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      Review: A Shostakovich Symphony Finally Reaches the Philharmonic

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      The composer’s 12th, from 1961, is being played by the orchestra for the first time under the conductor Rafael Payare, also making his debut.When the stirring central tune of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 first emerges, a few minutes into the piece, it’s very soft in the cellos and basses. The model for this moment is clear: Very softly, in the cellos and basses, is how the “Ode to Joy” is introduced in Beethoven’s Ninth.Beethoven’s Ninth, of course, is at the center of the repertory, while Shostakovich’s 12th, “The Year 1917,” had never been played by the New York Philharmonic before Thursday, when it was a vehicle for the conductor Rafael Payare’s debut with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall.Why has this symphony been neglected? Shostakovich’s reputation in the West, even after the Cold War ended, was founded on a sense of him as a kind of dissident of the heart, his music covertly opposed to the Soviet regime he outwardly served — or at least attempted to make peace with.But it’s hard to find ambivalence or coded irony in the 12th, which tells a triumphal tale of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and is dedicated to that struggle’s hero, Lenin. It premiered in 1961, a year after its composer finally joined the Communist Party. (How willingly he joined is one of the many questions that persist, unanswerable, about his true beliefs, and so about the relationship between his music and the dangerous political situation he faced.)Unlike his 11th Symphony from a few years before, into which some read secret sympathies with the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, there seems to be little in the 12th but positivity; even in quieter moments, blazing victory is never far away. I suppose the dark undercurrent that briefly pursues Lenin in his countryside hiding place outside St. Petersburg in the second movement could also suggest the fear Shostakovich might have felt. But here, that feels like a reach.The 12th wouldn’t, at this point, need to be disqualified from programs merely for being sincerely created propaganda — though I wouldn’t follow the program note’s glib assurance that we can forget the historical context, since “‘The Year 1917’ was over a century ago, and the Soviet Union is gone.” Tell that to the current president of Russia.It was valuable to get a chance to hear this symphony live, but it does come off a bit repetitive and thin, however wearyingly loud and dense it gets. You will not want to hear that earworm central tune again.In 40 minutes — its four movements flowing together without pause, and revolutionary songs quoted liberally throughout — the piece depicts a Petersburg (then Petrograd) simmering with chaos and tension, ready for battle; then Lenin’s retreat to plan his next move; the thunderous beginning of the revolution; and “The Dawn of Humanity,” the fortissimo, major-key utopia of Soviet life.It’s not the fault of Payare, 42, the music director of the San Diego Symphony and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, that it’s difficult to build tension in those final 10 minutes or so, which manage to be both relentless and fitful.His neat, spirited rendition of the work didn’t stint the mellower second movement, in which successive solos — the bassoonist Judith LeClair, the clarinetist Anthony McGill, the trombonist Colin Williams — advanced an atmosphere of doleful meditation. The Philharmonic seems to be steadily acclimating to its newly renovated hall, though the brasses remain extremely bright-sounding at full force, sharpened rather than golden.As the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, regularly shows, a conducting style that fits the punchy extremity of Shostakovich is not always right for Beethoven, whose Piano Concerto No. 2 was overemphatic and sluggish on Thursday, particularly in a plodding Adagio. The veteran soloist, Emanuel Ax, seemed to be searching for a middle ground between his pearly geniality and Payare’s starker phrasing, and the results sounded unsettled. Ax seemed more suavely at ease in his encore, Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s “Ständchen.”The concert opened with another Philharmonic premiere, William Grant Still’s brooding “Darker America” (1924), an ambiguous, 13-minute dreamscape of haziness, low-slung blues and a subdued conclusion.This was the first time the orchestra has put Still’s work on a subscription program in over 20 years, and it will be followed in March by his Symphony No. 2, “Song of a New Race.” To hear so much new to this ensemble — even Beethoven’s Second, while hardly a rarity, is probably the least played of his piano concertos — is a heartening sign of searching artistic leadership.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      At 26, the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s Star Keeps Rising

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      Having assumed the podium of three major orchestras and appeared on the world’s prestigious stages, he debuts next at the New York Philharmonic.AMSTERDAM — It’s impossible for an artist to avoid making an entrance at the Concertgebouw, one of the world’s most storied spaces for classical music.Double doors behind the stage are flung open, making way for a soloist or conductor to descend a flight of steps leading to the spotlight. When Klaus Mäkelä, a sharply dressed young Finnish maestro, did so on a Friday night in August, he was greeted with the kind of applause typically reserved for the end of a concert. With each stride, the ovation became stronger until, as he stood at the podium, the audience let out a sustained cheer.“That was amazing,” Mäkelä said in an interview later. “It feels like an eternity, to walk down to the stage, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the warmth of an audience in that way.”You could understand the enthusiasm. The house band, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, had been without a chief conductor since Daniele Gatti was abruptly dismissed over sexual assault allegations in 2018. After years of guest batons and speculation, the news had come at last in June that Mäkelä, just 26, would take the podium. This night was his first appearance since the announcement.Mäkelä, perhaps the fastest-rising conductor of his generation — beloved by players and administrators, if not always by critics — already leads two orchestras, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris. When he accepted the job here in Amsterdam, it was as “artistic partner,” a title he will hold until he officially becomes chief conductor in 2027, when his contracts with the other groups expire.Mäkelä conducting the Orchestre de Paris. “I haven’t found someone in the orchestra with something bad to say,” Nikola Nikolov, a violinist in the ensemble, said.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that is bureaucratic speak for what is effectively the beginning of his tenure, with a starting commitment of five weeks this season. That’s on top of guest appearances that will add to his résumé of prestigious ensembles like those in Berlin, Vienna, Chicago and Cleveland; next up is the New York Philharmonic, where Mäkelä makes his debut on Dec. 8, leading a contemporary work by Jimmy López Bellido and symphonies by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.Again, he is 26.But age has virtually never been a barrier, neither to his ambition nor to the way older colleagues regard him. Christian van Eggelen, a first violin in the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the chair of the group’s artistic committee, described Mäkelä’s first visit to the hall as “love at first sight.”“He was 24, and the second-youngest person onstage,” van Eggelen added. “Yet after three minutes, it was very clear that we were dealing with the most precocious conducting talent that we’ve seen in the past 50 or 75 years.”MÄKELÄ WAS BORN in Helsinki to music teacher parents — his father, cello, and his mother, piano. They both had students who attended a local German school, and decided to enroll Klaus there as well.“Everyone who went there was very efficient,” Mäkelä said, as he often does, with a wide smile but soft tone. “So they must have thought the same would happen to me.”The school might have taught discipline, but Mäkelä was already, in his words, a very nerdy child. He listened to the works of specific composers obsessively like immersive projects, and happily practiced his cello and sang in choruses, including in “Carmen” at the Finnish National Opera. It was there, backstage and watching the conductor on the monitor, that he first had the urge to pick up a baton.“I remember that we all had free ice cream,” he recalled. “But I also remember that I was completely mesmerized. I think it was the music, but also that the conductor was able to play all of this, which is a kind of instrument on a large scale.”His primary focus, though, was still the cello, which brought him to the famed Sibelius Academy’s youth department. While there, he made it into a conducting class with Jorma Panula, the teacher of luminaries like Susanna Mälkki, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä.“He had a very specific taste, which is that less is more,” Mäkelä said of Panula. “We all had to be able to conduct without moving at all. And then after that, we could do whatever we wanted. Conducting isn’t very difficult; one can learn it very quickly. But we never learned that. He never lectured, but instead felt us out. I think that was just his way of being: asking questions and always searching.”When the time came to attend the Sibelius Academy proper, Mäkelä continued with cello — though he never graduated — and played in the Helsinki Philharmonic, under conductors including Mälkki. That orchestra, no minor ensemble, was the first to ask him to conduct. From there, the invitations flooded in.By 20 — a time he refers to in conversation as “when I was younger” — he had an agent, the classical music power broker Jasper Parrott, and began to put a personal stamp on the programs he conducted. His championed the works of Jimmy López Bellido, whose name continues to dot Mäkelä’s concert calendar.A breakthrough came when he took the podium of the Oslo Philharmonic, in 2020. That orchestra, Mäkelä said, “feels like my baby.” The ensemble had offered him the job of chief conductor after only one visit; it’s a relationship, he added, that “started with this crazy trust, but has been one of the most fruitful things of my life.”Principally, it has led to an ambitious recording project of Sibelius’s complete symphonies, released this year on Decca. (Mäkelä is only the third conductor in the label’s history to have an exclusive contract.) The cycle reveals a lot about the strengths and shortcomings of Mäkelä’s career so far. Reviewers found it to be an uneven account, both glorious and forgettable, with what David Allen in The New York Times called “ups and downs” that were “sensationally played throughout.”That last part is essential to characterizing Mäkelä’s style. He elicits clean, skillful playing. And he falls somewhere between those conductors known for unfamiliar, occasionally counterintuitive readings of repertory classics — like Teodor Currentzis or Santtu-Matias Rouvali — and those who prioritize composer intentions with little need for additional insight. His performances are rarely sensational, nor do they seem to strive for novel arguments; yet they are unwaveringly honest and deferential to the score.“Maybe that’s the only moment where one could say, maybe, he is young,” van Eggelen said. “He doesn’t turn a score around and search for things to prove himself. What is noticeable is that there is this search for colors and the meaning of these different colors. Nothing’s dogmatic, though. It is, simply put, extremely pleasurable to work with him.”That was the feeling, too, at the Orchestra de Paris, which hired Mäkelä in 2020. (Together, they will be in residence at the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, with a triptych of Stravinsky scores for the Ballets Russes, and in a coming season as the pit orchestra in a new “Frau Ohne Schatten” directed by Barrie Kosky.) Nikola Nikolov, a violinist in the ensemble, said in an interview translated from French that although the players initially had doubts about him because of his age, they were quickly won over. Mäkelä, he added, doesn’t make aggressively distinct choices but comes with a clear interpretation and executes it with exactitude.“I haven’t found someone in the orchestra with something bad to say,” Nikolov said. “Klaus has confidence in people, and in this way he is a good conductor.”Mäkelä is also, players have said, remarkably efficient in rehearsals. His phrasing is direct without being dictatorial, and he doesn’t leave musicians waiting. “There are conductors who flip through pages when we are done,” Nikolov said. “Him, never. He always knows what he wants to talk about, and what he wants to say. That’s magic.”That is one reason Mäkelä attracts admirers among musicians in both Europe and the United States, where he first played with the Minnesota Orchestra but has developed steadier relationships with the Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. In Cleveland, he debuted at a summer Blossom Music Festival concert but made a more spectacular impression filling in last minute for Jaap van Zweden in a program that culminated with Beethoven’s Seventh.Mäkelä isn’t sure what he will do when his contracts expire in Oslo and Paris. “I love them both to death,” he said, “and they’ve been teaching me so much.”Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThe Clevelanders, musicians who are not easily impressed, took a quick liking to him. So did the local press; The Plain Dealer’s review of the Beethoven performance began, “Let there be a substitute every week, if every substitute can be like conductor Klaus Mäkelä.” He is the only guest with a two-week engagement there this season.Speculators may already be wondering whether there’s more of a future in Cleveland for Mäkelä if that orchestra’s music director, Franz Welser-Möst, departs at the end of his contract in 2027, after what will have been 25 years with the ensemble. But for now, Mäkelä would prefer to keep his attention on the orchestras he already has.HIS CONCERTGEBOUW DEBUT took place in an empty hall during the pandemic. Van Eggelen recalled that the orchestra had braced itself for Mäkelä’s arrival, being told to “watch out, apparently he’s amazing.” Mostly, van Eggelen said, the first rehearsal felt more like a homecoming than a visit from a star. “It was a way of working which we recognized, which brought us back to how wanted to be,” he said. “He was meticulous and at the same time let things go and let us make music. This combination of precision, which you need in our hall, and freedom — that was something that shook the whole orchestra up.”Chief conductors at the Concertgebouw Orchestra are elected by the players, who were in no rush to make a decision until they found what felt like a right fit. Other names had been in circulation, but a vote came quickly for Mäkelä because, as van Eggelen said, “there was an absolute, North Korean majority preference for Klaus.” They only had to offer him the post.That happened during the lockdown days of early 2021 in Paris. Mäkelä was preparing a concert there, keeping to himself because of a curfew. With only a small window of opportunity, a delegation from the Concertgebouw Orchestra went to Paris and had dinner with him. Afterward, back at the hotel, they emptied their minibars and knocked on Mäkelä’s door. Inside, they asked whether he would take the job.Thus began, Mäkelä said, a nearly year-and-a-half-long negotiation over how to keep his two orchestras while taking on Amsterdam. Eventually, they arrived at the plan to spend five years with him as artistic partner until 2027, with a commitment of five seasons as chief conductor to follow. Mäkelä had yet to play before a live audience at the Concertgebouw, but the orchestra had invested in a decade with him.The audience did finally come, that night in August, for a meaty program of Kaija Saariaho’s “Orion” and Mahler’s 80-minute Sixth Symphony. The rehearsals hadn’t been perfect, and the players were just returning from a summer holiday, but Mäkelä wasn’t worried. “They are concert animals,” he said. And he had felt as though he had been studying the Mahler, in some way, his whole life.Lifting his baton, Mäkelä said, he didn’t feel like the “cool cucumber” he appeared to be from the audience. But he relaxed the moment the Saariaho began. The evening was typical of his performances: accomplished without being overly assertive; legible and restrained with an eye toward explosive climaxes. By the end of the Mahler, the audience was even more enthusiastic than at the start. His Amsterdam era began.Mäkelä doesn’t yet know what he will do when the Paris and Oslo contracts expire in 2027. “I love them both to death,” he said, “and they’ve been teaching me so much.” But three music directorships won’t be possible, and with effectively all of them filling out his calendar now, he can feel the jet-setting, rising-star lifestyle of his early 20s begin to calm down.“That’s a conscious decision,” he said. “In a way, I’m trying to concentrate more. Guest conducting is fun, but a deep connection with the musicians — in Oslo, in Paris and now with the Concertgebouw — that’s my next big thing, to get to know them really well.” More

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      Scarred by War, a Ukrainian Children’s Choir Finds Hope in Music

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      Members of the Shchedryk Children’s Choir have emerged from conflict determined to sing, including at Carnegie Hall this weekend.When air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv recently, the Shchedryk Children’s Choir, which was deep in rehearsal for a Christmas program, went into action.More than two dozen young singers, carrying sheet music and backpacks, rushed from the Palace of Children and Youth, their longtime practice space, to a nearby bomb shelter. There, using cellphones as flashlights, they resumed their singing, filling the cold, cramped space with folk songs and carols until the sirens faded.“I was scared, but I was also hopeful,” recalled Polina Fedorchenko, a 16-year-old member of the choir. “We knew that if we could get through this, we could get through anything.”The children of the Shchedryk choir, which will perform at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, have been hit hard by the war. They have lost friends and relatives in the fighting; watched as Russian bombs have devastated schools, churches and city streets; and grappled with the anxiety and trauma of war.But the choristers have also forged a determination to use music as a way to heal Ukraine and promote their culture around the world.At Carnegie, the choir’s 56 members — 51 girls and five boys, ages 11 to 25 — will perform traditional songs and carols alongside other Ukrainian artists in “Notes From Ukraine,” a program sponsored in part by the Ukrainian foreign ministry. Proceeds will go to United24, a government-run platform that is raising money to repair damaged infrastructure.Clockwise, from top left, members of the choir including: Anastasiia Rusina and Taisiia Poliakova; Bogdana Novikova; Polina Fedorchenko; and Kateryna Rohova.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe concert will also celebrate the centennial of the North American premiere at Carnegie Hall of “Carol of the Bells,” by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych. (The name of the choir comes from the Ukrainian title for the music.)The choir hopes that the concert will help bring attention to Russia’s continuing attacks, including its recent efforts to damage Ukraine’s supply of electricity, heat and water, threatening a new kind of humanitarian crisis this winter.“It has been exhausting,” said Mykhailo Kostyna, a 16-year-old singer. “We’re just happy now that we can share Ukraine’s culture and spirit with the world.”The State of the WarA Pivotal Point: Ukraine is on the offensive, but with about one-fifth of its territory still occupied by Russian forces, there is still a long way to go, and the onset of winter will bring new difficulties.Ukraine’s Electric Grid: As many Ukrainians head into winter without power or water, Western officials say that rebuilding Ukraine’s battered energy infrastructure needs to be considered a second front in the war.A Bloody Vortex : Even as they have celebrated successes elsewhere, Ukrainian forces in the small eastern city of Bakhmut have endured relentless Russian attacks. And the struggle to hold it is only intensifying.Dnipro River: A volunteer Ukrainian special forces team has been conducting secret raids under the cover of darkness, traveling across the strategic waterway that has become the dividing line of the southern front.After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, many members of the choir scattered across the country. Some, seeking shelter and security, fled abroad.The choir, which has been a training ground for Ukrainian singers since its founding in 1971, held virtual rehearsals to keep the ensemble together. The choristers stayed in touch on social media, where they shared upbeat songs as well as clips of practice sessions, and checked in on one another.“The choir kept my connection to Ukraine alive,” said Taisiia Poliakova, 15, who fled to Germany shortly after the invasion. “It gave me a safe environment amid all the madness of war.”“These songs remind me of the pain,” one choir member said, “but they also help me somehow deal with the pain.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesLearning new songs at home was a challenge that provided an escape from the constant ringing of air-raid sirens. It also gave choir members an outlet for the intense emotions they were experiencing.Oleksandra Lutsak, 20, said the war had deeply affected her music. Now, when she sings, she said, she sees the faces of five friends who died in the war. Sometimes, she imagines the experience of a friend captured by Russian soldiers. When rehearsing folk songs, she envisions “destroyed homes with no roofs, collapsed walls, everything burned down — and people standing around who have nowhere to spend the winter.”“These songs remind me of the pain,” she said, “but they also help me somehow deal with the pain.”Other singers have struggled to look beyond the chaos of war. Polina Holtseva, 15, said she sometimes felt she was living in a constant state of fear. She was pained to see friends and relatives endure physical injuries and economic hardships because of the conflict.“I feel like I’ve suffered so many psychological traumas I can’t even speak of them,” she said. “My nervous system is all over the place. I feel like my whole world has been turned upside down.”Clockwise, from top left, the singers: Mykhailo Kostyna; Uliana Sukach-Kochetkova; the twin sisters Marharyta and Kira Kupchyk; and Varvara Avotynsh.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn August, the Shchedryk choir reunited for a series of concerts in Copenhagen. Then, this fall, as it prepared for its Carnegie debut, the choir rehearsed in Kyiv for the first time since the start of the war.The recent Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure brought new challenges. Rehearsals were often interrupted by sirens, and frequent power outages meant long stretches without light.“It was in those moments that we felt the most responsibility to keep practicing, because this was a testament to our dedication to our craft,” Fedorchenko said.Because of the war, the choir left Ukraine on Nov. 19 for Warsaw, where they were given rehearsal space inside the Chopin University of Music and obtained visas to travel to the United States.Marianna Sablina, the choir’s artistic director and chief conductor, whose mother founded the ensemble, said that the Carnegie concert, which was planned before the invasion, is now “even more momentous, given the struggles we are facing.”The choir is one of several Ukrainian ensembles to go abroad since the invasion, as part of 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 in the summer. The Kyiv City Ballet performed in many American cities this fall.The Shchedryk choir arrived in New York this week with a mix of excitement and nervousness, uncertain whether the performance would resonate with an American audience. They brought Ukrainian flags, T-shirts and souvenirs to give to new friends.In New York, they have a busy schedule: rehearsals at local churches as well as visits to tourist destinations including Times Square and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Wednesday, they gathered at Grand Central Terminal to sing “Carol of the Bells.”Marharyta and Kira Kupchyk, 14-year-old twins from Kyiv, said they felt relieved to have some distance from the war while in New York. But they said they were still growing accustomed to the enormity of the city.“In Kyiv, you can walk easier — you can even dance down the streets,” Marharyta said. “But in New York, it’s not like that.”In between rehearsals and sightseeing, the twins checked social media apps for news of the war and sent messages to family and friends in Ukraine. They said they worried about their father, who has been out of touch because he recently started military training in Kyiv.“I hope we can help make sure this war will end soon,” Kira said.Marianna Sablina, the artistic director of the Shchedryk choir, preparing the singers for their performance in New York.Lila Barth for The New York Times More

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      A Not-Quite-Star Maestro Has a Starry Season at the Met

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      Carlo Rizzi, a Met Opera regular sometimes taken for granted, opened the company’s season this fall and has juggled “Medea,” “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”Deep in Verdi’s opera “Don Carlo,” an impassioned solo cello line embroiders a bass aria with a vein of feeling.On a recent evening, the conductor Carlo Rizzi was leading the work at the Metropolitan Opera. Rizzi isn’t demonstrative on the podium; his gestures tend to be controlled, focused, professional. But from a seat at the back of the pit, it was possible to see him, at the end of the aria, smile slightly and blow a subtle kiss down in the direction of the orchestra’s principal cello, Rafael Figueroa.It was an affectionate, familial gesture from a man who has become family at the Met. “Don Carlo,” which runs through Saturday, is part of a three-production fall for Rizzi — along with Cherubini’s “Medea,” the season opener, and Puccini’s “Tosca” — that brings his number of performances with the company to more than 250 since his debut in 1993.“I am not 20 anymore,” Rizzi, 62, said in an interview the morning after a “Don Carlo” and before a “Tosca” that evening. “Particularly after the pandemic, I want to enjoy what I’m doing. That’s why I’m happy about these three works at the Met. Each one, in a different way, has been rewarding.”Rizzi is among the stars of the Met’s not-quite-stars, in company with conductors like Nello Santi (who led some 400 Met performances between 1962 and 2000) and Marco Armiliato (nearly 500 since 1998). These are not famous names, just musicians experienced and respected enough to allow the company’s vast repertory factory to function, particularly when it comes to core Italian works like “La Bohème,” “Rigoletto” and “La Traviata” that must be put on with perilously little rehearsal time.His name and face familiar to Met regulars — from the side, with his toss of silver hair and chin stubble, he looks a little like Plácido Domingo — Rizzi is the kind of artist who can be entrusted with “Medea,” a rarely performed opera that he had never done or even seen, late in the game, in addition to his long-scheduled “Tosca” and “Don Carlo.”“He did three operas at once,” said the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who sang the title role in “Medea.” “Who else can do that? And not just get through them: These were three spectacularly conducted operas. In my opinion, he is one of the best Italian conductors living right now.”Sondra Radvanovsky sang the title role in “Medea,” which Rizzi conducted to open the Met’s season.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I find him academic, in a good way,” said Michael Fabiano, here singing Cavaradossi in “Tosca” under Rizzi, with Aleksandra Kurzak. “He’s very studied and highly informed.” Karen Almond/Met OperaYet many descriptions of Rizzi include variations on the apologetic phrase “but in a good way.” “It’s going to sound pejorative,” the tenor Michael Fabiano, who starred in “Tosca,” said, “but I find him academic, in a good way. He’s very studied and highly informed.”Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, added, “He’s considered to be really strong, really solid, really reliable — solid in a good way.”The takeaway is that the soft-spoken Rizzi embodies qualities of patient, unshowy craft and dependability that are often overlooked, sadly old-fashioned and definitely unsexy. But they should not be taken for granted.“It’s underestimated how difficult it is for a conductor to succeed at the Met,” Gelb said. “There aren’t so many who have the degree of expertise and level of musicality when it comes to Italian repertoire that he has. We’re fortunate to have a conductor of his quality willing to come here to do the standard repertory.”Born in 1960 in Milan, Rizzi didn’t grow up in a musical family; his father was a chemist and his mother an accountant. But he was shy as a young child, and his parents tried to draw him out with piano lessons; he flourished. (His two siblings ended up with musical careers, too.)On top of his studies, Rizzi spent many nights watching opera at the Teatro alla Scala. These were Claudio Abbado’s years as music director there, and the productions and casts were regularly superb.“I was a pianist, and at the time I was very good at sight-reading,” Rizzi said. “That means that every clarinetist, bassoonist, singer and double bass player was coming to me. And making music together started to become more interesting than just the piano.”He conducted chamber orchestras, and Mozart concertos from the keyboard, and in his late teens began working as a repetiteur — the opera rehearsal assistant position that was the main root of old-school conducting careers.Rizzi did well in a couple of competitions, and began to find work in regional capitals like Palermo and Trieste. Word spread among singers. He was invited to conduct the Donizetti rarity “Torquato Tasso” at the Buxton Festival in England in 1988; that led to an engagement at the Royal Opera in London, and a broadcast reached Brian McMaster, then the leader of Welsh National Opera, who hired Rizzi as music director in Cardiff.Matthew Epstein took over for McMaster just as Rizzi was starting his tenure. (Rizzi served in the role from 1992 to 2001, then again, after his successor resigned, from 2004 to 2008.)“Let’s be honest: Carlo, with his name, is going to be used around the world mostly for the Italian repertory,” Epstein said. “But in Wales he did ‘Elektra’; he did ‘Rosenkavalier’; he did ‘Peter Grimes’ and ‘The Rake’s Progress.’ He’s a superb theater conductor, in the smallest of small groups of people who really work in the theater.”His Met debut was in “La Bohème,” which he has since done more than 60 times with the company. He led a new “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1998, a new “Il Trovatore” in 2000 and two new stagings of “Norma,” in 2001 and, starring Radvanovsky, on opening night in 2017. “Medea” was his third time opening a Met season.Yet he remains under the radar in New York. His work this fall has been like his Met career in general: nothing fancy, nothing fussy, just clear, compelling readings. “It’s not anything new or different, just the idea of being musically aware with every dramatic beat,” said the tenor Russell Thomas, who sang the title role in “Don Carlo.” “This is maybe my fourth production, and I never had anybody go into that much detail.”Under Rizzi, “Don Carlo” was sober and weighty.Ken Howard/Met OperaRizzi’s “Medea” had the formality of Gluck, who influenced Cherubini, mixed with hints of the tumultuous “Sturm und Drang” movement to come. “Tosca” was colorful and propulsive; “Don Carlo,” sober and weighty.“The way they play ‘Medea’ is not the way they play ‘Tosca,’” he said. “The flexibility is one of the great things about this orchestra.”Among Rizzi’s upcoming projects is to record orchestral suites he has drawn from “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca.” In future seasons at the Met, he’s slated to return for, yes, Puccini and Verdi — including more “Bohème” and a revival of “Un Ballo in Maschera.”“I really feel, since we did the ‘Norma’ opening night to now, he’s a much different person,” Radvanovsky said. “He’s more relaxed; I feel he’s more comfortable in his baton skill, his skill with the orchestra. His musical language has really relaxed and grown.”Rizzi said: “I don’t want to sound like an old sage, but I’m always in development. I learn more about conducting every day.” Perhaps unexpectedly, given that he is best known for leading the most familiar works in the repertory, in 2019 he became the artistic director of Opera Rara, a London-based company devoted to underperformed titles.“Carlo is incredibly knowledgeable, musicologically and dramaturgically,” Epstein said. “That’s why this Opera Rara thing is good for him. But he should be the music director of an opera house in Italy. It’s silly he hasn’t. And he should have had a go in this country as music director in one of the main houses. He’s not the ordinary Italian conductor — he’s just not. He’s better.”Fabiano, the tenor, locates in Rizzi “the spirit of these older conductors — Votto, Fausto Cleva, Gavazzeni — who had an inherent knowledge of the repertory and knew deeply the needs of the singer. An understanding of what singers need, and the deep care for the letter of the music, the construction of the music, makes for a very terrific maestro.”And while Rizzi is not the most breathlessly marketed baton, Donald Palumbo, the Met’s chorus master, put it simply: “For me, he’s a star.” More

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      After Covid, Playing Trumpet Taught Me How to Breathe Again

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      The benefits of group (music) therapy.Our director stepped onto the podium, and the auditorium stilled to an expectant silence. The black sequins on her conducting dress flared in the stage lights; the audience behind her was lost to the glare. With a glance and a whispered word, she gave us final instructions. As she raised her baton, we all breathed in time; on the downbeat, we exploded into sound. The song was “The Hounds of Spring,” by Alfred Reed, and I can still hear the opening bars. That concert, the entirety of which felt downright enchanted, propelled me into music college, where I studied music education, learning the basics of a dozen instruments so I could teach them someday. After a year, I turned in my loaner instruments, transferred to a new school and changed my major. At 18, I wanted to save the world, and I thought I could do it better some other way.Two decades later, in November 2020, worn out by lockdown, I longed to use my mind for something other than worry, to fill my living room with a sound that wasn’t the tinny, competing voices of my children’s virtual school. I played the trumpet for only a couple of months during college, after working with woodwinds and strings in high school, and I imagined studying fingering charts again and summoning a sense memory of correct embouchure. I messaged my middle-school band director, a brass player, and we swapped listings until I sent her the model number of a solid, beginner-level trumpet for $70. Two minutes later, her reply: “Oh, yes! Grab it!” Reconnecting with the trumpet was a delight, but playing alone in my living room was a discipline I didn’t keep for long.Covid caught up to me in May of this year. My symptoms were not dangerous, but they were persistent; I counted 12 days, 14, 16, and I still couldn’t eat normally or function for more than a few hours without exhaustion and physical pain. My mental-health symptoms, meanwhile, were devastating and worsened as the days passed. I couldn’t see the point of anything; I couldn’t stop crying; I couldn’t imagine a time when these things would change.I left the house, in those days, only to go to my daughter’s softball games, a five-minute drive from home, where I could prop myself in a camp chair yards from anyone else, sip Gatorade and feel the sun on my back. If life is pointless, I thought, thank God for softball. And then I thought, OK — if life is pointless, then why not do some things just because they’re fun?Seventy of us count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together.So I decided to relearn trumpet in a more committed way: by joining a community band. I found a no-audition ensemble near me and filled out the online interest form. I received a welcome text from my new section leader and a card in the mail, telling me how the band was sure to be better because I had joined. The first time I attended rehearsal, I played a single note, badly, then spent the rest of the 90 minutes listening. Throughout the following week, I practiced at home every day, switching on the metronome and playing long tones until my lips gave out. When the next Tuesday evening rolled around, I could play. Not well, but well enough. It felt astonishing, a revelation: Sometimes, things get better instead of worse.The trumpet only has three keys, called valves, which are played in seven combinations to make all of the possible notes. Depressing the first valve, for instance, can produce a low B-flat, an F, a higher B-flat, a D and several other notes I can’t reach. The difference between one and another depends on the frequency of the lips’ buzz. It is equal parts science and art. And it’s more difficult than I remembered.Nonetheless, on Tuesday nights, I grab my $70 trumpet and load my backpack with music, stand, mute, fingering chart, valve oil and slide grease, plus a towel to catch the mix of spit and condensation that brass players insist on calling “water.” I slip in the door, nodding to my fellow third trumpets as I set up and warm up. When the conductor — the volunteer director of this band for 42 years — raises his baton, I count like mad, leave out the notes I know full well I can’t hit and do my best on the others. I spend rehearsal listening, hard, to try to merge myself into the whole. Seventy of us — blue-collar workers and office administrators and retirees, woodwinds and brass and percussionists — count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together. We’re often out of tune or unpracticed. We sometimes dissolve into chaos, and then laughter. When time is up, I pack my bag, nod to my section mates again and slip back out the door into the night.In the months following my Covid infection, the most severe depression of my life gave way to the most severe anxiety. Normal days were rife with triggers: the car, the office, meetings, therapy, food, the doctor, social engagements. Community-band rehearsal was no exception, but I went anyway.I wasn’t always sure why. It was, as I had hoped, fun. But it was also more. Tracking the notes, counting the beats, linking the notes on the page to the correct fingering, frequency, breath and duration — it seems like a miracle that it ever works. Multiply that by 70 players, and it can feel like witnessing the impossible. Somehow community band did what I knew music could do when I enrolled in college, before I changed my mind about my future: It saved me. It drew me out — of my home, of my head. It taught me how to breathe again.Shea Tuttle is the author of “Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers,” co-author with Michael G. Long of “Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights” and co-editor of two collections on faith and justice. More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Taste of Holiday Bounty

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      Stéphane Denève leads a program of extravagantly colorful French works, with the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson as the soloist in a Ravel concerto.Thanksgiving came a day early at the New York Philharmonic this year: the calories, the juicy fat, the whipped cream, the fun, the sense of endless bounty. The orchestra’s program at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday was an immersion in richness and in flashing, warming colors, and it left you like a good holiday dinner does: a little dazed, even happily drowsy, stumbling toward the subway truly full.Conducted by Stéphane Denève, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony, the concert was très French — down to the tender Rameau encore played by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Ravel’s Concerto in G. (The program repeats on Friday and Saturday.)At the center of that concerto is a time-suspending Adagio. But in Ólafsson’s performance, the dreaminess — the slight blur, the delicacy — bled into the two outer movements, too. Some pianists lean on the factory-machine regularity, the bright lucidity, of those parts to hammer home a contrast with the slow movement. But, as he also showed in a very different repertory at his Carnegie Hall debut in February, Ólafsson resists vivid contrasts.It’s not that his touch is diffuse; it’s as clean as marble. And it’s not that the tempos he and Denève chose for the framing movements were slower than normal. But the effect Ólafsson got throughout, of a kind of virtuosic reticence, could be described in the same words I used for his performance in February: a “silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.”“Céléphaïs” (2017), a nine-minute section from Guillaume Connesson’s symphonic poem inspired by the fantastical writings of H.P. Lovecraft, opened the concert with an extravagance that offers proof of the survival of the orchestrational panache of the French tradition: its lurid lushness and sly squiggles, brassy explosions and sensual strings.Connesson’s precursors in that tradition got a hearing after intermission. The audience even got a second helping: The big, sweet slice of cake that is the Suite No. 2 drawn from Albert Roussel’s 1930 ballet “Bacchus et Ariane” was followed by another slice, the Suite No. 2 from another mythological ballet of the early 20th century, Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé.”On paper this seemed like overindulgence; it kind of was, but who doesn’t like their potatoes two ways every now and again? And while there’s a familial similarity between these works, Roussel’s style is ever so slightly more angular, with an underlying feeling of logic distinct from Ravel’s billowy scene painting.The Philharmonic played well throughout, riding the many waves and swerves of intensity and pigment, from dewy dawns to mellow dusks. There were some particularly notable contributions to the potluck: Ryan Roberts, just a few years into his tenure as the orchestra’s English hornist but already a pillar of the ensemble, matched Ólafsson’s eloquent introspection in the Ravel concerto’s slow movement.The principal flute, Robert Langevin, unspooled his instrument’s classic glistening solo in “Daphnis et Chloé” with conversational ease. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, had a russet-color turn in the Roussel, and Roger Nye, unusually seated in the first bassoon chair for that work, played with honeyed serenity.Unlike at most Thanksgiving dinners, by the end the fullness didn’t feel like bloat. The clear, cool acoustics of the new Geffen Hall work against textures getting too heavy; they favor breezy sleekness, which is perfect for Denève, whose music-making exudes relaxation without losing forward motion. A couple of hours later, I would have been more than ready to eat — I mean hear — some more.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Sphinx Was Ahead of the Curve on Diversity in Classical Music

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      It was the late 1990s, and Afa Sadykhly Dworkin saw a woman crying backstage at a concert hall in Michigan.Dworkin was there helping to run a competition for young artists started by the Sphinx Organization, a newly founded group devoted to fostering diversity in classical music. When she spied the woman in tears, she assumed that a bow or string had broken. But when she tried to help, the woman waved her off, saying that although her child had lost the competition, her tears were happy ones.“I’m crying because we thought my daughter was the best,” Dworkin recently recalled the woman telling her. “There’s no one who lives near us who plays at her level, so we came assuming we were going to win. And we didn’t win anything, but she has a family now. She has all these sisters and brothers now.”Sphinx, which turns 25 this year, has come a long way since that first competition. While the prize-awarding event remains at the core of its activities, the organization, which Dworkin now leads, has also started training programs and ensembles, and has pushed for more diverse repertory and orchestra rosters. It has promoted young soloists and arts administrators, and operates an ever-expanding annual conference. With a burst of new attention to phrases like diversity, equity and inclusion over the past two years, Sphinx’s steady, patient work has come to seem prescient.“They were raising the profile of the critical importance of diversity in orchestras before almost anybody was,” said Simon Woods, the chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “And before the League. They were there before everybody.”But perhaps Sphinx’s most fundamental and meaningful achievement has been its simplest one, the part that crying mother caught onto: creating a community of people who had thought they were the only one of their kind, or close. Forming what those in the Sphinx network call “la familia.”From left, members of the Sphinx Virtuosi, Hannah White, Alex Gonzalez, Clayton Penrose-Whitmore and Thierry Delucas Neves, at Carnegie.Rafael Rios for The New York Times“It’s so much more than our life’s work,” Dworkin, 46, the organization’s president and artistic director, said in an interview in October, the morning after Sphinx’s 25th-anniversary gala concert at Carnegie Hall. “It’s a family. It’s a society.”When Sphinx started, Dworkin was an undergraduate violin student at the University of Michigan. Raised in Baku, Azerbaijan, she had come to the United States as a teenager, when her father feared that political shifts at home might not be friendly to mixed-heritage part-Jews.Her parents were well educated — her father a chemical engineer and her mother an academic — but music wasn’t on their radar as a career option. Dworkin begged to play an instrument, though, so at 7 she entered the Soviet Union’s tightly organized music education program, and chose the violin. It quickly became her passion.The move across the Atlantic was a shock; she spoke no English. But with the help of a devoted teacher, she began to piece the language together. Then Aaron Dworkin, a transfer student from Penn State, enrolled in her teacher’s studio at Michigan.“We started talking immediately,” she said. “He’d zeroed in on something more than his own fiddle playing. He was interested in repertoire.”The child of a white mother and Black father, Aaron had been adopted by a Jewish family and raised in New York City. He introduced Afa to Black composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Grant Still and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and told her about the negative assumptions people had made about his artistry as almost always the only person of color in classical music settings. (After a decade as friends, then colleagues, they married in 2005.)Xavier Foley, a bassist and composer whose piece “An Ode to Our Times” was performed at the gala.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesAmaryn Olmeda, the winner of the Sphinx Competition’s junior division in 2021, rehearsed Carlos Simon’s solo “Between Worlds.”

      Rafael Rios for The New York Times“He had a problem with the world,” she said, “and he was going to do something about it.”What he had in mind was a competition — with the goal of discovering the musicians of color who were out there, and of building camaraderie among them. He was fearless about fund-raising and asking for assistance, and with the university as a partner and Afa working frenetically on the side of her violin teaching and playing, the inaugural Sphinx Competition took place in Ann Arbor in 1998.“It was never designed to be an affirmative action mechanism,” Aaron Dworkin said in an interview. “We told our jurors, ‘If you find no one rises to the right level, don’t give it.’ And there have been a couple of years of the competition in which we didn’t give certain awards.”The organization grew organically as issues presented themselves. “They have been really good at creating programs or initiatives where there is a gap,” said Blake-Anthony Johnson, the chief executive of the Chicago Sinfonietta and an alumnus of Sphinx LEAD, which is aimed at fostering arts administrators of color. “They have found all the crevices of nationwide issues, and tried to home in on them.”Some parents complained that their children had to play on cheap, borrowed instruments, so Sphinx organized higher-quality loans. Scholarships were arranged with prominent summer programs. Early on, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington offered performance opportunities for competition winners.Sphinx began to serve as something of a management firm, and also started a summer program of its own, the Sphinx Performance Academy; a large orchestra; a training structure for young children, Sphinx Overture; an elite touring chamber ensemble, now called the Sphinx Virtuosi; the annual conference, SphinxConnect; Sphinx LEAD; and a regranting program to support others’ projects, the Sphinx Venture Fund.Deborah Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said: “I’m very positive about Sphinx because they actually do something. Sphinx isn’t theoretical. They provide specific, effective programs.”What they have not ever wanted to do was create their own edifices. “One option would have been to start a kind of Sphinx Conservatory, but the vision was never separate but equal,” Afa Dworkin said. “It was how do we nurture, empower, lift up and create on-ramps within the existing structure. Aaron knew the talent was out there, so he wanted to find it, nurture it, give it a level playing field. He didn’t want a new Juilliard; he wanted Juilliard to look like New York.”In 2015, Aaron became the dean of the School of Music, Theater and Dance at the University of Michigan. It was a potentially uncomfortable moment for Sphinx: Finding a successor to an organization’s founder is always delicate, and in this case the most obvious candidate was the founder’s wife.“I have to give the board credit,” Afa said. “They didn’t just say, ‘Oh, you’ve always been around.’ They looked at other things out there, and took a six- or seven-month process to see if I was the right person.”She has remained in charge even though, two years after starting, Aaron stepped down as dean, saying in a statement it was “necessary for me to have the opportunity to focus more on my family.” (Afa said that his packed schedule at Michigan had been “taking a toll” on their two children.)“There are definitely things we disagree on,” she said of her husband. “Direction, choices. We have different aesthetics relative to music. I really love new music, and Aaron has an absolute dedication to the Romantic era. But he has given me plenty of space; I can’t think of one place where he overstepped.”The Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie. The group made its international debut in Brazil, and will perform next year in England.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesHer days in New York last month leading up to the Carnegie gala were a swirl of meetings, coffees and lunches with donors, alumni, staff, musicians and composers. Everyone had advice to give and receive, and logistical challenges to present to her. Most pressing, the Sphinx Virtuosi was then about to make its international debut in Brazil, and has also been planning events next year in England, as well as recording projects. She fielded everything with the calm humor and gentle decisiveness of a den mother.“She has no vanity about her,” said Victoria Robey, a member of the organization’s board. “She just wants to see Sphinx be the best it can be. And she’s fantastic at fund-raising. She doesn’t do it in an aggressive, transactional way; she does it in an organic way. Donors want to have the mission explained to them; they don’t just want to plop down their money and disappear. She builds with warm cohesiveness.”Alexa Smith, an associate vice president at the Manhattan School of Music, said, of her fellow Sphinx LEAD alumni: “One of the things we have all agreed has been impactful has been having the community, having people all over the country, where we can lean on each other. It’s somehow not competitive. And that’s a cultural thing that comes from Afa.”There have been debates, both within Sphinx and from outside, about the organization’s tactics. The Dworkins’ preference for quietly lobbying legacy institutions has struck some as old-fashioned in a culture dominated by call-outs fueled by social media. And although string players have always had a home at Sphinx, some in the field wish that there were more programs for other types of instrumentalists, too.The violinist and composer Jessie Montgomery, who has been involved with Sphinx from its early years, said that she has observed the musical level and socioeconomic status of the average Sphinx Performance Academy student steadily rise. Is the program, in that case, truly opening doors for those who would otherwise lack opportunities?And racial diversity in orchestras, dismal when Sphinx was founded, remains stubbornly low, though there are profound disagreements in the field about how to address the problem. Sphinx, true to its tradition of working within existing institutional bounds, has resisted calling for the elimination of the prevailing system of blind auditions, instead starting the National Alliance for Audition Support to offer financial assistance, coaching and other resources.Both the pandemic pause on performances and the broad push for racial justice in 2020 brought Sphinx more attention and resources. The mood was celebratory at the Carnegie gala, which featured a spirited performance by Sphinx Virtuosi members and a precociously poised solo from the 14-year-old violinist Amaryn Olmeda, who won the competition’s junior division in 2021. Nine years ago, Aaron Dworkin had taken the Carnegie stage for a speech in which he sharply criticized the field’s stagnancy; but this year, brought on as the 25th-anniversary honoree, he offered an uplifting, optimistic slam poem.“I think we owe them a lot,” said Woods, from the League of American Orchestras. “Not only for having a vision, but for plugging away at that vision year after year. For me what is really interesting is, it feels like their time has come. The work that they’ve been doing is now beginning to translate into meaningful change.”Even to the point where its leader can speculate — however hypothetically — about a world in which Sphinx would not be necessary.“On a practical level, is there enough talent today for that to be true, for Sphinx to become superfluous?” Afa Dworkin said. “Absolutely. Is our society and sector ready for it? No, not totally.”“I just think,” she added with a smile, “we have a little ways to go.” More

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      New York Philharmonic Was Once All-Male. Now, Women Outnumber Men.

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      The New York Philharmonic, which was an all-male bastion for most of its 180 years of existence, currently has 45 women and 44 men.When the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center in 1962, its new hall had no women’s dressing rooms. That’s because there were no women in the orchestra.But this fall, as the Philharmonic opens its newly renovated home, David Geffen Hall, its players have returned not only to more equitable facilities backstage, but to a milestone onstage: For the first time in its 180-year history, the women in the Philharmonic outnumber the men, 45 to 44.“It’s a sea change,” said Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, who joined the orchestra in 1992. “This has been a hard-won, long battle, and it continues to be.”The orchestra’s new female majority could prove fleeting — it currently has 16 player vacancies to fill, in part because auditions were put on hold during the pandemic — but it still represents a profound shift for an ensemble that had only five women at the beginning of the 1970s. That was the decade it began holding blind auditions, with musicians trying out by playing behind screens.The pipeline now teems with female candidates: At the Philharmonic, 10 of the 12 most recent hires have been women.“This certainly shows tremendous strides,” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive and a pioneer in the field of orchestral management. “Women are winning these positions fair and square.”“All we seek is equity,” she said, “because society is 50-50.”Women now make up roughly half of orchestra players nationwide, but they are still substantially outnumbered by men in most elite ensembles, including in Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.Jaap van Zweden conducting the women and men of the Philharmonic this month at the newly-renovated David Geffen Hall. Fadi KheirThe Philharmonic still falls short by several measures. Women hold only about a third of its leadership positions, including its principal positions and assistant or associate principals, which are the best-paid positions for players. The orchestra has never had a female music director. Some sections remain noticeably divided by gender: 27 of its 30 violinists are now women, for example, while the percussion section is made up entirely of men. There is still a glaring lack of Black and Latino members.Still, many artists hailed the new prevalence of women in the Philharmonic as a significant development. Symphony orchestras were long seen as the dominion of men. And turnover is generally extremely slow at leading ensembles like the Philharmonic, whose players are tenured and can remain in their posts for many years. Meaningful demographic change can take decades.“It’s more of a family now,” said Sherry Sylar, associate principal oboe, who joined the orchestra in 1984. “There are moms and pops both.”For much of its history, the Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, was closed off to women. At the time of its founding in 1842, women were not only discouraged from pursuing careers in music — it was rare for them to attend evening concerts unless they were with men. (In “Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra,” Howard Shanet wrote that during the 19th century, the ensemble’s public rehearsals on Friday afternoons were popular with “unaccompanied ladies who could venture forth by day with more propriety than they could by night.”)It was not until 1922 that the Philharmonic hired its first female member, Stephanie Goldner, a 26-year-old harpist from Vienna. She departed in 1932, and the orchestra became an all-male bastion again for decades.Then, in 1966, Orin O’Brien, a double bassist, was hired as the Philharmonic’s first female section player. Often described as the first woman to become a permanent member of the orchestra, she was at the vanguard of a pioneering group of female artists who opened doors for other women to join. The orchestra’s move toward blind auditions in the 1970s was seen as making the process fairer. By 1992, there were 29 women in the orchestra.Even as representation increased, however, female musicians often faced discrimination. Sexism was widespread in the industry (the maestro Zubin Mehta, who opined in 1970 that he still did not think women should be in orchestras because they “become men,” was named the orchestra’s music director six years later). Fewer women got the best-paid principal positions, and some who did found that they earned far less than their male counterparts. In 2019, the Boston Symphony settled a lawsuit in which the principal flutist of the orchestra said she was being paid less than a male colleague, the principal oboist.Judith LeClair became the first woman to take over a first chair at the Philharmonic when she joined as principal bassoon in 1981, at the age of 23. She described her early days in the orchestra, when she was one of 17 women, as lonely. She said she had to fight to be paid as much as her male colleagues, hiring a lawyer to help negotiate contracts. It took at least 20 years, she said, before she reached parity.Sheryl Staples, the orchestra’s principal associate concertmaster; Qianqian Li, its principal second violinist; and Lisa Eunsoo Kim, the associate principal second violinist, during a recent rehearsal. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“I did feel I was taken advantage of in the very beginning because I was a woman, and young and naïve,” she said. “It felt humiliating and demeaning.”Some male colleagues took to calling the women in the orchestra “the skirts.”“It minimized the role that we played in the orchestra,” said Sylar, the oboist. “It felt like you had to be better to gain the respect of the other musicians. It was just a constant struggle of always pushing myself to be better.”The nickname was not her only encounter with sexism. Shortly after she joined the orchestra, she recalled that Erich Leinsdorf, a frequent guest conductor, during a meeting in his dressing room, asked why she did not wear dresses during rehearsal (she preferred pants).“It just sort of floored me,” she said.It was not until 2018 that the Philharmonic changed its dress code to allow women to wear pants at its evening concerts. Before that they were required to wear floor-length black skirts or gowns.In recent years, as women have taken on more leadership roles in the orchestra, the climate has become more inclusive, several players said.“It’s so welcoming and warm and it feels just like a big family,” said Alison Fierst, who joined as associate principal flute in 2019, and had been moved by getting the chance to get to play alongside some of the pioneering women who had broken barriers in the orchestra.There are some outliers — the St. Louis Symphony, for example, has had a female majority for a decade — but men still outnumber women at most leading orchestras in the United States. Elsewhere, progress has been slower: The Vienna Philharmonic did not allow women to audition until 1997. It is now about 17 percent female.When the orchestra moved to Lincoln Center 60 years ago, it had no women in it. Now, it is majority female. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThe lack of women in leadership roles in orchestras — the principal players in each section can earn much more than their colleagues — has also drawn criticism. The vast majority of principal positions still go to men, and the conducting field is overwhelmingly male: Only one of the 25 largest ensembles in the United States is led by a woman, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, whose new music director is Nathalie Stutzmann.Michelle Rofrano, a conductor who is a founder of Protestra, an orchestra and advocacy group focused on social justice, said that more needs to be done to ensure that women rise to leadership roles.“Diversity shouldn’t be just a box to check; it requires mentorship and support,” she said. “We’re missing out on perspectives and an array of people who bring their unique talent.”The Philharmonic has sought to play a role in promoting change, including by hiring more women as guest conductors in recent years and by commissioning works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred states from denying women the right to vote (one of the works it commissioned, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize). Some of its players have privately urged the Philharmonic’s leaders to select a woman to replace the orchestra’s outgoing music director, Jaap van Zweden, who is set to step down in 2024.After spending decades in an industry in which men have been so dominant, some Philharmonic members say they are still getting used to the sight of so many women onstage. This fall, as the orchestra celebrates its remodeled home and the Philharmonic makes history with its female majority, some feel that a new chapter has begun.Sylar said she was struck by the artistry of the women who have recently joined the ensemble.“I’m not saying I want this to be an all-women orchestra either,” she said. “It just nice to see that women are being recognized for their talent.” More