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      Review: The Unaffected Excellence of the Cleveland Orchestra

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      One of the finest American ensembles returned to Carnegie Hall with a program that made its argument persuasively, but without force.Classical music is an art form that can’t help having one foot in the past and an eye on its family tree. You hear about piano teachers who can trace their techniques back to Beethoven, or composers who realize only after the fact that Debussy has crept into their writing. Lineage is crucial; influence, inevitable.It’s an observation that was made with gentle persuasiveness by the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, its longtime music director, at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday. With the casual excellence that has made this ensemble, at least on a technical level, the finest in the United States, they assembled movements from Berg’s “Lyric Suite” and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony into a five-section study in juxtapositions.Versions of this have been done; the conductor Raphaël Pichon and his group, Pygmalion, broke up the “Unfinished” and surrounded it with a sweeping Romantic collage on last year’s album “Mein Traum” — a nod to Schubert’s biography, and to the cultural world in which this work was created. But the musical connections on Wednesday were fewer, and more focused.Neither the Berg nor the Schubert is whole. The orchestrated form of the “Lyric Suite,” originally for string quartet, contains three of its six sections, and the “Unfinished” was never completed beyond the first two movements. Both products of Vienna, more than a century apart, they nevertheless share a quiet intensity, as well as expressiveness shaded by longing and melancholy. As tends to be the case with pairings like this, Schubert comes out sounding more innovative; and Berg, who here doesn’t write with a wholesale use of dodecaphonic style, more reverential.In its version for string orchestra — and particularly with five rows of violins on Wednesday — the Berg has an operatic edge, but under the baton of Welser-Möst, an often measured technician, the opening Andante amoroso was smartly balanced rather than exploited for dramatic effect. He continued into the first movement of the Schubert without pause, carrying the previous work’s subtle momentum through the symphony’s flowing melodies and the soft syncopations of its not-quite-waltzing second subject. Heard so closely with the “Lyric Suite,” the development stood out for its flashes of the future: harmonic language that would flourish at the height of Romanticism.It wasn’t so jarring, then, to return to the Berg — its whispering Allegro misterioso here like a distant and distorted memory emerging into consciousness, its quietness befitting the second movement of the Schubert, which ended with a halo of serenity. But Berg had the last word with his Allegro appassionato, seeming to make explicit the pervasive yearning of Schubert and take its Romantic sentiment to a breaking point. Like the symphony, however, it ended in sustained stillness.The program featured a rarity in Schubert’s Mass in E flat, performed with five vocal soloists and members of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.Chris LeeFor the concert’s second half — Schubert’s Mass in E flat, a wellspring of beauty that is bafflingly underperformed in the United States — the stage was drastically more populated with the addition of five vocal soloists and members of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, an all-volunteer ensemble that behaves like an entirely professional one. Yet, in a miracle characteristic of the Clevelanders, this work had the sense of awe baked into its scale but the clarity of chamber music: the Latin text intelligible despite face coverings throughout the choir, the melodic line traveling with ease among the instruments.It’s not until the “Et incarnatus est” section of the Credo that the soloists enter (with a songlike theme of delicate longing that all but prefigures the aria “Nuit d’ivresse” from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens”). These roles, rarely employed throughout the Mass, were luxuriously cast: the tenors Julian Prégardien and Martin Mitterrutzner, the soprano Joélle Harvey, the mezzo-soprano Daryl Freedman and the bass-baritone Dashon Burton. But they were also artfully indistinct, behaving with a unified vision that gave way to egoless balance.The piece was not without its grandeur. Wednesday’s Sanctus was one of divine wonderment; the Agnus Dei resonated from the lower strings with the richness of an organ. But the “dona nobis pacem” of the final bars, begun at a fortissimo, quickly calmed to a glowing piano. The concert, as much as it was a web of connections, also made the argument that music doesn’t need a showy climax to win over an audience. And neither does this orchestra.Cleveland OrchestraPerformed on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Conductor on a Mission to Help Ukraine

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      Before sunrise one day last week, the conductor Dalia Stasevska was deep in concentration in a Helsinki studio, ruminating on phrasing and transitions as she studied the score of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Then, at 10 a.m., she put away her music and set out on a mission.Stasevska, 38, a Kyiv-born musician who lives in Finland, drove across Helsinki in search of power generators to send to Ukraine, where millions of people, including her friends and relatives, have faced electricity shortages because of Russia’s continuing attacks. Later, she visited a factory in central Finland to inspect hundreds of stoves that she plans to send to families hit hard by the war.“We can’t look away or get tired, because the war machine does not get tired,” she said in a video interview after the factory visit. “We have to be in this together and do everything we can for Ukraine.”Since the start of the war last year, Stasevska, a rising young conductor, has been navigating the roles of artist and activist.As the principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Britain and the chief conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland, she maintains a busy concert schedule and makes frequent appearances in the United States. Starting Friday, she will lead the New York Philharmonic in a series of concerts featuring the violinist Lisa Batiashvili in the Tchaikovsky concerto.In between rehearsals and concerts, she devotes herself to promoting the cause of Ukraine. She said she has raised more than 200,000 euros (about $216,000) since the start of the invasion and has driven trucks loaded with supplies into the country. She is also a prolific commenter on social media, calling on Western governments to provide more weapons to Ukraine and denouncing Russia as a “terrorist state.”Stasevska conducing a concert of Ukrainian music in fall. Eager to bring a “moment of normality to a country where nothing is normal,” she said, she traveled to the city to deliver supplies and to conduct.via Unison MediaStasevska said that her aim was to continue to shine light on the suffering in Ukraine and to help bring an end to the war.“I can’t save Ukraine by playing music, but I can use my mouth and speak out, and I can act,” she said. “We can’t just hide behind our virtues. There comes a time for action.”Her colleagues say that Stasevska is eager to challenge the status quo both in the artistic realm and in life. Claire Chase, a prominent flutist and educator, described her as a “supernova,” praising her collaborative and commanding style.The State of the WarWestern Military Aid: Efforts to arm Kyiv have stepped up in recent weeks as the war enters a critical phase. So far missing from the new military aid infusion pledged by Western nations are American and German-made tanks that Ukraine’s leaders say are desperately needed.Helicopter Crash: A helicopter crashed in a fireball in a Kyiv suburb, killing a member of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s cabinet and more than a dozen other people, and dealing a blow to Ukraine’s wartime leadership.Dnipro: A Russian strike on an apartment complex in the central Ukrainian city was one of the deadliest for civilians away from the front line since the war began. The attack prompted renewed calls for Moscow to be charged with war crimes.“She is courageous on and off the podium,” Chase said, “the kind of person who will, under any circumstances, speak her mind, and I just have so much admiration for her.”Stasevska, the daughter of painters, grew up in Estonia and Finland, where her mother is from. But her relatives also nurtured her connection to Ukraine, her father’s home country. She learned Ukrainian, practiced folk songs and studied the country’s poetry, history and literature with her father and grandmother.She recalled being teased in school for her Ukrainian surname, but always felt proud of her identity.“Ukraine was always this beautiful place in my mind,” she said. “The way my family spoke of it, the apples were much bigger there than anywhere else in the world. It was this dream country filled with possibility, and with wonderful people.”When Stasevska was 8, her parents gave her a violin, telling her she could make a profession out of playing an instrument. But, she said, she didn’t feel emotional about music until she was 12, when a school librarian lent her a recording of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” She had never heard an orchestra before, and was amazed by the power and drama of the score.“It spoke to my soul,” she said. “It was mind-blowing.”Stasevska near the Ukrainian Institute of America on the Upper East Side. She leads a series of concerts in New York, beginning Friday.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesShe set out to become a professional orchestra musician. As a teenager in her bedroom, she played along as she blasted Beethoven symphony recordings by giants like the conductor Herbert von Karajan.Then, when she was 20, she began to see another path. She was inspired after she saw a concert led by the conductor Eva Ollikainen; she had never seen a woman conduct before.“I saw a role model and someone who looked like me,” she said. “Suddenly I was thinking: ‘Wait a minute, I’m interested in scores, I love orchestra music. Why can’t I try this?’”She sought out the eminent Finnish conducting teacher Jorma Panula, cornering him in an elevator to ask if she could study with him. (Finland has produced a prodigious number of world-class conductors, and Panula has mentored many of them, including Esa-Pekka Salonen and Susanna Mälkki.) He pulled a receipt from his pocket, and wrote a phone number for her to contact the organizer of an upcoming master class.After graduating in 2012 from the Sibelius Academy, the storied conservatory in Helsinki, Stasevska began a steady rise, starting as an assistant to Paavo Järvi at the Orchestre de Paris. In 2019, she was appointed to her post at the BBC Symphony, and in 2020, she was selected to lead the Lahti Symphony.She made a memorable debut with the New York Philharmonic in 2021, leading a program that included works by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams. Seth Colter Walls, reviewing that performance in The New York Times, described her conducting as “powerful but never overly brash.”When the invasion began, Stasevska was devastated, concerned for the safety of her friends and family. Her brother was living in Kyiv and studying to be a movie director. She struggled to focus on music and resolved to cancel an appearance in March with the Seattle Symphony and take a break from conducting. But she changed her mind, she said, deciding she could use her platform to oppose the war.During the concert in Seattle, she made a speech about the war and led a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem. At one point during a loud passage of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, she said she let out a scream from the podium.“It was some kind of prehistoric need for me to yell,” she said. “It was horrible being in this situation where you don’t know if your brother will be alive the next morning.”Working with her two brothers, as well as the Ukrainian Association in Finland, she began soliciting donations to buy supplies. They have gathered contributions from thousands of people and have purchased generators, stoves, clothes, sleeping bags, vehicles and other items.In the fall, eager to bring a “moment of normality to a country where nothing is normal,” she traveled to Lviv to deliver supplies and to lead a concert of Ukrainian music. She said it was important for Ukraine to promote its culture as a way of opposing Russia, citing the example of Sibelius, whose Second Symphony is on the Philharmonic program this week, and whose works around 1900 were often interpreted as yearnings for liberation from Czar Nicholas II. (She is married to the Finnish bass guitarist Lauri Porra, a great-grandson of Sibelius.)“When a country is fighting for its freedom and harmony,” she said, “cultural identity is essential.”As Stasevska’s profile rises, she has been mentioned as a contender for a music director position in the United States. And, she said, she’s interested.Deborah Borda, the New York Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, called her a “dynamic podium presence demonstrating a welcome combination of power and warmth, but with no compromise.” She praised her debut with the Philharmonic, noting that she was able to pull it off with only one rehearsal in the hall, on the day of the concert.“That took courage, equanimity, flexibility and pure technique,” Borda said. “She is a prime example of today’s ‘ready for action’ rising women conductors.”As the fighting continues in Ukraine, music has offered Stasevska an escape, she said in an interview this week in New York. Still, she said she sometimes finds it difficult to perform works by Russian composers, including Tchaikovsky. She copes by reminding herself that the composers she admires are not responsible for the war.“I really have hope; I know that Ukraine will win one way or the other,” she said. “We just have to be human in this moment and do the right thing.” More

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      A Mighty Generation of Musicians. A Moving Final Chapter.

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      The conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Daniel Barenboim have continued to perform as aging and illness loom.LOS ANGELES — At the beginning of the final movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the strings play a mellow, stirring hymn. Then a solo bassoon silences the warmth: A funeral dirge is passing through. But just a few moments later, the strings flood back, violas and violins swooping up through a sudden chord that conjures folk fiddling, energy, passion, life itself.No, they seem to cry. Not death. Not that. Not yet.I have rarely heard the strings’ rich, defiant answer to the bassoon as effusive, as certain, as it was on Sunday afternoon, in the last of three performances of Mahler’s Ninth at Walt Disney Concert Hall here, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by Michael Tilson Thomas.It has been nearly a year and a half since Thomas, at 78 one of the world’s leading musicians for more than half a century, announced he would be undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer. And five months since he told The New York Times that he had been contemplating the music he wants played at his memorial service.Yet M.T.T., as he is widely known, is still with us, and still vital. Conducting Mahler’s valedictory masterpiece, whose ending is the repertory’s great evocation of letting go, he took his time on Sunday but refused to wallow in the obvious, unbearable emotions.The performance came just days after another miracle of a concert from an eminent maestro lately forced to reckon with mortality. On Jan. 6, Daniel Barenboim, 80, stepped down from the podium of the Berlin State Opera, a position he has held since the early 1990s, after a year buffeted by health problems. The following day, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a program streamed live.Thomas comes from a generation of older musicians who have long ruled the classical music landscape, but who are reaching the twilights of their careers.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesLike Thomas’s Mahler, Barenboim’s Schumann and Brahms were autumnal but vigorous, more present-tense than elegiac. While neither man seemed interested in denying reality, both made clear their intention to affirm life while it lasts.Not that. Not yet.Together, these were among the most poignant spectacles I’ve witnessed as a concertgoer. However sketchy and inevitably arbitrary such milestones are, the recent struggles and remarkable late-career concerts of these two men will always mark for me the passing from the scene of their generation of artists — a generation that has loomed over the musical landscape, and stubbornly refused to cede it, for decades.Although in fine health, Riccardo Muti, 81, is stepping down as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this season. The pianist Martha Argerich, also 81, who grew up with Barenboim in Buenos Aires and joined him in Berlin, has lately had her own health issues. At the Salzburg Festival last summer, the pianist Maurizio Pollini, yet another 81-year-old, canceled a recital because of heart trouble after the audience was already in its seats. Last year, a fall caused Herbert Blomstedt, 95, to briefly interrupt his calmly authoritative, jaw-dropping tour of the world’s top orchestras, which will continue at the New York Philharmonic in two weeks.The fact that more attention is being paid to Blomstedt now than 30 or 40 years ago is telling about the field. While classical music has always been fascinated by child prodigies, it is a performing art in which older performers truly hold sway. Even as audience draws: Brian Lauritzen, the host of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s radio broadcasts, wrote on Twitter that Sunday afternoon’s concert was the most full he had seen Disney Hall since before the pandemic.So audiences are sometimes witness to aging bodies pressing up against their limits. I was at Carnegie Hall in 2000 when the great tenor Carlo Bergonzi, who had never sung the title role of Verdi’s “Otello,” finally had to admit, after two painful acts, that his 75-year-old vocal cords were no match for the part and bowed out of the rest. At Salzburg this summer, Barenboim appeared a frail shell of his former self, straining to mount the podium as he led the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the youth ensemble he founded with Edward Said.But while his physical infirmity was disconcerting, what has stayed with me most was the sensitivity showed him by the superstar pianist Lang Lang, the soloist that evening. As they walked on and off and as they played, Lang both deferred to and deftly guided his maestro mentor in a way that did not ignore what was happening but granted Barenboim a full measure of dignity, and provided him the opportunity to make music as best as he was capable.Martha Argerich, left, and Daniel Barenboim — musical companions since the 1940s — appeared together with the Berlin Philharmonic as Barenboim announced his resignation from the Berlin State Opera.Monika RittershausIt was a moving reminder that even amid the little humiliations — when Thomas first returned to the podium after his cancer treatment, in November 2021, his slipping pants had clearly not yet been tailored to the changes in his body — aging and illness open a space for both performers and us in the audience to be vulnerable and graceful. To be connected to a long line of transmitted knowledge and beauty. To be grateful.After he canceled a much-anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Ring” in October, it seemed possible that Barenboim might not conduct again. And when he did return, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on New Year’s Eve, critics’ accounts painted a grim picture, focusing mainly on the performance’s distended length.But a week later, with the Berlin Philharmonic, he balanced natural flow and robust urgency in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Second Symphony. Without lacking vividness, the Brahms had a gentle cast in its opening; the Allegro finale sent off bright energy, but its colors were the blaze of a sunset rather than daylight brashness. It was just the right amount of goodbye.And after the high-spirited delicacy of the Schumann, Barenboim joined Argerich, a musical companion of his since the 1940s, at the keyboard for Bizet’s four-hand piece “Little Husband, Little Wife” from the suite “Children’s Games”: a moment of aching tenderness.Barenboim took the handful of stairs to the stage carefully but without relying on the handrail, and his motions on the podium were sometimes wide and sweeping. But he often seemed to be overseeing as much as conducting: leading with watchful eyes but keeping his arms down, experienced enough to know what the orchestra didn’t need from him.Thomas, too, told The Times in August that his illness had forced him to be more efficient in his gestures. On Sunday he was fluent but restrained, sometimes keeping a simple beat; sometimes slicing his baton horizontally; sometimes pumping his arms firmly downward; sometimes raising his hands, cupped around an invisible ball, as if both to summon and catch the sound.There was the straightforwardness that has always characterized his Mahler. (Among many recorded cycles of the symphonies, his no-nonsense, beautifully performed set with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led for 25 years, was my choice to play straight through on a long road trip last year.) Here in Los Angeles, his pace was patient even in the middle movements, which, more than sardonic or sour, felt proud and feisty. Here I am, they seemed to say. Take me or leave me.The work’s glacial final minutes, with the strings slipping past one another as the beat grows amorphous, seemed, more than ever in my experience, to describe the haziness of the end of consciousness.But there was not, in the silence that follows the dying of the sound, the usual game of chicken between an audience raring to applaud and a conductor unwilling to release. On Sunday there was no battle of wills, no self-indulgence, before the ovation. Thomas let the quiet come, then let it go. More

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      Review: A Guest Conductor Reveals the Philharmonic’s Potential

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a contender for the orchestra’s podium, shined in “The Rite of Spring” — the piece Jaap van Zweden began his tenure there with.When Jaap van Zweden led his first concert as the New York Philharmonic’s music director, in September 2018, he ended the evening with Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Instead of an auspicious climax it was a red flag, a sign of many more performances like it to come: paradoxically rushed and ponderous; stridently martial; so obsessed with detail, there was little sense of a cohesive whole.An orchestra’s sound is not fixed, though. Music directors are often away — as van Zweden has been since November, with no plans to return until mid-March — which leaves room for guest conductors to reveal fresh potential in an ensemble you thought you knew well.As if to prove that point, the Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali — a contender for the Philharmonic podium when van Zweden departs next year, and the only guest to be given two weeks of concerts this season — ended Thursday’s program at David Geffen Hall with “The Rite of Spring.”If van Zweden’s reading of this work amounted to a warning, Rouvali’s was a glimpse of the insights and thrills he might bring to a tenure in New York. He, too, teased out details — a dancing ostinato in the basses near the end, prominent from the moment it started, took on a relentless terror — but didn’t sacrifice momentum or primal energy. Once Judith LeClair’s opening bassoon solo unfurled with liberal rubato, his “Rite” remained organic, in its wildness more unpredictably frightening than van Zweden’s brash yet controlled account.Rouvali’s performance was the kind that made you wish he would stick around a little longer, if only for the opportunity to hear what he has to say about other corners of the repertory. By that point, however, he had already covered so much ground, his visit to the Philharmonic was beginning to come off like a prolonged audition.Last week, he led Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture (episodic where it should have steadily escalated); Magnus Lindberg’s new Piano Concerto No. 3 (lucid and well shepherded); and Beethoven’s Second Symphony (gracefully lithe and transparent). And Thursday’s program, in addition to the Stravinsky, opened with the New York premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s recent “Catamorphosis,” followed by Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, featuring Nemanja Radulovic in a staggering debut.Nemanja Radulovic made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.Chris LeeThorvaldsdottir’s work opened the evening, but with a 20-minute running time it was more substantial and satisfying than a typical curtain-raiser. Her music often has the feel of transcriptions from nature; like Messiaen notating bird songs, she seems to translate the sounds of tectonic and cosmic forces for the concert hall. Similarly immense, “Catamorphosis” at first appears like more of the same before developing into one of her most intensely felt scores to date.The environment she conjures here is one of entropy. Over a foundational pedal tone in the lower strings, textural fragments — brushed percussion, a piano played both inside the instrument and at the keyboard — come and go as if by chance. Occasionally, wisps of melody are emitted from the winds, too light to follow. In the violins, glissandos that slide the pitch slowly up and down are redolent of a distant siren.It’s fitting, in a sense, that “Catamorphosis” premiered without a live audience in the darker pandemic days of early 2021, streamed by the Berlin Philharmonic on its Digital Concert Hall. This is the music of natural forces indifferent to human witnesses; yet in those violins and their sense of looming urgency, a doleful cry for help — from Thorvaldsdottir, from the earth itself — begins to emerge.Percussive textures continue to pass through while the strings, rarely rising above a mezzo piano but made richer by divisi lines that add voices to each section, flare with the emotional tension and release of Barber’s Adagio for Strings — though, crucially, never for phrases long enough to tip into sentimentality. It is a requiem taking shape but held at bay.Radulovic was similarly withholding in the Prokofiev concerto. After lifting his bow above the strings of his instrument repeatedly, like a tennis player bouncing the ball before a serve, he softly let out into the work’s opening solo, resisting its invitation for a vibrato-heavy, singing line and opting instead for something lighter and more objective, befitting the transparency of the score.Modest at first, he was nevertheless an immediately commanding presence. Part of it was his pop star look, including platform boots and a mane of long, wavy hair with a topknot. But he was also charismatic in his adventurous rubato later in the Allegro moderato; in his simply lovely and smartly shaped melodies in the second movement; and in his folk freedom and crunchy chords in the Spanish-inflected finale. His encore — Paganini’s showy Caprice No. 24, made showier in an arrangement by Aleksandar Sedlar and Radulovic — was a dose of old-fashioned fun, with the kind of virtuosic, at times laugh-out-loud showmanship that has had audiences cheering for centuries.Throughout the concerto, Rouvali was a willing accomplice, lending the score the clarity it requires with a whiff of daring. It’s the kind of playing you might expect from the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, where he is the principal conductor. There, his close relationship with the ensemble has often resulted in lively performances that change from night to night in a spirit of experimentation and curiosity.Those aren’t qualities I usually associate with the New York Philharmonic. But I did on Thursday — and hopefully will more often in the future, whether Rouvali returns next as the orchestra’s music director or, at the very least, as a welcome guest.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Nicola Benedetti Prepares Her Next Star Turn: Festival Leader

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      EDINBURGH — Not long into an interview with the violinist Nicola Benedetti, there was a knock at the door.“Ohhh, chips!” she whispered excitedly as a takeaway carton of haggis and fries entered the room. “I’ve been in meetings since 8 o’clock this morning. Do you mind?” A pattern quickly emerged: a question, a tidal wave of thoughts on the profundity of art, a pause for breath and then, eventually, a chip.“I think I’m in a good position to be saying, ‘Here’s why chips taste fantastic’ to somebody who hasn’t tasted them,” said Benedetti, who, in addition to her work as an acclaimed instrumentalist and educator, recently began her tenure as the director of the Edinburgh International Festival. She was describing her approach to the age-old question of attracting new audiences.That process “involves the disarming of prejudice,” she said, “but doing so in a way that still absolutely has integrity, that maintains and preserves the integrity of the art forms that we have presented and the tradition we’ve upheld for 75 years, and by not apologizing for what we do, not trying to change what we do.”Benedetti, 35, is the first Scot and the first woman to lead the festival since it began in 1947. For many, the appointment came as a surprise. “I always thought that she was keen to expand in that direction,” said Richard Morrison, the chief culture writer for The Times of London, adding, “that did rather shock me, that she’d be prepared to devote quite so much of her time and energy to that huge project.”Although Benedetti has had to be more selective in her future repertoire, and is more interested in consolidating existing musical partnerships than she is in finding new ones, she has been reluctant to press pause on her performing altogether. “Taking on this role meant I really had to double down on my commitment to continually improving as a musician,” she said.She premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall, and is touring Szymanowski’s second concerto with orchestras in Berlin, Manchester and Boston this month. She has even restarted sporadic lessons, with the violinist Andrea Gajic, to help regain confidence after a wrist injury that forced her to pull out of a residency last summer at the Aldeburgh Festival in England.Benedetti premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.Light Press Media and Design Her brain, she admitted, goes “in 20 different directions at once.” But her aim for the Edinburgh festival is focused: “to provide the deepest possible experience for people. We’re unapologetic and uncompromising on the weight, depth and profundity of the art that the festival presents, to the maximum number of people and the broadest possible audience.”Morrison said that her vision is not elitist, but that it also does not sacrifice excellence, “which, in a way, is slightly contrary to what the politicians and the bureaucrats are pushing towards in both England and Scotland.”Benedetti’s goal of bringing in broader audiences is one that was shared by her predecessor, Fergus Linehan, who incorporated pop music into the festival for the first time, in 2015. Though her background suggests she’ll lean more toward the fine arts, Benedetti confirmed that pop will still be programmed.“The diversity of music that we hear is going to remain,” she said. She wouldn’t be drawn on specifics of programming, but expect a bigger emphasis on Scottish voices and, because of sustainability targets, “deep dives” into a more select group of international orchestras. “When you’re flying 90 people from anywhere in the world to Edinburgh, I would like audiences to really understand why we chose them,” she said. “What’s special about their sound, their identity?”There will even be an attempt to break down traditional genre boundaries, and “recategorize through intensity of experience, and type of experience,” Benedetti said. How does she plan on selling the festival’s more traditional audience on all of that? “I have a lot of trust in people,” she said. “And I expect a lot from them.”Benedetti enters this role at a time when British arts organizations are struggling. Last fall, the Edinburgh Film Festival went into administration, which is similar to bankruptcy in the United States. In November, Arts Council England announced upheaval-inducing funding reallocations. That was followed in December by reductions in the Scottish government’s own budget for 2023-24, including a £7 million ($8.46 million) cut to Creative Scotland, the country’s national arts organization.The Edinburgh International Festival’s core funding is expected to remain at the same level for 2023-24, but, with rising costs and inflation, a standstill budget amounts to a cut. Will putting an international Scottish soloist with a national voice in this leadership position help attract private donors? “The great unknown is how much, in a really tricky climate, the Benedetti factor will end up benefiting the festival,” said Brian Ferguson, an arts correspondent for The Scotsman.Benedetti said that she doesn’t expect resistance from Edinburgh International Festival regulars: “I have a lot of trust in people. And I expect a lot from them.”Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesWhat happened to the Edinburgh Film Festival, Benedetti said, “heightens the acuteness of everybody’s vulnerability, and the need even more to be bold, clear and ambitious.“And not just get a marketing company to write statements about why you’re relatable to people,” she added. “The uncomfortable but necessary position of the festival is one where natural tensions lie.”IF BENEDETTI IS AMBITIOUS, that stems from her father, Gio. An Italian émigré who left school in Scotland at age 15, he would later embark on a series of financially successful, idiosyncratic business ventures in dry cleaning, cling-film dispensers and first-aid kits.“He had a real spirit for change, for making stuff happen, and was very, very ambitious about owning something, and about making money,” Benedetti said, adding, “he’d be the first one to say that, he’s not bashful at all about that.”She’s inherited her father’s uninhibitedness. When asked what kind of house she grew up in, she replied, “a big one.” After first picking up the violin at 4, Benedetti swapped the picturesque Ayrshire village of West Kilbride in Scotland for the “extreme environment” of the Yehudi Menuhin music school in Surrey, England, five years later.“If your priority in life is not to play your instrument to the highest possible level, I would not encourage people to go into that environment,” Benedetti said, but then defended the school’s specific commitment to excellence. “What do we want from the world? Do we all really have to be the same? Does everything have to follow one exact format?”After winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, her public profile raced ahead of the security she felt in her own playing. “I didn’t win the Tchaikovsky Violin Competition, I didn’t win the Joachim Competition — that’s not what I won,” she said. “So in terms of my violinistic chops, I had a long way to go, in full view of the public.”To make matters worse, she added, “I was sometimes in a total fight-or-flight mode on‌stage, and I wasn’t playing at all how I could play.” Today, it’s a different story. She delivered an assured performance of the Szymanowski concerto with the conductor Karina Canellakis in Berlin, finding a meaty yet tender sustained sound.But for Benedetti, the more significant change has been psychological: feeling grounded enough in her technique to free up and really explore, even in the fastest, most intricately patterned corners of her repertoire, like Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto, written for her in 2015 and reprised by Benedetti on many occasions. “I feel like I’ve become a lot more confident over time as a violinist,” she said.Teddy Jamieson, senior features writer for The Herald in Scotland, said of Benedetti, “She’s always been very serious about what she does, and really interested in the place music has in society — its role, its worth.” That, coupled with her undimmed energy as a self-starter, resulted in the Benedetti Foundation, a music education project she started in 2019, which provides large-group opportunities for string players of all abilities.“Too many times in my life I’ve seen, ‘Let’s have the whole nation playing the violin in two years,’ and people saying, ‘Our world will be fixed if that happens,’” Benedetti said of the organization’s constructive role within the wider education ecosystem. Within minutes, she flipped from arch idealist to blunt realist: “I’m in a position which is constantly doing this,” she said, putting her index fingers together, and wiggling them like a seismometer needle.Benedetti quickly shuts down questions about her personal life, and about the large ring on her finger. Otherwise, there’s a friendly gregariousness to her that belies her solitary violin work. “There’s a lonely quality to the soloist world, and especially because I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I left school at 15 and between the ages of 15 to 23, where you form some of those really strong bonds, I was basically on my own out there. That made an already quite lonely profession a bit more lonely.”A summer day in Berlin last year offered an alternative to that; Benedetti found herself shielding from “too much community,” focusing on her concert there rather than on a city full of friends. And the best friend she’s made around the world? “This person,” she said, pointing to the ring.“And family,” she quickly added. Benedetti used to live in London but is now based in Surrey, which she said has strengthened her support system: “I get excited about going home, and I can’t say that I ever really felt that when I lived in London.”The move places her close to relatives for the first time since she was a child; she’s a 15-minute drive from her sister (and fellow violinist) Stephanie Benedetti, along with her 1-year-old nephew Nico and 3-year-old niece Sienna, who received her first miniature violin for Christmas.There is a sense that personal connections come first for Nicola Benedetti. “I’ve refound in the last six or seven years,” she said, “such a community developed through the teaching and educating world, different parts of the industry that you wouldn’t necessarily access through being a touring concert soloist.” More

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      Daniel Barenboim, Titan of Conducting, to Step Down in Berlin

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      The 80-year-old conductor, citing poor health, said he would resign as general music director of the Berlin State Opera after three decades.Daniel Barenboim, a towering conductor and pianist who as general music director of the Berlin State Opera over the past three decades built an artistic empire without rival and helped define German culture in the aftermath of reunification, will resign his post this month because of health problems, the opera house announced on Friday.Barenboim, 80, who was diagnosed last year with a serious neurological condition, said in a statement that his illness made it impossible for him to carry out his duties.“Unfortunately, my health has deteriorated significantly over the past year,” he said. “I can no longer provide the level of performance that is rightly demanded of a general music director.” His resignation is effective Jan. 31.Barenboim, one of classical music’s biggest stars, had hoped to return to his famously frenzied schedule this year. But the ongoing uncertainty of his condition placed strains on the State Opera — the company was left scrambling to find substitutes, including for a highly anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle last fall — and made it difficult to find a path forward.Matthias Schulz, the State Opera’s director, said that the company was grateful to Barenboim, who turned the Staatskapelle Berlin (the pit orchestra of the State Opera) into one of the world’s most revered ensembles.But, Schulz said, it had become increasingly clear that Barenboim could not be the stable figure the musicians needed, noting that he appeared with the company less than 10 times in 2022, compared with more than 50 times in previous years.“He took responsibility for the fact that he just cannot be sure what he really can fulfill,” Schulz said in an interview.Barenboim was unavailable for comment, a spokeswoman for the opera house said.Born to Jewish parents in Argentina, Barenboim has been a fixture in the German artistic and political scene for decades and has helped define the country’s modern culture since the reunification of East and West Germany. In 1989, three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he led the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert dedicated to the citizens of East Germany.He has become an influential public figure in Germany and beyond. In 1999, along with the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. he created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, providing a forum for young Arab and Israeli musicians to play together.Klaus Lederer, Berlin’s senator for culture, called Barenboim “an artist of the century and one of the most remarkable personalities working in Berlin.” He said in a statement that stepping down was the right choice, even though it was not easy for Barenboim.“His decision was made in a reflective manner; it puts the well-being of the State Opera and the Staatskapelle Berlin in the foreground,” Lederer said. “All of this deserves the greatest respect.”During his tenure in Berlin, Barenboim brought the Staatskapelle to new heights, frequently leading international tours and securing hundreds of millions of euros in government grants to finance his ambitions. He co-founded a music conservatory, the Barenboim-Said Akademie, which opened in 2016. He persuaded officials to build the Pierre Boulez Saal, a Frank Gehry-designed hall housed in the same building as the conservatory, which opened in 2017. And he pushed a costly renovation of the opera house’s main theater, which was finished that same year. The State Opera now has 587 employees and a budget of more than 81.4 million euros ($86.6 million).There have been troubles along the way, but Barenboim maintained his grip on power. In 2019, members of the Staatskapelle accused him of bullying; later that year, though, the opera house, saying that it could not verify the accusations, extended his contract through 2027.He seemed set to reign indefinitely in Berlin, but health woes forced him to cancel performances last spring and summer as he recovered from surgery and grappled with circulatory issues. In October, having disclosed his neurological condition, he said he was taking time off to “focus on my physical well-being as much as possible.” He canceled his participation in the new “Ring,” a herculean undertaking seven years in the making that had been built around him, as well as a planned tour in Asia with the Staatskapelle and a concert in Berlin in November to celebrate his 80th birthday.As he rested at home, he initially resisted resigning his post and told friends and family that he planned to return to the podium. But even as he kept up some appearances, attending rehearsals and teaching classes in Berlin, his ability to lead the opera house full time grew increasingly uncertain.On New Year’s Eve, he appeared to be making steps toward recovery when he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin while sitting down. But critics noted that he at times seemed unsteady and did not deliver remarks to the audience, as he sometimes does on such occasions.His future activity at the podium is uncertain, but this week, he is scheduled to conduct three concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic and the pianist Martha Argerich, a childhood friend, though in an altered, less physically demanding program. It is unclear whether he will reduce his commitments at the Divan Orchestra, the conservatory or the Pierre Boulez Saal.Barenboim’s resignation will mark the end of an era at the State Opera. Schulz said it was too early to know when the company might name a successor.“There’s no need to rush it,” Schulz said. “It’s more important that this institution makes the right decision for the future, and it’s absolutely possible to take time for that.”But it may prove challenging to find a figure of Barenboim’s stature. The Staatskapelle’s musicians have likened their three-decade relationship with him to a marriage.“There are not so many people at the moment who can run an opera house of this size and reputation coming out of the era of Barenboim,” said Manuel Brug, a cultural critic in Germany. “It’s unique that somebody stayed for 30 years and had the possibility to form something like this. It will be hard to follow.”Barenboim said in his statement on Friday that his time at the opera house had inspired him “musically and personally in every respect.” He hoped to continue conducting at the State Opera, he added. He will retain the honorary title of principal conductor for life, conferred on him by the musicians.“Of course, I will remain closely connected to music,” he said, “as long as I live.” More

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      Review: A Philharmonic Contender Returns to the Podium

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      With a change of the guard imminent at the New York Philharmonic, Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the only guest conductor leading two programs this season.A changing of the guard on the world’s great orchestral podiums was in the air on Friday. Daniel Barenboim, 80, the longtime music director of the Berlin State Opera, had just announced he would step down at the end of the month because of his declining health.A potential generational shift was looming at the New York Philharmonic, too. The evening before, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, 37, had conducted that ensemble with crisply elfin spirit as one of the leading candidates to take over when Jaap van Zweden, 62, leaves at the end of next season.Rouvali faces steep competition — not least from Gustavo Dudamel, 41, who is widely considered the favorite for the position and who arrives in New York this spring for Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a classic music director showcase.But it is no accident that Rouvali is the only Philharmonic guest conductor this season to get two weeks of concerts. After the current program of works by Rossini, Magnus Lindberg and Beethoven, he leads music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Prokofiev and — like the Mahler, a prime assignment — Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” starting next Thursday.It is an added sign of trust in and respect for Rouvali, the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, that each of those programs includes a new work co-commissioned by the Philharmonic: Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis” and Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 — bless him for being one of the few contemporary composers who favor plain, simple concerto titles — with the calmly formidable Yuja Wang as soloist.Yuja Wang, front, was the soloist in Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3.Chris LeeOn Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Rouvali, too, was a calm and lucid guide through the piece — which came off, however, as billowy and somewhat baggy. The score’s meter markings are precisely gauged for shifts of pulse that don’t come across audibly as slow-fast contrasts of tempo; this may be why Lindberg has cheekily described the work as a concerto in three concertos, rather than three movements.But while that is an impressive technical achievement, the whole thing ends up registering for the listener as a bit homogeneous, a roughly half-hour foray into richly chromatic nostalgia, swaths of it reminiscent of golden-age film music à la Korngold. (A modernist sheen over a late-Romantic spirit has become a trademark Lindberg move.) Like the Groundhog Day spectacle of votes for a House speaker this week, the performance gave the sense of hearing the same concerto again and again.If this repetitiveness yielded little urgency, the piece wasn’t exactly sluggish, either. Moment by moment, passage by passage, the music doesn’t feel heavy. Lindberg keeps the orchestra airy, often adding complexity by dividing the strings into ever-ampler harmonies rather than using denser instrumentation or greater volume. And the daunting solo part emerges — particularly in Wang’s cool hands — as quicksilver and subtle, integrated into the general textures and restrained even in the fevered portions of the cadenza near the end of the first movement.Lindberg is never less than artful, as in how that cadenza seems to silkily melt out of softly plush strings, which just as quietly and cleverly rejoin the pianist a minute or so later. The shadows at the start of the second movement organically grow into an expansive, grave grandeur reminiscent of Debussy’s “La Mer,” with passages of candied glockenspiel woven beautifully into the golden wire of a tiny group of violins. The third movement has bits of sumptuous playfulness, punctuated by yelps of brass.But overall the work’s impact is muted and breezy, which is striking given the broad, Rachmaninoff-esque sweep of Lindberg’s musical gestures.Rouvali, one of a full lineup of conductors accompanying Wang in the coming months as she tours with the work, which premiered in San Francisco in October, matches her clean, objective style. There is a conscientiousness to Rouvali that can tip into squareness, as I felt when he led the Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony a year ago. And Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture on Thursday lacked the steadily accumulating propulsion, even through lyrical passages, that is the piece’s reason for being; the soufflé never really rose.But in Beethoven’s Second Symphony — a classic that is still somehow underrated — he was superb, with his deliberate, even careful conducting yielding a graceful, stylish interpretation. I have rarely been more clearly yet delicately aware of Beethoven’s most visionary passages here: the orchestra mistily reconstituting itself near the end of the first movement, the amorphous clouds of harmonies in the finale.Under Rouvali, the second movement was intimate and sober, but it gradually relaxed, even to a charming daintiness; the third, never rushing the eager rhythms, reached elegance. This conductor doesn’t do breathlessness, and he could probably do with a little more liveliness. But when he avoids plainness, his judiciousness can seem very like maturity.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Revisiting a Composer’s Psychedelic Lewis Carroll Music

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      Lewis Carroll’s influence is all over contemporary culture.There’s the surreal image of going “through the looking glass”; the look of a Tim Burton movie, including his version of “Alice in Wonderland”; the skewed angles of Tom Petty’s video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More”; the use of a word like “galumphing.”And, as a new album from the Albany Symphony demonstrates, there are the Carroll-inspired musical works of the composer David Del Tredici, some of which have been captured on two world premiere recordings from the ensemble, led by David Alan Miller.These long-awaited performances — of “Pop-Pourri” (from 1968, and revised in 1973) and “Adventures Underground” (written in 1971 and revised in 1977) — are a booming, psychedelic marvel. In the initial seconds of the first movement of “Pop-Pourri,” Del Tredici smash cuts between a Bach harmonization of a Lutheran chorale, “Es Ist Genug,” and his own setting of Carroll’s text. The “Litany of the Blessed Virgin” is also in the mix — making good on Del Tredici’s claim, in the album’s liner notes, that the piece is “a kind of Cantata of the Sacred and Profane.”But that’s not the strangest, or even most alluring, part of the beginning: That would be the music for saxophones, which tends to keen and swoon underneath high-flown writing for a soprano (on this recording, an indefatigable Hila Plitmann). The second movement features boisterous, fast moving lines for contrabassoon. And in the third movement, Del Tredici lets his late ’60s freak flag fly, with percussion blasts and woolly lines for distorted electric guitar and bass.“I’m always trying to make the text come alive,” Del Tredici, 85, said in a recent phone interview. He remembered that, for the “Jabberwocky”-quoting third movement, “I needed something for the monster.”He found just the thing at a percussion store in New York. “They had a huge tam-tam in one room, and I said, ‘What about that, can I rent that?’” he recalled about the period shortly before the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas led the piece in 1972. “And they said: ‘Well, it’s only been rented once for a movie at MGM. I guess you could.’”“I was doing weird things,” Del Tredici said of his work on the “Alice” pieces.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“For a long time I just wrote,” Del Tredici said, describing how the “Alice” music came together. “I didn’t care what I wrote.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesDel Tredici then went to Thomas, who was working with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and asked, “Could you rent this for me, for one shot on the tam-tam?” The response: “OK, sure.” (With a winking tone, Del Tredici noted, “They had money.” For their part, Miller and his Albany players likewise make the passage sound like a million bucks in the new recording.)“I was doing weird things,” Del Tredici said. “None of these instruments existed with symphony orchestras — like all the electric stuff. You might find the instrument, but then you had no one to play it. The hardest was the banjo. It was always fighting some kind of tradition by demanding what I did.”But within a span of only a few years, Del Tredici managed to bend that tradition. His “Alice” works — which encompass chamber music, grand symphonic entries and even an opera, “Dum Dee Tweedle,” from 1990 — have drawn public acclaim and interest from elite performers for decades. A 1981 Decca release of “Final Alice,” for large orchestra and soprano, boasts no less a podium eminence than Georg Solti, who with Barbara Hendricks and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra grasped Del Tredici’s penchant for brash, experimental density.Despite that title, “Final Alice” was not Del Tredici’s last word on Carroll. His “Child Alice,” over two hours long, followed shortly thereafter. A selection from that work — “In Memory of a Summer Day” — won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet the gargantuan score received its premiere recording only in the past decade, thanks to the conductor Gil Rose and his Boston Modern Orchestra Project.In the liner notes for that release, Del Tredici was specific about the ways in which layered meters connected with Carroll’s text. Although the musical surfaces may seem madcap, the underlying structures are anything but; small, micro-units of song are balanced with grander processes and callbacks that give these pieces a weightier sense of scale.How did Del Tredici manage this? “One notebook at a time,” he said. “And then I put the notebooks together.” After amassing 50 different notebooks of sketches for a piece like “Child Alice,” he began stitching and editing. That process “was the fun part,” but also a “scary” one.“For a long time I just wrote,” he said. “I didn’t care what I wrote. I insisted I didn’t know what I was doing. Like magic, it did come together.”That magic touch is evident in the new recording of “Pop-Pourri,” released by Albany Records; the swooning saxophone music from the first movement also has a part to play during the amplified extremes of the third movement. While there is an intent to delight a listener — “I’m not entertaining by accident!” Del Tredici exclaimed with a laugh — the writing also rewards a closer listen.After “Pop-Pourri,” as the critic Frank J. Oteri has observed, Del Tredici never used such imposing, rocklike amplification in his “Alice” works again. But there is still an audible connection between “Pop-Pourri” and the folk ensemble embedded within “An Alice Symphony” (which was memorably recorded by the composer Oliver Knussen as conductor).Del Tredici is at work on an opera about his experience with Parkinson’s disease.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIf the “Alice” music is not heard frequently in concert halls today, that may have less to do with style than it does with the orchestra world’s declining investment in grand contemporary works. “I was lucky, getting wonderful performances at the beginning,” Del Tredici said. “The commitment of orchestras — that’s very important. They did give a commitment to my music that they don’t do nowadays, that I see.”Del Tredici hopes to see “Dum Dee Tweedle” staged in full one day. (It has only been presented in concert.) During the interview, he recounted showing the work to a conductor. “I hadn’t heard it for a long time,” he said. “And I couldn’t believe it: It’s 75 minutes of nonstop, fast music. It’s very weird.” (A recording is available to stream on his website, and makes for a thrilling ride.)And he’s currently contemplating another opera with a comic bent about his recent experiences with Parkinson’s disease. In conversation, he analogized that effort with his decision in the 1990s to write music directly on gay themes.“I like being open,” he said, “about all the things that are hard to be open about.” More