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      After Decades, the Philharmonic’s Hall Sounds and Feels More Intimate

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      Raise your hand if you ever thought you would go see the New York Philharmonic, America’s most venerable orchestra, by entering off Lincoln Center’s plaza through a wide-open garage door. No one?But yes: The main entrance of David Geffen Hall — the Philharmonic’s home, newly, completely and happily renovated after a wait of decades — is now a big glass wall that can swoop up in good weather. And the past week has been bright and mild in New York. So as audiences drifted in for some of the first concerts in the revamped hall, the lobby inside and the plaza outside merged, without any barrier.It’s a new degree of informality, matched once you get into the transformed auditorium. The vast, drab shoe box that the city knew as Avery Fisher Hall after 1973 — a few years before a major remodeling attempted to fix the acoustics that had been criticized since the building first opened as Philharmonic Hall, in 1962 — has been gutted.Five hundred seats have been eliminated, along with the proscenium. The stage has been pulled 25 feet forward, and seating has been stretched around it. The once-dingy interior is now acres of honey-colored wood, the seats upholstered in a floating-flower-petal motif. A theater in which it once felt like miles from the back row to the timpanis now verges on intimacy.There is intimacy in how it sounds, too. Any judgment on a hall’s acoustics is highly provisional after just a few visits. For the rest of October’s opening events — and the rest of this season — I will be listening to the Philharmonic play in the new Geffen, and hearing how the experience changes as I sit all over. The orchestra will be changing, too, adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.But a mighty improvement is already obvious. The acoustical problems of the hall post-1976 have perhaps been overstated. Especially as it aged, it sounded so bad at least in part because it looked and felt so bad.Now the sound, like the whole experience of being there, is far more immediate and warm. We hear with our eyes as well as our ears, and simply seeing your fellow audience members sitting above and around the stage makes Geffen sound more human.On Wednesday, the Philharmonic’s first subscription program in the space, the third movement of John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives” demonstrated that magical orchestral alchemy in a superb hall: the way dozens of musicians playing softly can feel huge. A low growl in the basses was palpable, not just audible. At quiet dynamics throughout the evening — like the brooding opening of the catacombs section of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and the ambiguous haze of Tania León’s “Stride” — the sound was glistening and lucid.Van Zweden and the orchestra on Wednesday; the sound was glistening and lucid in quiet passages.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIf, at its loudest and densest, the Philharmonic seemed strident and blurrily blaring rather than richly massed and blended, with the brasses and percussion overwhelming the woodwinds and strings, that may be less an inherent quality of the room than a remnant of the orchestra’s notoriously blunt and punchy style.That style — which has not always been discouraged by Jaap van Zweden, on the podium as music director for another two seasons — evolved partly because of the shortcomings of the old hall, the need to force the sound to reach its distant upper reaches. But what felt necessary merely to be heard in that former space could profitably be eased in this new one. The Philharmonic no longer has to blast to a faraway audience, but can play more like it is sharing the music with a bunch of friends gathered around the campfire.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.It’s been a long journey to that campfire. Most observers swiftly recognized that the 1976 renovation, which built a new theater in the shell of the 1962 building, had not solved the hall’s acoustical issues, and had introduced new aesthetic ones. But the will was not present — and relations between the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, its landlord, were too dysfunctional — to do much about it.Around the turn of the 21st century, a plan emerged to demolish the building entirely and start over, but the Philharmonic was so spooked by the scheme’s probable cost and duration that it tried to pick up and move to Carnegie Hall, its home before Lincoln Center was built. That escape failed miserably, leaving Avery Fisher Hall as the center’s problem child, ignored in a sweeping, six-year campuswide refurbishment that finished in 2012.In 2015, David Geffen restarted the hall project with a $100 million gift — minus the $15 million required to buy off Avery Fisher’s heirs, who were surprised to learn that Fisher’s name wouldn’t be permanently attached to the building. But the design that was developed in the wake of Geffen’s donation once again spiraled out of control in ambition and price tag.It wasn’t until two pragmatic chief executives, Deborah Borda at the New York Philharmonic and Henry Timms at Lincoln Center, arrived a few years ago that a workable project — which would, as in 1976, fill the existing shell with new contents — was finally agreed on. And when the pandemic shut down performances, construction was fast-tracked so that the opening has come two years earlier than planned, without exceeding the $500 million budget.The only part of the 1960s auditorium that remains is the zigzag ceiling, and it’s been painted black and hidden behind a billowing silvery sheath. In one crucial way, though, this is a restoration: At 2,200 seats (versus 2,700 starting in 1962), the hall finally has the capacity for which its acoustics were originally designed.Over the next weeks and months, the orchestra will be adapting to its home the way a player adjusts to a new instrument.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesIn pulling the stage forward and surrounding it with seating, the new theater, designed by Gary McCluskie of Diamond Schmitt Architects, with Paul Scarbrough in charge of the acoustics, borrows the approach that was workshopped with a temporary structure for over a decade at Lincoln Center’s summertime Mostly Mozart festival. That setup was in turn influenced by the “vineyard” seating of the Philharmonie in Berlin and its most famous American descendant, the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.If it lacks Disney’s flair, the Geffen auditorium, clean and straightforward, is more successful than the hall’s public spaces, which have been redesigned by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Their main achievements are in decluttering. The box office has been moved to a corner, allowing the lobby to extend far deeper off the plaza, reducing crowding in a space now more appealing to linger in. Having lost its weird mudroom of an archival display, the grand promenade one floor up is much more expansive, too. The corner of 65th Street and Broadway has become a small performance space visible from the street.But the eclectic decorations — the vaguely tree-shaped lighting fixtures on the first tier balcony, for example, and the scattering of curvy couches in the lobby — have the brightly clashing patterns and generic whimsy of a Marriott, a college student center or the new Delta Sky Club at LaGuardia. The champagne-colored curtains surrounding the grand promenade, stitched with bits of light-catching gold, have the mass-market feel of those spaces, too — bathed in the permanent deep blue light of a catering hall cocktail hour.A week in, the sprawling spans of frosted glass around the promenade are already smudged, which is a little icky and a little charming: The new Geffen Hall already has a comfortable, lived-in feel. That seems to be the point. After all, Marriotts, student centers and airport lounges are designed to be antitheses of the intimidation often associated with classical music. But in eschewing intimidation, did the space have to reject glamour, too?Some of the ways the new hall intends to embrace a broader audience already feel persuasive. A concert hall’s quality in unamplified music is no indication it will work when amplified, too. (Carnegie Hall is a classic example.) But when its retractable fabric dampening panels are opened and line the walls, the new Geffen is as good with amplification as without.“San Juan Hill: A New York Story,” Etienne Charles’s multimedia excavation of the history of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center, which officially opened the hall on Saturday, begins with a small jazz ensemble playing alone for half an hour. The amplified sound was direct but resonant; even Charles’s slightest finger taps on a drum registered, just enough.And on Tuesday, the mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile convened a handful of guests for the first in his series of events this season modeled on bluegrass jam sessions. Merrill Garbus, the singer of the band Tune-Yards, came onstage in bright green socks, so Thile took his shoes off, too. The sound was crisp yet tender, the moody lighting classily done.It was astonishing and delightful to realize that Geffen Hall had become a place where artists could pad around the stage in their socks, or groove as quietly as they would in a tiny jazz club. On Tuesday there wasn’t that vaguely embarrassing feeling of an orchestra hall slumming it with pop. Geffen felt — and sounded — natural.Near the end of the show, Thile looked out into the darkness and smiled broadly. “Let’s do this lots more times,” he said. More

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      Review: Musicians of Color Reclaim Control in a White Space

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      In “Everything Rises,” the violinist Jennifer Koh and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines recount their complicated relationships with classical music.Not long into “Everything Rises,” which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines confronts the audience with an uncomfortable declaration.“I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines, who is Black, sings with disdain. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”“Everything Rises” is a timely collaboration, created by the Korean American violinist Jennifer Koh and Tines, that interrogates what it means to be a classical musician of color — to have chosen to make a creative life and professional career in a medium and a milieu that are overwhelmingly white, and to have tucked away fundamental elements of their identities in the process. The result of those inquiries is a compact, affecting and meditative multimedia work made entirely by people of color, including the composer and librettist Ken Ueno, the director Alexander Gedeon and the dramaturg Kee-Yoon Nahm.Koh and Tines conceived this show several years ago. Its debut was originally scheduled for spring 2020, but because of the pandemic it instead premiered this April at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What happened across the United States between those two dates — particularly in terms of racial violence perpetrated against Black and Asian Americans — made the enterprise seem even more pressing.The work begins with Koh and Tines dressed in typical concert dress: she in a wine-colored gown, crowned with demure dark hair, and he in a tuxedo. But he is also wearing a black blindfold, which leaves him feeling his way across the expanse of the Fishman Space stage at BAM. Early on, the audience sees a video clip of Koh’s winning performance as a 17-year-old at the 1994 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, an early highlight of what could have been a traditional career.Soon enough, however, Koh reveals her true, hot pink hair. Tines puts his customary earrings on. The duo wear fitted black tank tops with voluminous black skirts — a coming into their full selves, and a recognition of the parallels of their individual paths.Musically and narratively, “Everything Rises” underlines the fact that Koh and Tines, as well as their creative partners, are constantly code switching, depending on where they are and whom they are with. Ueno imaginatively expresses those frequent alternations between ways of being, drawing texts from their experiences and sampling audio recordings of interviews with the matriarchs of their respective families: Koh’s mother, Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh, who fled the Korean War to the U.S., and Tines’s grandmother, Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, a descendant of enslaved people.Ueno weaves clips of these women recounting chilling, graphic stories. Alma recalls the lynching of one of her relatives — “they killed him and hung him, cut his head off and they kicked his head down the streets” — while Soonja remembers, “I saw people being tortured and people on the trees, bodies hanging on the trees.”There are also moments of melancholic tenderness in “Everything Rises,” such as in the lullaby-like “Fluttering Heart,” and testaments to enduring resilience. Over the course of the show, Tines and Koh hold each other up literally and figuratively: hearing, acknowledging and amplifying each other’s stories.Ueno’s score nods to 19th-century Western idioms, traditional Korean music and shimmering contemporary electronica. The effect is not a pastiche, but a sonic code switching. He also allows Tines and Koh — exemplary technicians and artists of profound intensity — to explore their full tonal and textural ranges. Moments of racial violence are evoked by Koh playing growling, guttural scratch tones, often on her open G string, while Tines cycles from his rich basso profundo to an ethereal falsetto. (The day before “Everything Rises” opened, BAM named Tines as its next artist in residence, beginning in January.)The piece ends with a hopeful original song, “Better Angels,” which is preceded by a particularly haunting sequence. Ueno writes a new setting of “Strange Fruit,” the powerful song, made famous by Billie Holiday, that portrays violence against Black Americans and that, in part, led to Holiday’s prosecution by the U.S. government. It’s impossible not to imagine Holiday’s ancestral shadow as part of this work: Alongside Alma and Soonja, she becomes its third matriarch.Everything RisesThrough Oct. 15 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      In ‘Tár,’ a Female Maestro Falls Into the Same Old Traps

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      The film’s thesis is blunt: Put a woman in power, and she’ll be as sexually inappropriate and badly behaved as any man.Early in the new film “Tár,” an eminent conductor, played by Cate Blanchett, has strewn classical LPs over her floor. They’re designed in the old-school style of the Deutsche Grammophon label, which had the grandest maestros of the 20th century — the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado — brooding from the covers of recordings of symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner.Lydia Tár is sorting through them with her foot — as if in disgust, like she can’t bear to touch them. As if she’s toppled the whole patriarchal tradition and can now stand above it, a David who’s killed all the Goliaths.But we soon discover that she wasn’t mulling over the records in that spirit; she was merely looking for inspiration. For her new Mahler album, she’s decided that she wants to be photographed sitting alone — oversize score open, face solemn, lighting dramatic — in the seats of the Berlin Philharmonic’s home hall. Just like Abbado and the rest.Tár represents a radically different face of classical music. Barely any women — in the film or in real life — have done what she has: made it to the top tier of the world’s orchestral podiums. Let alone that of the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the most celebrated of them all, which Blanchett’s character rules with cool authority.“We don’t see women at the top of this food chain ever,” said Marin Alsop, who during her tenure at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was the first and only female leader of one of the 25 largest American ensembles.But, as we gradually learn, Tár represents anything but a radical break with the past.In the music world, that past is embodied in the worship of maestros, whose hard-to-define, near-spiritual, silent yet crucial role as conduits of the great composers has long granted them fearsome dominance. Theirs is a position so flush with power that it has been all too easy for them to abuse it.Blanchett plays a powerful conductor in “Tár,” which posits that classical music is addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader.Focus FeaturesIt’s become an assumption for many inside and outside the field that, as women and people of color slowly but steadily diversify the ranks of top conductors, the problems associated with maestro worship — that outsize power, eye-popping (even deficit-encouraging) salaries, sexual misconduct, anger issues, reactionary repertory choices, dependence on name-brand conductors to sell tickets — will ease.Not so fast, says “Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field.The film posits a more unsettling, intractable possibility: that classical music remains so robustly addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader that it will continue to grant those leaders a degree of power that will inevitably corrupt women and men alike.For Lydia Tár is no better — certainly no better behaved — than any of the rageaholic, underling-seducing men we are often assured are going extinct.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.That some of those men have, in recent years, undergone steep falls from grace for their misconduct doesn’t seem to give Tár pause. She is a sexual predator, imperious, controlling. She grants plum gigs to her crushes and turns up her nose at fresh sounds as she elevates the standards: The movie centers on her rehearsing the Berlin orchestra in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which she decides to pair with Elgar’s equally classic Cello Concerto (featuring, of course, a talented young woman who has caught her eye as soloist).“Tár” says that the fundamental structure of the field — the persistent over-glorification of the podium, casting even benign conductors in a paternal role — is the problem. And it’s a problem that won’t necessarily be solved by changing the identity of the person holding the baton. The film’s thesis could be bluntly stated: Women, too, can be inappropriately horny and generally evil.The woman Field creates has achieved more power than any female conductor in history. She wields it malignantly, and she is humiliated for doing so, even more catastrophically than any of her real-life male counterparts.If that fantasy is persuasive, it’s because, for all its noirish, even horror-movie trappings, “Tár” is a largely realistic depiction of its subject matter. (Far more so than “Black Swan” in relation to ballet, or “Whiplash” to jazz.) Blanchett gestures on the podium like a real conductor; a few references to the symphony she is preparing as “the Five” — rather than “the Fifth” or “Mahler Five” — are almost the only slips of tone.Marin Alsop, here conducting the Baltimore Symphony in 2015, was the only female conductor of a top American orchestra, when she stepped down last year. (Now, a year later, there is again one.)Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe protagonist is clearly based partly on Alsop, who stepped down from the Baltimore podium last year — leaving the number of women in top American positions at zero until Nathalie Stutzmann became music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this month.Alsop, like Tár, is a lesbian with a partner and a child. And like Tár, she founded a fellowship program for young women seeking to follow in her footsteps. Unlike Tár, Alsop has never been accused of misconduct, with the fellows or otherwise.When we spoke by phone recently, Alsop said that the premise that women would fall into the traps laid by traditional power structures was “premature.”“There haven’t been any women in those positions,” she added. “There haven’t been any people of color in those positions. To assume that they will also be taken under the spell of this maestro mythology, it really is presumptuous.”Presumptuous or not, the film is a reminder that the change we should hope and work for is as much about modesty as it is about identity: a vision of conducting as a vehicle for building community, for giving back, rather than solely for wielding authority in the service of a tiny group of pieces from the ever more distant past. (It is not only men who perpetuate this limited view of the repertory: Stutzmann, for one, told The New York Times recently that she would proudly be focusing on music from before the 20th century.)Cultural changes may well force modesty on the field, like it or not. In the wake of pandemic lockdowns, and as classical music continues to drift further from the mainstream, ticket sales that were once energized by the names and faces of beloved maestros have dried up. Audiences haven’t heard of almost any conductors. Deutsche Grammophon and the other record labels that hawked those brooding visions of paternal authority are shadows of what they were just a few decades ago.Conductors will always be responsible for wrangling a single vision from a stage of 100 musicians; for making decisions; for leading. But that leadership can be more demystified, more collaborative, more modest. It’s a change that must involve more diversity on the podium — but, as “Tár” cautions us, not just that.“I hope the premise that women or people of color will be just as autocratic can be disproved,” Alsop said. “I hope we’re given the opportunity to disprove it.” More

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      A Lifelong Friendship’s Latest Chapter: A Concerto Premiere

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      At the San Francisco Symphony, Magnus Lindberg’s music is being conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, his fellow Finn and former classmate.Look at the biographies of Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and you’ll notice that the similarities stack up pretty quickly.These two Finnish artists — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, attended the same music school and, on Thursday, will jointly present the premiere of Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the San Francisco Symphony.Well, they’re not exactly the same age. “Magnus is four days older than me,” Salonen said in a joint video interview with Lindberg, “which I’ve never let him forget.”Lindberg laughed. They are friends, of course, and this week’s premiere is the latest chapter in a lifelong relationship defined by mutual support and even the occasional collaboration, as when Salonen recorded Lindberg’s first piano concerto, a 1994 work loosely inspired by Ravel but in a thoroughly modernist vein.The second piano concerto, which the New York Philharmonic debuted in 2012, is a product of Lindberg’s residency there, and was conducted by Alan Gilbert. It is a grand, deceptively conventional piece, running nearly half an hour over three movements. During a reunion with Gilbert three years ago in Hamburg, Germany, Lindberg saw Yuja Wang perform Shostakovich’s two piano concertos with the NDR Elbphilharmonie.“I found that interesting, and we had dinner, and we started to discuss this and that,” Lindberg said, recalling his first meeting with Wang. “I said I would like to do another piano concerto one day, and it became a project.”In the interview, Lindberg and Salonen discussed their history and that project — in which Wang will be the soloist, and which will travel to the New York Philharmonic in January under the baton of their fellow Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Salonen and Lindberg — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, and attended the same music school.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesHow did you meet?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN We met at 15 in a music theory group in the precollege department of the Sibelius Academy.MAGNUS LINDBERG We were thrown out of music theory after two weeks because we were trying to know everything better than everyone else. And that teacher put us in the hands of another teacher, who became our theory teacher for eight years. We spent basically all Saturday mornings together during those years.SALONEN We had this iron principle that no matter what happened Friday evening — whether a party or whatever — we were always there Saturday morning.LINDBERG It was typically the three of us playing on two pianos, six hands. We would go through Scriabin’s First Symphony, and then we would analyze it and check the harmonies and play it. Also, we ended up having Esa-Pekka conduct if we played four hands. For me, at least, it was sort of a lifesaver because music theory was always around music with this teacher. It was always making noise, never theoretical.SALONEN During those years, we went through not only the Western music canon but all kinds of things that did not belong to the canon. We developed a party trick that became really unpopular, which is that we played music by Josef Matthias Hauer, the weird Austrian composer who invented a 12-tone system before Schoenberg. We played “Apokalyptische Phantasie” on four hands, and it was not super popular, but we did it anyway because we thought the best thing we can give to friends is to widen their horizons.Yuja Wang, left, will be the soloist on Lindberg’s new piano concerto, which she helped influence.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesAnd to the public. You were founders of the group Korvat Auki.SALONEN We had a group of composing students and also instrumental students who were interested in contemporary music, who felt that we needed something new in Finnish music life and to open the windows to the newest things in Europe. So together with other friends and fellow students we started Korvat Auki. That’s how we met Kaija Saariaho, in the first meeting of the society. The first meeting, in fact, took place in Kaija’s then-boyfriend’s apartment. He was a painter, so he brought in his visual arts friends, and there was cross-pollination.The idea was to bring new music to people. So we did concerts in schools and hospitals and so on — outside gas stations in the middle of nowhere, in snow banks. I organized one concert in my old school, which was totally faultlessly executed except that I had forgotten to announce it. Nobody knew that this concert had happened. I started studying conducting as well, mainly because no one seemed interested, so we had to bring someone from our own ranks.LINDBERG We founded a group called Toimii, and that definitely came out of an enormous respect for what Stockhausen was doing. Aside from playing written music, we also did a lot of improvisation. We thought that should be a natural way of expressing musical thoughts.SALONEN That was the group that once performed music at Ojai in bunny suits. That was a children’s concert; the kids seemed to like it.Children have the most open ears.SALONEN Exactly. They are the best audience, no question.How have those years influenced your careers?SALONEN In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive. We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing. Now I’m getting ready to rehearse his piano concerto tomorrow morning, and it’s a style that I know very well. But the delight here is for me to see, “Oh that’s new; that chord you haven’t used before.”I tell my young conducting colleagues and students: Form relationships with composers. Because in the best-case scenario, you might find a working partner for the rest of your professional life. Of course, growing up in Helsinki in the 1970s was a great place for this to develop because it was a statistically unusual situation where like-minded composers were studying together and hanging out, and despite the different stylistic approaches, we were completely loyal to one another.LINDBERG And we’ve been keeping on with the tradition that every time one of us has written a new piece, we gather and listen, and we give feedback. Being a composer in this strange world is astonishingly alone. Having someone you can trust telling you what he is thinking is crucial.SALONEN The funny thing is that composing gets lonelier as you get older and become more famous. Because fewer people dare to say anything. So at the end of the day, you have your old friends and colleagues.“In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive,” Salonen said. “We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWhat new directions, Magnus, did you take with this new piano concerto?LINDBERG I am sort of free. I don’t have to invent the concerto as a sort of individual-collective setup. This piece, despite being in three movements, would almost rather be like three concertos — a concerto in three concertos. I spent a lot of time working on it, and last winter, when it wasn’t fully ready, Yuja and I went through, and I allowed her to influence the writing. The specialties of her technique and her approach to the piano are quite stunning.What should audiences listen for?SALONEN The first time I went through this score, I spotted a few old friends: a moment, very fleeting, where there is a strong allusion to an existing piano piece. There’s one where the orchestra quiets down and the piano starts playing the first bar of “Ondine.” It’s like this hallucination almost, and it goes by very quickly. This is a technique that Magnus has been using since the very beginning. It’s like bumping into somebody in the crowd on the subway. It’s a familiar face — “I must know that person” — and then it’s over.LINDBERG You think you invent something, then you realize, Oh, my God, that was so close to something that exists. Instead of abandoning it, for a brief moment you can give it a tribute, and go away from it.SALONEN These moments, the accidental ones, happen to every composer — at least all the composers who respect the history of music and are aware of it. There’s something nice about the fact that you sometimes go back to your ancestors. It’s a sign of love and respect. More

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      Ralph Vaughan Williams Was Complicated, but Not Conservative

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      The English composer deserves a fresh assessment as the world does (and doesn’t) observe the 150th anniversary of his birth.Ralph Vaughan Williams understood what his fate was likely to be.“Every composer cannot expect to have a worldwide message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people,” Vaughan Williams, an Englishman, said in a series of lectures on folk music and nationalism at Bryn Mawr College in 1932. “Many young composers,” he went on, “make the mistake of imagining they can be universal without at first having been local.”There was a time when it seemed plausible that Vaughan Williams might become, if not exactly a universal composer, then at least something more than the countrymen he had described as “unappreciated at home and unknown abroad” in the 1912 essay “Who Wants the English Composer?”Several of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies were staples in the United States in his lifetime, and from the depths of the Blitz around 1940 to the front-page news of his death in 1958, he was among the 20th-century composers that American orchestras played most. The New York Times critic Olin Downes even placed him near the summit of contemporary composition in 1954, though he feared that his “kinship to modern society” meant that “the music of the Englishman will age sooner than that of Sibelius with the passing of the period that bore it.”So it seemed. When Harold Schonberg, Downes’s successor, argued in The Times in 1964 that “Vaughan Williams may turn out to be the most important symphonist of the century,” he did so while complaining that his scores were no longer performed, and alongside a report about how busy Benjamin Britten had become.If Vaughan Williams’s music has since recovered in Britain after a period when it was the butt of modernist jokes — “The Lark Ascending” and “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” are routinely elected the favorite works of radio listeners there — the same has hardly been true elsewhere, even in this, the 150th anniversary of his birth.Perhaps Aaron Copland’s judgment in 1931, that Vaughan Williams was “the kind of local composer who stands for something great in the musical development of his own country but whose actual musical contribution cannot bear exportation,” was in the end right.On this page of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, he referred to “Pilgrim’s Progress” with the inscription “Upon this place stood a cross, and a little below a sepulchre.”via Royal College of MusicIT IS AT THIS POINT in an essay on an arguably overlooked composer that a critic will often suggest that the judgment of history is wrong, explaining that new research shows that the subject, if renowned as a conservative, was in fact a progressive, deserving of a fresh assessment.It’s an easy enough argument to make in Vaughan Williams’s case, and he does repay another listen. An excellent new biography by the musicologist Eric Saylor makes clear that the composer — who was born in Gloucestershire on Oct. 12, 1872, wrote his first piece at 6, the year of the Brahms Violin Concerto, and his last at 85, in that of Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” — was not, or at least not entirely, the parochial reactionary that he has sometime appeared to be, the comforting nostalgist and purveyor of rustic folksiness who dressed like a gentleman farmer, as Copland called him, and composed like one, too.Especially in the 1920s and ’30s, Vaughan Williams was amply capable of wielding ferocious, dissonant violence, most sardonically in his Fourth Symphony; Bartok admired his percussive Piano Concerto. His modal vocabulary, flecked with pentatonic and other outré accents, could be profoundly ambiguous — sometimes stark, as in “Job,” a ballet in all but name, and sometimes discomforting, as in the otherworldly Sixth. Even the “Lark,” for all its pastoral popularity, has an indeterminate form and a sense of “sonic freedom,” Saylor writes.Nor did Vaughan Williams, a student socialist who remained left-leaning, always flee the present into an Arcadian past, despite the wistfulness of works like his Oboe Concerto. He confronted a broken world in “A Pastoral Symphony,” which despite its title reflects on World War I, in which he witnessed death as a medical orderly and artilleryman, and in “Dona Nobis Pacem,” a pleading antiwar testament from 1936 that anticipates Britten’s “War Requiem.”In truth, though, it is hard to tell any sort of simple story about Vaughan Williams. He cared not at all for trends, making sure he knew what was going on elsewhere in contemporary music — he did, after all, study with Ravel — but remaining indifferent to much of it. “Schoenberg meant nothing to me,” he wrote after the serialist’s death in 1951, “but as he apparently meant a lot to a lot of other people I dare say it is all my fault.” Michael Kennedy, a biographer and friend, recalled that he liked to pronounce “tone row,” impishly, as if it rhymed with “cow.”“Why should music be ‘original’?” Vaughan Williams grumbled in 1950. “The object of art is to stretch out to the ultimate realities through the medium of beauty. The duty of the composer is to find the mot juste. It does not matter if this word has been said a thousand times before as long as it is the right thing to say at that moment.”He was therefore a pragmatist, with an independent streak as strong as his patriotism. He was not beholden to English music as he found it — neither Elgar’s imperial grandeur nor the examples of his tutors, Parry and Stanford — but sought through folk songs and hymnals to refine a national style that he could preserve, and through which he could prosper. Oxymorons work better for him than simplistic categories; he was a conservative iconoclast, an unconventional traditionalist.“There is a unity of style, it’s just that he was able to stretch it in so many different directions,” the conductor Andrew Davis, who is president of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, said in an interview. “Elgar’s style was quite consistent, and Britten changed over the years, but there was not the radical breadth of emotional range that you find in Vaughan Williams.”During World War I, Vaughan Williams witnessed death as a medical orderly and artilleryman.via RVW TrustOn account of that breadth of emotional and compositional range, there are any number of entry points into Vaughan Williams’s work; for me, the moment of discovery came hearing the Fifth Symphony.ON ITS FACE, the Fifth is one of Vaughan Williams’s most straightforward works, and more than debatably his most purely beautiful. Dedicated to Sibelius, it premiered at the Royal Albert Hall, with the composer conducting on June 24, 1943, and it was immediately hailed for its lustrous consolation amid total war. After a New York Philharmonic performance the following year, Downes called it “the symphony of a poet, regardless of the throng, who communes with the ideal.”That poetry, especially the yearning of its Romanza, was hard-earned. Vaughan Williams started the symphony after he met Ursula Wood in 1938, his eventual second wife, who offered him musical as well as personal rejuvenation. He found inspiration piecing together scraps from other works, including from an opera he feared he would not finish, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and short contributions to a pageant that he had directed, “England’s Pleasant Land.” They were called “Exit for the Ghosts of the Past” and “A Funeral March for the Old Order.”The result is not the exercise in dishonest nostalgia that some critics have heard. The scholar Julian Horton has argued that, from its uneasy opening harmonies to its concluding passacaglia, seraphic at the last, its rarefied blend of archaic modes and modern tonalities created “a new musical order,” a way out of a musical and civilization collapse.Put another way, the Fifth, which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will play next month, is a symphony about hope. And whether Vaughan Williams intended it or not, it was initially heard by some as a political work, though not necessarily in the way one might expect from an avowed English nationalist.Far too old to fight in World War II, Vaughan Williams still made himself useful, writing scores for propaganda films, aiding European refugees, even collecting scrap metal to do what he could for the war effort. No composer, he told Michael Tippett in 1941, could “sit apart from the world & create music until he is sure he has done all he can to preserve the world from destruction.”But the Fifth struck some listeners as a different sort of contribution to the conflict. From Vaughan Williams’s nationalism, intriguingly, flowed a genuine internationalism; around the start of the war, he founded a branch of Federal Union, an activist group that, among other political arrangements, sought a United States of Europe. For his friend and fellow traveler Adrian Boult, the Fifth’s “serene loveliness” indeed showed, “as only music can, what we must work for when this madness is over.”If the Fifth offers an idealist corollary to the defiance of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony, its finest interpreters make that idealism sound plausible. Boult’s readings have too stiff an upper lip for me, though their authority is unmistakable; others, from Serge Koussevitzky’s muscular account to the soaring grandeur of John Barbirolli’s, the radiant patience of André Previn’s to the touching honesty of the composer’s own, give more of a sense of the stakes involved.But the 20th century was harsh on “loveliness” like this. Who could believe in such an uncomplicated optimism now? Vaughan Williams’s grim Sixth, which was such a sensation after its debut in 1948 that the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra all played it at Carnegie Hall in 1949, stands as the answer, with its desolate epilogue. Vaughan Williams half-joked that he called it “The Big Three,” a reference to the great-power leaders who crushed dreams of a new world order after the war; critics, to his annoyance, heard it as portraying a nuclear apocalypse.Yet there the Fifth remains, an expression in sound of what once was thought possible. “To imagine beauty under such conditions,” Saylor suggests of its writing, “and to express that beauty so that others too might find hope within the wreckage — that is the mark of the true artist.” Perhaps, dare I say it, a universal one. More

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      What I’ve Learned in 60 Years of Listening to the Philharmonic

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      When Anthony Tommasini was a young, aspiring musician, he made his first forays into the orchestra’s concert hall. He realized it would not do.In April 1962, having just turned 14, I attended a New York Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall that brought together my top two classical music heroes: Leonard Bernstein and Rudolf Serkin. Well, three heroes, if you include Beethoven, the evening’s featured composer. I can still see Serkin swaying on the piano bench, mouthing the German words to a joyous theme, almost a beer hall tune, in the “Choral Fantasy,” as he played along. Their exhilarating performance of the mighty “Emperor” Concerto made me fantasize about somehow, someday playing it.After the concert, I waited at the stage door and, mumbling shyly, got Serkin’s autograph. I still have two scrapbooks of programs and playbills from those days, now falling apart.That Carnegie concert was just five months before the orchestra was to take up residence in its new home, Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. For years this project had been promoted as the beginning a new era for the performing arts in New York, and the country. I bought into the hype. After all, Bernstein — Uncle Lenny to aspiring young musicians like me — had been talking up the hall big time, asserting that the orchestra needed a state-of-the-art space, a home of its own and a place of honor in this ambitious cultural complex. It sounded like a great idea to my teenage self.Later, as a music critic, I would spend an enormous amount of my professional life with the New York Philharmonic and what became Avery Fisher Hall, then David Geffen Hall. Now that the Philharmonic is opening the doors to its transformed auditorium, and welcoming audiences to what it hopes will be not just a new era, but a creative rebirth for the orchestra and its audiences, I’ve been reflecting on my early concert-going life. And some of my youthful impressions turned out to be perceptive about problems that would vex this hall for some 60 years.Back then, I didn’t see what the problem was with Carnegie Hall. Yes, it was dusty and worn, with chipped paint, torn seat cushions and no air conditioning. All that made it seem more welcoming, somehow — its storied history as tangible as the dust particles. I felt like I belonged there, just by dint of loving music so much.When Philharmonic Hall opened, almost immediately critics, artists and architects complained about its acoustics. I remember reading the coverage by the lofty New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg. In one column he wrote that the “first night was a near-disaster, acoustically,” that the sound “was too dry,” that “low strings could scarcely be heard” and that quick adjustments to the hall left it, at best, inconsistent. Whew, I thought, he certainly seemed sure of himself.I was too consumed with school — the Third Form at St. Paul’s in Garden City, Long Island — along with practicing the piano and entering competitions, to get to Philharmonic Hall until the summer of 1963. It certainly looked plush and elegant. But it’s telling that I have such vague memories of the music from that night. The performances (by a festival orchestra), the sound of the music, must not have grabbed me. The musicians seemed kind of distant.Thinking back, my memories of Philharmonic concerts I attended during those first years, usually sitting somewhere in the balconies, remain vague, though I heard some exciting performances, including Duke Ellington leading the orchestra in his suite “The Golden Broom and the Green Apple.” I finally heard Bernstein conduct the orchestra there in early 1966, and I can’t say I have lingering memories, even with Prokofiev’s powerful Fifth Symphony as a closer.Newly renovated versions of the hall have been unveiled over the years, including this one in 1976.Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
      What was wrong? At that time I was also going to the Metropolitan Opera, the “old” Met on 39th Street, and though I can hardly remember what the house looked like and have only scant recollections of productions, I remember the music vividly and in detail. In retrospect I blame Philharmonic Hall: the setting, the stiff formality and stuffiness.I acclimated to Philharmonic Hall, or so I thought, when I attended the orchestra’s Stravinsky Festival in the summer of 1966. The first concert, led by Bernstein, ended with “The Rite of Spring” (with Stravinsky in the audience). The last one ended with Stravinsky conducting his “Symphony of Psalms.”OK, I thought, this place will do. After all, the music, what’s being presented, matters most. Then, a month later, I heard Bernstein conduct the “Rite” again, preceded by Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, in an open-air tent as part of the Long Island Festival at C.W. Post College.This concert was an epiphany. I “got,” I’m sure, the point Bernstein was making by pairing these pathbreaking scores. Sitting maybe 15 rows from the stage, I was overwhelmed by the sheer audaciousness of both pieces. It was clear to me that no concert at Philharmonic Hall could have the visceral impact that this one did.Fast forward to 1997, when I joined the staff of The New York Times as a classical music critic. Now it was my job to report on performances and hold the orchestra to high standards. I went to concerts at Avery Fisher Hall all the time, usually sitting in the same choice seat. I wanted to be open-minded and maintain a larger perspective. Yes, the hall was no Carnegie or the Musikverein in Vienna, but the badness of the acoustics was often overstated. On a given night, a concert there could be terrific.Since I started this look back with memories of Beethoven at Carnegie, let me use him to explain how I’ve experienced the hall over the years. When I got the critic’s job, Kurt Masur, a self-professed Beethoven expert, was the Philharmonic’s music director. His Beethoven had heft and rectitude but it came across as ponderous and imposing, somehow above it all, rather like the hall itself.The contrast was stunning when, in 2006, Bernard Haitink brought the London Symphony Orchestra to Avery Fisher for a survey of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. The playing was crackling and robust, confident yet spontaneous. The maestro and his players seemed to be delving into these sublime, sometimes strange scores for the first time. I forgot about the drab surroundings and the acoustical limitations.I fully supported the decision to hire the young Alan Gilbert, who took over as music director in 2009. Some critics and patrons found his Beethoven performances uninspired. I didn’t really agree, and I didn’t care. The orchestra became newly adventurous under his watch. At the end of his first season, working with the inventive director Doug Fitch, Gilbert turned the featureless hall into a wonderfully makeshift opera house for a riveting production of Ligeti’s modernist opera “Le Grand Macabre.” I forgot all about acoustics. That night the hall seemed cool, the place to be.But it wasn’t, really. And there were too many nights when stirring Bach choral works, animated Mozart symphonies, intense Brahms concertos, diaphanous Debussy scores and more just sounded wan, and I felt restless in my seat.Over the years, there have been a few attempts at major renovations to correct the hall’s shortcomings. They weren’t radical enough. So it was past time to get it right, to reconfigure the entire space and to turn David Geffen Hall into a welcoming and acoustically lively home for America’s oldest orchestra. When the visionary Deborah Borda was appointed president of the Philharmonic in 2017, her second stint running the orchestra, she swept aside existing plans and started afresh. (She and Henry Timms, the new president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, worked to make it happen, helped by the closure from the pandemic, which allowed construction to speed up.)During a recent rehearsal at Geffen, she said that the goal was to create an “intimate-feeling hall.” The word “feeling” is crucial. The new auditorium, after all, seats 2,200 concertgoers. But being in it, standing on the stage looking out, I felt the space was invitingly intimate. I felt the same sitting in various seats close and far, high and low.Though critics have pledged not to discuss acoustics until after concerts begin, and it will take time to assess, I can’t help saying that I’m guardedly optimistic about what has been accomplished.The transformation of the public spaces already seems a triumph. Especially the spacious yet cozy main lobby just off the plaza, which has a 50-foot-wide video screen on the back wall, upon which live performances will be screened for free, so passers-by can get a sense of what’s going on upstairs.Still, as Borda told me in an interview last year, “If we don’t get the acoustics right, it’s not going to be a success.” Giving concerts, after all, is what orchestras do, the whole point. We’ll see. More

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      David Geffen Hall Reopens, Hoping Its $550 Million Renovation Worked

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      When the New York Philharmonic opened its new home at Lincoln Center in 1962, it held a white-tie gala, broadcast live on national television, with tickets having sold for up to $250 apiece, or nearly $2,500 in today’s dollars.It was a glittering affair, but the hall’s poor acoustics — a critical problem for an art form that relies on unamplified instruments — ushered in decades of difficulties. After the last major attempt to fix its sound, with a gut renovation in 1976, the hall reopened with a black-tie gala and a burst of optimism. But its acoustic woes persisted.Now Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic are hoping that they have finally broken the acoustic curse of the hall, now called David Geffen Hall, which reopened on Saturday after a $550 million overhaul that preserved the building’s exterior but gutted and rebuilt its interior, making its auditorium more intimate and, they believe, better sounding.But this time they are taking a different approach to inaugurating the new hall. Geffen reopened to the public for the first time not with a pricey formal gala, but with a choose-what-you-pay concert, with some free tickets distributed at the hall’s new welcome center.And instead of opening with Beethoven (as the orchestra did in 1962) or Brahms (as in 1976), Geffen opened with the premiere of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles that pays tribute to the rich Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood that was razed to clear the land for Lincoln Center. The work, commissioned by Lincoln Center, was performed by Charles and his group, Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden.“It really is like a homecoming, but there are some different family members around this time, which is a great thing,” Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, said in an interview.The reopening of the hall drew several elected officials, who saw it as a hopeful sign for a city still trying to recover from the damage wrought by the coronavirus. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York predicted that people would look back at the moment as more than the opening of a new concert hall: “They will say you got it done in the middle of a pandemic.”Senator Chuck Schumer was among the elected officials at the reopening of the hall, which was described as a hopeful moment for a pandemic-battered city. Christopher Lee for The New York TimesBoth Lincoln Center, which owns the hall, and the Philharmonic, its main tenant, see the new hall as an opportunity to become more accessible and welcoming. They are seeking both to lure back concertgoers and to reach a more diverse cross-section of New Yorkers, including Black and Latino residents, who have long been underrepresented at these events.“This is not your grandmother’s Philharmonic,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. “We are thinking of the totality of the artistic and human and social statement.”Instead of one big celebration, there will essentially be a month of festivities, part of an effort to showcase the hall’s versatility, to break through into the consciousness of media-saturated New Yorkers — and to avoid placing too much emphasis on a single high-pressure night that could yield quick-fire judgments on the renovation and the acoustics.Dozens of people lined up outside the hall on Saturday morning for a chance to get free tickets to “San Juan Hill.” Joanne Imohiosen, 83, who has been attending concerts since the Philharmonic came to Lincoln Center in 1962 and lives nearby, said she hoped the renovation would finally remedy the hall’s acoustic issues. “They should have figured it out by now,” said Imohiosen, who used to work as an assistant parks commissioner. “They’ve been fiddling with it for years.”After “San Juan Hill,” the Philharmonic will return with a couple of weeks of homecoming concerts pairing works by Debussy and Respighi with pieces by contemporary composers including Tania León, Caroline Shaw and Marcos Balter, whose multimedia work “Oyá” is billed as a fantasia of sound and light.There will be not one, but two galas — one featuring the Broadway stars Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Bernadette Peters, and another featuring a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A free open-house weekend will close out the month, with choirs, youth orchestras, Philharmonic players, hip-hop groups, dance troupes and others performing each day in different spaces in the hall.Much is riding on the success of the revamped Geffen Hall. The 180-year-old Philharmonic, which is still recovering from the tumult of the pandemic and grappling with longstanding box-office declines, is hoping that a more glamorous hall with better sound will lure new audiences.“The stakes are very high; everybody’s waiting and hoping that it’s going to work out,” said Joseph W. Polisi, a former president of Juilliard whose new book, “Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center,” has sections tracing the trials and tribulations of the building. “$550 million is a lot of money. It’s a very big bet.”At the core of the Philharmonic’s strategy is a desire to make Geffen Hall not just a concert venue, but a welcoming gathering place. The new hall includes a coffee shop, an Afro-Caribbean restaurant and a welcome center next to the lobby. Small performances, talks and classes on music and wellness will take place inside a “sidewalk studio” visible from Broadway.The renovation, which equipped the main auditorium with a film screen, an amplified sound system and other technical improvements, gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to reimagine its programming. “San Juan Hill” and “Oyá” showcase the Philharmonic’s new abilities, mixing music with film, 3-D imagery, electronics and light.“The new hall can do things that we’re going to do as a 21st-century orchestra,” Ms. Borda said.A critical test of the new hall will be its audiences. The Philharmonic and Lincoln Center have worked over the past several years to attract more low-income residents to performances, and Lincoln Center has been handing out fliers at nearby public housing complexes advertising upcoming events at Geffen Hall. For the opening, they made a point of inviting former residents of the San Juan Hill neighborhood, as well as schools that serve large numbers of Black and Latino students.“This is a home for all New Yorkers,” Ms. Borda said. “We want to invite them in.”Throughout the hall’s history, politicians, architects, musicians and critics have at times declared past renovations successful, only to see acoustical issues resurface soon after.Mr. Polisi, the former Juilliard president, said that this time seemed different, given the crucial decision to reduce the size of the hall — it now seats 2,200 people, down from 2,738. He said if the Philharmonic had finally remedied the sound problems, it would allow the orchestra to focus on other priorities, including building closer ties to the community and finding a conductor to replace van Zweden, who steps down as music director in 2024.“If they’re a happy orchestra now and they’re able to feel comfortable in their home, that’s also going to be a very psychologically important element for the organization,” said Mr. Polisi, whose father, William Polisi, had been the principal bassoonist of the Philharmonic.As construction workers made finishing touches on the hall this week, unpacking furniture and installing metal detectors in the lobby, the Philharmonic’s players filed into the auditorium for rehearsals. The early reviews from the musicians have been largely positive: Many say that they can finally hear one another onstage and that the sound feels warmer.Ms. Borda and Mr. Timms said they were confident that the Philharmonic would finally have a hall to match its abilities, though they said they did not want to jinx the reopening. “The thing about curses,” Mr. Timms said, “is you never claim they’re broken. You let them speak for themselves.”Ms. Borda, who first began trying to revamp the hall in the 1990s, when she served a previous stint as the Philharmonic’s leader, said she had prepared an image of an atomic explosion to send to Mr. Timms if the renovation turned out to be a disaster.“If it’s really bad,” she joked, looking at Mr. Timms, “I’m sending you this first.”Adam Nagourney More

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      Review: The War in Ukraine Looms Over an Orchestra’s Debut

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      Utopia is the latest project from Teodor Currentzis, whose home ensemble has faced scrutiny over its ties to Russian state funding.HAMBURG, Germany — After Claude Debussy heard a young Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” he was said to have quipped, “One has to start somewhere.”That start turned out to be auspicious. And Utopia — a new ensemble that has assembled some top performers from groups throughout Europe and abroad — has similar potential. It debuted this week, with a slight but superbly executed program of, as it happens, “The Firebird” and works by Ravel that it is currently touring, with a stop at the Laeiszhalle here on Wednesday evening.Utopia’s name inspires eye rolls; but its sound, awe. Tensions like that always seems to attach themselves to its founder and conductor, Teodor Currentzis, who often appears to serve himself more than music yet at the same time reveals what can feel like a previously veiled truth.His already complicated artistry has been complicated further since the war in Ukraine began. Currentzis was born in Greece but has long been based in Russia, where he was given citizenship by presidential decree in 2014. The invasion brought fresh scrutiny to his ensemble there, MusicAeterna, and its funding from the state-owned VTB Bank. Currentzis, for his part, has been silent, caught an irreconcilable position between Russia and the West. Members of MusicAeterna, however, have been seen on social media championing the invasion.Some presenters in Europe have canceled MusicAeterna’s or Currentzis’ engagements over the war — most recently, the Philharmonie in Cologne, Germany this week — while others have stood by them, including the mighty Salzburg Festival in Austria.When the creation of Utopia was announced in August, its rollout — seeking little press, and with only brief tours of one program at a time — came off as a rushed reaction to MusicAeterna’s troubles. After all, it was billed as an independent orchestra with independent (a euphemism for Western) funding. But the ensemble has been in development for several years.The State of the WarRussia’s Retreat: After significant gains in eastern cities like Lyman, Ukraine is pushing farther into Russian-held territory in the south, expanding its campaign as Moscow struggles to mount a response and hold the line. The Ukrainian victories came as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia illegally annexed four regions where fighting is raging.Dugina Assassination: U.S. intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist. American officials said they were not aware of the plan ahead of time and that they had admonished Ukraine over it.Oil Supply Cuts: Saudi Arabia and Russia, acting as leaders of the OPEC Plus energy cartel, agreed to a large production cut in a bid to raise prices, countering efforts by the United States and Europe to constrain the oil revenue Moscow is using to pay for its war in Ukraine.Putin’s Nuclear Threats: For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, top Russian leaders are making explicit nuclear threats and officials in Washington are gaming out scenarios should Mr. Putin decide to use a tactical nuclear weapon.Currentzis could have more control over the story of Utopia if he weren’t so reticent because of the war. Then, he might be able to offer a stronger argument for the group’s existence than what has been advertised: simply to bring together “the best musicians from all around the world” for the web3-like purpose of decentralizing classical music.That said, there is undeniable talent among Utopia’s ranks. Sure, the concertmaster on Wednesday was Olga Volkova, who holds the same post in MusicAeterna, but elsewhere there were ambassadors from the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Paris Opera; plenty of players born in Europe, but also ones from Australia, Asia and the Americas.With little rehearsal time, they gave their first concert in Luxembourg on Tuesday. After Hamburg comes Vienna, then Berlin, where vast swaths of the Philharmonie remain unsold. That was not the case on Tuesday at the more intimate Laeiszhalle, which was nearly full with a warmly receptive audience. Outside there was nary a protester, as there have been at the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko’s recent recitals, and inside Currentzis was greeted with cheers surpassed by only the riotous applause that followed each piece.It’s not hard to see why. This was an evening that never sagged or lacked in interest, even if Currentzis’ style tipped toward the profane. He relished extremes, with hyperbolic readings of the scores that you could say reflect a lack of trust or taste — but that you could also say are riveting from start to finish. Love or hate them, his performances make people truly care about music.If there were doubts that this pickup group wasn’t ready for the public, they were dispelled at the sound of the players’ sharp, decisive articulations and unison string downbows in the Stravinsky — his 1945 version of the “Firebird” suite — or their unwavering precision in the encore, Ravel’s “Boléro,” which on Wednesday began so softly, its patient, extended crescendo had the feel of a traveling band entering the scene from afar then boisterously announcing itself.On the program were three ballet scores, and Currentzis treated them with fitting sensuality and freedom. His Stravinsky breathed fire while also luxuriating in the winding tendrils of a flame. Ravel’s second suite from “Daphnis et Chloé” blossomed organically from a wispy opening’s gentle enchantment to a densely textured tableau that, even then, refrained from giving away too much too soon. But when the climax came, it was so powerful that I felt the nudging vibration of my watch warning me that the sound had pushed past 90 decibels.Throughout, the Utopia players were visibly pleased, and united. During Ravel’s “La Valse,” Currentzis didn’t keep time so much as swing his arms broadly from right to left and back again, yet the orchestra maintained controlled instability in this affectionate but darkly ambiguous tribute to Johann Strauss II and his symphonic treatments of Vienna’s signature dance.Ravel nearly named the piece after that city, with the German-language working title of “Wien.” Currentzis’ interpretation was largely one of entropy, but it also had transporting, whirlwind glimpses of a joyous ballroom. Those moments were a painful reminder of his current relationship with Vienna, where Utopia is welcome but MusicAeterna is not.These days, that kind of bitter aftertaste accompanies all of Currentzis’ performances, both the good and the bad — certainly on Wednesday, and who knows for how long.UtopiaPerformed on Wednesday at the Laeiszhalle, Hamburg, Germany. More