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      Where Culture Flows Along London’s River Thames

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      The Southbank Center, the host of this year’s British Academy Film Awards, has become a focal point of the city’s arts and culture scene.LONDON — As Lisa Vine looked out over the River Thames from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Southbank Center’s Royal Festival Hall main foyer, she recalled first coming here as an 11-year-old girl in 1957 to attend a concert.Over the decades, Ms. Vine, a retired teacher and native Londoner, who had stopped in for coffee on the way back from a nearby errand, has seen a lot of change here. She has not only watched the Southbank Center develop — with the Queen Elizabeth Hall opening in 1967 and the Hayward Gallery the next year — she has also seen the area around it grow and change, with the addition of artistic and performance spaces including the National Theater, the British Film Institute, the Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe.“I remember when the river was dull,” she said, looking out at a panorama that includes the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Now, she noted, “there is so much going in terms of concerts and events, but I don’t get out here as often as I should.”That’s the sentiment of Londoners and visitors alike. With so much going on at the Southbank Center, from classical music concerts, dance premieres and D.J. sets to poetry, film and literature festivals, it would be impossible to attend every event. And all of those happenings — at a venue that’s open five nights a week, where about 3,500 annual events take place — have made the Southbank Center one of the focal points of London’s arts and culture scene.Hosting the British Academy Film Awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, for the first time on Sunday is yet another big moment in the storied history of the space, which has had everyone from Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Jacqueline du Pré to David Bowie, Michelle Obama and Greta Thunberg grace its stages.The Royal Festival Hall, as seen from the Hungerford Bridge. The venue opened in 1951, kicking off the development of what would become the Southbank Center. Bjanka Kadic/Alamy“We’re so thrilled about the central location of the Royal Festival Hall and accessibility of the space, enabling us to program our most ambitious and inclusive night for attendees yet,” Emma Baehr, the BAFTAs’ executive director of awards and content, wrote in an email. (The awards have previously been hosted in various locations, most recently the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington.) “Southbank is the largest arts center in the U.K., home to the London Film Festival and in the heart of London on the River Thames — having staged our television awards there for several years, it felt a natural move for us.”The Royal Festival Hall — which seats 2,700 — was opened in 1951 by King George VI, along with his daughter Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, during the Festival of Britain, which was centered on the south bank of the Thames. The area had been devastated during World War II and its derelict buildings and factories were razed to build a number of temporary structures for the festival.During the next few decades, not only did the Southbank Center develop — both the 900-seat Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery, which holds contemporary art exhibitions, are fantastic examples of 1960s Brutalist architecture — but the area around it did, too.The British Film Institute, which hosts film festivals and has helped fund a number of films including the BAFTA-nominated movies “Aftersun” and “Triangle of Sadness,” opened its first theater in 1957 under the Waterloo Bridge. And the National Theater, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, opened its doors next to the institute in 1976.Members of the royal family, including Princess Elizabeth, center, opened the Southbank Center’s Royal Festival Hall in 1951 during the Festival of Britain.Associated PressThat festival centered on the redeveloped south bank of the Thames, where the Royal Festival Hall, right, sat alongside a typical British pub.Frank Harrison/Topical Press Agency, via Getty ImagesAbout a mile east is Shakespeare’s Globe, which first opened in 1599 and then burned down in 1613 during a performance of “Henry VIII” (a second theater was later built but was eventually closed by parliamentary decree in 1642). The newest version of the theater opened in 1997 and now houses two stages including the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where plays and concerts are performed by candlelight. A stone’s throw from the Globe is the Tate Modern, the world-class modern and contemporary art museum housed in a former power station that opened its doors to the public in 2000.“I spend my life in a constant state of FOMO because there is always something happening,” said Stuart Brown, B.F.I.’s head of program and acquisitions, adding that the area is quite magical because of its location by the river and the architecture of the buildings. “You’ve got these incredible world-class artistic offerings to people through music, theater, visual arts, film, and all those experiences can inspire us, move us, make us think about the world differently.”The American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, backstage at the Royal Festival Hall circa 1963. Ms. Fitzgerald is among the luminaries who have appeared at the London venue. David Redfern/Redferns/Getty ImagesMusic has always been a highlight of the programming at the Southbank Center and with six resident orchestras — including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Aurora Orchestra — almost every evening there is some kind of concert.“Music is absolutely central to everything we do,” said Elaine Bedell, the chief executive of the Southbank Center. However, she added that classical music audiences globally had not returned to full pre-Covid strength and that that was something she and her colleagues wanted to address. “We have a very dynamic new head of classical music, Toks Dada, who has a very clear strategy and has very ambitious plans for bringing new audiences to classical music.”The Purcell Sessions have been part of that overall strategy to bring in younger audiences to various genres, including classical music. Housed in the same building as the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Purcell Room is an intimate stage with just 295 seats. The series based there is a chance for up-and-coming musicians, some of whom work across different art forms, to showcase their talents. “It has always had this legacy of experimentation,” Ms. Bedell said. “The idea is, it’s a real space for collaboration, innovation and invention.”The Purcell Room, of course, is not the only space for collaboration and experimentation. For 40 years the Southbank Center has had an “open foyer” policy in the building that houses the Royal Festival Hall, which connects to the other Southbank buildings through a series of outdoor concrete walkways. Like the year-round free exhibitions, and the concerts outside during the summer Meltdown festival, the foyer is open to the public seven days a week as a civic space. Weekly music jams, dance groups and language clubs meet up there to practice.“That sense of openness and inclusiveness is the unique thing about the Southbank Center,” Ms. Bedell said, adding that there are cafes and restaurants scattered across the cultural campus that help add to the center’s revenue. “I like the idea that people kind of feel their way to use the space.”Over the years, the various cultural institutions along the river’s south bank have cross-pollinated on projects. For a number of years, the British Film Institute has used the Royal Festival Hall for premiere screenings during the London Film Festival. Last year during the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition “In the Black Fantastic,” which focused on Afrofuturism, the institute hosted a talk with Ekow Eshun, the show’s curator.“We have a warm and collaborative relationship with other organizations on the south bank, meeting regularly as leaders to learn from each other and share best practice,” Kate Varah, the executive director of the National Theater, wrote in an email. “We’re all asking similar questions as we navigate through the permacrisis, and it’s more important than ever that we share our experiences and have a forum for collective ideas.”During the lying-in-state of Queen Elizabeth in September, a number of the spaces worked together to entertain — through poignant music and archival film of the royal family — the thousands of mourners who stood in the queue that snaked past the cultural institutions before heading across the river to Westminster Hall.The interaction between the venues is just one of the reasons fans of the area like Ms. Vine say they love it so much.“It is a wonderful place, one of my favorites in London,” she said. 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      A Ukrainian Orchestra on a Mission to Promote Its Country’s Culture

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      Members of the touring Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine have watched the devastation of war from a distance.The Ukrainian violinist Solomia Onyskiv arrived in the United States last month on a mission.With the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country approaching, she worried that the world was quickly forgetting the suffering there. She had come with 65 other musicians from the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine to lead a 40-concert tour aimed at promoting Ukrainian culture.“We are almost in a state of panic now,” Onyskiv said. “We worry deeply about the future of our country because this war won’t stop. Russia won’t stop. And if we don’t stand up, if the world doesn’t stand up, there will be more suffering.”On Wednesday, Onyskiv and her colleagues will get one of their most visible platforms yet: the stage of Carnegie Hall, where they will perform a program that includes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, as well as the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych’s Chamber Symphony No. 3.The concert is a milestone, but also a bittersweet moment for many of the musicians: They have spent much of the past year on tour, away from family and friends, watching the destruction of war from afar. Some have struggled to keep their focus as they embark on their cultural mission, checking constantly for news of Russian attacks and reading stories about Ukrainians who have been killed.Michailo Sosnovsky, the orchestra’s principal flute, who is featured in the Stankovych piece, said he worried about the safety of his wife and five children, who live in Lviv, and the safety of friends, including some musicians, who serve in the military. He speaks with his family by video every day, but gets anxious if they do not respond quickly to his messages.“I think about my family every minute of every day,” said Sosnovsky, who has played in the orchestra for two decades. “It’s a very difficult situation. But we must stay and do our part to help our country from here.”Members of the Lviv National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine performing at the Lviv National Philharmonic hall last year. Adri Salido/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesThe Lviv orchestra, established in 1902, is among many Ukrainian cultural groups that have gone abroad since the invasion in efforts to highlight the country’s cultural identity. The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, an ensemble of refugees who fled the war and musicians who stayed behind, toured Europe and the United States last summer. The United Ukrainian Ballet, made up of refugee dancers, has toured widely and made its U.S. debut this month; and the Shchedryk Children’s Choir, which is based in Kyiv, was featured at Carnegie in December.Over the past year, the Lviv musicians have toured in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Austria and other countries. Their visit to the United States began last month in Vero Beach, Fla., and will conclude next month at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Earlier this month, the orchestra performed four concerts at Radio City Music Hall, playing music from “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” After the Carnegie concert, the tour will continue in New Jersey, as well as at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx.The tour was mostly planned before the war, but the continuing devastation has added poignancy and meaning. In some cities, the musicians have been greeted with prolonged applause and shouts of “Glory to Ukraine!”Theodore Kuchar, the ensemble’s principal conductor, said the orchestra had been encouraged by moments like that. He recalled a recent performance in Miami in which many audience members were wearing Ukrainian flags and shouting “Bravo!” before the orchestra had started playing.“The orchestra hadn’t even tuned,” he said, “and you would have thought that you were you were there five seconds before the end of the Super Bowl with the score tied.”Kuchar, who is Ukrainian American, said that while the tour had been eagerly anticipated, many musicians felt guilty for being away from the country during such a difficult time.“I’ve not met a single person who privately doesn’t say to me, ‘Maestro, we’re so fortunate to be here, but our hearts are back there,’” he said.Kuchar said the emotional toll of the war was present as the musicians work to build support for Ukraine’s cause.“There’s nobody in this orchestra that does not know somebody who has either lost a finger, an arm, a leg or their life,” he said. “Everybody has been affected.”The Carnegie performance was added last spring. The hall’s leaders heard about the tour and thought that hosting the orchestra would help show solidarity with Ukraine. The actor Liev Schreiber, who has Ukrainian roots and has been involved in efforts to raise money for Ukraine over the past year, hosts the program.“We hope the performance will be a powerful opportunity to showcase the musicians’ artistry, their personal resilience and to remind everyone of the cultural richness that is an integral part of Ukraine,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director.The violinist Vladyslava Luchenko, a soloist on the tour, said audience members’ enthusiasm had given the musicians hope. She described music as the “best way to reach people’s souls and hearts.”“We have to use music to fight for good, for freedom, for human values,” she said. “We have to think about what we can bring, and not what we have lost.”Luchenko, who is from Kyiv but lives in Switzerland, recalled losing friends in Ukraine to Russian missile attacks. She said that performing during the war was a “double emotional load.”“You open your heart and feel all the pain so much more,” she said. “It has been a challenging but beautiful journey.” More

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      Pensacola Christian College Cancels Concert Over Gay Singer, Drawing Backlash

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      Pensacola Christian College called off an appearance by the King’s Singers, citing the “lifestyle” of a member.The King’s Singers, a renowned British a cappella ensemble, looked forward to its appearance last week at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, the final stop on the group’s four-city tour of the United States.Instead, the college informed the ensemble two hours before the concert was to begin on Saturday that it was being canceled because of concerns about what it called the lifestyle of a singer, who is gay. Students, parents and staff members had complained to the administration, saying that hosting the group would run counter to the college’s Baptist values.The school’s decision has drawn backlash, with artists, gay rights activists and the ensemble’s fans denouncing the college for homophobia and discrimination. The King’s Singers issued a statement on Monday expressing hope that “any conversations that follow might encourage a greater sense of love, acceptance and inclusion.”In an interview on Tuesday, Jonathan Howard, a member of the six-person group, called the cancellation “really shocking” and “hurtful.” The singers led a workshop for Pensacola students on Saturday and had started rehearsing for the concert — a crowd of more than 5,000 was expected — when they were pulled aside by college officials and informed of the cancellation, he said.Howard said it was the first time in the group’s 55-year history that an engagement had been canceled for reasons other than bad weather, war or the coronavirus pandemic. He also said the group had performed at Pensacola before.“Our mission is always the same: Can we bring people together, connect them and heal them through music?” he said. “Usually that’s received with open arms, even if our politics and personal beliefs are different.”Two members of the ensemble are gay, Howard said, though a statement by Pensacola Christian College made reference to only one. The statement provided by the school said it had canceled the concert after learning that one of the singers “openly maintained a lifestyle that contradicts Scripture.” It said it had treated the artists with “dignity and respect,” and that they were paid for the performance.A section in the school’s articles of faith that refers to several verses in the New Testament says the community believes that “Scripture forbids any form of sexual immorality including adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, and use of pornography.”The cancellation comes amid growing concern about discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people in parts of the United States, including Florida, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed legislation last year prohibiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades, a law that opponents have called “Don’t Say Gay.”After news of the cancellation spread on social media, several performing artists posted messages in support of the King’s Singers.“Such a misguided, closed, short-sighted decision, which you met with dignity, love, comprehension, grace, and class,” the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato wrote on Twitter. “Let the music PLAY. Love is love, and true compassion is what endures. Thank you for showing the way!”The King’s Singers will continue their tour in Canada this week, appearing in Montreal; Toronto; Ottawa; and London, Ontario. More

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      Review: Bach Collegium Japan Returns With Chamber Music

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

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

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

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      Gustavo Dudamel: A Maestro at a Crossroads

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

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

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

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

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