrate one section at a time without employing his full forces — or full imagination — in the standard repertory pieces. Occasionally, an overwhelming plushness traded the vulnerability of Rachmaninoff’s music for invincible solidity. In the final movement, the players relaxed into the piece’s complexity, its romance caught in a swirl of vexed intent. Nelsons took the second movement of the Sibelius, built on a deceptively simple rhythmic unit, at face value, without the pluck, personality or sly contentment others have mined in it. In a piece as graceful and zesty as the Ravel, the slowly accumulating strength of the orchestra could be taken for turgidity.The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, left, was the soloist in the New York premiere of Thomas Adès’s “Air.”Fadi KheirIn the two New York premieres, though, Nelsons unleashed the ensemble’s astonishing range of colors to enliven the particular atmosphere of each work.In a program note, Escaich compared his cello concerto “Les Chants de l’Aube” to a stained-glass window. The metaphor isn’t readily apparent; the music doesn’t bring to mind a mosaic of translucent, jeweled tones. If anything, its palette feels cool, foreboding.Escaich might be embodying spiritual forces both good and evil. With a glinting, coppery tone, Capuçon gave the opening phrase — a Baroque homage that nods to Bach’s Invention No. 13 — a cunning flicker of darkness and light. The violins played long notes on high, not unlike the angelic overture to Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” as the horns droned down below. Flutes dipped like swallows, and brasses popped out like goblins. Tubular bells tolled ritualistically. Within this frame, both beatific and ominous, Capuçon’s cello maneuvered: warm, bodily, determined.In that sense, the cello, in both design and execution, was very much the piece’s animating force, passing through light and shadow, and knowing something of both. Escaich wrote cadenzas to link the three movements into a continuous form, and Capuçon emphasized their atmospheric expressivity as opposed to their show-pony virtuosity. The orchestra navigated the shifting meters and watery textures of the second movement with conviction, and Nelsons masterfully plotted the way in which the final movement’s heavenly motif for celesta and harp melted away into a dangerous dance. Jazzy dalliances and an abrupt ending didn’t ultimately detract from the concerto’s absorbing sound world.Adès’s “Air,” by contrast, devotes itself to a single idea — one of fragile beauty — for its 15-minute duration. The way Adès pitches the violin writing high up, almost daring the soloist to sustain it, recalls the extreme tessitura for the soprano role of Ariel in his opera “The Tempest.” This time, though, the effect is serene instead of unnervingly otherworldly.Mutter, who gave the world premiere of “Air” at the Lucerne Festival last year, played at Carnegie with a platinum tone, densely concentrated. The orchestra drew mesmeric circles around her, conjuring a world of glass, as Mutter’s sound irradiated a childlike innocence full of whispered awe.With the sensitivity of an opera conductor who loves his singers, Nelsons consistently scaled the orchestra’s sound to his soloists’ resources. If his rendition of Sibelius’s “Luonnotar” — a tone poem about the mythic creation of the earth and firmament — lacked a cosmic spatial sense, then at least its quiet intensity was of a piece with the soprano Golda Schultz’s rosy tone and haloed high notes; these performers were very much describing, rather than dramatizing, the piece’s world-shattering dimensions. Nelsons cushioned Mutter’s elegantly assured playing with spirited, swift touches in Mozart’s First Violin Concerto, and he matched Capuçon’s dazzling, consuming focus and mercurial coloring. Each collaboration felt natural, intuitive.At times during the Boston Symphony’s performances, the parts were greater than the whole. A textbook reading can be exemplary but also plain. But when this orchestra had a new story to tell, it was full of surprises. More

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      Review: Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra Gets Ambitious at Carnegie Hall

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      After decades away, the musicians, led by Kent Nagano, were back in the United States to perform works by Sean Shepherd, along with Beethoven and Brahms.“Go big or go home” must have been the rallying cry for the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra’s debut at Carnegie Hall Saturday night. The last time this group appeared in the United States was more than 50 years ago, in 1967. So for this program, the Hamburg musicians, led by the conductor Kent Nagano, went large-scale ambitious, performing the world premiere of the American composer Sean Shepherd’s t12- movement “An Einem Klaren Tag — On a Clear Day” for cello, choruses and orchestra.Here, that ambition demanded the participation of no fewer than five choruses culled from both Germany and New York: the Audi Jugendchorakademie (a youth chorus sponsored by the car manufacturer); Alsterspatzen (the children and youth choir of the Hamburg State Opera); the Dresdner Kreuzchor (a boys’ choir that dates back to the 13th century); the Young ClassX ensemble (a youth choir from Hamburg); and the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. By my count, more than 200 instrumentalists and singers were jammed onto the Carnegie stage, plus Nagano and the soloist Jan Vogler on cello, for the nearly hourlong work.The concert began with the music of a Hamburg native: Johannes Brahms. The orchestra performed his brief, sonically luminous and emotionally ambiguous “Schicksalslied” (Song of Destiny) with the Audi singers. Written in three movements with an ancient Greek-inspired text by Friedrich Hölderlin, “Schicksalslied” descends from radiant joyfulness into dark despair before resolving into something akin to solace. Nagano, deeply mindful of shape and phrasing, coaxed the strings into producing a warm glow that seemed to be lit from within.Nagano and the orchestra continued that careful, deeply intentional sculpting of rhythm, articulation and dynamics in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. In a work full of lithe charm, the Hamburg musicians, who also serve as the orchestra of the Hamburg State Opera, were able to showcase a more exuberantly playful side of their collective personality. After all, this is a symphony in which Beethoven, for all his callbacks to the structure and style of Haydn and Mozart, takes a radical tack: the Eighth lacks a slow movement, and dances at its own singular pace. Even with that whimsical spirit, the musicians created each moment with great deliberation.That pinpoint precision subsided in the sweep of Shepherd’s massive and earnest piece. Mostly using poetry by the German writer Ulla Hahn, Shepherd calls “On a Clear Day” both “a plea for compassion toward our fellow human” and an outcry against environmental calamity. Despite Vogler’s presence, it’s not a concerto per se; rather, Shepherd used the cello more as an actor who steps into a variety of roles to present occasional plaintive and virtuosic soliloquies against a colossal backdrop: here, a melancholic companion for the singers, trading a melody back and forth; there, channeling the spirit of a beleaguered Mother Earth.Shepherd has a fantastic gift for orchestral color; for example, in the sixth movement, he juxtaposes a rapturous, lyrical passage for solo cello with winds, brass, harp, piano and percussion — including glockenspiel and sleigh bells — to glittering, mysterious effect. The piece is so expansive in both size and scope, however, that it sometimes felt like Nagano was less a conductor than the captain of a giant cruise ship, wrestling his oversized vessel into a modest port. The even keel at which he had led the Brahms and Beethoven had vanished.Hamburg Philharmonic State OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Now Celebrated, Julius Eastman’s Music Points to a New Canon

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      The 92nd Street Y, New York and Wild Up presented a three-concert festival of works by this pioneering Black queer composer. What next?At last, it no longer feels accurate to describe the music of Julius Eastman as “long lost.”We’re firmly enjoying some new period of appreciation for the pioneering but once-overlooked work of this Black queer composer and multi-instrumentalist; archival recordings and new interpretations are widely available, and the art world more broadly has taken an enthusiastic interest in him. And at the 92nd Street Y, New York, this weekend, Eastman was celebrated with a three-concert series by the ensemble Wild Up, called “Radical Adornment.”

      Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy by Wild UpThe first two programs, both of which were well attended, presented works that, in recent years, have re-emerged as pillars of the American Minimalist repertoire. Friday’s show offered the evening-length “Femenine” — gentle at the outset, then thundering (if overamplified) as conducted by an energetic Christopher Rountree. And on Saturday afternoon, the rollicking, pop-aware “Stay On It” received a luxurious, 20-minute reading that was even better than on Wild Up’s recording of the piece.These concerts capitalized on Wild Up’s devoted attention to the Eastman catalog, which so far has included two portrait albums released on the New Amsterdam label. (A third volume, also excellent, is due for release in June, and a total of seven are planned.)As if to note that there is still work to be done in the Eastman revival, Wild Up spent Saturday evening performing an immersive, five-hour take on “Buddha” — an enigmatic piece built from spare melodic lines, written out within an egg-shaped oval that Eastman drew around the margins of a one-page score. Like “Femenine” and other works, it invites interpretive choices and improvisation; and by now, this group expertly responds to such calls.As you might expect, that meditative “Buddha” finale was the most sparsely attended of the three events. By the end — precisely at midnight — the audience had thinned out to only a handful of attendees, some of whom were musicians who had played in earlier shifts of the relay-style performance.Yet this marathon set also thrillingly shone a spotlight on the players who had done so much to make the prior concerts, and Wild Up’s recent recordings, so captivating. And it corrected some of the concerns I had had about amplification issues during “Femenine.” I had left that Friday show thinking that I hadn’t heard enough of the saxophonist Shelley Washington — in part because of the heavy prominence of electric keyboard in the amplified mix — but “Buddha” offered a form of redress. Specifically, I cherished the chance to hear her supple approach in moments of mellow melody as well as in passages of forceful group exultation.Tariq Al-Sabir during Eastman’s “Buddha” on Saturday night.Joseph SinnottElsewhere, the violist Mona Tian — an expert in the string quartet music of Wadada Leo Smith — was liable to place a dollop of edgy timbre or rhythmic pulsations into the dronescape whenever things threatened to go slack. And crucial to the opening hours of “Buddha” were the saxophonists Erin Rogers and Patrick Shiroishi. Rogers’s own music is often hyper urgent and fast-acting, but in the relaxed time scale of this performance, she savored every extended-technique tool in her embouchure. Shiroishi led fiery episodes and often grinned while listening to Rogers’s solo playing.For stretches of that performance, I longed for a recording of this “Buddha,” and had a similar sensation during the Saturday afternoon set, when Richard Valitutto took on Eastman’s through-composed, fully notated “Piano 2.” He gave the proper sternness to Eastman’s thick systems of melody, strewn between the hands in syncopated passages. But he also had a theatrical sense of swagger when encountering jaunty lines that press forward with parallel thrust — a quality not as present on an otherwise excellent recording of the work by Joseph Kubera, a contemporary of Eastman’s.And as the metaphorical curtain was coming down on Saturday, I started thinking about the kinds of Eastman concerts I have yet to hear. Up until now, the focus has reasonably been on simply presenting his music. That was the case at the 92nd Street Y, as it was in 2018 at the Kitchen for the festival “Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental.” But now that bigger institutions have taken notice of Eastman, it is time to turn curatorial attention to the broader context in which he worked.In his time, Eastman was a rare Black artist in the otherwise mostly white classical avant-garde. But as George E. Lewis noted in his forward to the scholarly essay collection “Gay Guerrilla,” edited by Mary Jane Leach and Renée Levine Packer, Eastman was not the only one. Benjamin Patterson was a part of Fluxus. Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble, which played music by Eastman and counted him as a member in the 1970s, also worked with Muhal Richard Abrams, a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective that also nurtured composers like Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill and Wadada Leo Smith. (Gallingly, Braxton’s 75th birthday passed in 2020 without an appropriate New York City retrospective, even after pandemic restrictions on performances were lifted.)What would an Eastman festival sound like that also included the works of all those artists, many of whom are still alive? They have written fully notated works like “Piano 2” and improvisatory, conceptual pieces like “Buddha.”The problem, as ever, is one of committed resources. Last season, the New York Philharmonic played Eastman’s recently reconstructed Symphony No. 2 during Black History Month. But there is no sign of a recording; for now, just a minute of that performance lives on YouTube. And what is stopping American orchestras from broadly taking up the music of Braxton and Mitchell while those artists are still around?The 92nd Street Y has a role to play in this as well. And the broad success of its Eastman festival with Wild Up should encourage it to continue along a similar path. That way, in addition to the small matter of putting on exciting shows, it might also help classical music avoid the future problem of needing to belatedly celebrate other American composers who died with too little recognition. More

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      Review: The Danish String Quartet Spins Through Schubert

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      The group returned to Zankel Hall for the latest installment of its “Doppelgänger” project, featuring a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.Schubert’s song “Gretchen am Spinnrade” famously imitates a spinning wheel in the piano: the left hand repeating the rhythm of a pedal, and the right whirling a phrase in perpetual motion. It’s not exact, but it is evocative, like the Goethe poetry it’s based on.At Zankel Hall on Thursday, that spirit of repetition — oblique and constantly transforming — coursed through the third installment of the Danish String Quartet’s “Doppelgänger” project, which pairs Schubert’s late quartets with new commissions, and closes with an arrangement of a lied: in this case, “Gretchen.”Before that came Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet, a relatively light work among its “Doppelgänger” siblings, and the single-movement “Quartettsatz,” as well as the world premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals,” a slippery but entrancing series of permutations in which a set of musical gestures are rearranged like matter.That piece rarely repeats itself, but the Schubert ones do; the violist Asbjorn Norgaard, speaking from the stage, described the “Rosamunde” as one of the most repetitive works in the quartet repertoire. (Philip Glass would like a word.) But it was less so on Thursday as the Danes ­— Norgaard, as well as the violinists Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, and the cellist Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin — skipped the written reprises of the first two movements’ opening sections.Those cuts make for a slightly shorter performance, perhaps not even easily noticed by a casual listener, but not a materially different experience. More striking was the playing itself, in both the “Rosamunde” and the “Quartettsatz”: unshowy, soft with an ember glow, charismatically dancing. Phrases were passed around with ease; rhythms and voices doubled seamlessly. At any given moment there was, as David Allen recently observed in The New York Times, the impression that each note had been considered. This was ensemble music at its purest — a consensus interpretation, rendered selflessly in service of the group as instrument.Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” wasn’t written as a direct response to Schubert, but in the context of Thursday’s program it came off as something of a distant cousin; her work is less interested in repeating whole passages, but like her Viennese predecessor she obsesses here over gestures, reshaping them, foregrounding and obscuring them, layering them in explorations of counterpoint and compatibility.Read into the title what you will: daily routines, ceremonies, religion. They all are implied in the piece’s nine sections — effectively made 11 by two “Ascension” interludes with the rich harmony of a chorale and the serene lyricism of a hymn. The segments flow into one another without pause, except for some written rests, and unfold organically, each little motif introduced then recurring in a new guise.At the start are sputtering bows and glissando slides over a droning foundation that is occasionally built out into briefly sustained, then shifting chords. Those textures — others come along, including percussive col legno and open fifths that flip steady ground into weightless suspension — glide among the instruments, a vocabulary ordered then reordered, always expressing a fresh thought. Thorvaldsdottir, in a mode characteristically abstract yet suggestive, could prolong an idea like this ad infinitum. But at 21 minutes, her score speaks with poetic concision, ending before it has overstated its point.About poetry: The Danes concluded their recital with a Schubertian arrangement of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” in which the first violin acted as the soprano. But they also introduced a fifth instrument, a music box. As Oland turned its handle, the machine spun out a roll of paper punched with the swirling piano line — seeming to repeat itself but, in its small changes, irresistibly moving.Danish String QuartetPerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      New York Philharmonic, Pushing Cultural Diplomacy, Plans Asia Tour

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      Amid rising political tensions, the orchestra said it would perform in Hong Kong and Taiwan this summer and send a delegation of musicians to mainland China.The New York Philharmonic, saying it hoped to use culture to help ease political tensions, announced plans on Thursday for a summer tour in Asia, including stops in Hong Kong and Taiwan and a visit to mainland China by a small group of musicians.The tour will be the Philharmonic’s first visit to Asia since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when many countries in the region shut their borders. It comes amid rising tensions between the United States and China and concerns about the possibility of a crisis over Taiwan.Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s incoming president and chief executive, said the orchestra hoped to show that music could help strengthen ties between the United States and Asian countries.“At a time when communication and trust are on the decline, our firm belief is that cultural diplomacy is more important than ever,” he said. “Showing that we can span borders and bring people closer through music is at the heart of our mission.”The Philharmonic held a Shanghai residency in 2019. A delegation of nine players will visit the city this summer to lead chamber music concerts and teach classes.Chris LeeAfter a hiatus during the pandemic, American and European ensembles have in recent months explored returning to Asia, a booming market for classical music before the pandemic.The Philadelphia Orchestra, the first American ensemble to perform in Communist-led China, is planning to send a delegation of 12 musicians to Beijing and Shanghai this fall. (Last year, the orchestra canceled a tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its visit to the country in 1973, worried that China’s then-strict coronavirus protocols would create logistical challenges.)The Cleveland Orchestra is planning an Asia tour in 2025 that could include a visit to China, as well as Japan and South Korea. The Boston Symphony Orchestra visited Japan last year, the ensemble’s first overseas tour in four years.The New York Philharmonic’s Asia tour will include performances in late June and early July at the Hong Kong Cultural Center as well as performing arts centers in Taipei and Kaohsiung, a city in southern Taiwan. The orchestra will perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, featuring the violinist Hilary Hahn.Hong Kong is familiar terrain for the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, who also leads the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.“I look forward to sharing the work of my New York musical family with audiences in both Taiwan and Hong Kong,” van Zweden said in a statement.The pandemic forced the Philharmonic to cancel three previously scheduled trips to China, where it has had a partnership with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra since 2014. Following the visit to Hong Kong in July, a delegation of nine Philharmonic players will go to Shanghai for six days, where they will lead chamber music concerts and teach classes.The Philharmonic is also working to strengthen ties with Taiwanese cultural groups; on Friday, it will present a concert at David Geffen Hall by the Taiwan Philharmonic.Ginstling said the orchestra was considering a full tour in mainland China in the summer of 2024.“It’s too early to commit to that,” he said. “But we’ve certainly made it clear to our friends in Shanghai that when the circumstances warrant and enable it, we will resume our visits with the full orchestra.” More

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      The Danish String Quartet’s ‘Prism’ Is Essential Listening

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      This group has wrapped its series of five albums that traced a lineage from Bach to late Beethoven to his successors into the 20th century.The three Danes and a Norwegian who play together as the Danish String Quartet have always had a charming modesty to them. But it was nevertheless a bit of a surprise, when their first studio recording of late Beethoven came out in the initial installment of “Prism,” a series exploring that composer and artistic lineages, to find them writing of themselves as “still a group of boys.”The Danish, who return to Zankel Hall on Thursday to offer the third part of “Doppelgänger,” their project pairing Schubert with new commissions, have never really approached Beethoven’s formidable last works in their genre like children, after all. They were already renowned as one of the major string quartets by the time they recorded Op. 127 in 2016, when the youngest among them was still 32, and they had built their reputation in large part on their preternatural maturity — a sense of proportion, a slight reserve, a certain inexplicable wisdom — in those scores, which can mystify far more senior musicians.As they tell it now, though, they had barely gotten going. Op. 127 was the focal point of “Prism I,” the first of five recordings on the ECM label treating the late Beethoven quartets not as the alien, anomalous masterpieces they often appear, but as part of musical history, on the one hand influenced by Bach, who is represented on each release by a transcribed fugue, and on the other influencing later successors, here Mendelssohn, Webern, Bartok, Shostakovich and Schnittke.“Prism V” came out earlier this month, and it completes a series that has come to mean more to the quartet than they might initially have expected. The eldest of the “boys” has now passed 40: The broad chords they played with such rich allure at the beginning of Op. 127, they write in the note for their most recent release, turned out not only to be “the entry gate to the promised lands of the late Beethoven quartets,” but “the exit door from our life as a young string quartet.”Op. 127 in E flat, opening“Prism I” (ECM)What a prospect a “fully-fledged” Danish String Quartet, as they describe themselves now, will be, for these releases must qualify as some of the most essential listening of the past decade. No recording could quite capture what makes the Danish so special in concert, could make indelible the fleeting aura of rapt, intense concentration that settles in a hall when they are at their best. But the five “Prism” releases come close, documenting the unique potency of a quartet that may not be the most technically imposing around, nor be the most radical in repertoire, but which excels at being itself.All the elements of the Danish style are here to behold, first among them their particular sound. Part of the intrigue when listening to string quartets comes in hearing how four audibly separate voices convene in music: how they blend together or scrape against one another, or how one rather than the others drives an argument forward. But the Danish play as if they have abandoned their individual personalities entirely to serve the collective — as if they were joined on a single instrument, armed with four bows.For the three Danes who met as not-yet-teenagers — the violinists Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen and the violist Asbjorn Norgaard — and the Norwegian cellist Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin, who joined them in their 20s, music has long been an act of friendship. They share it naturally, as equals. Listen to any of the Bach fugues on the “Prism” releases, and you find that few, if any, of the thematic entries are underlined or even pointed out. Even when they adopt the bare tone they favor in Bach, they adjust their balances to welcome a new line, a new thought, with exquisite, barely perceptible ease.You get the sense in these recordings that every bar of music has been as carefully considered as it should be, that the minutest aspect of each note has been discussed; the control of sonority and articulation on show is absolute, even as the range of both is vast.Op. 131 in C-sharp minor, finale“Prism III” (ECM)There are downsides to the Danish approach, sensible as a whole yet bold in details. Their patience pays dividends in the long slow movements of Op. 127 and Op. 132, but becomes a tad staid in the drawn-out variations of Op. 131. Theirs is not a Beethoven of struggle, of strife; if they allow rough edges to creep into the blistering dissonance of the Grosse Fuge, they hardly threaten the general air of composure. The most violent playing across the series, oddly, comes in the first movement of Mendelssohn’s A minor quartet on “Prism II,” as a young disciple rages at a master’s death.For the most part, the Danish impose themselves as indirectly as possible on the music, and they seem happy to let the connections running through the albums strike the listener as they come, too. “Doppelgänger” places Schubert works alongside new pieces explicitly inspired by them — Thursday’s concert pairs Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” with Schubert’s “Rosamunde” — and the links in “Prism” are similar, if less deliberately contrived. They can be a matter of direct quotation, as when Schnittke uses the Grosse Fuge in his Third Quartet, or of something as clear as Bartók beginning his First with a slow canon echoing the methods of Beethoven’s Op. 131. But they can also be elusive; you still have to listen, and listen well.Op. 130 in B flat, fourth movement“Prism II” (ECM)Listening well also reveals the subtle liberties that the Danish bring to their playing, the touches that prevent their performances from ever sounding bland. They find astonishing rhythmic freedom within the confines of their admirable discipline, a lilt to their phrasing that surely stems from the folk songs they so eagerly arrange and perform together. Take, as examples, the sense they make of the awkward opening of the finale of Op. 132, so often ungainly in the hands of others, and the elegant spring they lend to the dancing fourth movement of Op. 130, whose cavatina they unfurl with breathtaking serenity. It’s playing whose virtues speak for themselves, yet its simplicity is anything but.“The first album was recorded by four relatively fresh young men,” the Danish write in their latest release. “Now we are fathers of babies, toddlers and school kids.” Here is a rare middle age we can welcome. More