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      ‘Succession’: A Soundtrack Fit for a Concert Hall

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      Nicholas Britell’s score for the HBO series, which concludes on Sunday, has developed, episode by episode, into a classic theme-and-variations work.There comes a moment near the start of most “Succession” episodes when a faint beat enters the scene, right before some punchline or turn of the screw.Then the show’s theme music kicks in. Over snippets of vintage family videos, a piano fantasia as grainy as the footage unfurls like a sample for swaggering hip-hop alongside courtly, imperious strings.Like any effective theme, it lodges itself in your head immediately. But this music’s composer, Nicholas Britell, isn’t a mere tunesmith, and he doesn’t stop there. Over the four seasons of “Succession,” which ends on Sunday, he has written something unusual in television: a sprawling yet conceptually focused score that has developed, episode by episode, into a classic theme-and-variations work that would be just as fit for the concert hall as for the small screen.This is characteristic of Britell, who doesn’t tend to simply set the emotional tenor of a scene. A screen composer at the forefront of his generation — not a successor to John Williams and his symphonic grandeur but rather a chameleonic, sensitive creator of distinct sound worlds — Britell draws as freely from late Beethoven as he does from DJ Screw, and is as compelling in modes of aching sincerity and high satire alike.Britell is one of the foremost screen composers of his generation, drawing freely from a diverse array of influences including classical music and hip-hop.Clement Pascal for The New York TimesAnd in “Succession,” he evokes a classical music tradition in which a composer doodles at the piano to improvise on a theme, putting it through permutations based on mood and form. This could serve as good parlor entertainment, but also the basis for inventive, kaleidoscopic works; Britell’s soundtrack, in its pairing of piano and orchestra, has an ancestor in Rachmaninoff’s concerto-like “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” He would do well to adapt his score into a similar piece.With his theme and variations, Britell offers a parallel of the show itself: an idée fixe established at the start — a patriarch’s departure from the top of his business empire is more of a when than an if — and a circular (some would say static) plot about the ways in which three of his children maneuver to take over.It is a premise that carries on even after the father’s death early this season; the most recent episode, about his funeral, demonstrates the psychological hold Logan Roy still has over his children and how, united in grief, they nevertheless continue to scheme.The musical seed for all this couldn’t be simpler: not the theme for the main titles, but a lumbering, eight-chord motif that appears within it, and at the start of the “Strings Con Fuoco” cue.From there, variations surface with nods to Classical and Baroque forms: a dancerly minuet or rondo, a concerto grosso of angular strings, a wandering ricercare.Many cues have titles resembling those of a symphony’s movements, tempo indications like “Adagio” and “Andante Con Moto.” Others could blend in with a chamber music program, like Serenade in E flat, or Impromptu No. 1 in C minor, which shares its name with one of Schubert’s most famous piano solos.That can’t be a coincidence. Listening to Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor (K. 475), “Succession” fans might feel transported to the show’s soundtrack.An excerpt from Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor (K. 475)Mitsuko Uchida (Decca)In the first two seasons, Britell followed a fairly confined playbook of the eight-chord motif’s different guises: a beating piano similar to that Mozart fantasia, darkly regal strings and brasses.Generally, each variation was recognizably developed from the same cell. The biggest departures occurred whenever the Roy family left New York. For an episode at Connor’s New Mexico estate, Austerlitz, Britell interjected a guitar variation not heard before or since.Scenes in England took on a stately fanfare. And, at the family’s country house, preparations for a meal were accompanied by a Schubertian violin sextet.Something changed by Season 3. The music, like the story, became more openly emotional; for every cunning rondo, there was a doleful largo. Unsteady ground onscreen translated to surprises in the sound, such as Britell’s first use of a choir at the end of the season finale. Again the score swerved, stylistically, when characters were away from Manhattan. During the climactic episodes, set in Tuscany, he put his theme through an Italian prism for cues like “Serenata — ‘Il Viaggio.’”In the final season, Britell has expanded his palette of variations even further. Logan Roy’s authoritarian monologue on the floor of his news channel ATN is given a coda of chilling dissonance. Suspended chords conjure the in-between state of the children after his death. The irrepressible feelings at the most recent episode’s funeral might as well have a cue title like “Appassionata.”The question is, how will Britell’s theme and variations end? Historically, composers have gone one of two ways: by revisiting the beginning, as in the Aria of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, or with the potential for further development, as in Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations.You could ask the same of the Roy children, who going into the series finale are behaviorally similar to where they started but also, on a deeper level, are not. Will they achieve resolution? Or will their cycles of intrigue continue? Chances are, the answer will be in Britell’s music.In the final season of “Succession,” Britell has expanded his palette of variations even further.Clement Pascal for The New York Times More

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      The Composer Gabriella Smith’s Music Marvels at Nature

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      Smith, a rising young composer, has adapted her work “Lost Coast” into a cello concerto premiering this week at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.In 2014, the composer Gabriella Smith took a hike through the Lost Coast in Northern California. Populated by bears, mountain lions and Roosevelt elk, it’s an area so rugged that the scenic Highway 1, which runs along the water, has to detour far inland. She kept a tide log on hand for portions of the trail that follow the shore. “You have to be careful,” she said, “not to be swept away.”The wildness surprised her. “I felt so much awe being there,” Smith said. And she liked the sound of the name: the poetry of the words “lost” and “coast” together, the multiple meanings it suggests. It was, as John Adams, one of her mentors, would say, a title in search of a piece.She wrote a cello solo with looping electronics for Gabriel Cabezas, a friend and former classmate at the Curtis Institute of Music, inspired by the image of a trail being repeatedly washed away. Then the piece transformed into a more complex, layered recording, released in 2021. And now “Lost Coast” is taking on yet another life, its grandest yet: a cello concerto, premiering on Thursday with Cabezas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.This work and its trajectory are a lot like Smith’s career. At 31, she prefers to write for people she has a relationship with, even as she receives increasingly prominent commissions. Here and elsewhere, her music, in addition to its fascination with the natural world, exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy — not to mention an infectious groove.“I always assume,” Cabezas said, “that anybody who listens to her music will be her next biggest fan.”Growing up in Berkeley, Calif., Smith studied piano and violin, and at 8 — even earlier, if you ask her mother — began to write music of her own to figure out how it all worked. But she kept it secret, convinced that what she was doing was strange, even embarrassing. She didn’t know anyone else like her.It took encouragement, as well as music theory lessons, from her teacher at the time to keep going. Smith was inspired by the composers whose works she was learning: Mozart, Bach, Haydn. Her own pieces, though, didn’t resemble theirs, if only because, she said, “I didn’t know how to sound like that.”Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music and artistic director, speaking with Smith during a rehearsal this week. He will conduct the premiere of her cello concerto “Lost Coast.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesOnce, she wrote what she thought was a Mozartean duo for violin and piano, until she heard two classmates play it. “But that,” Smith said, “encouraged me, because it was this puzzle to figure out how to make the idea match the result.”Other influences entered her brain, mainly Bartok and Joni Mitchell. And she received a boost from Adams. He remembered a quiet teenager who arrived at his house with a “staggering” number of pieces, all polished with plastic spiral binding. “I was impressed,” he said, “that she obviously had this incredible determination at a young age.”Smith wasn’t just determined in music. She also loved nature and became interested in environmental issues around the age she started composing. At 12, she started volunteering at a research station in Point Reyes; the people there told her that they had never been approached by someone so young, but they gave her a try. For the next five years, she banded birds and bonded with local biologists. She even got her mother on board.At 17, she started at Curtis in Philadelphia but missed the West Coast. “I was so homesick,” she said, “that it sort of forced me to reckon with not only who I was as a composer, but as a person. I infused all that into the music, and that’s when my music started to sound like me.”Smith is soft-spoken. But as a composer “she fills up the whole room,” said the violist Nadia Sirota, who has performed her music and collaborated with her and Cabezas as a producer on the “Lost Coast” album. “She knows exactly what she’s talking about. And when someone has clear ideas, it’s just about realizing them.”As Smith continued to write, Adams clocked that her sound was quickly maturing. He saw a sensitivity to the natural world that, he said, “goes all the way back to the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.” And he could tell that, for performers and audiences alike, it would be fun. Cabezas has certainly felt that way: “You don’t lose a sense of what music should be, but at the same time there’s optimism, quirkiness and humor.”In “Tumblebird Contrails,” a piece that Adams and Deborah O’Grady, his wife, commissioned through their Pacific Harmony Foundation, a Point Reyes hike is translated into music of muscularity, amazement and delight. Similar adjectives come to mind for other scores, such as the quartet “Carrot Revolution,” an immediately engrossing work of pure excitement.These feelings, Smith said, come naturally: “I try to put in all the emotions, but joy is the one I care most about. It’s the joy that I experience from the natural world and, honestly, the joy of making music.”Smith’s titles tend toward the playful. Sometimes they can seem nonsensical, like “Imaginary Pancake,” a piano solo written for Timo Andres. But that was inspired by a memory from a childhood summer music program where she was impressed by an older boy who was playing something with his arms stretched to both ends of a keyboard. She asked him what it was, and he said Beethoven.As an adult, she tried to find that music but couldn’t; she realized that her memory had exaggerated it until it became something else. So she composed based on the inspiration of an imaginary piece. And “pancake”? That’s the image of a player leaning over the keyboard with arms outstretched, flat like a pancake.Now living in Seattle, Smith remains involved in environmentalism. She bikes instead of drives, and is working on an ecological restoration at a former Navy airfield. There is some anger about the state of climate change in her music, like the song “Bard of a Wasteland,” but even then the rhythms suggest underlying optimism. “It’s so easy to slip into despair,” she said, “but there are all these people around us working on this in incredibly joyful ways. We need to feel the things we need to feel and grieve the things we need to grieve. Then we need to go on.”The pervading emotion of Smith’s music is joy: “the joy that I experience from the natural world and, honestly, the joy of making music,” she said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThere is determination, too, alongside awe in “Lost Coast.” The album version was made in Iceland, over multiple sessions that layered Cabezas’s playing with a few contributions by Sirota and singing by Smith, based on her compositional method of recording herself on Ableton software. “She creates music in space,” Sirota said. “It’s almost like she’s molding clay.”For the concerto version, Smith adapted her singing into more traditional lines for winds and brasses. But it wasn’t a one-to-one transfer; many sections were heavily changed, and she also added a cadenza. “There are some wild parts that she rewrote,” Cabezas said. “It fits the orchestral aesthetic a little more, and she’s found some places where that works even better.”Smith wants to further integrate the environmental and musical sides of her life. Her next piece — for the Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary, with a preview coming to Carnegie Hall in November ahead of its full premiere in January — will include interviews she made with others working on climate solutions. But she is still figuring out how to do more.“I can write music, but that feels like the first step,” she said. “A lot of it feels like uncharted territory. But everybody, in every field, needs to do this.” More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Leads His New York Philharmonic

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      Performing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the superstar maestro conducted the orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.Gustavo Dudamel began his reign at the New York Philharmonic on Friday with an ending.Greeted with a roar from the audience as he appeared with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall for the first time since being named its next music director, this superstar maestro conducted Mahler’s ninth and final completed symphony, one of the repertory’s great evocations of farewell. Few works survey the span of a life — its highs and lows — more thoroughly and unsparingly, from the pastoral to the hysterical, from raucous existence to pianississimo death.The program was planned long before Dudamel’s appointment, but it turned out to be ideal for this moment. Nearly an hour and a half long, Mahler’s Ninth fills a concert on its own. No overture; no soloist; no intermission.On Friday it provided a long, focused communion between a conductor and the players he’ll be leading in the years to come. (Dudamel’s predecessor, Jaap van Zweden, finishes next season and, because of classical music’s ludicrously slow planning cycles, Dudamel, currently at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, won’t officially start his five-year contract until 2026.)The Ninth was ideal for the moment, too, because this orchestra has a particular claim on Mahler, who briefly but indelibly served as its chief conductor around the time he was finishing the symphony, just before his death in 1911. While hardly a rarity, the Ninth is a piece that the Philharmonic has mostly entrusted to its music directors — including Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, two of the 20th century’s most influential Mahlerians.With the weight of this history palpable, Dudamel achieved in this sprawling, complex and bracing score a kind of casualness. He gave a sense of this as just another piece.This Ninth wasn’t a hothouse flower or a religious rite. Leading with easy flow and, especially in the great Adagio fourth movement, a tendency toward briskness, Dudamel had no interest in the self-seriousness that can easily bend this symphony toward exaggerated solemnity. The goal seemed to be bright freshness more than autumnal glow.Conducting without a score in front of him or a podium railing behind — there are, he seemed to be saying, no barriers between me, the players and the audience — Dudamel persuasively and naturally guided the score’s many slight, important shifts of pace. The deceleration to the end of the first movement was artful, and the complicated transitions at the close of the third were lucid. The music never felt bullied, manipulated or artificially inflated.At the start of the finale, the strings that interrupt a funeral dirge in the bassoon weren’t a slap in the face, but a swift tidal inundation. Those strings had earlier played with mossy darkness in the first movement’s passionately strange “Leidenschaftlich” passage.Throughout the symphony, the trumpets had the right coppery bite. The principal harp, Nancy Allen, brought the smooth, slightly unearthly resonance of temple bells to her music. Ryan Roberts, on English horn, played with his usual flawless poetry in small yet meaningful solos, especially near the end. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, offered both tenderness and tanginess.And yet missing from the evening was a certain degree of personality and depth.If the beginning of the first movement was clear and straightforward, it also lacked mystery and poignancy — an establishment of mood beyond mere accuracy. The murky, brooding music later in that movement, a nod to Wagner’s depiction of the magical, shapeshifting Tarnhelm in his “Ring,” passed without phosphorescent eeriness.There was a sense of celebration as Dudamel took the podium for the first time since being named the Philharmonic’s next music director.James Estrin/The New York TimesWhile there was understandably a sense of celebration in the sold-out hall on Friday, which bled into the performance, it’s not clear that love-fest is the right mood for much of Mahler’s Ninth. In the second movement, bouncing up and down at the knees and making smiling cues with a flared left hand, Dudamel led a ländler dance that was more sweetly rustic than ominously rough. And there was a breezy, circuslike feel to the waltz it transforms into, rather than anything sinister. This was not a rendition of the Mahler who prefigured Shostakovich.Some restraint in that second movement — even some sunniness — might make sense so as to leave somewhere to go in the unquestionably more explosive third. But on Friday, that Rondo-Burleske third movement wasn’t really intense, either.While the first measures were sumptuously grand, there was no sense of grotesquerie, self-mockery or more than slight pepperiness in what followed, so the sudden slowing into the consoling, contrasting theme — like a roof opening to reveal the full expanse of the starry night sky — didn’t have the necessary impact. Dudamel hadn’t brought us to a place from which we needed to be consoled.This wasn’t particularly light-textured playing, but the feeling was nevertheless almost airy, with a reticence in the lower strings. Eighty minutes seemed to pass quickly — perhaps too much so.With the orchestra’s principal horn position currently vacant, Stefan Dohr, who fills that role for the Berlin Philharmonic, was a guest, to uneven effect. In his crucial part here, Dohr was steady, but the mellow solidity of his tone, shading into leadenness, didn’t seem quite in the same sound world as his colleagues. The passing around of solos through the winds in the fourth movement offered a feeling of humanity but, like this performance as a whole, felt a bit stranded: neither elegant nor raw.The Philharmonic still tends to gesture toward super-soft playing rather than really achieving it, let alone relishing it. And with an edgy thinness to the orchestra’s sound at full cry, rather than rounded, blended warmth, I felt a revival of my concerns from the fall opening of the renovated Geffen Hall about the space’s clear but stark acoustics.Under Dudamel’s baton, the symphony’s final minutes, as the strings gradually dim to nothingness, were as sensible as I’ve ever heard them. This was a pleasantly even-keeled lullaby rather than a radical or wrenching depiction of life draining away. The playing was poised, but it left a ways to go in profundity.It was an ending. But for this conductor and this orchestra, it felt like a place to start.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Claire Chase Is Changing How People Think of the Flute

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      She is marking her 24-year effort to expand the instrument’s repertoire with performances, including a Carnegie Hall series, as well as a box set and a new fellowship.Something unusual happens when people speak about the flutist Claire Chase. Seasoned musicians light up with gleeful optimism. They use superlatives that would seem reckless if they weren’t repeated so often. The most jaded among them appear incapable of negativity.“It’s so difficult to talk about Claire,” the composer Marcos Balter said. “She’s so much more than a virtuoso flutist or a pedagogue. She is a true catalyst for change. But also not only that. She makes you think that everything is possible.”Chase’s reputation is all the more remarkable for the level head she maintains as one of the most enterprising and imaginative musicians in her field — which is to say one of the busiest fund-raisers and devoted interpreters of new music, and the unconventional performances it often demands. This, on top of a life that involves shuttling among Cambridge, Mass., where she teaches at Harvard University; Brooklyn; and Princeton, N.J., where her partner, the author Kirstin Valdez Quade, works, and where they have been raising their 10-month-old daughter.This month is one of the biggest stress tests on her schedule yet. Earlier in May, she played Kaija Saariaho’s concerto “L’Aile du Songe” with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Next she is planning a marathon of 10 performances looking back on the past decade of her “Density 2036” project, a colossal initiative intended to last 24 years in which she has commissioned annual new works for the flute, leading up to the centennial of Edgar Varèse’s solo for her instrument “Density 21.5.”Her coming concerts will culminate in two premieres, on May 24 at the Kitchen and the next day at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. She is also releasing a box set of “Density” recordings and starting a fellowship to ensure that this music reaches the next generation of flutists.Chase performs with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, where she will return for a series of concerts.Chris LeeIn an interview at her Brooklyn apartment, Chase, who turns 45 on Wednesday, recalled being told that once you become a parent, everything else becomes “like miniature golf.” That has helped.“Two weeks into our daughter’s life, I was like, Oh, I get it,” she said. “I have these 10 ‘Density’ shows and things that are finally launching, and it really is miniature golf. And it’s such a gift because I can’t possibly take what I’m doing too seriously. The only truly important thing is feeding and caring for and learning from this little person.”Much has changed in Chase’s life since “Density” began, but her resting state of restlessness has been a constant. She was a founding artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble — arguably America’s leading performers of new work — which in 2001 had grown out of her time at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. With that group, she churned out commissions that put composers like Balter on the map.By the time “Density” got off the ground, though, Chase knew that she wouldn’t remain with the ensemble forever. Leaving, she said, “was always in the back of my mind. All artists — we have to be very honest about what we’re afraid of, and I was really afraid of holding this thing back.” It was one of the hardest things she’s ever done, she added, but also one of the best lessons she’s ever learned.As the years of “Density” went on, more developments came. She joined the Harvard faculty and was asked to become one of eight collaborative partners of the San Francisco Symphony under its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. She met Quade and started a family. And since then, she has approached her work with a fresh sense of time.“My dream for all pieces, not just ‘Density’ pieces, but for everything I commission,” Chase said, “is that it can potentially work with me and a Bluetooth speaker on a granny cart in the subway.”Jamie Pearl for The New York Times“I only have so much time I can give each day, and so much energy,” Chase said. “If this month of ‘Density’ had happened in a different part of my life, I think I’d be practicing eight hours a day, and I would be living and eating and breaking and only seeing this material.”Even with what limited time she has, Chase is seen by fellow musicians as thoroughly committed — whether performing Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto on tour with Esperanza Spalding or revisiting the “Density” repertoire. Audiences can tell, too, from her animated but not overstated movement, dizzying technical facility across the flute family, and extended techniques that branch out into vocalization and dramatic text recitation.The composer and scholar George E. Lewis, who now serves as artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, said that her interpretation of his piece “Emergent,” from early in “Density,” has evolved so much that it sounds “like the difference between early and late Coltrane.” Susanna Mälkki, who has led Chase in performances of the Lara concerto, as well as the Saariaho at Carnegie, said that she stands out among contemporary music specialists because, while some might “be very scientific about it,” Chase doesn’t forget that, fundamentally, most composers just want to reach listeners.“If we approach this as an intellectual exercise, it won’t work,” Mälkki added. “We need to have a balance, and she is so generous and engaged, it’s mesmerizing. And from there, her aura just spreads.”It spreads not just to fellow performers but to colleagues in the broader classical music field. Lewis said that Chase has a gift for seeing “how things could be, not how they are now,” and that in the process, “she sweeps you up into the enthusiasm and makes you believe you can do anything.”Salonen recalled meeting her as part of a New York University project devoted to the future of classical music. When the inevitable subject of getting young people interested in and on the boards of institutions came up, he recalled, she said “that her problem with I.C.E. is that she would really want to see some older board and audience members.”“Jaws dropped,” he said. “You could hear it. Then I thought: This woman is doing something. She has her finger on something that we don’t.”Through the ensemble, Chase caught the attention of Matthew Lyons, a curator at the experimental-art nonprofit the Kitchen. When she introduced the idea of “Density,” before it had begun, he quickly got on board. “I have a weakness for long-form creative projects,” he said, “and Claire just kind of came in with this infectious energy and determination and courage to take it on.”Chase’s projects include a fellowship she started to ensure that the music she is commissioning reaches the next generation of flutists.Jamie Pearl for The New York TimesThe Kitchen has been the New York home for “Density,” a space where Chase has been given time to prepare theatrical, multimedia presentations for each edition. A program can contain just one, full-length piece — like the two premieres this month, Craig Taborn’s “Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ubique” — or it can be a batch of new works. Regardless, an installment typically adds up to roughly an hour, with the idea that the project can conclude with a 24-hour performance.The roster of composers has been diverse in nearly every sense of the word: age, race, gender identity, career stage. “It’s not uniform,” Balter said. “Claire is the glue, but there is not an aesthetic glue.”If there is a defining aesthetic, it’s virtuosity. Lewis said that a commission for her means that you are writing music for “someone who can do just about anything.” “Busy Griefs,” which premieres at the Kitchen on the 24th, calls for its performers to wander through the audience and navigate notated and improvised material; “Ubique,” at Carnegie Hall on the 25th, however, is fully notated, a journey of its own, but with nothing left to chance.Thorvaldsdottir said that she “always pictured Claire in everything I was writing,” but balanced her technique with more abstract ideas about density and ubiquity — “an exploration of colors and timbres and textural nuances between the instruments.” In composing specifically for Chase, Thorvaldsdottir is far from alone among the “Density” contributors; it can be difficult to picture anyone other than Chase performing this idiosyncratic, challenging and occasionally large-scale music.Chase is aware of how, as “Density” enters its second decade, she must ensure that the new repertoire doesn’t merely exist, but that it also spreads beyond her own concert calendar. She is already a teacher and mentor — young flutists “follow her around like little puppies,” Lewis said — and now she has also created a “Density” fellowship, whose first class was announced this month.Ten early-career flutists will take on one of the project’s pieces and devote a year to studying it with Chase, and often the composer, then performing and potentially recording it. Future concerts might not have the grand multimedia treatment of a Kitchen program, but, Claire said, that has always been the plan.“My dream for all pieces, not just ‘Density’ pieces, but for everything I commission,” she added, “is that it can potentially work with me and a Bluetooth speaker on a granny cart in the subway.”With that philosophy, “Density” begins to look a lot more like, well, the rest of classical music: endlessly interpreted, with endless possibilities for how it’s presented. All it takes for repertoire to survive is continued performance, generation after generation. Chase’s fellowship, she hopes, is a start.“One little thing at a time,” she said. “It’s such a gift to be thinking about 20 years from now, or even just 10 years from now, and then 13 when this is all over. Oh, then I’ll be so sad. What am I going to do?” More

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      Boston Symphony Picks Chad Smith of L.A. Philharmonic as New Leader

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      The departure of Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, is another loss for that orchestra, whose maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, is also leaving.Chad Smith, a veteran arts leader who has helped turn the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the most innovative orchestras in the United States, will leave his post this fall to become president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, both ensembles announced on Monday.Smith, 51, who has been the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive since 2019, said in an interview that the pandemic had made him rethink his priorities.“I really have thought a lot about my journey here, and I’m ready for a change,” he said. “Change is also healthy for everyone.”Smith’s departure is a significant loss for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is still reeling from the announcement in February that its superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would leave in 2026 to become the next music director of the New York Philharmonic.Smith said that his move was unrelated to that of Dudamel, with whom he has worked closely in promoting contemporary music and expanding the orchestra’s youth education programs. He said that he felt it was the right moment now that the worst of the pandemic appears to be over and audiences are once again returning to concert halls.“My decision was my own, and I know that Gustavo’s decision was his own,” he said. “It will provide the opportunity for the organization in L.A. to have a new artistic and executive leadership team to really move into the future.”Smith will take the helm of the Boston Symphony at a time of tumult and division.The orchestra has in recent years built a reputation for artistic and financial success, winning Grammy Awards and amassing an endowment of $484 million. But after the retirement in 2021 of the orchestra’s longtime leader, Mark Volpe, the organization entered a chaotic period.A long list of senior leaders and staff have departed, including Volpe’s successor, Gail Samuel, the orchestra’s first female president and chief executive, who abruptly resigned in December, just 18 months into her tenure. (Samuel also came from the Los Angeles Philharmonic.)The turmoil has alarmed the Boston Symphony’s musicians, staff, board and patrons. The orchestra’s leaders, including the board chair, Barbara W. Hostetter, a philanthropist, have declined to speak publicly about the problems. In a statement on Monday, she praised Smith’s appointment, saying that it would “usher in a new era of many exciting opportunities.”Smith said he was not intimidated by the troubles in Boston, adding, “The B.S.O. is going through things that all organizations go through at certain times.” He said he would work to bring stability to the orchestra and to help it rethink its identity and mission.“There are a lot of questions you have to ask,” he said. “Who do we want to be? What are those things that are absolutely essential? And where can we can continue to grow and expand and think differently about who we are and how we connect with audiences in our communities?”Smith said that he would work to bring more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the orchestra, which is less diverse than some of its peers. And he said that he was eager to keep Andris Nelsons, the music director in Boston since 2014, whose contract expires in 2025, calling him an “extraordinary musician.”The challenges in Boston are familiar to Smith, who has spent 21 years at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, previously serving as its chief operating officer and vice president of artistic planning, developing a reputation for innovative programming and for forging ties to contemporary composers. He became chief executive in 2019 after the abrupt resignation of Simon Woods, who had been in the job for less than two years.Like the Boston Symphony, the Philharmonic has been known for its artistic and financial success. Both institutions have benefited from having robust, and highly lucrative, outdoor summer offerings: the Hollywood Bowl in California, and Tanglewood in Massachusetts.The loss of Smith will create a void in Los Angeles, where the orchestra is in the beginning stages of a search for a successor to Dudamel. Thomas L. Beckmen, the chair of the orchestra’s board, said in a statement that the Philharmonic was “confident our next leader will carry forward our values and vision and inspire the L.A. Phil to even greater heights.”Dudamel expressed his gratitude to Smith in a statement, noting that the “only constant in life is change” and pledging in his remaining years to “give everything I can to the L.A. Phil and our wonderful audiences.”Smith’s move to Boston will be a homecoming of sorts. He studied European history at Tufts University and has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in vocal performance from the New England Conservatory, and often attended Boston Symphony concerts while Seiji Ozawa was music director.He recalled a memorial concert for the composer Aaron Copland. “I still get chills thinking about that,” Smith said. “It’s something I come back to very often about why I love the orchestral world and the orchestral music.” More

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      What Gustavo Dudamel’s Recordings Reveal About His Conducting

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

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

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

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

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