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      Review: At 95, a Conductor Is Still Showing New Facets

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      Herbert Blomstedt introduced the New York Philharmonic to a piece he premiered in Stockholm 59 years ago.At 95, the conductor Herbert Blomstedt is still showing new sides of himself to the New York Philharmonic.New sides that are also old ones. On Thursday at David Geffen Hall, he introduced the orchestra to Ingvar Lidholm’s “Poesis,” a work whose premiere he led 59 years ago as a rising maestro in Stockholm.Lidholm (1921-2017) was part of the European avant-garde that sought a fresh start for music in the rubble-strewn wake of World War II, advancing Schoenberg’s 12-tone theories as a way to decisively sweep aside Romanticism and the rest of a fraught cultural past. But, ever curious, Lidholm didn’t stay a doctrinaire serialist for long, and the 18-minute “Poesis” is an exploration of elemental sound and stark drama without reliance on stylistic rules.From an indelible, primordial start — pieces of rough sandpaper rubbed together in an unpredictable rhythm over a quivering haze in the strings — the work unfolds tensely, with groups of instruments that are not exactly in angry conflict but are all strong-willed and sharp-elbowed. Uneasy groans and light bruises of tone suddenly condense into buzzing clouds that explode in a storm of slapped bows on strings, glinting violins and roaring brasses before receding back to a mood of clenched hovering.A pianist (here the strong, unflappable Eric Huebner) provides pounding clusters — answered by shocks of percussion and woozy trombones — and shimmering plucks and strums of the strings inside his instrument. He sometimes softly strikes those strings with a mallet for the barest halo of sound, and at one point loudly blows a whistle directly at the audience; Lidholm doesn’t shy from arresting theatricality.In another passage, the players briefly whisper sibilants; a series of sliding glissandos in a double bass near the end, almost vocal, feels like a tiny, impeded aria. Alongside strict notation, Lidholm provides room for improvisation within bounds, giving the music a core sense of something seething and fertile.It’s a grandly stern piece, but, like the best of its space-age era, it pulses deep down with a kind of optimism that comes off as sweetly poignant today, the underlying conviction that a fresh postwar start was possible. There’s poised elegance to its savage volatility.So close did Blomstedt remain to “Poesis” and its composer over the decades that when Lidholm revised the piece in 2011 — making a wild central piano solo quieter and more reflective — the new version was dedicated to this conductor, whose career has continued past expectations to this age-defying, jaw-dropping point.Having missed some concerts last year after a fall, Blomstedt walked on and offstage on Thursday with assistance from the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, Frank Huang. But once seated on a piano stool placed on the podium, he hardly seemed frail; his gestures were, as usual, restrained and focused. He addressed the audience before “Poesis” with a down-to-earth wit that made Lidholm’s sometimes forbidding world more welcoming.And after intermission he was a gracious guide through Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” This was a leisurely, mellow, thoroughly pastoral rendition of a piece that under other batons — like that, as my colleague David Allen recently observed, of Charles Munch — can be hair-raising. At Geffen Hall, terror didn’t infringe on even the final sections, the “March to the Scaffold” and “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath.”But the playing was polished, lucid and natural, the work of a conductor with no need to prove himself with inflated intensity. Referring to Huebner, the pianist in “Poesis,” Blomstedt had earlier reassured the audience about that piece’s more outré techniques. “It’s music,” he said, “because he’s a musician.” In Blomstedt’s hands, too, everything is simply, sincerely musical.New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Facing Death, a Pianist Recorded Music of Unspeakable Emotions

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      Lars Vogt, for one of his final albums made before dying from cancer, turned to chamber music by Schubert with Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff.There are recordings that are meant for the ages, that are intended to sound definitive. There are recordings that document a fleeting interpretation, that inspire or provoke, that accept the impossibility of a final word. And then there are the rare recordings whose circumstances defy the ordinary routines of an artist, that capture a high or a low moment in that person’s life and, matched to the right music, transcend it.In February 2021, Lars Vogt probably should not have traveled to Bremen, Germany, to join his close friends, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his sister, the cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, in recording Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat. Vogt, a widely beloved pianist and a conductor on the rise, arrived in pain; his doctors had asked him not to go, but to check into a hospital to await a conclusive diagnosis of the cancer that would take his life, at just 51, last September.Instead, Vogt sat down at a keyboard.“He did the most incredible things,” Christian said in an interview, adding that Vogt, his colleague of 26 years, suddenly played as if he had reached a kind of fulfillment or liberation. “Even on a technical level,” he continued, “I’d never heard him in this kind of perfection, exuberance, lightness. He was everything at the same time.”Vogt, who spoke openly about his illness, continued to perform until not long before his death; he was making plans for a U.S. tour with the Tetzlaffs this spring, on which they will now be joined by one of Vogt’s dearest students, Kiveli Dörken.Vogt’s remaining recordings include concertos by Mendelssohn and Mozart, as well as a Schubert album with the tenor Ian Bostridge.Anna VogtThe Schubert — to which Vogt and the Tetzlaffs added an earlier trio and other works by the composer for a double album, out on the Ondine label this week — was far from the pianist’s valedictory recording. With the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, of which he was music director, he taped Mendelssohn and Mozart concertos; with the tenor Ian Bostridge, Schubert’s “Schwanengesang.”But the E flat trio — a piece in which Schubert, a year short of his own death, peers into the darkness yet finds joy — became particularly significant to Vogt. “Feels a little bit like everything, at least in my life, has developed toward this Trio in E flat major,” he wrote after hearing the recording, in a message to the Tetzlaffs that is quoted in the album’s liner notes. “If not much time remains, then it’s a worthy farewell.”Schubert: Piano Trio in E Flat, finaleChristian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine)As Tanja tells it, an awareness of mortality was not entirely new in Vogt’s personality or artistry, though he necessarily felt it more strongly as his cancer treatment progressed.“It was always this strange mixture of feeling, ‘OK, there is death somewhere, and there is despair, frustration, whatever, it’s there because we’re human beings’ — and then, next moment, he would be the most silly and joyful person,” she said. “That’s what always made his playing so incredibly touching, because you see the whole range of the human tragedy, and the lightness of life.”Judging by his recordings, Vogt was a heartfelt soloist, excelling in the Bach-Schubert-Brahms lineage, yet he was arguably at his finest as a chamber musician; even the tone he gleaned from a piano — compassionate, never domineering — seems to invite collaboration. The Schubert album is the latest in a peerless series of releases with the Tetzlaffs that bears witness to a relationship not just between three artists of stature, but among intimates with a common, fearless commitment to expression.“It’s something that’s a bit hard to understand totally from the outside; there was a very strong symbiosis,” Reijo Kiilunen, the founder and managing director of Ondine, said of the trio’s recording sessions, in which they appeared to speak “a special language” with one another. “You simply hear it in their playing.”Before the Schubert, Vogt and the Tetzlaffs had essayed the three Brahms trios, as well as two by Dvorak; with Christian alone, there were accounts of sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. There is never the feeling, in any of those interpretations, that the instrumentalists are competing for the limelight or trying to impress anyone, least of all the listener; they are sharing the music with one another.One of those recordings has become especially poignant since it was made in 2015: a searing reading of Brahms’s Violin Sonata in G, which was also the last piece that Vogt and Christian played together, as nurses gathered to hear them perform a week or so before the pianist’s death.There is one passage, in the first movement, that movingly illustrates their partnership. It seems simple enough — the violin strums, like a guitar, as the piano adopts the searching main theme — and most duos play it simply, as a basic question of foreground and background. Yet Vogt’s tone is soft, withdrawn, as if he does not want the attention to fall entirely on himself, but would rather draw the ear to the support that Christian is offering, the essential accompaniment to his mournful song. There is no ego.Brahms: Violin Sonata in G, first movementChristian Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine)“In Lars’s words, which I think we all share,” Christian said, “the incredible difference between Schubert and Brahms is that Schubert shows you the absurdity, the horror and the beauty of everything, and Brahms actually takes you by your hand, and tries to give solace.” With Brahms, he added, “you have somebody at your side who is very much like you, and suffering like you. Whereas you are next to Schubert, and say, ‘Who is this giant?’”For the Tetzlaffs, Schubert’s E flat trio represents Vogt’s emotional landscape, as well as the strength he showed in the face of his illness. Finished in November 1827, the piece dwells on Beethoven’s death earlier that year: It is in the same key as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, and it likewise centers on a funeral march, in C minor, whose shadow is cast off only in a finale that takes consolation, of a sort, in compositional virtuosity, delighting as it layers themes on top of one another.“This is like a psychodrama with Lars dealing with the situation,” Christian said. “He would still have the loudest laughter and the wildest demeanor, engaging with us. But this is also what Schubert is doing in that slow movement: dealing with pain in a way that is not hiding, and not getting smaller, but getting bigger.”The funeral march, with moments of dignified hope that are interrupted by outbursts of extreme turmoil, is clearly a reckoning with the abyss, so much so that Schubert demands the impossible from the people playing it, much as grief asks of its sufferers. There is one point where the string lines are marked triple forte, yet crescendo from there, accents spiking the way. It’s unplayable writing, for unspeakable emotions.“He says, ‘Deal with it; say something,’” Christian explained of Schubert in those moments. “But how?”Schubert: Piano Trio in E Flat, Andante con motoChristian Tetzlaff, Tanja Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt (Ondine)For Vogt, music remained, to the end, a means of saying something. The Tetzlaffs said that he timed his chemotherapy treatments to fit his concert and recording schedule, and that playing helped keep him going.“It reminds me of a Ukrainian woman I know,” Tanja said. “She said, in Ukraine — because from one side, from the other side, it was always conquered by different people — there is a saying: When things get bad, we start laughing, and when things get unbearably bad, we make music; we sing.”Making music, “you are away, somehow, from real tragedies, but you can canalize everything that you are feeling and suffering from into something that becomes a moment,” Tanja continued. “It’s so incredibly important that we have this. I mean, what a miracle.” More

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      For the Conductor Charles Munch, Virtuosity Meant Taking Risks

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      When Charles Munch started work as the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1949, he gave a speech.There wasn’t much he could say, in truth. His English was poor, though he had just sacrificed an umlaut in his surname in deference to American spelling. An Alsatian sometimes known in Germany as Karl, and in France always as Charles, he had served the Kaiser on the Somme in the First World War, then defended French culture in resistance to the Nazis in the Second. If he bothered to hold a rehearsal at all, he spoke to his musicians in a variety of languages, or let his gestures, flamboyant yet intentional, do the talking.Munch wanted to make one thing clear to the Bostonians, though: He was not their former music director, Serge Koussevitzky. The orchestra’s players had toiled under him, an autocrat whose shadow lingered over Munch, too. Even after Munch died in 1968 — while touring the United States with the Orchestre de Paris, which he had formed a year before — his New York Times obituary labored over the comparison with his predecessor, describing his task as having been “on a par with trying to follow Thomas Alva Edison as an inventor or Magellan as a navigator.”Yet Munch had no interest in being Koussevitzky’s kind of maestro; once a Stradivarius-wielding concertmaster himself, he saw no artistic or human point in making a musician miserable. As Time reported in a cover story in December 1949, he spent his first weeks in Boston telling his players that they could rest easier. In his introductory remarks, he told them that “there will be joy.”Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3, finaleBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1959 (Sony)For him, “beauty, joy and goodness” were the calling of an artist. As such, music, as he said in 1954, could offer “reconciliation with life itself.” Munch was shy and private when his baton was not slicing through sound; his biographer, D. Kern Holoman, has argued that conducting gave him relief from sadness of all sorts, whether the grief of enduring two wars between the cultures that claimed him, or the anguish of an unhappy marriage. (Holoman taught at the University of California, Davis, until 2017, when he left over rape allegations.)Conducting may have given Munch relief, but perhaps not deliverance. His interpretations could be as extreme as his times, at one moment outlandishly swift or brutally violent, contemplative or uncommonly tender the next, giddy fun at the last. The critic Virgil Thomson wrote of his approach to Franck’s Symphony that “he plays it very slow and very fast, very soft and very loud, reins it in and whips it up, gives it (and us) a huge workout.” That description fits more broadly; Munch was the rare conductor who welcomed imprecisions, even coarseness of tone, in his pursuit of outright spontaneity. An objectivist he was not.All this and more is clear from Munch’s enthralling discography. His Boston recordings for the RCA label were collated in an 86-disc Sony set in 2016; it has sold out, but most of the contents are still on streaming platforms. Warner and Eloquence have since separately boxed their catalogs of his pre- and post-Boston releases, giving a sense of Munch from his first sessions, with the pianist Alfred Cortot in Saint-Saëns in 1935, to his last, with the Orchestre de Paris in Ravel in 1968.Schubert: Symphony No. 9, finaleBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1958 (Sony)Munch was a different musician under studio conditions than he was live, Holoman writes, and he controlled his most explosive tendencies in the hope of making records that would last. Even his two incendiary Boston readings of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” his trademark piece, come nowhere close to the maelstrom he inflamed onstage. He dared one of the world’s most proficient orchestras to play beyond itself in concert; some of his finest releases — his Schubert Ninth, his Mendelssohn Third — are, conversely, those in which he builds tension by refusing to let go as blatantly as he might in front of an audience.Even so, sample Munch’s recordings — more than the Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel in which he was justly celebrated — and it is hard to disagree with the verdict of the Times critic Howard Taubman, who wrote of a 1950 concert: “Whether the music is illuminated or driven, it is never just respectable or indifferent. It is alive; it is the natural outgrowth of the conductor’s point of view.”MUNCH WAS BORN in Strasbourg, which was then in Germany, on Sept. 26, 1891, into a dynasty of musicians. His father, Ernest, mounted a Bach revival leading the church choir of Saint-Guillaume; his brother, Fritz, was a conductor and conservatory director; his uncle Eugène was an organist who taught Albert Schweitzer, whose friendship and spirituality influenced Charles throughout his life.Charles learned all kinds of instruments, like a little Bach might, but settled on the violin and was playing under his father’s baton by his early teens. He went to Paris in 1912 to study with Lucien Capet, a famed quartet violinist, but returned home to his family days before Germany invaded Belgium. Conscripted into the German army with two brothers, he was injured as an artilleryman at Verdun; he subsequently embraced pacifism and took succor in music.The common critique of Munch as a mature conductor was that his volatility ill fit works in the Haydn-to-Brahms tradition, but he had a strong training in the Romantic school of German conducting. After playing as the concertmaster of the Strasbourg orchestra from 1919 to 1924, he spent a year under Hermann Abendroth in Cologne, then held the same post at the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig for six seasons, working for Wilhelm Furtwängler and Bruno Walter. His return to Paris in 1932 to start his podium career — with Brahms’s First — was made possible by the wealth of the Nestlé heiress Geneviève Maury, his new wife.At first, Munch was renowned for supporting new music, and during World War II, he made his allegiances clear by protecting and promoting French composers. At the helm of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, France’s leading ensemble, Munch told his players in September 1940 that it was through art that they could “continue the fight.” One of his most intimate friends, the pianist Nicole Henriot, would have her hand crushed by the Gestapo; Munch joined the Resistance, helped those he could, and tried to avoid compromising situations.Munch leading the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony at Symphony Hall in 1964.BSO ArchivesResearch on the culture of wartime France by Jane F. Fulcher, Leslie A. Sprout and other scholars has suggested that while the Nazis visited horrors on Jewish artists, neither the occupiers nor their Vichy collaborators — nor their Resistance opponents — sought to curtail concert life. Most musicians in the Resistance carried on as if the occupation did not exist; French music, except that by Jews, was not banned. Careful still to tend to proud Parisian traditions in the Germanic classics, Munch spent much of the war showcasing contemporary scores, such as politically ambiguous new works like Honegger’s Second Symphony and pieces that had been written in Nazi camps, including Jean Martinon’s “Stalag IX.”Munch and the Société became so busy, they reached a strikingly high standard. Their wartime recordings, now in the Warner box, are remarkable for their calm, even in “La Mer” or “La Valse.” After their liberation, they let loose for Decca; the Eloquence set superbly reproduces the orchestra’s distinctive postwar timbre, as well as Munch’s intensity of expression. There is crisp Beethoven, heartbreaking Tchaikovsky, delicate yet eager Ravel. An account of Berlioz’s “Le Corsaire,” from May 1948, is so exhilarating, it is little surprise that the authorities were reluctant to let Munch leave.Berlioz: “Le Corsaire”Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1948 (Eloquence)BUT LEAVE MUNCH DID. On an initial visit to the United States that started near the end of 1946, he enjoyed the New York Philharmonic yet found the Boston Symphony to be “the culmination of all orchestras,” as he told The Boston Globe. He led that ensemble in only seven concerts before he signed a contract to become its permanent conductor, in March 1948. Despite a brutal schedule that included the first tour by an American orchestra in the Soviet Union, in 1956, he stayed through 1962.While George Szell was giving the Cleveland Orchestra a focused power, and Eugene Ormandy sought glitter and gold in Philadelphia, Munch brightened Boston’s formerly dark hues, bringing its strident brass and cutting winds to the fore — most prominently the quivering principal flute of Doriot Anthony Dwyer, who became the only woman in the orchestra after Munch hired her in 1952.Debussy: “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune”Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1956 (Sony)Critics heard the transparent, though dry, results as typically French, but the ensemble’s fervor — its blare, some said — under Munch was his own, removed from the grace that his mentor, Pierre Monteux, drew from the same players. If Thomson had warned the Symphony in 1944 that “its form is perfect, but it does not communicate,” after a decade of Munch, the reverse might have been more true.The cliché about Munch’s Boston Symphony was that it was all but a Parisian ensemble in exile. “When I was living in New York in the ’50s,” Michael Steinberg of The Globe wrote in 1964, “I used to imagine Symphony Hall as the scene of a more or less perpetual performance of the Berlioz ‘Symphonie Fantastique,’ relieved now and again by ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ and ‘La Mer.’” That slur notwithstanding, Munch’s advocacy was unwavering and proud: His Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel were references for a generation.Although the beauties of Munch’s Boston-era recordings of French music are great, some of them stray intriguingly from the norm. He rarely treated Debussy or Ravel as scores only to paint with prettily: For all their gorgeous interplay of voices, there is often a bite to them, as if Munch were deliberately placing them in a lineage that ran back to Berlioz and forward to Roussel and Honegger, and later Dutilleux. Once or twice, his own loneliness breaks through; he draws out “Le Jardin Féerique,” at the end of “Ma Mère l’Oye,” until it is tear-inducingly poignant.Still, Munch’s tastes were broad, and he could be as fascinating beyond the French repertory. As a matter of principle and proclivity, he kept up Koussevitzky’s loyalty to new music, ardently recording Piston, Martinu and other works that he premiered. He largely avoided Germany after the war, but the most performed composers in his first decade in Boston were Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms. Little of his hard-driven Mozart and already-outdated Bach survive, but his Brahms was strong, and his Beethoven full of ideas.Beethoven: “Coriolan” OvertureBoston Symphony Orchestra, 1956 (Sony)Some of those ideas work, and some do not, but that’s the reminder that Munch offers today: Virtuosity is empty without the thrill of interpretive risk. “He was without peer in the things he did best and, even in the things he did worst, never less than interesting,” the critic Martin Bernheimer wrote after his death. “There are few like him left.” More

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      California’s Leading Conductors Come Together for a New Festival

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      Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Rafael Payare will assemble their orchestras and more for the California Festival: A Celebration of New Music.LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Rafael Payare are the three most influential orchestra leaders in California, but the first time they met as a group was last week.The setting was a Right Bank hotel overlooking the Seine in Paris, and the subject was California: in particular a new, two-week music festival, announced by the three conductors’ orchestras on Tuesday, that will be staged in dozens of venues across the state in November.“I still can’t believe it worked,” said Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Paris Opera, of he and his fellow conductors getting together. They had just recorded a promotional video for the festival’s website. “Not only were we all in the same city, but we all happened also to be free for an hour.”The November event — called the California Festival: A Celebration of New Music — is a collaborative project organized by three maestros, Dudamel from Los Angeles, Salonen from the San Francisco Symphony and Payare from the San Diego Symphony. Cumulatively, they have spent about 35 years on California podiums.Salonen, who was the Los Angeles orchestra’s music director from 1992 until 2009 and remains a draw when he guest conducts here, said that the festival would pay tribute to the enthusiasm of California audiences for new music by little-known composers, the kind of works that he, Dudamel and Payare have each promoted from their podiums.“It’s been something I had been thinking about for a long time, from when I knew I would be taking over in San Francisco,” Salonen said in an interview from Paris, where he was conducting the Orchestre de Paris in a performance of his new Sinfonia Concertante for Organ and Orchestra. “Instead of seeing each other as rivals, we should do something together.”The festival, which is planned for Nov. 3 through Nov. 19, will feature, in addition to the three conductors’ ensembles, over 50 orchestras, chamber music groups, choirs and jazz ensembles. They will perform in grand spaces like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, as well as smaller and more intimate ones tucked in communities across the state. The bulk of the repertory, which is still being organized, will be from the past five years, and from the worlds of jazz and classical music.“The whole idea is that there will be new music, commissioned in the last five years, and with different composers from everywhere,” said Payare, who had taken a train from London to Paris to meet Dudamel and Salonen, where he was conducting “The Barber of Seville” at the Royal Opera House. “There’s a lot of music that has not been explored, that have never been performed. It tells us a lot about this period of California. It’s very welcoming and lets you be who you are and do things that are not traditional.”Most of the performances will be indoor. “As the festival happens in November, we’ll have all of our performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall,” said Dudamel, who also leads the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. But in San Diego, which is temperate almost year-round, Payare said, some of the shows that he will conduct will be at the orchestra’s new outdoor Rady Shell.Salonen said that while these conductors were overseeing the festival, they were also letting the individual groups chose what they want to present to audiences. “This is not curated in any kind of centralized way,” he said. “It’s more like taking the temperature of what’s going on at the moment. These can be their own commissions, or some other pieces. New pieces that they feel compelled to present.”This kind of collaboration, Dudamel said, might be novel here, but he was used to it in South America, where he grew up.“In Venezuela we work like this all of the time, sharing and creating together, and this coming together feels like a meeting of old, like-minded friends to be honest,” he said. “It’s something that feels quite natural.” More

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      Tanglewood’s Summer Season Blends Familiar and New

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      The Boston Symphony Orchestra, grappling with leadership turnover, hopes to attract audiences with a program of classics and contemporary fare.Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, drew sold-out crowds last year, a milestone in its recovery from the pandemic.This summer, the orchestra hopes to build on that success with a program that blends familiar works with more contemporary offerings, the ensemble announced on Wednesday.The lineup includes works by 28 living composers, including the world premiere, in July, of a piece by Iman Habibi, led by the orchestra’s music director, Andris Nelsons. There are also more traditional works, including a concert performance of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” also led by Nelsons in July, and appearances by festival regulars including the pianist Emanuel Ax and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.“This year’s programs both inspire a sense of discovery and celebrate returning guest artists whose appearances move us so deeply year after year,” Nelsons said in a statement.The new season, which starts in late June and runs through late August, comes as the Boston Symphony grapples with leadership turnover. In December, Gail Samuel, the ensemble’s first female president and chief executive, said she would resign her post, just 18 months into her tenure. Soon after, another senior leader, Asadour Santourian, a vice president of the orchestra who oversaw Tanglewood and the orchestra’s education efforts, abruptly resigned.The Boston Symphony has declined to comment in depth on the departures. Samuel has been replaced on an interim basis by Jeffrey D. Dunn, a member of the orchestra’s advisory board. Ed Gazouleas, a former violist in the orchestra and a longtime faculty member at the Tanglewood Music Center, is overseeing the summer season as the orchestra searches for a permanent replacement for Santourian.After canceling its season in 2020 because of the pandemic and hosting a shortened season in 2021, Tanglewood returned almost to full force last year. The festival drew around 290,000 patrons, compared with 312,000 in 2019, though there were fewer events in 2021.This summer, a variety of contemporary works will be featured. “Makeshift Castle” by Julia Adolphe, which premiered at Tanglewood last year, will be performed again in August, paired with Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, featuring Ma as soloist.Later that month, the orchestra will perform “Four Black American Dances” by Carlos Simon, alongside Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 5 and Gershwin’s Concerto in F, both featuring the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.Keith Lockhart will lead five programs by the Boston Pops, including a new symphonic version of the musical “Ragtime.” More

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      Review: Leif Ove Andsnes Adds to Carnegie Hall History

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      The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes brought Dvorak’s sprawling 1889 rarity to New York with committed playing and interpretive wisdom.“Probably few pianists will have sufficient courage to play them all in succession,” Antonin Dvorak predicted about the 13 sections of his sprawling, nearly hourlong “Poetic Tone Pictures.” But, he added, “only in this way can the listener obtain a proper notion of what I intended, for this time I am not just an absolute composer but also a poet.”He was correct; since it was written in 1889, “Poetic Tone Pictures” has been taken up by so few pianists, it didn’t arrive at Carnegie Hall until Tuesday evening, as the dreamily kaleidoscopic second half of a recital by Leif Ove Andsnes.It has been a week of firsts at Carnegie. On Saturday, Yuja Wang accomplished the sensationally unheard-of — at the hall, if not in the world — by muscling through Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” in a marathon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Tuesday’s recital was another impressive milestone, but, in Andsnes fashion, a more modest one.His performance of the Dvorak — measured in appearance but interpretively varied, played with thorough commitment and characteristic wisdom — had the qualities of a standard-setting account. Even if “Poetic Tone Pictures” doesn’t return to Carnegie any time soon, Andsnes made a compelling argument for why it should: how, despite its unpianistic moments and longueurs, it is, in its entirety, a touching display of awe at life itself, told with a folk tune or a naïve melody, a solemn march or a sentimental dance.The work’s expansiveness was a contrast to the recital’s first half, which was thematically focused, with a trajectory from reticence to unambiguous passion in a clear but gentle gesture toward the war in Ukraine. Andsnes fashioned something like a suite from four pieces played straight through, beginning with Alexander Vustin’s “Lamento,” from 1974, and drawing from over 200 years of classical music history.Vustin, a Russian composer who is thought to have died of complications from Covid-19 early in the pandemic, straddled tonality and the avant-garde fashions of post-World War II music. In “Lamento,” for example, Andsnes’s left hand faintly beat chords of shifting harmonies, while his right one, more angular and unpredictable, entered with a trill before letting out atonal flourishes and chirping interjections — but never for long, like fervent ideas held back from full expression.By the end, all that remains are the chords, at a whisper, which on Tuesday led naturally into the quiet, pained opening of Janacek’s sonata “1.X.1905, ‘From the Street,’” written in memory of a 20-year-old Czech worker who was killed — pointlessly, Janacek believed — by a German soldier during a political demonstration. Here, it was as if the sentiment of “Lamento” had surfaced in mournful lyricism and waves of rage.Janacek destroyed the sonata’s third movement, tearing it out of the score and throwing it into a stove the day it premiered in 1906, but Andsnes programmed a fitting coda in a 2005 bagatelle by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s pre-eminent composer. Like many Silvestrov pieces, this one was a touch too pretty, even in Andsnes’s unforced reading, but after the Janacek, its insistent serenity came off as a plea for beauty, if not for peace.That could have sufficed for the recital’s first half. If there was a misstep on Tuesday, it was in following the bagatelle with Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, which might have provided an impassioned climax had it not been performed with such a level head. Instead, it prolonged a point that had already been made.If anything, the slowly accumulating final chord of the bagatelle could have set up the softly arpeggiated one at the start of “Twilight Way,” the first of the “Poetic Tone Pictures.” (Hardly representational, Dvorak’s character pieces would be better served by a more literal translation from their Czech title, “Poetic Moods.”) From there, Andsnes was a masterly shepherd of this score, never losing sight of its sometimes obscured line and maintaining control of its agonizingly tricky articulations to bring out the reverent dignity of “In the Old Castle”; the sweet, I-could-have-danced-all-night shadow of a melody in “Furiant”; and the shards of light cutting through a chorale in “On the Holy Mountain.”At Carnegie, you could understand, even appreciate, Dvorak’s pride in what he had created with these humble observations of Czech life. “It is an ominous number,” he wrote to a friend of the 13 movements, “but there were just as many Moravian duets and they, after all, managed to wander quite a way through the world! Perhaps they will do so again.” Over 130 years later, they have.Leif Ove AndsnesPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Kronos Quartet Offers a Creative Snapshot of a Global Pandemic

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      A diverse group of composers presented nine new and recent works at Carnegie Hall on Friday, ranging from exuberant joyfulness to existential questioning.No one is ever going to say that Kronos Quartet is satisfied with the string quartet status quo. This group, founded nearly 50 years ago by violinist David Harrington, has, in its malleable virtuosity, become a wellspring for hundreds of new music commissions. Some of those have become iconic pieces of repertoire; others have provided real-time snapshots of creative collaborations. True to form, this Kronos program at Zankel Hall featured nine new and recent works, nearly all written during the past three years. It offered a wide palette of sonic ideas and creative visions, though some were more fully formed than others.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. The Benin-born composer and singer Angélique Kidjo’s “YanYanKliYan Senamido #2,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, provided an easefully exuberant start to the evening, with interlocked melodies and rhythms playing call-and-response. The Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi’s “Daughters of Sol” was a profoundly meditative study on shade and color, with each layer unfolding slowly into another. The Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “I Haven’t the Words” was a restless, questioning susurration precipitated by the tumults of 2020, including the pandemic lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. Jennifer TaylorThe movement-based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake entered Zankel for the world premiere of her “eyes closed” with the regality of a one-woman procession, carrying a clutch of large plastic sheets. She distributed them to Harrington, violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt. They became her fellow dancers, twisting and fluttering the sheets into three-dimensional shapes. The conceit was spectacularly imaginative: the sheets had enough form to become both dynamic sculptures and, in their murmured crinkling, significant percussive accompaniment for occasional wails from Sunny Yang’s cello. (The elegiac visual effect was not unlike the plastic bag scene from the film “American Beauty.”)Some works didn’t cohere quite as completely. Mazz Swift’s “She Is a Story, Herself” included several exciting moments, such as flitting small melodic ideas that subsided into a graceful chorale, but the piece overall did not feel fully conceptualized. Canadian composer Nicole Lizée’s “Zonelyhearts,” a lengthy homage to “The Twilight Zone,” tacked wildly between willful wackiness — including using Pop Rocks (yes, the classic 1970s candy) as a form of percussion, amplified with the performers’ open mouths nestled up to microphones — and existential musings on censorship and surveillance.While the stage setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it was also, at times, hard to see what was going on.Jennifer TaylorThe quartet played in Zankel Hall’s temporarily reconfigured, in-the-round seating arrangement. While this setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it also meant that it was hard for a large portion of the audience, myself included, to see three composer/guest musicians who performed their own works alongside Kronos. Instead, we saw only their backs. I overheard nearby concertgoers lamenting that they couldn’t really view such instruments as Soo Yeon Lyuh’s haegeum, a hoarsely voiced, two-stringed and bowed Korean instrument used in her sweetly nostalgic piece “Yessori (Sound from the Past),” or the one-stringed dan bau, the Vietnamese zither played by the virtuoso Van-Anh Vo in her pandemic-era piece “Adrift,” in which the musicians circle around each other melodically, grounded by a walking bass line plucked out by the cello. Nor could we fully appreciate the facial expressions and hand gestures of Peni Candra Rini, the composer and singer from the East Java province of Indonesia who appeared with the quartet in her wistful piece “Maduswara,” also arranged by Garchik.With zero fanfare, this Kronos program included music by eight female composers and one who is nonbinary; many are people of color. (In 2023, such a program would still be lamentably rare at many venues. Carnegie Hall had pledged to give a particular limelight to female performers and composers this season.) What Harrington did note proudly from the stage is that Kidjo, Candra Rini, Darvishi and Lyuh’s pieces were works created for Kronos’s engaging and inspired 50 for the Future commissioning project, which has put 50 recent compositions in the hands of young and emerging ensembles without cost online.This concert also marked the final New York City Kronos Quartet appearance for the cellist Sunny Yang, who has been part of the ensemble for the past decade. (Next month, the group will welcome Paul Wiancko in that chair.) As an encore, the group played Laurie Anderson’s “Flow”; in this context, her short, tender work felt like a benediction.Kronos QuartetPerformed on Friday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Yuja Wang Sweeps Through a Rachmaninoff Marathon

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      It was a momentous occasion as Wang played all five of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra at Carnegie Hall for one show only.Yes, Yuja Wang did an encore.After playing, with electric mastery, all four of Rachmaninoff’s dizzyingly difficult piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” on Saturday — the kind of feat for which the phrase “once in a lifetime” was invented — she would have been forgiven for accepting a sold-out Carnegie Hall’s standing ovation, letting those two and a half hours of music speak for themselves, and heading home for a bubble bath.But this is a superstar artist as famous for what comes after her written programs as during them. At Carnegie in 2018, she responded to waves of applause with seven encores. Appearing with the New York Philharmonic a few weeks ago, she returned to the keyboard no fewer than three times.So on Saturday, the audience hushed as Wang, after all she’d already done with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, sat back down at the piano and played the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.” It had the same freshness and tender lucidity that, in her hands, had lay beneath even Rachmaninoff’s densest, most ferocious fireworks.She didn’t seem to have broken a sweat — neither on her face nor in her music-making, which had been calmly dazzling all the way through the final flourish of the Third Concerto at the program’s end.To these scores’ vast demands she brought both clarity and poetry. She played with heft but not bombast, sentiment but not schmaltz. Her touch can certainly be firm, but not a single note was harsh or overly heavy; her prevailing style is sprightly, which is why the concert didn’t feel like eating five slices of chocolate cake in a row. In the 18th variation of the “Rhapsody,” the work’s aching climax, she began demurely and dreamily before adding muscle. But when the orchestra joined in, a point at which many pianists begin to pound, she refused to hammer.She didn’t give the sense that she was pacing herself, either, over this very long stretch. With five breaks — two pauses, two full intermissions and one long, impromptu stop spurred by a medical emergency in the audience that interrupted the Second Concerto, the opener, just after the final movement had begun — the concert lasted about four and a half hours.Wang took on her marathon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Chris LeeThe program was flanked by the Second and Third concertos, touchstones of the repertory for the past century, and also included the youthful First; the changeable, big-band-inflected Fourth; and the playfully kaleidoscopic “Rhapsody.” The composition and revision of these five pieces extended almost from the beginning to the end of Rachmaninoff’s career, from the early 1890s to the early 1940s. (He was born 150 years ago this April.) But all of them share his unmistakable stamp: the sumptuous soulfulness, the soaring expansions, the restless rhythmic shifts and, of course, the alternation of fierce energy and intimate reflection in the piano.Wang is nimble at that alternation, with power and accuracy in fast fingerwork and fortissimo chords — and, just as important, patience and elegance in cooler moments. Her pillowy chords at the close of the Second Concerto’s middle movement floated quietly into place, and she was shadowy but luminous before that piece’s ending romp.Before the final plunge near the end of the Third Concerto, the piano takes one last, brief inward look. Wang shaped this passage with exquisite detail: the first two chords gentle, the next suddenly louder and surprisingly tough — tougher than she’d sounded in solo moments like this during the whole concert — before the rest of the phrase ebbed into mist. This handful of measures painted a whole situation and personality: vulnerable, strong, searching but not lost. It was as memorable as the blazing runs and octaves that followed.The program’s first block, the Second and First concertos, might have involved shaking out some jitters over the momentousness of the occasion. Whatever the reason, there was a sense of audibly finding the right gear among Nézet-Séguin and this orchestra — which has a historical claim to Rachmaninoff, having premiered the Fourth Concerto and the “Rhapsody” before eventually recording all five of these pieces with him as the soloist.The Second Concerto’s opening movement was unsettled on Saturday, and the balances seemed off: The strings, less rich than turgid, swamped the winds and often Wang. Rubato stretched the line, but everyone wasn’t always stretching in the same direction. Wind solos felt excessively manicured, to the point of preciousness.But things gradually settled in. Apocalyptic storm clouds moodily gathered underneath the piano line in the first movement of the Fourth Concerto. And by the “Rhapsody,” which followed the Fourth, the ensemble had taken on the ideal Rachmaninoff sound: glittering and grand.The Philadelphians were practically feline in the iridescent orchestration of the grim Dies Irae’s appearance in the “Rhapsody.” A shivering hush in the first movement of the Third Concerto was like a snow in which Wang made soft footsteps with the palest chords. In the second movement, the winds at the start sounded as flexible and natural as they had all day, and the orchestra now seemed to sweep Wang’s lines upward rather than smothering her in the race to the final measures.That culminating dash had the easy sparkle of Wang’s best work. The concert also showed off, perhaps better than ever before, another defining feature of her performances: flamboyant clothes.A lot of them. She wore, along with her typical very high heels, a different dress for each of the five pieces, with skintight fits and shimmering fabric in red, ivory, green and silver — and, most immortal, a magenta minidress for the “Rhapsody” paired with sparkling periwinkle leg warmers. (Alas, there was no costume change for the encore. Next time!)With the controversy that greeted Wang’s attire choices 10 or 15 years ago now thankfully muted, we can concentrate on the joyfulness of those choices, which on Saturday were apt partners for these fundamentally joyful works. Virtuosity on this level, in material this ravishing, is elevating to witness — which is why, even after so many hours, I was left at the end feeling an exhilarated lightness. Like many others I saw, I drifted up the aisle and onto the street unable to stop smiling.Yuja Wang and the Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More