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      A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them

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      Alisa Weilerstein’s latest project is a series of staged solo recitals that weave Bach’s cello suites with newly commissioned works.When the cellist Alisa Weilerstein found herself cooped up with her family at the start of the pandemic, her first instinct, like that of so many classical musicians, was to find some way — any way — to communicate.She joined the artists who found solace on social media, streaming a movement of Bach’s cello suites each day, for 36 days in a row. “I just want to have a kind of outpouring of music, of thoughts, and everything else,” she told The New York Times then. “Right now all I really want to do is give.”It didn’t last. Come that November, Weilerstein had put her cello away, and she was taking long walks on the beaches near her home in San Diego instead of practicing. When she finally forced herself to play again, she found herself staring out of the window, wondering what her field might look like when, or if, performers returned to the stage.“To everyone’s credit, I think, everyone is wrestling with this issue,” Weilerstein said in a recent interview from Toronto. “We all had a lot of time to think about what it means to really connect with an audience, what it means to connect with each other, and an appreciation for being in one communal space.”If Weilerstein’s response was a common one to a common crisis, the result of her reflections shines with uncommon ambition, so much so that it is hard to think of many soloists of a similar stature who would dare to bring anything like it to the stage.Meet “Fragments,” a project whose first installment — of six — Weilerstein will perform at Zankel Hall on April 1. Certain aspects of it may be familiar. She will be there, playing solo. She will perform a Bach suite in its entirety, and she will play it with her typical, heartfelt passion. She will offer new music: quite a lot of it, selected from works by 27 composers she has commissioned.Weilerstein at the “Fragments” premiere in Toronto.Lisa SakulenskyBut this project is intended to reimagine what a cello recital can be, to challenge some of the conventions that Weilerstein thinks might inhibit a listener’s immediate response to the music, and to add layers of theatricality to the arguably staid traditions of the concert hall, in an acceptance that a musician is, after all, performing on a stage.So each of the six programs, which Weilerstein will offer over the next few seasons, will have a dramaturgical element: Hanako Yamaguchi, the former, longtime director of music programming at Lincoln Center, is her artistic adviser, and her production team includes the director Elkhanah Pulitzer, the set and lighting designer Seth Reiser, and the costumer Carlos J. Soto. There will be limited program notes in advance, little to guide listeners except their ears and eyes through a collagelike narrative arc assembled from musical fragments.“There’s a lot of things that classical music does uniquely well, and it’s important to preserve those things,” Weilerstein said. “I do think, though, that we clearly have a problem, that we are not connecting with enough people, and that we are relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.So “Fragments” is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly passé genre of “response” programming, in which composers are commissioned to write works on the dispiriting condition that they must speak to a piece by the masters of the past. Having scoured the internet to survey the new-music scene, and consulted with past collaborators including Osvaldo Golijov and Matthias Pintscher, Weilerstein invited 28 composers to participate. The 27 who agreed — including Tania León, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon and Daniel Kidane — make up a roster that is remarkably diverse demographically and stylistically, but almost all of them asked if they should write with specific reference to Bach, Weilerstein recalled. She left the choice up to them.“Some did,” she said, “and some very much did not.”Caroline Shaw, whose “Microfictions” for Weilerstein is the second volume in a run of collected miniatures that she has also written for the Miró Quartet and the New York Philharmonic, said that her piece is not an explicit response to Bach, but that his influence was surely present in it.“Fragments” is an attempt to fix a problem, Weilerstein said of “relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”Evelyn Freja for The New York Times“I live with his music all the time, I love it deeply,” Shaw said, adding that the second book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” has been her “soundtrack” for the past year. “It’s very hard to write anything for solo cello and not have some subconscious relationship to Bach.”Weilerstein did set some rules. She asked that the new pieces be about 10 minutes long, and that they come in two or three fragments that she could intersperse with other scores without violating the meaning of the music. Bach was not available for consultation, but she is subjecting his suites to the same treatment.“There was a temptation to write something really virtuosic, really out there, really avant-garde,” said Reinaldo Moya, one of the more junior composers in Weilerstein’s group, “because you’re not going to have the chance to work with a soloist of that caliber every time. At least I don’t.”Free to write what he wanted, Moya drew on the personal ties that he has to Weilerstein through the conductor Rafael Payare, her husband. Earlier in their careers, Moya and Payare both played in the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, a country that has such an addiction to caffeine that it has a precise linguistic taxonomy for coffee and its functions. Moya’s fragments depict an early-morning brew, an after-lunch pick-me-up and a sludgy cup needed for staying up late.“It felt a little bit — all right, it felt a lot risky to give her a piece about coffee like that,” Moya said. “But I wanted to go with my gut, and relate my work to something that might connect with her on that level, not a technical or a composer-y level.”WEILERSTEIN HAS NEVER had the reputation of being a new-music specialist, but she has given her fair share of premieres, and few of her colleagues on the international circuit can list anything so bold as her recording of Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto on their discographies. She has evidently thought hard about how contemporary composers can be given a fairer chance to break through to audiences, especially to those people for whom contemporary art, say, is an easier ask.“There are myriad reasons, of course,” Weilerstein said, exploring the apparent divergence in the fields, “but there is one very fundamental thing, which is, you walk into an exhibition, you see the painting or you see the work of art before anything, and it can hit you right where it needs to hit — and then you can find out all the context around it. With contemporary music, there’s so much context put around it even before we’ve heard anything.”For that reason, the lack of program notes — before the lights go dark, the audience will be given only the most basic information about the project, and the names of the composers they will hear — is a core part of “Fragments,” and a sign, its creators said, that, for all the deliberate, thoughtful artifice, the focus is on the music.“To shed the Rorschach inclination towards finding meaning in the program before hearing the music was a really important piece of the puzzle,” Pulitzer said. “How many of us do that, where we look at the bio, we’re making assumptions about gender, race, nationality, compositional precedent, who where their teachers, and when were they born?”The aim, she added, is to strip as much of that presumptive meaning as possible away, so that listeners can follow Weilerstein’s attempts to create new meaning in her musical quilts, and “dare to embark on this journey of not knowing, and allow it to be OK.”For Shaw, that was part of the attraction of “Fragments,” beyond the obvious appeal of writing for a soloist whose visible commitment expresses such a clear love of music.“Going to hear a concert and not looking at what’s on the program and not knowing what comes next — those have been some of my deepest and most revealing listening experiences,” Shaw said. “There’s also something beautiful and important about presenting different composers side by side, and behind a curtain, so that you’re not focusing on their name, or whether or not they’re Bach.”The staging does offer some hints about the music, as if to hold the listener’s hand. Reiser’s set stays constant, a deconstructed theater arrayed so that it evokes soloists’ constant struggles to create “a room of one’s own” as they travel the world’s halls, Pulitzer said, and at the same time “reawakens the spaces for the people who are familiar with them.” Each composer has a specific lighting color, to give a sense of which fragments combine to make wholes.There may be people, Weilerstein admits, who are put off by even a modest staging, or by her tinkering with performance traditions. For her though, “Fragments” is an attempt to make the concert hall more of a place of adventure again, and less of a dead end.“It’s like the E.M. Forster phrase, ‘only connect,’” Weilerstein explained. “This is the philosophy behind the project, fundamentally: connecting the pieces, connecting the voices of our time together, connecting the familiar and the new, connecting this music with the audience without the barrier of so much contextualization, categorization, bias, all of these things.”“And connecting,” she added, “our contemporary world with the concert format. This is what it’s about for me.” More

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      ‘It Needs You’: The Human Side to Boulez’s Demanding Music

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      Matthias Pintscher speaks about Boulez’s “Dérive 2,” which the composer’s old ensemble performs in New York this weekend.Pierre Boulez, one of the most commanding musicians of the past century, must have been asked countless times, before his death in 2016, what he thought his legacy might be.It was a mark of his stature that he had so much to choose from. Perhaps his work as a conductor, one of rare clarifying power? Perhaps his visionary inspiration as an institution builder, in his native France and elsewhere? Perhaps his polemical writings? But when pushed, he would often point to his formidable, intricately constructed compositions.“Performances are transient, you know,” Boulez said in an interview in 1999. “That’s just something which happened, and you are happy sometimes. But, I mean, that’s not the main fact in my life. I would like that my works survive myself, that’s all.”Will they? And with what impact?Boulez can no longer promote them himself after all, and some of his most illustrious champions — Daniel Barenboim, Maurizio Pollini — are sadly starting to pass from the stage. Yet there are still artists tending the Boulezian flame, chief among them the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Parisian new-music group that Boulez founded in 1976, and its music director, the composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher. Together, they will perform one of Boulez’s late, monumental works, the 45-minute, 11-instrumentalist “Dérive 2,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. It will be just the third time that a Boulez piece has been performed at Carnegie Hall since his death.Pintscher, 52, first met Boulez in the late 1990s, and they later became close friends. Describing his mentor as “the most curious, alert, giving and generous man,” Pintscher spoke in a recent phone interview about interpreting Boulez’s works and how best to think about their influence. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Boulez conducted an earlier version of “Dérive 2” at Carnegie Hall 20 years ago this week, but this is still music that many listeners — even new-music devotees — struggle to get to grips with. How would you describe it?You are absolutely right, because “Dérive 2” is maybe one of the most austere of the big, major works, in comparison with “Répons,” or “Sur Incises” in particular. I think it’s an absolutely significant score in terms of how it’s put together, the architecture, and his idea of constantly building and extending and letting music just grow by itself. You know, like you plant a seed and just watch how it goes, and a twig becomes a branch, and becomes a tree, and the tree then stands very, very solid.The time has come to revisit the text with all these Boulez scores, especially with the Ensemble, where we still have members that have played this piece with Pierre. There’s always like, yeah, but Pierre did that slightly faster or slower, or he waited there, and it’s interesting because — I mean, we’re talking about very subtle differences — the scores tell something different, and I find it absolutely fascinating to now not be a copy of Boulez, but to really get back to the text.It’s quite funny that Boulez, who as a conductor had such a reputation for fidelity to text, may not have been entirely faithful to his own scores.I mean, it’s like what people always ask myself also, “Do you love playing your works? Doesn’t it feel good, or what does it do to you?” I personally interpret my own works exactly in the same way as a Bruckner symphony, or a Schubert symphony, or a piece by Boulez. When I’m asked to perform a work of myself that goes way back, more than a handful of years or even more than 10 years, I really have to sit down and learn the score. With Pierre it was the same.Of course we had conversations about “Dérive 2.” He was making jokes like: Woah, tonight “Dérive 2,” oof, buckle up, roll up your sleeves. He said this in his most charming and witty way. But yes, it’s a big piece, it’s a long piece, it is very demanding, it is very challenging. It’s like Ravel: Everything is wonderfully logical, but once you abandon that and you forget about the structure and how it has been built, you can really immerse yourself in the energy and the flow of that music.You conduct a huge amount of new music. Does Boulez — and more broadly the Darmstadt School-era composers like Nono and Stockhausen, who shot to prominence in the 1950s — still have a definable influence on composition today, especially on young composers?That’s a big question, huh? I think we have to understand that the significance, the legacy of a composer cannot be measured by the statistics of how many performances a composer or a certain piece has at a certain time. It’s like those works are landmarks for their time — as is the “Goldberg” Variations. I don’t know how many times the “Goldberg” Variations are being performed worldwide, daily.It’s a reference. It adds to the roots of music history, as we understand that the very late Brahms becomes the early Schoenberg, the very late Schubert becomes the very early Bruckner, and the very late Stravinsky becomes Pierre Boulez. If you look at “Threni,” for example, by Stravinsky, there is some sort of transition to where Boulez picks it up, and I think those links in music history are fascinating and important.He created these monuments; they’re cathedrals. “Répons” is an absolute masterwork. It’s very hard to program because it requires an ideal space, very heavy electronics and it’s extremely difficult to play. It’s not just a piece that you put on. So I think we have to understand that it can’t be measured by how many times a piece is being performed. The material that we had in Paris last week was material No. 61. There’s 61 sets — probably more! — of “Dérive 2.” That tells us something.Might we say that this is a transitional period, and it’s too early still to tell — that Boulez’s compositional legacy is still unclear, even if his significance is obvious?I can’t really tell. Maybe you’re right and it’s too early. But as I said, I think those scores are manifests and documents of a certain time, a time of change.There’s so much talent out there. I’m teaching at Juilliard, and those young artists, yes, they’re really troubled by the question, “How can I find my voice?” And in terms of finding your own basic voice, it’s a basic requirement to study the “Brandenburg” Concertos, to study “L’Orfeo” by Monteverdi, to look at the G major Schubert Sonata, look at Schoenberg — and look at Boulez. Like it or not, it is a reference, it is a major key holder in music history. I personally find the music mesmerizing, I find it beautiful, but maybe because I’ve lived for it so long.They’re demanding because you have to use the ear, you cannot just beat what you see and think that does justice to the piece. It requires the human experience, and maybe now that I’m 52, I only start to really realize what it means to play his works with the space that they need — with all the respect that I have for what I see in the text, it also needs to be translated into a human reality.And that’s why those works are major, and that’s why they’re like a Beethoven symphony, or that Schubert G major piano sonata, because it needs you. It needs the individual, the human to find the right context for it. You cannot just play them through, and think that’s it. There’s more; there’s layers. More

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      DNA From Beethoven’s Hair Unlocks Medical and Family Secrets

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      It was March 1827 and Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favor: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance?The parade of mourners continued after Beethoven’s death at age 56, even after doctors performed a gruesome craniotomy, looking at the folds in Beethoven’s brain and removing his ear bones in a vain attempt to understand why the revered composer lost his hearing.Within three days of Beethoven’s death, not a single strand of hair was left on his head.Ever since, a cottage industry has aimed to understand Beethoven’s illnesses and the cause of his death.Now, an analysis of strands of his hair has upended long held beliefs about his health. The report provides an explanation for his debilitating ailments and even his death, while also raising new questions about his genealogical origins and hinting at a dark family secret.The paper, by an international group of researchers, was published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology.It offers additional surprises: A famous lock of hair — the subject of a book and a documentary — was not Beethoven’s. It was from an Ashkenazi Jewish woman.The study also found that Beethoven did not have lead poisoning, as had been widely believed. Nor was he a Black man, as some had proposed.And a Flemish family in Belgium — who share the last name van Beethoven and had proudly claimed to be related — had no genetic ties to him.Researchers not associated with the study found it convincing.It was “a very serious and well-executed study,” said Andaine Seguin-Orlando, an expert in ancient DNA at the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, in France.The detective work to solve the mysteries of Beethoven’s illness began on Dec. 1, 1994, when a lock of hair said to be Beethoven’s was auctioned by Sotheby’s. Four members of the American Beethoven Society, a private group that collects and preserves material related to the composer, purchased it for $7,300. They proudly displayed it at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California.But was it really Beethoven’s hair?The Hiller lock, which the study found did not come from Beethoven but a woman, with its inscription by its former owner, Paul Hiller.William Meredith/Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, San Jose State UniversityThe story was that it was clipped by Ferdinand Hiller, a 15-year-old composer and ardent acolyte who visited Beethoven four times before he died.On the day after Beethoven died, Hiller clipped a lock of his hair. He gave it to his son decades later as a birthday gift. It was kept in a locket.The locket with its strands of hair was the subject of a best-selling book, “Beethoven’s Hair,” by Russell Martin, published in 2000, and made into a documentary film in 2005.An analysis of the hair at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois found lead levels as high as 100 times normal.In 2007, authors of a paper in The Beethoven Journal, a scholarly journal published by San Jose State, speculated that the composer might have been inadvertently poisoned by medicine, wine, or eating and drinking utensils.That was where matters stood until 2014 when Tristan Begg, then a masters student studying archaeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, realized that science had advanced enough for DNA analysis using locks of Beethoven’s hair.“It seemed worth a shot,” said Mr. Begg, now a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University.William Meredith, a Beethoven scholar, began searching for other locks of Beethoven’s hair, buying them with financial support from the American Beethoven Society, at private sales and auctions. He borrowed two more from a university and a museum. He ended up with eight locks, including the hairs from Ferdinand Hiller.First, the researchers tested the Hiller lock. Because it turned out to be from a woman, it was not — could not be — Beethoven’s. The analysis also showed that the woman had genes found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations.Dr. Meredith speculates that the authentic hair from Beethoven was destroyed and replaced with strands from Sophie Lion, the wife of Ferdinand Hiller’s son Paul. She was Jewish.Lab work on the Moscheles lock at the University of Tübingen in Germany.Susanna SabinAs for the other seven locks, one was inauthentic, five had identical DNA and one could not be tested. The five locks with identical DNA were of different provenances and two had impeccable chains of custody, which gave the researchers confidence that they were hair from Beethoven.Ed Green, an expert in ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved with the study, agreed.“The fact that they have so many independent locks of hair, with different histories, that all match one another is compelling evidence that this is bona fide DNA from Beethoven,” he said.When the group had the DNA sequence from Beethoven’s hair, they tried to answer longstanding questions about his health. For instance, why might he have died from cirrhosis of the liver?He drank, but not to excess, said Theodore Albrecht, a professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio. Based on his study of texts left by the composer, he described what is known of Beethoven’s imbibing habits in an email.“In none of these activities did Beethoven exceed the line of consumption that would make him an ‘alcoholic,’ as we would commonly define it today,” he wrote.Beethoven’s hair provided a clue: He had DNA variants that made him genetically predisposed to liver disease. In addition, his hair contained traces of hepatitis B DNA, indicating an infection with this virus, which can destroy a person’s liver.But how did Beethoven get infected? Hepatitis B is spread through sex and shared needles, and during childbirth.Beethoven did not use intravenous drugs, Dr. Meredith said. He never married, although he was romantically interested in several women. He also wrote a letter — although he never sent it — to his “immortal Beloved,” whose identity has been the subject of much scholarly intrigue. Details of his sex life remain unknown.The Stumpff lock, from which Beethoven’s whole genome was sequenced, with an inscription by its former owner Patrick Stirling.Kevin BrownArthur Kocher, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and one of the new study’s co-authors, offered another possible explanation for his infection: The composer could have been infected with hepatitis B during childbirth. The virus is commonly spread this way, he said, and infected babies can end up with a chronic infection that lasts a lifetime. In about a quarter of people, chronic infection will eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer.“It could ultimately lead someone to die of liver failure,” he said.The study also revealed that Beethoven was not genetically related to others in his family line. His Y chromosome DNA differed from that of a group of five people with the same last name — van Beethoven — living in Belgium today and who, according to archival records, share a 16th-century ancestor with the composer. That indicates there must have been an out-of-wedlock affair in Beethoven’s direct paternal line. But where?Maarten Larmuseau, a co-author of the new study who is a professor of genetic genealogy at the University of Leuven in Belgium, suspects that Ludwig van Beethoven’s father was born to the composer’s grandmother with a man other than his grandfather. There are no baptismal records for Beethoven’s father, and his grandmother was known to have been an alcoholic. Beethoven’s grandfather and father had a difficult relationship. These factors, Dr. Larmuseau said, are possible signs of an extramarital child.Beethoven had his own difficulties with his father, Dr. Meredith said. And while his grandfather, a noted court musician in his day, died when Beethoven was very young, he honored him and kept his portrait with him until the day he died.Dr. Meredith added that when rumors circulated that Beethoven was actually the illegitimate son of Friedrich Wilhelm II or even Frederick the Great, Beethoven never refuted them.The researchers had hoped their study of Beethoven’s hair might explain some of the composer’s agonizing health problems. But it did not provide definitive answers.The composer suffered from terrible digestive problems, with abdominal pain and prolonged bouts of diarrhea. The DNA analysis did not point to a cause, although it pretty much ruled out two proposed reasons: celiac disease and ulcerative colitis. And it made a third hypothesis — irritable bowel syndrome — unlikely.Hepatitis B could have been the culprit, Dr. Kocher said, although it is impossible to know for sure.The DNA analysis also offered no explanation for Beethoven’s hearing loss, which started in his mid-20s and resulted in deafness in the last decade of his life.An 1827 lithograph of Beethoven on his deathbed by Josef Danhauser, after his own drawing.Josef Danhauser, via Beethoven-Haus BonnThe researchers took pains to discuss their results in advance with those directly affected by their research.On the evening of March 15, Dr. Larmuseau met with the five people in Belgium whose last name is van Beethoven and who provided DNA for the study.He started right out with the bad news: They are not genetically related to Ludwig van Beethoven.They were shocked.“They didn’t know how to react,” Dr. Larmuseau said. “Every day they are remembered by their special surname. Every day they say their name and people say, ‘Are you related to Ludwig van Beethoven?’”That relationship, Dr. Larmuseau said, “is part of their identity.”And now it is gone.The study’s findings that the Hiller lock was from a Jewish woman stunned Mr. Martin, author of “Beethoven’s Hair.”“Wow, who would have imagined it,” he said. Now, he added, he wants to find descendants of Sophie Lion, the wife of Paul Hiller, to see if the hair was hers. And he’d like to find out if she had lead poisoning.For Dr. Meredith, the project has been an amazing adventure.“The whole complex story is astonishing to me.” he said. “And I’ve been part of it since 1994. One finding just leads to another unexpected finding.” More

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      For This Experimental Festival, Bring Your Swimsuit and Dancing Shoes

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      The Borealis experimental music festival in Norway has become a space for lively exploration in a famously self-serious field.BERGEN, Norway — Little could be predicted about a premiere by the young experimental Norwegian-Tamil composer Mira Thiruchelvam. But it was held at a fjord-facing heated pool, so the presenter had a suggestion: Bring a swimsuit.It was par for the course at Borealis, the experimental festival here that has achieved renown as a launchpad for eclectic projects by musicians from Norway and beyond. If in recent decades, the Nordic countries — facilitated by enviable government funding for the arts — have proved a hotbed of musical activity, punching above their weight in the classical world, Borealis has become the region’s warmhearted fringe festival, showcasing a blossoming experimental classical scene.A sound installation in the traditional Sami construction, Borealis’s coziest concert hall.Elina Waage Mikalsen, Borealis’s artist in residence, had a sound installation in the hut.Led by Peter Meanwell (artistic director) and Rachel Louis (the managing director), Borealis, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in a five-day festival that ended Saturday, has created a rare space for lively exploration in a notoriously self-serious field. It is the festival that’s “nothing to be afraid of,” as the local paper Bergens Tidende called it in a headline during the week, right down to its “eksperimentell”-themed tube socks.Part of what gives Borealis its accessible feel is its use of Bergen’s tightly grouped cultural centers, separated by cobblestone alleys, short and often wet — a given in Europe’s rainiest city. On opening night, the United Sardine Factory, a repurposed cannery, hosted short commissions by composers across the festival’s history to honor its anniversary. Listeners could then meander over to a 13th-century royal banquet hall, whose medieval splendor was the backdrop for the Indonesian ensemble Gamelan Salukat, performing works by the experimental composer Dewa Alit.The singer Juliet Fraser in “Plans for Future Operas.”Borealis found its coziest space in a small wooden structure on the mountain of Floyen, built in the style of the Sami, the Indigenous people of the Sapmi region (encompassing parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). Accessible via a short funicular trip and winding hike, the structure was home to a sound installation by the Borealis artist-in-residence, the Norwegian-Sami Elina Waage Mikalsen — the work’s thrumming bass seemingly keeping pace with the churning flames in the building’s wood-burning stove. Given the Norwegian government’s recent acknowledgment of continuing human rights violations on Sami lands, Mikalsen’s exploration of Sami experimentalism — the subject of her talk later in the week, featuring performances by the Sami musicians Viktor Bomstad and Katarina Barruk — felt especially potent.This year’s festival also saw a number of works investigating the nature of instruments, probing their materials and extending their boundaries. The quietly intense Norwegian violin and contrabass duo Vilde&Inga, collaborating with the composer Jo David Meyer Lysne, presented “NiTi,” a dialogue between the duo and Lysne’s metal and wood kinetic sculptures that moved silently back and forth throughout the performance — a poetic distillation of the action of playing a string instrument.a performance of “Glia,” by the American composer Maryanne AmacherAt first, the musicians produced subtle flickering textures using their own instruments, then gradually integrated the fixtures beside them, including a violin harnessed to a contraption that tickled its strings. Much like Vilde&Inga’s forest-inspired collaboration with the composer Lo Kristenson a few days later, though, the work felt inconclusive, less a finished product than a fantastical impulse that the collaborators would do well to keep pursuing.More successful in this vein was “I N T E R V A L L,” created and performed by the Norwegian percussion trio Pinquins with the artist Kjersti Alm Eriksen. Around a hollow wooden cube, with instruments and industrial and household appliances hung on ropes from its ceiling, the four performers began a sort of haywire scavenger hunt, hurling objects through the frame, blowing petulantly into plastic tubes attached to the cube, even grabbing long poles to bang on the theater itself, for an inexhaustible probe of the setting’s sound-making potential.A drawing by Oyvind Torvund’s for “Plans for Future Operas.”A young DJ at a family workshop at Borealis.A similar playfulness pervaded the Norwegian composer Oyvind Torvund’s imaginative “Plans for Future Operas,” performed by the soprano Juliet Fraser and the pianist Mark Knoop. Part of a continuing series in which ensembles perform the sounds of hypothetical performance situations, “Plans” is accompanied by a slide show of Torvund’s scribbled doodles. As various visions flashed on the screen — a “car horn” opera, for which Fraser issued honks; a “telepathic opera,” during which she kept silent, appearing to communicate songs by mind alone as Knoop played — the duo conveyed, with gusto and evident amusement, Torvund’s freewheeling musical language.Notable throughout the festival was its care for participants of all ages and backgrounds. A performance of the Torvund presented outside the concert hall was geared toward audience members with accessibility needs. In workshops, children created miniature versions of the “I N T E R V A L L” cube using carrots, beads and wire, and recorded shrieks to be played back on tape loops. On one night, four enthusiastic participants in Borealis’s Young Composer program, whose applicants needn’t be young or trained as composers, presented heartfelt premieres.After-hours dancing.After-hours audiences found delightfully earsplitting sets by the White Mountain Apache violinist Laura Ortman and the electronics and vocal duo Ziur and Elvin Brandhi; as the evening wore on, a group of young people began an impromptu residency on the dance floor. The next morning, bathers at — and in — the heated pool witnessed Thiruchelvam’s rollicking commission “External Factor” performed with the dancer Thanusha Chandrasselan — part of a series inspired by the Borealis office’s Sunday tradition of fjord swimming. Listeners bobbed to Thiruchelvam’s thumping electronics, interspersed with her improvisations on Carnatic flute and electric guitar, and cheered for Chandrasselan’s jerky choreography, her boots managing impressive friction against the pool’s wet ledge.One of the festival’s oldest works was among its most forward thinking: the pioneering American experimental composer Maryanne Amacher’s “GLIA” (2005), whose title refers to the nervous system cells that support communication across synapses, performed by the composer Bill Dietz, a former Amacher collaborator, and Ensemble Contrechamps. As Dietz explained in a preconcert discussion, Amacher would not likely have approved of the piece’s posthumous performance, viewing her works not as fixed sets of sounds, but rather as part and parcel with the circumstances in which they were originally produced. Yet ‌I could not help but be grateful to be wandering around the illuminated pyramid of players in the black box theater, letting the voluminous layers of sound course through my ears.Tourists and Borealis audience members enjoy the view above Borgen; nearby this perch, reached by funicular, is the Sami construction.Closing night began promisingly with the Norwegian sound artist Maia Urstad’s enigmatic “IONOS” — an atmospheric dialogue among three radio amateurs that resulted, at one point, in contact with another user somewhere out there. Much to its credit, Borealis is a place where artists can take risks, even if things will occasionally fall short of the mark — as in the final piece, the British composer (and former Borealis director) Alwynne Pritchard’s “Counting Backward,” for the Bergen chamber ensemble BIT20, conducted by Jack Sheen. “Counting Backward” was a bloated collage of predictable ambient ensemble writing and hokey prerecorded observations on time and nature, echoed by volunteers planted throughout the audience. As BIT20 played, four performers in the center of the theater tied a knot from thick ropes so they could repeatedly hoist a tree stump from the floor, an act that underscored the degree to which the work’s own threads were disconnected.The mind strayed toward what would have been a more satisfying conclusion to the week: the Pinquins show two nights before in the same space. At the climax of that work, the performers yanked open the wooden cube’s canopy, spilling a supply of sunflower seeds to the ground. The drizzle of seeds continued, and continued — a hypnotic, seemingly unending invocation of what a festival like Borealis can make possible. More

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      Review: A Contemporary Music Group’s Next Era Begins

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      George E. Lewis’s tenure with the International Contemporary Ensemble began with a tribute to the multitalented artist Douglas R. Ewart.Some artists earn the “multi-hyphenate” label by doing two or three things. But Douglas R. Ewart works on a whole other level.That much was clear when this composer, visual artist, poet, multi-instrumentalist and instrument-maker put on a true multimedia event at the Chelsea Factory on Friday night. He gave a thrilling tour of his varied creativity in the company of a violist, cellist, bassoonist and two percussionists from the International Contemporary Ensemble — whose new leader, George E. Lewis, organized the concert, making his curatorial debut with the group.In the lobby were three of Ewart’s sculptures (including one dedicated to the jazz musician Eric Dolphy), and inside the hall hung five of his paintings (including one titled “Rasta in Sun Ra”). Underneath those canvases, the concert featured some shimmering, percussive work from Ewart, 76, himself — on a tall wooden staff outfitted with a sequence of Bundt cake pans, which he called “The George Floyd Bunt Staff.” (More on the chiaroscuro effect of that Bundt/bunt ambiguity later.)From left, the International Contemporary Ensemble players Wendy Richman, Aliya Ultan and Rebekah Heller.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAlso on offer was Ewart’s piping, ecstatic approach to the sopranino saxophone, informed by bebop and the avant-garde alike. And there was plenty of meditative yet tuneful chamber music writing for the full ensemble, which the composer sometimes underlined with performances on a series of flutes.Elsewhere, Ewart gave somber, spoken-word testaments to Floyd’s memory, in addition to more slyly humorous commentaries on contemporary discussions of race. One such aperçu involved his interrogation of the phrase “unapologetically Black,” with him saying, “I am not unapologetically anything, because when I say that I have already apologized.”Other compositions offered space for Ewart to celebrate the practice of “sound sifting” — which he defined as a dedicated process of studying music’s mysteries — alongside playing from the ensemble members that emphatically endorsed his poetry’s quality of exultation.Clockwise, from top left: Ewart’s “Eye of Horus” (2017-18); “Sonic Stroller” (2006); his elaborately decorated performance outfit, which has bells stuffed in its pockets; and “Eric Dolphy Sonic Dread” (2017).It sounds like there’s a lot going on here. But while undeniably jam-packed and charged with grave themes, the evening progressed with a sense of unhurried equanimity. That was in large part thanks to the figure cut by Ewart; when he paced the stage to grab a new instrument, you could hear bells — tucked away in the pockets of his colorful, homemade concert suit — jangling peaceably.The International Contemporary Ensemble had commissioned the evening’s first through-composed piece, “Songs and Stories of Hopes, Dreams and Visions,” and throughout, the players were on Ewart’s same wavelength: intense yet generous. At the outset of the concert’s first half — a 40-minute set that included three works played without a break — the percussionists Nathan Davis (on vibraphone) and Clara Warnaar (on marimba) collaborated on dreamy, interlocking mallet-instrument patterns that recalled past Ewart projects that have involved choirs of similar instruments.Rebekah Heller, the ensemble’s bassoonist, responded to the upward-swooping graphic notation of “Red Hills” with a peppery excitement that rivaled earlier interpretations of it. (This piece was previously documented during a 1981 concert in Detroit, which has recently been reissued digitally on Bandcamp.)

      Beneath Detroit / Ewart . Barefield . Tabal Trio by Geodesic DisquesEwart, center, performed spoken-word portions of the show alongside musicians including Ultan, left, on cello, and Heller, on bassoon.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat members of the International Contemporary Ensemble could stack up so well against the recorded legacy of an artist like Ewart was no small thing. Credit also to Lewis, the ensemble’s new artistic director. This pathbreaking trombonist, composer and scholar literally wrote the book on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the organization that provided schooling to Ewart in the 1960s, after he immigrated from Jamaica. (Ewart later served as chairman of that influential organization.)During the intermission on Friday, Lewis interviewed Ewart, a longtime collaborator, onstage. They amiably referred to moments in their history together, which includes a memorable 1979 duo recording on the Black Saint imprint.Given that relationship, Lewis was an ideal figure to extract more from Ewart about the ambiguities only hinted at in the performance’s staging and program notes. Such as: Why was the percussion instrument that Ewart employed during “Homage to George Floyd” billed as “The George Floyd Bunt Staff,” when it was clearly built from a series of Bundt pans? Channeling the serious-and-witty ingenuity of his music, Ewart responded with a sports analogy. He noted that Floyd’s death had catalyzed protests that had helped the national conversation to advance, like the sacrifice bunt in baseball.Nathan Davis, left, and Clara Warnaar on percussion. The performers played against a backdrop of visual artworks by Ewart.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesSuch poetic abstraction risks sounding flip out of context, but the qualities of Ewart’s compositional practice made the gesture seem more like an authentic celebration of multiplicity and invention. The variety of tones he elicited from this instrument helped make the ambit of the tribute clear. When rapidly twirling it, and dragging the edges of a particular pan against a drumstick, he created a haunting, skittering effect — a restless signal of warning. When striking it directly, he could produce profoundly resonant gong-like sounds.This elegant shift from the grave to the exultant was heard again during the finale of the concert’s second half, which reached a climax with a fully notated piece for the ensemble players, “Truth is Power,” in which Ewart improvised on sopranino saxophone.It was a raucous, exciting conclusion to the show. And it was just a taste of what Lewis’s directorship of the International Contemporary Ensemble could bring. How many other artists like Ewart might benefit from having their larger works receive this kind of attention? The possibilities are extensive, and tantalizing.Douglas R. Ewart and the International Contemporary EnsemblePerformed on Friday at Chelsea Factory, Manhattan. More

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      The New York Philharmonic Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      Jaap van Zweden’s final season as the New York Philharmonic’s music director will feature belated debuts and premieres, and a grand farewell.In his final season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Jaap van Zweden will lead a host of premieres, performances of Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony, and a residency in China, the orchestra announced on Tuesday.Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s incoming president and chief executive, said that the season would showcase van Zweden’s devotion to new music and traditional works.“This is an opportunity,” Ginstling said in an interview, “to really celebrate all the elements that Jaap brought to the New York Philharmonic.”Van Zweden will make his first appearance on Sept. 27, with a gala featuring the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.The season will feature premieres by several composers, including Olga Neuwirth, Mary Kouyoumdjian and Melinda Wagner, as part of Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission new pieces from 19 women. And in summer 2024, the orchestra will return to China for the first time since 2019, for a residency in partnership with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.New Yorkers hoping to hear a taste of the Philharmonic’s future will have to wait: There will be no appearances next season by Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who was announced as van Zweden’s successor in February. Ginstling said scheduling conflicts were to blame.Here are nine highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Oct. 11-14For those keeping track of all the ways in which the Philharmonic has followed the lead of its West Coast counterpart, the Los Angeles Philharmonic — in its leadership, in its hall’s look, in its choice of music director — here’s another one: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the lively Lithuanian conductor who is being talked of as a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will be making her debut. Daniil Trifonov, a welcome fixture at David Geffen Hall, will join for a program of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, as well as selections from Sibelius’s “Lemminkäinen Suite” and Raminta Šerkšnytė’s “De Profundis,” from 1998. JOSHUA BARONEMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will make her New York Philharmonic debut in October.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLigeti’s Centennial, Oct. 19-21The Philharmonic is celebrating the centennial of Gyorgi Ligeti’s birth with multiple concerts. (Look out for pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing Études on Nov. 7.) This program, one of the most eclectic on the Philharmonic’s calendar, brings two pieces of Ligeti’s into dialogue with Brahms’s Serenade No. 1 and a piano concerto by the living modernist Elena Firsova. The Ligeti works are from relatively early in his career. (And one, “Mifiso la sodo,” is a U.S. premiere!) Evaluating their place alongside the Brahms and the Firsova, with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist, should make for a bracing ride with David Robertson at the podium. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Israel in Egypt,’ Oct. 25-26A recent performance of “Solomon” at Carnegie Hall was a reminder of the sumptuous power of Handel’s English oratorios, his genre of concert-format, loosely plotted, often biblically inspired works that made choruses the stars. The Philharmonic rarely programs these pieces — with the obvious exception of the perennial “Messiah,” conducted this year in mid-December by Fabio Biondi — so “Israel in Egypt” will be a treat. On the podium, Jeannette Sorrell makes her subscription debut with the orchestra, leading the choir of Apollo’s Fire, her Cleveland-based ensemble. ZACHARY WOOLFESound On, Oct. 27Past concerts in this chamber-focused series have delved deeply into contemporary music — and have also been relegated to smaller spaces inside Lincoln Center. But on this date, when the Ensemble Signal conductor Brad Lubman joins Philharmonic players and a wide range of guest soloists, the music will be presented in Geffen Hall proper. That bodes well for Unsuk Chin’s transporting aesthetic, which is represented here by her Double Concerto for Piano and Percussion. And there’s similar potential for a new (as yet untitled) collaborative work by Kinan Azmeh and Layale Chaker. Both are leading player-composers who also happen to improvise, and they’ll both be onstage here. SETH COLTER WALLSDessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Nov. 30-Dec. 2Bryce Dessner, one-fifth of the rock band the National, wrote his Concerto for Two Pianos for the tight, persuasive duo Katia and Marielle Labèque, who bring it to Geffen for its New York premiere. Dessner’s taste for lush transparency, evident in his orchestrations for Taylor Swift’s album “Folklore,” shows in the way he cushions the piece’s unabashedly pretty piano parts without overwhelming them. OUSSAMA ZAHR‘Vertigo,’ Jan. 23-26Playing film scores live alongside screenings has become a booming business for orchestras struggling with attendance, but the fare is usually blockbusters: the “Harry Potter” series, “Jurassic Park,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Not when the Philharmonic performs Bernard Herrmann’s lush, ominous music for Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” as audiences watch that strange, hypnotizing study in erotic obsession. (Next season also brings “West Side Story” (Sept. 12-17) — Spielberg’s 2021 version, which featured the Philharmonic on its soundtrack — and “Black Panther” (Dec. 20-23). ZACHARY WOOLFEJames Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which will be screened with a live soundtrack.Universal Studios Home EntertainmentKarina Canellakis, April 4-6I’m not entirely joking when I say this, but now that the Philharmonic has lined up its next music director, it can start thinking about who Gustavo Dudamel’s eventual successor might be. Karina Canellakis, who coincidentally occupies Jaap van Zweden’s former post as the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, might well be on its shortlist when the time comes. This native New Yorker’s belated Philharmonic debut offers a taste of her thoughtful programming: Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung,” Scriabin’s “Le Poème de l’Extase” and Ravel’s Piano Concerto, with the soloist Alice Sara Ott. DAVID ALLENOlga Neuwirth, April 18-20Olga Neuwirth’s contribution to Project 19 in 2020 went — well, the way of many things early in the pandemic. Nearly four years after its scheduled premiere, it is finally coming to Geffen Hall, having been first unveiled instead with the Berlin Philharmonic, which streamed the unruly and delightful work for countertenor, children’s choir and orchestra on its Digital Concert Hall platform. Andrew Watts takes up the solo vocal part, making his New York Philharmonic debut alongside the conductor Thomas Sondergard, on a program that also includes Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. JOSHUA BARONEMahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, June 6-8Those with a taste for dry humor might ask themselves what exactly it is that Jaap van Zweden plans to resurrect with these final Geffen Hall concerts as the Philharmonic’s music director, but Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at least offers him a grand farewell. He will be joined by the New York Philharmonic Chorus, the soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller and the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova. ALLEN More

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      Review: Protecting and Defending Ukraine’s Cultural Identity

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      A festival responds to the assaults and insults of war by celebrating the composer who shaped the nation’s contemporary music, Borys Liatoshynsky.The shadow of the war in Ukraine once again hovered over the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival on Friday when it began its three-day tribute to the 20th-century composer Borys Liatoshynsky at Merkin Hall.Hours before the opening-night program, which highlighted composers who influenced Liatoshynsky, the International Criminal Court accused the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, of war crimes, and issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. Oleksii Holubov, Ukraine’s consul general in New York, recounted that news to the audience on Friday and was greeted with applause.When the 2022 festival took place, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was fresh, with Putin attempting to justify his actions in part by claiming that Ukraine had no independent cultural identity. Holubov, in his remarks on Friday, said that this year’s festival, the fourth, comes at a time “when our cultural identity, our history and our music are at stake.”On Saturday, the second day of programming traced a pedagogical lineage from Liatoshynsky to several living composers. The Sunday afternoon program pairs two Liatoshynsky quartets with works by Bartok and Copland, composers who, like Liatoshynsky, are credited with defining a national style. Again and again, reclamation resists erasure.Born at the end of the 19th century, Liatoshynsky lived through the Ukrainian War of Independence, the rise of Lenin and Stalin and both world wars. He embraced expressionism early in his career and became an influential teacher at Kyiv Conservatory, where his students included Valentyn Sylvestrov, Ukraine’s most famous living composer.Liatoshynsky, a composer with an intensely volatile style, wrote music that didn’t comply with the Soviet Union’s aesthetic of socialist realism. He was dogged by censors and branded a formalist. After Stalin’s death, he found his way back to his original compositional voice late in life and is now remembered as the father of Ukrainian contemporary music.Liatoshynsky’s Violin Sonata (1926), a thorny work full of short bursts of agitation, opened the program on Friday. The violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv gave the piece’s core thematic material — a melody that skitters, scrapes and then leaps upward — a bold arc, and she applied an eerie calm to passages marked sul ponticello (a technique of bowing near the bridge that produces a high, scratchy sound). At times, though, she and the pianist Steven Beck seemed to set aside interpretive matters just to get through a piece of hair-raising difficulty.Following the Violin Sonata, Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano (1913) sounded almost lissome, with the clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich shaping long melodies with a full, lovely tone and understated warmth. The violist Colin Brookes and the pianist Daniel Anastasio likewise cultivated the beauty of Liatoshynsky’s Two Pieces for Viola and Piano (Op. 65), with Anastasio painting a dappled night sky in the Nocturne and Brookes hinting at a mixture of solitude and disturbance.The conductor James Baker made perfect sense out of the unusual instrumentation for Liatoshynsky’s Two Romances (Op. 8), which uses voice, string quartet, clarinet, horn and harp. He highlighted Liatoshynsky’s text painting in the first song, “Reeds,” with strings that rustled like paper and then refracted like shards of light. The bass Steven Hrycelak was a genial narrator with an oaken timbre.Liatoshynsky’s avant-garde-minded students inspired him, and they were represented by two pieces. Sylvestrov’s “Mystère” was a symphony of percussion in which the alto flutist Ginevra Petrucci elegantly snaked her way through a battery of timpani, cymbals, glockenspiel, marimba, Thai gong and more. Each instrument cut through the air with its own vibrations — splashes, thwacks, tinkles, knocks — for a cumulative effect that was captivating to experience live. The brief “Volumes,” by Volodymyr Zahorstev, blared forth with a chaotic play of instrumental timbres.The concert closed with Liatoshynsky’s “Concert Etude-Rondo,” a devilish showpiece given a crisp performance by Anastasio. This was a late piece, written in 1962 and revised in 1967, a year before Liatoshynsky’s death. Its stubborn character extends from driving octaves in the bass to shattered-glass effects in the piano’s delicate upper reaches.The transliteration of composers’ names in this review follows a 2010 resolution adopted by the government of Ukraine, according to Leah Batstone, the festival’s founder and creative director. As Holubov said at the start of the concert, Ukrainian language is the heart of the Ukrainian nation — and Ukrainian music, its soul.It was hard not to see — or rather, hear — a symbol for the persistence of the Ukrainian people in the uncontainable, endlessly restless music of a composer who refused to concede his identity to the state. More

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      Review: Jaap van Zweden Returns to a Changed Philharmonic

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      Since the orchestra’s music director was last on the podium in November, his successor has been announced. He came back blaring with Messiaen.“What have I missed?” you could imagine Jaap van Zweden thinking as he stood on the podium at David Geffen Hall and looked out at the audience on Friday evening. It’s been months since van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, led this orchestra in a furious burst of activity as it opened the renovated Geffen Hall.In the meantime, the world has swiftly turned: Last month, the orchestra announced that Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would succeed van Zweden, who is departing after next season. The prospect of a Dudamel era — a throwback to the heady, celebrity-fueled, jet-set days of Leonard Bernstein — immediately overshadowed van Zweden’s comparatively modest tenure.Modesty was set aside on Friday, though, for Messiaen’s immense, very loud “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which van Zweden is ambitiously following this week with Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” for a brief residency the orchestra is calling “Spirit.”The spiritual quality couldn’t be more obvious in the austere severity of the “St. Matthew Passion.” It’s a little harder to discern in the hulking, gaudy “Turangalîla,” a 10-part, 80-minute paean to an erotic ecstasy that spills over into the realm of the cosmic.To keep things on a cosmic scale, Messiaen musters a solo piano part of concerto-level difficulty and variety. And the woozy, slippery wail of the theremin-like ondes martenot. And a glockenspiel, and a celesta. And a forest of percussion instruments, including shimmering tam-tam; curt wood blocks; and drums, both crisp and booming.Written in the aftermath of World War II, during which Messiaen spent time as a prisoner of war, the intricately conceived “Turangalîla” comes across as an explosion of long-simmering tensions: aggression and relief, energy and romantic longing, a celebration so huge it seems to encompass all the beauty and ominousness of nature, the delicacy and the granitic weight.The legacy of Stravinsky’s primal, euphorically muscular “Rite of Spring” is here, but billowing with the perfume of the French tradition of Ravel and blazing with the Technicolor brassiness of Broadway and Hollywood, returning to a few motifs — like a grim fanfare and a questioning four-note murmur — again and again.The quieter parts were the most memorable on Friday. The oscillating buzz of piano and celesta in the “Chant d’Amour II” section seemed to cast a blur over a lush melody in the violins. In “Turangalîla II,” a solo cello had the burnished strength of a horn. There was beautifully mellow playing in the winds throughout the “Jardin du Sommeil d’Amour,” the longest section, with the piano gently frisking, like a dancer in the moonlight on a foggy summer night.With van Zweden conducting, the score was forceful but slightly smudged, the textures both less lucid and less blooming than I’ve heard. I was aware, as I hadn’t been since earlier days in the renovated hall, of a hard, blaring quality to the orchestra’s sound in this space, a sense of being not surrounded, but almost assaulted.This performance felt heavier than some. But the work’s trippy grandeur and over-the-top virtuosity come through no matter what. And van Zweden’s build from misty mystery to density in the “Turangalîla I” section was persuasive, as was that from spare, forbidding march to ferocious dance in “Turangalîla III.”Jean-Yves Thibaudet, experienced at the daunting solo piano part, was both crisply powerful and self-effacingly suave. Cynthia Millar was a subtle presence at the ondes martenot — to the point that the instrument could have been more assertively amplified. We get to hear this retro-sounding relic of early electronica so rarely: Let it rip.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More