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      Review: Bach Collegium Japan Returns With Chamber Music

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      Players from the ensemble came to New York to perform works by Bach, Telemann and Johann Gottlieb Janitsch at the 92nd Street Y, New York.At the 92nd Street Y, New York, on Sunday, Bach Collegium Japan — led by its founder and music director, Masaaki Suzuki — brought bold, brisk style to chamber works by its eponymous composer and his contemporaries.A small subset of this ensemble’s period-instrument forces — five strings, oboe, flute and harpsichord — came together in various configurations for a Bach orchestral suite, one of Telemann’s “Paris” quartets and a chamber sonata by Johann Gottlieb Janitsch. The baritone Roderick Williams joined them for cantatas by Bach and Telemann.It was an afternoon of fitful pleasures. When the players had a clear, distinctive musical character to embody — a blithe movement from the Telemann quartet or the slumber aria from Bach’s cantata — they tackled it with focused collaboration. Individual members of the group had moments of understated eloquence.At times, though, the ensemble, with Suzuki at the harpsichord, confronted the audience with an undifferentiated wall of sound. They shaped the music broadly, with little of the interplay between loud and soft, dark and light, that gives Baroque music its unique shimmer. (I wonder whether Suzuki misjudged the acoustics of Kaufmann Concert Hall, which, while not especially warm, still carry.)Suzuki’s approach brought to mind his conducting of Handel’s “Messiah” with the New York Philharmonic in December, when the players conveyed the music’s general shape without filling in the details.At the Y, the program’s opening, Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor (BWV 1067), came off a bit noisy when it should have been stately. A zippy tempo for the Rondeau made it difficult for the players to lock into the movement’s buoyancy. Ryo Terakado’s overly bright violin didn’t cohere with Emmanuel Balssa’s sensitively shaded cello.That suite, though, is really a showcase for the flutist, and Liliko Maeda played trippingly — airy and smooth, fleet and seamless. Alternating between legato and staccato, her tone practically bounced off the harpsichord, and she tumbled gracefully through intricate passagework.Janitsch’s spacious Sonata da Camera in G minor, altogether sweeter and less densely scored than the Bach, made room for Suzuki’s broad phrasing. The strings inflated their long lines, and Masamitsu San’nomiya’s oboe shone. Stephen Goist’s viola cut through like white light in the Largo.In the Telemann quartet, Balssa explored minute gradations in hushed dynamics, and Terakado, whose blunt leadership as first violin often dulled the luster of the music on the program, brought a sly smile in his playing.If the childlike pleas of Telemann’s cantata “Der am Ölberg zagende Jesus” struck a modern ear as a strange way to express Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, then Bach’s “Ich habe genug” was the opposite: magnificent and profound. It tells the biblical story of Simeon, who, having held the Christ child, says he can finally die in peace, for the world has nothing left to offer him.Williams has a lovely baritone that is almost tenorial in the lucidity of its middle and upper registers. I expected him to lean into that quality during the Bach cantata’s first aria, in which the melody is relatively high, but Williams’s Simeon, consumed by the music’s dusky beauty, was already preparing himself for death. It was only in the second aria, which envisions death as the ultimate slumber, that Williams revealed the downy softness of his voice, singing the final repeat of the verse entirely in piano — weightless and unburdened by earthly matters.The melancholy of Bach’s cantata hides a deeper contentment. At the Y, the players missed it in the first aria, skimming over its gentle undulations. Then, in the second, as they traced the descending musical figures, keenly attuned to one another and to the music’s character, they found it.Bach Collegium JapanPerformed on Sunday at the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan. More

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      Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

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      He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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      Gustavo Dudamel: A Maestro at a Crossroads

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      LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel paused mid-Rachmaninoff the other morning and flashed a mischievous smile at the 92 players of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.“This part,” he said as they rehearsed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, “is like that aunt who kisses you too much.” He puckered his lips loudly three times. “My dears,” he said, looking toward the violins, “let’s try it again.”He was back on the same podium where, just two days earlier, he had broken the news to the musicians, in a shaky and uncertain voice, that he would leave his post as their music and artistic director in 2026 to take on the same job at the New York Philharmonic. It was, he said, one of the hardest decisions of his life. But now he was back in his element, making music, swaying his hips and throwing his fist into the air, and imploring the players to “liberate every bit of gravity” from their playing — “to levitate.”Dudamel, 42, the rare maestro whose fame transcends classical music, finds himself at a crossroads: not only planning to move to a new orchestra, but also into a new phase of his career. Even as his curls have started to gray, he has never quite shed the image of a wunderkind, who at the age of 12 led his first orchestra in Venezuela, where he was born, and at 26 landed the job in Los Angeles.Dudamel backstage on Thursday at his first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since he announced his move to New York.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“You cannot imagine how I have changed in these last years,” he said in an interview. “I’m not a young conductor anymore.”As Dudamel prepares to take the podium in New York, he is working to establish himself as a seasoned interpreter of the repertory — a maestro fluent in the symphonies of Mahler and Beethoven as well as less common fare, like a ballet by Ginastera. And he wants to continue to bring works by living composers into the mainstream.He is also eager to expand his legacy as a social activist — he was trained in El Sistema, the Venezuelan program that teaches music to children, many of them from poor families — from his coming platform in New York.“I see New York as a capital of the world, where I can send a message to the world that music is an important element of life — not only entertainment, but transformational,” he said.Dudamel has a devoted following in New York, where he was so admired that the Philharmonic decided to forgo a typical search for a music director, focusing its efforts instead on pursuing Dudamel like a “heat-seeking missile,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. Players admire his passion and humility; unlike most conductors, he in known for abstaining from solo bows after performances, instead preferring to gesture to highlight the contributions of the members of the orchestra.The film composer John Williams, a friend and mentor, described Dudamel as a “blessing to music” and predicted that he would be a transformative force in New York.“I can’t think of another conductor, man or woman, that I know that derives more sheer joy from music,” he said. “I don’t think you could have a better leader — a more positive person — to admit freely all kinds of things into our world, and at the same time maintain all the best traditions.”Dudamel stepping onto the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesSome have likened Dudamel to earlier titans like Leonard Bernstein, a predecessor at the New York Philharmonic, speaking of his potential to become a larger-than-life figure and to elevate the orchestra’s standing in American cultural life. Others question whether he is the product of hype. It is a lot of pressure.“Of course we will have challenges,” he said. “That is part of the beauty. Every day that you are in front of an orchestra, that you’re in front of a score of music, it’s a new challenge.”“To be afraid or worried about the risk of making mistakes is not in my head,” he added. “Never! Because I think risk is a part of life.”GUSTAVO ADOLFO DUDAMEL RAMÍREZ was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, on Jan. 26, 1981, the son of Oscar Dudamel Vásquez, a trombonist who played in a salsa band, and Solange Ramírez Viloria, a voice teacher. His arms were too short to play trombone like his father, so he took up the violin.His grandparents initially tried to discourage his studies, worried about having another musician in the family.“One time my husband told me, ‘Can you imagine if our grandson is a violinist? Who will be able to stand all the noise in the house?’” Engracia Vásquez de Dudamel, his grandmother, recalled in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper Hoy in 2009.But the family relented, and Gustavo enrolled in El Sistema, where his talents as a conductor were soon recognized by José Antonio Abreu, the celebrated Venezuelan educator who had founded what became El Sistema in 1975.Abreu took on Dudamel as a pupil, teaching him rhythm and phrasing, and honing his technique as a conductor, telling him to feel sound in his hands the way a flying bird feels air. He appointed Dudamel to lead the national youth orchestra and inculcated in him the zeal of an evangelist, enlisting him in his effort to spread the “social mission of art.”Dudamel said that he wants to “send a message to the world that music is an important element of life — not only entertainment, but transformational.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIn 2004, Dudamel became a sensation after he won the first Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany. One of the jurors in the competition, the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (then the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) phoned Borda (then the orchestra’s president) and told her he had just seen “a real conducting animal.”She invited Dudamel to make his American debut at the Hollywood Bowl the following year, in a program of works by Tchaikovsky and the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas.“In his U.S. debut Tuesday night, a 24-year-old conductor from Venezuela with curly hair, long sideburns and a baby face accomplished something increasingly rare and difficult,” the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote of that performance. “He got a normally restive audience’s full, immediate and rapt attention. And he kept it.”Dudamel’s New York Philharmonic debut, in 2007, was just as memorable — especially after he broke a baton once used by Bernstein, which the orchestra had lent him, near the end of the concert, in the last few measures of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. (The baton, still in two pieces, remains in the Philharmonic’s archives.)At his New York Philharmonic debut in 2007, Dudamel was given one of Leonard Bernstein’s batons. It broke during the last few measures of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Philharmonic ArchivesWhen he began his tenure in Los Angeles, in 2009, Dudamel quickly became a celebrity, forging ties with Hollywood and capturing the imagination of audiences who were unaccustomed to classical music.He set out to develop the ensemble’s sound; he has hired 42 of its musicians, about 40 percent of the orchestra. And he sought to continue Abreu’s mission, creating the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, known as YOLA, which was modeled on El Sistema.During his directorship, the Philharmonic continued to rethink the role of a modern orchestra, making the promotion of new music a priority. The ensemble, one of the most financially secure in the United States thanks to the box office revenues it gets from the Hollywood Bowl, has commissioned more than 200 works during Dudamel’s time there and brought in pop and jazz stars, helping cement its reputation for innovation.The composer John Adams, a frequent collaborator, said that Dudamel arrived in Los Angeles a “babe in the woods when it came to contemporary repertoire.”“Then he discovered he liked it,” Adams said. “And now he’s not only a wonderful interpreter, but just a wonderful champion.”As part of his focus on new music, Dudamel has sought to elevate composers from Latin America, often lamenting that the region’s composers are barely known compared to its writers and visual artists.The Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz said that Dudamel had been crucial in promoting her music, adding that it could be difficult for female composers from Latin America to gain recognition. She recalled a 2017 concert at which he featured one of her compositions before a performance by the Mexican pop singer Natalia Lafourcade, greatly expanding the audience for her music.“He’s an extremely generous person,” she said. “I’ve never felt I was with this infamous conductor where always there is some huge distance. I’ve always felt very, very close.”In 2021, Dudamel became the music director of the Paris Opera, looking to expand his repertory and build more ties to Europe, where he has been a welcome guest at prestigious orchestras including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. (His wife, the Spanish actress and filmmaker María Valverde, is from Madrid, and the couple maintain a home there.)Dudamel is known for forgoing solo bows, often preferring to highlight the contributions of the orchestra. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesDudamel’s ties to Venezuelan leaders, whose support was vital for El Sistema, have drawn scrutiny. He conducted at the funeral of President Hugo Chávez, and for years he resisted criticizing the government, even as a series of social and economic crises worsened in the country.In “¡Viva Maestro!,” a documentary about Dudamel released last year, he spoke about the pressure he faced, not wanting to harm El Sistema. “I’m a leader of a program,” he said. “It’s not Gustavo only. It’s thousands of children, millions of young people.”After a young El Sistema-trained viola player was killed during a street protest in 2017, Dudamel decided to speak out. “It was very difficult to see my people fighting, to see my people suffering and getting to a very violent moment,” he explained in the documentary.He issued a statement that said “enough is enough” and wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times, criticizing a government plan to rewrite the constitution. President Nicolás Maduro responded by canceling overseas tours by Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, which he has led since 1999. Many players in that group, which had been a source of national pride, left the country. And Dudamel, who had last visited Venezuela in 2017, felt unable to return, even for the funeral of Abreu, his mentor, who died the following year. Instead he arranged a memorial concert in Santiago, Chile.Dudamel finally returned to Venezuela a few months ago, shortly after touring with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Boston, New York and Mexico.As he pondered his next steps, he went to Barquisimeto to reconnect with what he described as “the genesis of my life as a musician.” He caught up with friends and family. He met with students and teachers in El Sistema. And he visited Abreu’s home, sitting in his studio and looking through his books.Dudamel said that his teacher, whom he calls “maestro” and speaks of as a father, remained “in my soul and in my brain.” He contemplated what Abreu would have made of his move to New York.“I was part of a vision — of his vision,” he said. “He saw me when I was a 9-year-old boy in Barquisimeto. I think he saw this. He saw me being in New York with the New York Philharmonic. I’m sure of that.”He added: “I can see him. I can feel him. And I believe he is happy. He’s very happy.”Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Joshua Barone from New York. More

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      Review: An Orchestra Falters in Schubert’s ‘Great’ Symphony

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      Bernard Labadie and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s returned to Carnegie Hall in a program that also included a Mozart piano concerto with Emanuel Ax.Despite Schubert’s best efforts, his “Great” Symphony never received a performance in his lifetime. Initially considered overlong and unplayable, it took Mendelssohn, who gave its premiere, and Schumann, who wrote passionately of its glories, to bring it to light more than a decade after Schubert’s death. Now it’s a repertory staple.The Orchestra of St. Luke’s and its principal conductor, Bernard Labadie, closed their first concert of the season together with the symphony at Carnegie Hall on Thursday — pulling off the hourlong work only intermittently. A sense of occasion flickered in and out.Schumann praised the symphony’s “heavenly length,” and its extended stretches of repeated material do give it an expansive air — not unlike the landscape of Gastein, Austria, where it was written. At Carnegie, Labadie and his forces made emphatic use of recapitulations and musical echoes, giving them a swell of renewed vigor or, when called for, a more diaphanous quality.Woodwind chorales, led by penetrating oboes whose silky tone occasionally turned rough-hewn, were handsome, and the brasses played with a captivatingly neat style — clear and stringlike, but also rousing when required. The cello section took its higher-lying solo in the second movement with breadth and transparency. Elsewhere, the strings anchored a bristling Scherzo, driving the music with buzzing figures and arpeggiated leaps, but thinned out toward the end of the symphony.Problems with communication and balance emerged among the sections. When the strings and woodwinds handed off phrases to one another, they seemed to be telling different stories instead of completing sentences. The strings often covered the beautiful divisi writing for winds or trombones. The beloved Trio lacked the sense of swirling, airborne, circular momentum — perhaps because of Labadie’s heavy downbeat — that makes the return to the opening bars of the third movement such a whirring delight.Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18 in B flat, with Emanuel Ax as the soloist, opened the program. It’s obvious in retrospect that Labadie had calibrated his orchestra to the dimensions of the Schubert. The fullness of the players’ tone, the strength of their attack, the opacity of the texture — all of it weighed down the simple joviality of the Mozart.These two pieces share a similarly extroverted, convivial spirit offset by moments of startling intimacy. In the Mozart, that intimacy takes the form of a theme and variations in a minor key during the Andante. It almost feels like a concert aria of lightly expressed melancholy that needs time to unlace itself; Labadie instead kicked up high-key drama. When Ax rendered Mozart’s quick, broken octaves as a lovely murmur, the orchestra ignored him and plowed ahead. In the final movement, soloist and orchestra occasionally lost each other.Ax, who recorded the concerto in the 1980s, had the notes at his fingertips. He played broadly, confidently, showing the architecture of whole passages and thumping out Mozart’s grace notes with cheeky brazenness, even if individual phrases wanted for detail. Ax skimmed over scales, and there wasn’t much beauty to relish in his straightforward treatment of melodies that had the potential to sing.His encore, Liszt’s arrangement of the Schubert song “Ständchen,” was the opposite: a whisper of something private under the moonlight. He voiced the melody elegantly and applied suppleness to the chordal accompaniment.The Orchestra of St. Luke’s likewise found inspiration in its own final moments onstage. As the fourth movement of Schubert’s symphony came to an intense finish, its themes breaking through the prevailing texture, the players dug deep for a rooted sound that felt alert to the score’s momentousness — and to the music they were making together.Orchestra of St. Luke’sPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: No Dudamel Yet, but a Celebration at the Philharmonic

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      Esa-Pekka Salonen led the New York Philharmonic the day after Gustavo Dudamel was named as its next music director.If critics ruled the world — hope springs eternal — Esa-Pekka Salonen might be the New York Philharmonic’s music director right now. A conductor and composer, incisive and dryly funny, with a broad and quirky repertory, he was favored by some of us during the process that resulted in the selection of Jaap van Zweden in 2016.Who knows how long Salonen would have stayed in the job, but van Zweden is leaving after next season, just a few years into his tenure. And on Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced that Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would replace him.Dudamel, though, is conducting on the West Coast this week. He’s coming to New York for a news conference on Feb. 20, then doesn’t lead his new orchestra until May. Because of classical music’s glacial planning cycles, it won’t be until 2026 that he officially takes up the podium.So, by coincidence, it was Salonen — Dudamel’s predecessor in Los Angeles and now the music director of the San Francisco Symphony — who led the Philharmonic’s first concert since the appointment, on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall. (One for the annals of bad timing: Just last week, the two men and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony unveiled, with much hoopla, the California Festival, a coming joint venture.)If any performance could have captured the excitement the Philharmonic is feeling —  look at the photo published in The New York Times of Judith LeClair, the principal bassoon, erupting when she learned the Dudamel news — it was the joyful rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that closed Wednesday’s program.Under Salonen, the first movement steadily gained tension and excitement from the alternation — and sometimes the superimposition — of rough, abrupt accents and silkily long legato lines. He was unafraid of dramatic elongations of transitional passages: the short prelude to the Vivace section, the exchange of quietly wistful material through the winds later on.The Allegretto second movement, which under some batons can feel like an adagio dirge, was here remarkably flexible, neither too slow nor too heavy. The third movement began with a blitheness that gave the weighty trio section true grandeur by contrast. A whooshing start to the finale was soon, once again, grounded in those legato lines, headlong but fundamentally guided.It was interesting to compare with the excellent interpretation of Beethoven’s Second Symphony here last month by Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Written merely a decade before the Seventh, it is a vestige of the vanishing world of Classicism, and Rouvali scrupulously avoided breathlessness, any sense of losing rhythmic clarity and control.But in Salonen’s take on the more bacchic Seventh, you got a sense of revelry in the way this music is intricately constructed to seem on the verge of falling apart. Near the end of the first movement, there was the proper, slightly exhilarating, slightly queasy-making impression of different parts of the orchestra simultaneously speeding up and slowing down.It was appropriate in a week of Philharmonic pride that the soloist earlier in the program was drawn from the ranks of the orchestra: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet, who was featured in the American premiere of Salonen’s “kínēma.” Replace the “k” with a “c” and you get the idea; the piece was drawn from plans for a film score.Salonen said from the stage that the roughly half-hour work, composed during the pandemic lockdown and scored for strings alone, was “practically” a clarinet concerto — made up of five “scenes” that he compared to individual rooms, each without the ranging or development we usually expect within concerto movements. (For those who wanted development, he said to laughter, there was the Beethoven symphony to come after intermission.)The first scene is a shining, dewy dawn; the second, a soft, easygoing aria over a steady repeating bass line; the third, a bright, pizzicato accompaniment to a skipping, spattering clarinet; the fourth, a restrained elegy punctuated by sudden, swiftly abandoned surges.The fifth begins with hymnlike solemnity, reminiscent of a sunset, with the violins making a high, smooth spearing sound that shades into the tone of the clarinet. Unexpectedly aggressive, sharply rhythmic music follows — this seems to be the material that Salonen joked earlier was an echo of “Psycho” — accompanied by siren cries from the soloist.It felt odd to be unleashing so much drama at the very end, a big release of something that was never quite built up. But “kínēma” isn’t unpleasant, and McGill was a stylishly reserved soloist, not one to impose himself even in virtuosic passages — his tone mellow yet direct, sweet and refreshing.The concert — beginning with Luciano Berio’s elegantly wry, 20th-century layering of four versions of an 18th-century Luigi Boccherini quintet — was a spirited union of new and old, and an aptly stirring celebration of exciting news.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      New York Philharmonic Appoints Gustavo Dudamel as Music Director

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      Dudamel, a charismatic 42-year-old conductor, will take up the Philharmonic’s podium in 2026, in a major coup for the orchestra.LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel, the charismatic conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose fiery baton and bouncy curls have made him one of classical music’s most recognizable figures, will leave his post in 2026 to become the music director of the New York Philharmonic, both orchestras announced on Tuesday.“What I see is an amazing orchestra in New York and a lot of potential for developing something important,” he said in an interview. “It’s like opening a new door and building a new house. It’s a beautiful time.”The appointment of Dudamel, 42, is a major coup for the New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, which was once led by giants including Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein. Just a decade ago, there were concerns about its future, given the languishing efforts to renovate its lackluster hall and questions about its artistic direction. Now its home, David Geffen Hall, has reopened after a $550 million renovation, and it has secured in Dudamel the rare maestro whose fame transcends classical music, even as he is sought by the world’s leading ensembles.His departure is a significant loss for Los Angeles, where since 2009 Dudamel has helped build a vast cultural empire and helped turn the orchestra into one of the most innovative and financially successful in the United States.He was lured east by Deborah Borda, the New York Philharmonic’s powerful president and chief executive, in an instance of classical music history repeating itself. She signed the 26-year-old Dudamel to the Los Angeles Philharmonic back when she led that ensemble, and helped make him a superstar in its relatively new Walt Disney Concert Hall. Now she hopes to repeat that success in New York.“It’s a wonderful match,” said Borda, who arranged the deal in one of her last big pieces of business before she steps down from her post at the end of June. “I’m joyous for our orchestra. I’m joyous for our city.”The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dudamel, one of the highest-paid artists in the industry, earned $2.8 million during a recent season in Los Angeles. In New York, he will be given the expanded title of music and artistic director, to match his current role. He will succeed Jaap van Zweden — first as music director designate in the 2025-26 season, then as the orchestra’s 27th music director in the 2026-27 season — with an initial contract for five years.Dudamel, who was born in Venezuela, will be the orchestra’s first Hispanic leader, in a city where Latinos make up about 29 percent of the population. His appointment comes as the Philharmonic has worked to connect with new audiences, especially young people and Black and Latino residents.Classical music audiences typically skew older, but Dudamel is a rare figure who has been able to galvanize traditionalists and newcomers alike. He has made nurturing a younger generation of artists and music fans a priority, building a youth orchestra in Los Angeles modeled on El Sistema — the Venezuelan-based movement, in which he trained, that weds teaching and social work.Dudamel at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, where his contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic will expire at the end of the 2025-26 season.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesAnd he is unique among modern conductors for his pop-culture celebrity. Dudamel has appeared in a Super Bowl halftime show and voiced Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour.” He inspired the wunderkind Latin American conductor played by Gael García Bernal on the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle” and made a cameo appearance on the show. (“Hear the Hair” was its parody of a classical music marketing campaign.) In addition to making recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, he has conducted on soundtracks of a recent “Star Wars” film and Steven Spielberg’s version of “West Side Story.” In 2019, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Dudamel now faces the difficult task of attempting to raise the New York Philharmonic’s standing in American cultural life while helping it navigate a series of challenges, including dwindling ticket revenues, shifting audience behavior since the pandemic and persistent questions about the relevance of classical music and live performance today.Dudamel said that as music and artistic director, he would champion new music and work to develop the orchestra’s sound, now that the musicians had a hall in which they could fully hear each other onstage.“There are no limits, especially in an orchestra with such a history,” he said. “I see an incredible infinite potential of building something unique for the world.”Dudamel, who has been the music director of the Paris Opera since 2021, and of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela since 1999, was a favorite for the podium in New York as soon as it became vacant. In the fall of 2021, van Zweden announced that he would step down at the end of the 2023-24 season after a six-year tenure.When Dudamel appeared at the Philharmonic last spring, for a two-program Schumann symphony cycle, some players, hoping to win him over, showed up to rehearsals bearing gifts and handwritten notes. Inside his dressing room, a group of musicians gave him a bottle of the Brooklyn-made Widow Jane bourbon, telling him the Philharmonic would welcome him if he could find a way to spend more time in New York.“Everything comes alive with him,” said Christopher Martin, the orchestra’s principal trumpet. “Everything is as natural as breathing.”Borda said that it was Dudamel’s long and fruitful relationship with the Philharmonic — he has led 26 concerts with the orchestra since his debut in 2007 — that had made him the choice of the musicians, board members and managers. She recounted meeting him secretly in various European cities over the past year, often flying in and out within 24 hours to avoid suspicion, as she tried to secure a deal. (Seeing him in Los Angeles, she said, “just didn’t feel kosher.”)In October, when Dudamel was in New York to perform at Carnegie Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she took him on a tour of the renovated hall during a rehearsal, taking a circuitous route to sneak him onto the third tier so that even the orchestra’s musicians would not know. The attempt at secrecy was foiled when they bumped into Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was preparing for a gala performance.The secrecy was broken on Tuesday afternoon when the New York Philharmonic’s musicians were summoned for an announcement shortly after a rehearsal with the guest conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Some worried that the news would be bad; only members of the orchestra committee knew what the meeting would be about.Judith LeClair, the New York Philharmonic’s principal bassoon, reacted to the news of Dudamel’s hiring on Tuesday.James Estrin/The New York TimesWith the players reunited onstage, Borda and her successor, Gary Ginstling, stepped onto the podium.“Our next music director will be,” Borda said, with a pause, “Gustavo Dudamel.”The musicians erupted into 20 seconds of applause, in a journey from wide-eyed surprise to whistles and cheers, genuine expressions of joy. Judith LeClair, the bassoonist, was the most animated of them, looking dumbfounded before holding a radiant smile through the rest of Borda’s speech.“The Philharmonic has had its ups and downs,” Borda told them. “And it had an amazing time in the ’60s, when we were golden,” she added, referring to Bernstein’s music directorship. “I really feel the promise of that again.”Afterward, members of the orchestra were visibly elated. The oboist Ryan Roberts, who grew up in Los Angeles, called his mother there: “Mom, guess who our new music director is.” She could be heard responding with Dudamel’s name, virtually screaming with excitement.The appointment of Dudamel is the latest chapter in a remarkable career. Born in the Barquisimeto, Venezuela, he grew up in a musical family: His mother was a voice teacher, and his father a trombonist who played in salsa bands. He enrolled in El Sistema as a child and studied violin and composition before pursuing conducting.He sometimes faced questions about his ties to Venezuelan leaders — he conducted at the funeral of President Hugo Chávez — but tried to remain above the political fray. But in 2017, after a young El Sistema-trained viola player was killed during a street protest, Dudamel issued a statement that said “enough is enough” and wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times accusing the government of flouting the Venezuelan constitution. President Nicolás Maduro canceled several overseas tours by Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra as punishment, and Dudamel did not return to Venezuela until a quiet trip late last year.Dudamel has been a champion of new music, collaborating in Los Angeles with composers including John Adams and Gabriela Ortiz. He has also joined forces with pop and jazz stars, such as Billie Eilish and Herbie Hancock. The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe wrote in 2017 that the Los Angeles Philharmonic was “the most important orchestra in America. Period.”At the New York Philharmonic, Dudamel will lead an organization that is smaller than his Los Angeles empire, and one that has struggled in recent decades with financial troubles. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, with its Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall as well as the Hollywood Bowl, garnered about $187 million in yearly revenue before the pandemic. The New York Philharmonic earned $86 million.Chad Smith, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, congratulated Dudamel on the move, praised his tenure there for leaving “indelible marks on classical music” and hinted at the orchestra’s next steps.“From our earliest days, the L.A. Phil has been a trailblazer, boldly embracing the new, welcoming the world’s greatest artists to our stages and redefining the role of an orchestra in our community,” he said in a statement. “The search for our next music director will be conducted with this same spirit as we define the future of our organization.”Dudamel broke the news on Tuesday to Los Angeles players after a rehearsal, telling them that he would always be an Angeleno.Dale Breidenthal, a violinist in the orchestra, said Dudamel’s departure was stunning for the ensemble. “We haven’t processed it,” she said on her way out from the rehearsal. Still, she added, New York needed his talents. “We are really excited for him,” she said.Dudamel said he did not expect to build a replica of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in New York. “It’s impossible,” he said. “They are completely different cultures.”Still, he said, he would like to explore the idea of creating a youth education program similar to his efforts in Los Angeles. “It will be very important that we really develop social action through music,” he said. “For artistic institutions in the world, it’s important to embrace and to build. It will be very beautiful.”Borda, who returned to New York in 2017 after 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, balanced the New York Philharmonic’s budget and built up its once-depleted endowment. She also helped bring to fruition the long-delayed renovation of Geffen Hall, working with Henry Timms, the president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, to push it through ahead of schedule during the pandemic shutdown.That renovation has helped to revitalize the orchestra; speaking with the players on Tuesday, Borda told them, “It’s really because of you that he’s coming” but added, “And I have to say, it doesn’t hurt to have a nicer hall.”Paid attendance so far this season has hovered around 88 percent, compared with 74 percent before the pandemic, though the revamped hall is somewhat smaller. But the ensemble is still grappling with a host of questions about its identity and vision.Borda offered Dudamel two gifts while wooing him. One, given early in the search, was a program book from a Philharmonic tour of Venezuela in 1958, with a cover designed by the artist Carlos Cruz-Diez.The other, which he received as the deal was being finalized, was a pencil that was used to compose music by an artist who will now be his predecessor: Leonard Bernstein.Dudamel said in the interview that he would always maintain a connection to Los Angeles.“I don’t feel that I’m leaving this place or that it will be goodbye forever,” he said. “All the time I have spent here and all the experience that I have built here, I will bring to New York to build something new. This is life. I don’t feel that it’s an end.”Joshua Barone contributed reporting from New York. More

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      Gustavo Dudamel’s 10 Notable Recordings

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      Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, has a varied catalog of classics and contemporary works, as well as film scores.If Gustavo Dudamel, the 42-year-old superstar maestro who on Tuesday was announced as the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, is known for anything, it’s the sheer energy of his performances. His body moves with dancerly charisma as his baton conjures extremities of orchestral sound; the music feels alive, and so do you.The same could often be said for his recordings, even without the spectacle of a live concert. Still, the quality of Dudamel’s catalog is as varied as his repertoire: beloved symphonies, Latin American music and premiere recordings of contemporary works, even film soundtracks. If his Beethoven Nine is overblown, his Mahler Nine is heartbreakingly understated. Almost no album is without something to love, and something to scratch your head at.Over the years, Dudamel’s recordings have revealed gifts for Tchaikovskyan Romanticism, dancing rhythms and, above all, American music. Here is a sampling of those, as well as some possible red flags for his future in New York.John Williams: ‘The Imperial March’Dudamel is a fixture in Los Angeles — not only as the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a post he will hold through the 2025-26 season, but also as a celebrity conductor who moves easily between the worlds of Hollywood and classical music. Sometimes, he occupies both at once. He is a friend of the film composing legend John Williams, celebrating him on the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall and recording hits including recognizable themes from the “Star Wars” movies.John Adams: ‘Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?’Dudamel has enthusiastically led the works of living composers, many in world or American premieres. John Adams is a particular specialty; Dudamel was the first to record his oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” and has led older pieces including “Grand Pianola Music.” (This spring, he will be in the pit for “Nixon in China” at the Paris Opera, where he is the music director.) At Disney Hall in 2019, Dudamel also conducted the premiere of Adams’s piano concerto written for Yuja Wang, “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?”Ginastera: ‘Estancia’Another of Dudamel’s ensembles is the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in Venezuela, where he was born. With those players, he has released a lot of music, for the most part in the realm of familiar classics. On the album “Fiesta,” though, they explore Latin American (or Latin-influenced) works including Ginastera’s short but teeming 1941 ballet “Estancia.” The finale, driven by malambo rhythms, is a foot-tapping, smile-inducing explosion of energy, and of life.Ives: Symphony No. 4Among Dudamel’s finest recordings with the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a cycle of Ives’s four symphonies, works of pioneering American sound that freely dabble in the melodies of popular and traditional songs. From movement to movement, Dudamel demonstrates a mastery of the music’s mystery, delicacy and deeply felt nostalgia. All those come together in the finale of the enormous Fourth, a layered collage of tunes and textures that, under Dudamel’s baton, feels as unsettled and tenuously harmonious as America itself.Tchaikovsky: ‘Romeo and Juliet’Dudamel’s interpretations of Tchaikovsky are not uniformly the best; his “Nutcracker” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic can be missed. (Try instead Simon Rattle’s in Berlin or Valery Gergiev’s in St. Petersburg.) But his penchant for extremity makes for gripping drama and fervent passion in his account of the “Romeo and Juliet” fantasy overture with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra.Beethoven: Symphony No. 6The extremity often employed in Tchaikovsky doesn’t, however, serve Beethoven’s symphonies. Dudamel’s recordings of those works with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra often lack the breadth of Beethoven’s sound — the wit and joy alongside the darkness of, say, the Fifth. Particularly confounding is an unrelaxed and excitable Sixth that hardly lives up to the symphony’s nickname as the “Pastoral.”Mahler: Symphony No. 9When Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic visited Carnegie Hall for two concerts last fall, they ended their first program with an uneven reading of Mahler’s First Symphony. On disc, though, Dudamel proves himself to be a more trustworthy guide elsewhere in Mahler: through the varied moods of the Fifth, with the Berlin Philharmonic, and through the Indiana Jones-like adventure of the Seventh’s Scherzo. He is at his wisest in the Ninth, recorded — touchingly, patiently, unpretentiously — with the Angelenos.Andrew Norman: ‘Sustain’Dudamel’s support of new music in Los Angeles peaked with the Philharmonic’s 2019-20 centennial season, which inspired a series of commissions including Andrew Norman’s symphony-length “Sustain.” This cosmic score reveals itself slowly and, at times, unexpectedly. Yet for all its complexity, the music unfurls with lived-in inevitability in this standard-setting account.Bernstein: ‘West Side Story’Bits of “West Side Story” have appeared in Dudamel’s concerts before, but he took up the entire score — with propulsive intensity, playfulness and beauty — for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film adaptation. Here, Bernstein proves a master of different musical idioms; and Dudamel does the same in the recording sessions for the soundtrack, which was made, fittingly, with both the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics.Thomas Adès: ‘Dante’While in Los Angeles, Dudamel unveiled a modern masterpiece: Thomas Adès’s evening-length “Dante,” which Dudamel conducted in its concert premiere last spring after the “Divine Comedy”-inspired work had debuted as a ballet score in London. A recording of it, made at Disney Hall, is set for release in April on the Nonesuch label, but for now, there is a taste in “The Thieves — devoured by reptiles,” the Lisztian 12th section of “Inferno.” More

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin Extends His Contract With the Philadelphia Orchestra

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      The four-year extension will keep him at the podium through at least the end of the 2029-30 season.The conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led the Philadelphia Orchestra to accolades and worked to broaden its repertory, including by promoting the music of overlooked composers, has renewed his contract, the orchestra announced on Sunday.The four-year extension will keep Nézet-Séguin, 47, at the podium through at least the end of the 2029-30 season. As part of the deal, he has been given an expanded title, serving as both music and artistic director of the 123-year-old ensemble.In an interview, Nézet-Séguin likened his relationship with the orchestra to a “great and healthy marriage.”“Making music when we know each other, when we love each other, makes a world of difference,” he said. “To see this relationship flourish and expand — I’m very grateful for it.”Nézet-Séguin, who began his tenure as the orchestra’s eighth music director in 2012, is one of classical music’s busiest conductors. In addition to his post in Philadelphia, he is music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and leads the Orchestre Métropolitain of Montreal, where he was born.Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra and the Kimmel Center, said Nézet-Séguin was a transformative figure in the orchestra’s history.“The music they are making together is transcendental — this great orchestra, this extraordinary conductor,” he said. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts in this relationship.”Nézet-Séguin has helped guide the orchestra’s recovery from the pandemic, which has brought steep financial losses and resulted in a decline in the number of people attending concerts. (The orchestra lost about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees after canceling more than 200 concerts at the beginning of the pandemic.)The orchestra is experimenting with ways of attracting new concertgoers, including by lowering ticket prices and holding performances at different times of the day. Attendance has improved over the past few months, reaching an average of 60 percent capacity so far this season, compared with 66 percent before the pandemic.As classical music grapples with a history of racial and gender discrimination, Nézet-Séguin has emerged as a champion of overlooked composers. This week, for example, the Philadelphia Orchestra performed the Negro Folk Symphony by William L. Dawson, a Black composer. The orchestra gave the world premiere of the piece in 1934 but, before this week, had only performed it in full on one other occasion.Nézet-Séguin said that in the coming years he planned to continue to diversify the orchestra’s repertory, which he hopes will help nurture new classical music fans.“We must listen more to people from communities we want to embrace,” he said. “We must not always impose. We should ask, ‘How can we welcome you?’”Nézet-Séguin also hopes to raise the orchestra’s profile by leading more tours, including in China and other parts of Asia, as well as in the United States. Last fall, the orchestra canceled a tour of China planned for May, worried that the country’s then-strict coronavirus protocols would create logistical challenges. The tour was meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the orchestra’s visit to the country in 1973, when it became the first American ensemble to perform in Communist-led China.Under Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra has won accolades, including its first-ever Grammy last year, for a recording of two symphonies by Florence Price, the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra.Nézet-Séguin will be feted in Philadelphia in the coming days with what the orchestra is calling “Philly Loves Yannick Week.” As part of the festivities, the ensemble has produced a bobblehead modeled on him, complete with his trademark bleached-blond hair and red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes.He said he could envision many more years in Philadelphia, noting the orchestra’s history of music directors with lengthy tenures, so long as the musicians wanted him and he could keep them stimulated.“There’s nothing I can do as a conductor if I don’t have my orchestra with me,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’m just the person waving and thinking. In the end they do the music.” More