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

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

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      Matthias Pintscher to Lead Kansas City Symphony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      Long Play Rises to the Top of New York Classical Music Festivals

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      This weekend of concerts, organized by Bang on a Can, has quickly but assertively ascended to the rank of destination event.Long Play has been around only since last year, but it is already the most important classical music festival in New York City.And, based on the 15 concerts I attended during its second edition, which unfolded and overlapped in spaces around Brooklyn from Friday through Sunday, this festival by the Bang on a Can collective could even stand to get a little bigger.Capacity crowds amassed at Pioneer Works to hear Meredith Monk’s ensemble collaborate with the Bang on a Can All-Stars; at Roulette to hear the Philip Glass Ensemble; at the Mark Morris Dance Center to hear a new repertory group investigate music from the early 1990s by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill. These in-demand sets couldn’t fit everyone who wanted to hear them, but with two or three other events always close by, nobody was truly left out in the cold.Before Long Play, Bang on a Can had spent three decades presenting one-day marathon concerts. But the scope of this organization’s ambition has reached a new level, and it is an untrammeled joy to experience.Meredith Monk, center, performing with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars as part of her set on Friday.Peter Serling @lotsopikturesFor example, on Saturday afternoon at Public Records, the JACK Quartet performed a version of “Prisma Interius VII” by the young composer Catherine Lamb. Previously conceived for violin and synthesizer alone, the piece was recast here for the dreamy, collaborative ability of the JACK players to hold precise microtonal harmonies. Staggered entries of droning pitches steadily created complexly sour motifs that tended to plunge downward. Where Lamb switches up her patterns with melodic ascents, the players savored the opportunity to make this often static music sing out.From there, you could race over to the big crowd forming at Roulette for Glass’s music, or stay put to enjoy Xenakis’s “Tetras” as well as “rag′sma,” by the JACK violinist Chris Otto. Although I’ve enjoyed those pieces on recordings, I felt a need to check in on the Glass Ensemble. The composer was present in the audience but no longer performs with this band, so this was an opportunity to hear the group’s veteran music director, Michael Riesman, lead younger players like the saxophonist Sam Sadigursky.When interpreting the composer’s landmark “Glassworks” album from 1982, the ensemble brought a bass-heavy thump that reflected real love for the “Walkman” mix — created in its time “for your personal cassette player,” a way for Glass to put his music in a useful dialogue with contemporary pop styles (a lesson that the Bang on a Can crew took to heart in their own careers).Conrad Tao, left, and Tyshawn Sorey playing the music of Morton Feldman at Roulette.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNext, at the BRIC House Ballroom, I heard a performance by the saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who is known for his fusion of avant-garde jazz and London club music, but here stuck to flutes, as part of a serene South Asian-influenced quartet led by the vocalist (and sometime bassist) Ganavya. Call it another sign of an aesthetically confident festival: Here, artists are not required to stay in expected lanes.Early Saturday evening, Roulette hosted the symphonic, brawling, experimental, tuneful big-band music of David Sanford; slightly overlapping, in the BRIC lobby, was the Momenta Quartet’s presentation of Alvin Singleton’s string quartets. Sanford, one of my favorite living composers, conducted his own music, in which you can hear his taste for artists as wide-ranging as Helmut Lachenmann and Charles Mingus.

      A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordI stayed for Sanford’s entire set before watching the Momenta players handle the climactic, interlocking figures from Singleton’s third quartet with an acrobatic ease; after that, they brought Romantic feeling to the fourth. This varied sequence of music by two living Black composers, ecstatic on its own terms, also put the lie to claims that you’ll sometimes hear from bigger institutions that say they are retreating from “classical music” in an effort to appeal to new audiences.The composer Henry Threadgill, second from the right, was in the audience for a program of his music.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWhen programmers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Lincoln Center say such things — fewer string quartets, like Momenta, more electric bass, as in Sanford’s band — you can understand the point, and maybe even agree with it in principle. But with the Long Play festival, Bang On a Can replies: “Why not both, and why not back to back?”Also on Saturday night, I caught a performance at Public Records by the trio Thumbscrew, with Mary Halvorson on guitar, Michael Formanek on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. In addition to Thumbscrew’s own vibrant compositions, the trio also let loose a wild take on Mingus’s “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk.”This kind of wide array was on offer all weekend. The next day, I traveled from a set of electronic music by the composer Ash Fure to a quartet performance led by the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan.

      ANIMAL_LONGPLAY from Ash Fure on Vimeo.Though visually arresting, an environment combining art installation and avant-house-music light show, Fure’s new concept — a kind of thumping club from hell — seemed starkly limited as musical matter compared with thrilling past chamber works on the album “Something to Hunt.” Half an hour later, at BAMcafé, Brennan’s quartet interpreted languid-then-convulsive pieces like “Space for Hour,” from her recent album “More Touch”; her electronically outfitted vibraphone playing belongs in a conversation with the Ash Fures of the world.

      More Touch by Patricia BrennanFrom there, I enjoyed the first 75 minutes of a radical yet sensitive take on Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories,” with Conrad Tao on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. This is originally a piano solo, yet Sorey’s skittering cymbal work was closely attuned to the score, his floor toms tuned to highlight the densest chordal moments in Tao’s interpretation of the notated material.I would happily have stayed for the final minutes but needed to rush to hear a band playing the music of Threadgill’s Very Very Circus outfit. The guitarist Brandon Ross, the tuba player Marcus Rojas and the drummer Gene Lake were all veterans of that ensemble; here, they brought works like “Little Pocket Size Demons” to life in the company of younger players, including the guitarist Miles Okazaki.From left, Brandon Ross, Marcus Rojas, Yosvany Terry, Gene Lake, José Dávila, Ron Caswell and Miles Okazaki performing Threadgill’s music at the Mark Morris Dance Center.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThreadgill isn’t likely to play the Very Very Circus music himself again, but he was in the audience on Sunday to appreciate the birth of a new repertory band in his honor; he soaked up applause from his seat, just as Glass had.The weekend was so rich, it hardly mattered that Sunday night’s planned closing set, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had to progress without the participation of the group’s sole remaining founder, the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, who tested positive for Covid-19 before the gig. Hutchings bravely stepped in on short notice, and the potent, anchoring work of the percussionist Famoudou Don Moye recalled some of his first recorded performances with the group, after he joined in the early 1970s. Hutchings didn’t try to sound like Mitchell, but instead gave listeners a taste of the brawny, insistent tenor sax sound that we hadn’t heard the previous day in his appearance with Ganavya.Such is the strength of Long Play. When a veteran headliner has to drop out, there’s still something else to savor. And when a veteran like Meredith Monk does hit the stage — as she did for Friday night’s opening concert — she is apt to bring a new vigor to vintage works like her “Tokyo Cha Cha,” which she performed, complete with choreography, for nearly 20 grooving, ethereal minutes.Pray that this festival continues, and that it expands. It should become a destination event; and if it does, it’s going to need some bigger rooms — or a bigger schedule — to serve a public that is already showing that it wants to hear all of this music. More

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      Menahem Pressler, Pianist Who Co-Founded the Beaux Arts Trio, Dies at 99

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      Mr. Pressler, who fled Nazi Germany as a youth, was the anchor of a group that, with various lineups, performed all over the world for 53 years.Menahem Pressler, the celebrated pianist who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and, after establishing himself in postwar America, co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio, which became the world’s reigning piano-violin-cello ensemble and dazzled audiences for a half-century, died on Saturday in London. He was 99. His death was announced by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he had been on the faculty since 1955.At 14, Mr. Pressler hid on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, as Nazi thugs smashed his father’s shop. When World War II began in Europe, his Jewish family landed in Haifa, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Traumatized, he nearly perished at 16, but he found the will to live in a haunting Beethoven sonata. In 1946, he won an international piano competition in San Francisco. A year later, he made his Carnegie Hall debut.After years as soloists, Mr. Pressler, the violinist Daniel Guilet and the cellist Bernard Greenhouse joined forces in 1955 and formed the Beaux Arts. Such groups, called piano trios although two of their members play string instruments, had been around for centuries. But theirs was a daring venture at a time when most listeners preferred string quartets, with their even sonorities and vast repertory, for intimate chamber concerts.There are technique and temperament issues in a piano trio. The elephantine grand piano can easily bully its smaller partners or timidly overcompensate. And the piano’s staccato notes have to blend with a smoother continuity of strings. Some trios are also notorious for two-against-one squabbles. But the Beaux Arts achieved what critics called a wondrous harmonic unity in a resilient three-way musical marriage.The final version of the Beaux Arts Trio in performance in New York in 2008, from left: Daniel Hope, Mr. Pressler and Antonio Meneses.Julien Jourdes for The New York Times“We do everything together, the good things and the bad,” Mr. Pressler told The New York Times in 1981. “We travel and get lost together. We eat meals together. As in every close relationship, the musical traits and qualities that first attracted us to one another can become irritants, so we have to keep renewing the attractions that first brought us together. We try to handle our separate egos and create a single ego for the whole group.”Over decades, the trio’s violinists and cellists came and went — changes that might have doomed the precarious balance of sound, interpretation and chemistry that is the heart of chamber music. But critics said the trio was held together by the diminutive, cherubic, irrepressibly ebullient Mr. Pressler, who as mentor and leader preserved its technical quality and its confluence of musical views.The Beaux Arts eventually won a devoted global following and many awards. It recorded nearly all the piano trio repertory — Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saëns and others — mostly on the Philips label, through the boom years of LPs and into the digital age. The group was praised for redefining the perception of the piano trio and of chamber music itself.“In recent years, we’ve seen a rapid expansion not only of the audience for chamber music, but of that audience’s sophistication and its awareness that the genre also includes sonatas, piano trios, small vocal ensembles, quintets, sextets and indeed all manner of combinations,” John Rockwell of The Times wrote in 1979. “And for that expansion of awareness, we can partly thank the Beaux Arts Trio.”In 2008, when the Beaux Arts Trio disbanded after 53 years, Mr. Pressler was still its anchor, the last surviving original member. He was 84, but he continued performing as a soloist and with ensembles. He also continued teaching at Indiana University, where he held the Charles H. Webb chair in Music.Menahem Pressler was born in Magdeburg, Germany, on Dec. 16, 1923, 153 years after what is generally accepted as Beethoven’s birthday. One of three children of Moshe and Judith (Zavderer) Pressler, he began playing the piano at 6 and was an accomplished performer as a teenager, taught secretly by a church organist after Hitler’s persecution of the Jews rose to a fever pitch.He recalled Kristallnacht, in November 1938, when the Nazis orchestrated a nationwide attack on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.“The thugs broke into our family shop in Magdeburg — a gentleman’s outfitters,” Mr. Pressler told The Guardian in 2008. His English still accented with the German of his childhood, he slipped into the present tense as vivid memories returned: “We are hiding in the house, hoping it will go by. In the street, you hear running, yelling, smashing sounds, banging at the door.”Menahem, his parents and his siblings, Leo and Selma, escaped to Italy months later and then reached Haifa. His grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all perished in the Holocaust.Tormented by loss and dislocation and unable to eat, he grew thin and weak. One day, playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, he fainted. But it was a turning point.“It has idealism,” he said of the sonata. “It has hedonism, it has regret, it has something that builds like a fugue. And at the very end, something that is very rare in Beethoven’s last sonatas — it is triumphant. It says, ‘Yes, my life is worth living.’”He recovered, and at 16 he performed with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.After winning a Debussy competition in 1946, Mr. Pressler moved to New York. His Carnegie Hall debut, at which he performed Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, won rave reviews.“This, indeed, was the playing of a free artist, secure in his birthright,” Olin Downes wrote in The Times. “The presence of a huge orchestra, an authoritative conductor, an immense audience, did not and could not inhibit the warmth, the loveliness and certainty of his interpretation.”In 1949, he married Sara Scherchen. She died in 2014. His survivors include their son, Amittai; their daughter, Edna Pressler; and his partner since 2016, Annabelle Weidenfeld. Mr. Pressler had homes in London and Bloomington, Ind.In 1955, the same year Mr. Pressler began teaching at Indiana University, the Beaux Arts Trio made its debut at the Berkshire Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. (now the Tanglewood Music Festival).Touring was often a bizarre experience. Mr. Pressler played pianos that were out of tune, battered or broken. One piano’s pedals once fell off. In a town in Chile, he was presented with an upright. In another hall, the piano had a dead key, and a message: “I tried to fix that note but I couldn’t. Try not to use it too much.” Some page turners could not read music. The trio was stranded in India. Mr. Greenhouse did an entire European tour with his leg in a cast.But to perceptive audiences, the trio was a marvel, not only of sound but also of subtle sights. Its performers were in constant visual and aural communication with one another — heads swiveling and nodding, eyes making contact, bows signaling cues, the pianist’s left-hand upbeat cuing the cello’s entrance or the violin’s stroke: an undercurrent of almost imperceptible signs as the tidal melody swelled and ebbed.While the trio’s artistry was achieved over many years, it was tested periodically by the adaptations required to incorporate new members. After 32 years as the cellist, Mr. Greenhouse was succeeded by Peter Wiley (1987-98) and Antonio Meneses (1998-2008). Mr. Guilet was replaced by Isidore Cohen (1968-92), Ida Kavafian (1992-98) Young Uck Kim (1998-2002) and Daniel Hope (2002-8).The Beaux Arts often performed as many as 130 concerts a year in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas, including annual appearances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.“Menahem Pressler: Artistry in Piano Teaching,” by William Brown, was published in 2008. That year, Mr. Pressler returned to Germany to observe the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. And in 2013, at 90, he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, at a New Year’s Eve concert that was televised live throughout the world. More

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      Review: When the Philharmonic Applauds the Soloist

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      Without interplay from the musicians, Leonidas Kavakos found tension in his own playing in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto.After the musicians of the New York Philharmonic finished Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto on Thursday night, they did something they don’t usually do: They applauded the soloist.With a violinist on the order of Leonidas Kavakos, that reaction felt justified. He is a wonder. The music flowed out of him like a river — big, glistening and unobstructed, but also tasteful in its frictionless subtleties.Shostakovich, under the watch of Soviet authorities and brought to heel at Stalin’s pleasure, completed the concerto in 1948 but, presumably fearing retribution for failing to glorify the nation and its people, shelved it until after Stalin’s death in 1953. The work is constructed as a suite of movements. It opens with a character piece, a murkily colored Nocturne that lives in the Upside Down of Chopin’s genre-defining works for piano, and reaches a climax in a Baroque-derived Passacaglia, at once august and austere, that leads into a fiendish five-minute cadenza for the soloist.Playing from memory, Kavakos cleared one hazard after another in Shostakovich’s stupendously original score. He didn’t just spin legato lines in the searching, conversational Nocturne; he expounded entire legato paragraphs in an eloquent, unbroken stream of consciousness. Shredding his way through the Scherzo, his tone was poised, even lavish. Where some violinists convey a sense of anguish in demanding passages — playing two melodies in duet or an endless seesaw of double stops — he sounded effortless. Even his harmonics had a juicy ping.The orchestra, led by Gianandrea Noseda, faded into the background. The players failed to envelop Kavakos in the Nocturne’s glimmering, unsettling darkness. The Scherzo had no abandon, and the Burlesque’s funhouse-mirror distortions of the concerto’s once-noble themes had no derision. Noseda fitfully ratcheted up the intensity of the Passacaglia with its implacable 17-bar pattern. As energy slacked, shy deference reigned.Without interplay from the orchestra, Kavakos found tension in his own playing. In the cadenza, he could have been a caged animal reacquainting itself with its own majesty. His encore, taken from Bach’s Partita No. 1, was spellbinding.It was hard to imagine how anything could follow Kavakos’s performance, and perhaps someone at the Philharmonic felt the same way. After he left the stage, an announcement was made that the next piece, George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 1, would be pushed to after intermission.During the break, I wondered if the clean, bright acoustics of the Philharmonic’s new hall were partly to blame for the orchestra’s showing in the Shostakovich. Each instrumental section sounded crisp, soloistic and unblended.The Walker, an imaginative exercise in disparate timbres, dispelled those suspicions. The orchestra, from the pointed brasses to the curling woodwinds, found its way to unanimity of utterance.The final piece, Respighi’s “Roman Festivals,” gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to demonstrate how far it has come in calibrating its sound to the enhanced acoustics of its new auditorium. A composer of sunny bombast, Respighi provided the stirring finale for the ensemble’s first subscription program of the season in October with “Pines of Rome,” the second piece in his Roman trilogy. At the time, colors practically bounced off the walls in the lively acoustic; climaxes, perhaps overshot, took on a fuzzy quality.On Thursday, the orchestra showed off the clarity of fortissimo passages, layering percussion, brass and strings in handsome tiers. Corrosive brasses and heated strings enlivened the Respighi’s first movement, and gray-toned woodwinds, transparent violins, and luxuriant cellos and basses colored the second.In something of a redo of Shostakovich’s Burlesque, “Roman Festivals” closes with a portrait of the antic, circuslike crowds of Piazza Navona in Rome. The Philharmonic’s players came alive in the coordinated chaos. It was the sound of revelers falling into a shared rhythm — and of an orchestra relearning how to play with itself.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More