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      Nathalie Stutzmann Ushers In a New Era at the Atlanta Symphony

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      Stutzmann, the only female music director among the largest 25 American orchestras, takes the podium with a strong sense of self.At Bravo! Vail this summer, Nathalie Stutzmann was leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in a reading of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony as volatile as the thunder that echoed around the mountains that evening.It wasn’t so much impulsive as poetic. The players phrased their lines with the arc and the articulation of a singer — a good one. They seemed to breathe together, too, even to gasp for air.In the depths of the first movement, immediately before Tchaikovsky’s most consuming cry of desolation, the bassoons, basses and timpani hold a low F sharp, for just a beat and a half. Most conductors plunge straight into the torment to come; no pause, after all, is marked in the score.Stutzmann waited. She inhaled. The beat and a half stretched to four, then eight. That low F sharp came to sound lonely, bereft. Only then did she let the pain flood out.Textually, it was blatant. Emotionally, it hurt. And for Stutzmann, that’s what matters.“What is respect for a score?” Stutzmann, who for three decades was among the world’s leading contraltos before she turned fully to conducting, said during an interview the next day. “Is it to play exactly what is written, or is it to play what is written and put your own life in it, your emotions, your feelings, which means sometimes you might need to take a bit of time? Why not?”She continued: “To respect the score is to make it alive, and the score lives because of us. The only thing we can do for the score is to dare.”This week, a daring new era dawns at the Woodruff Arts Center in Georgia, as Stutzmann officially takes the podium at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, giving her first concerts as music director. The sole woman holding that title at one of the largest 25 orchestras in the United States, Stutzmann’s inauguration comes at the start of a season in which she also makes conducting debuts at the New York Philharmonic, the Bayreuth Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, where she oversees new productions of “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte” in May.Jennifer Barlament, the executive director of the Atlanta Symphony, called her “a really tremendous artist,” one who “brings a whole different set of voices, artistic tastes, personal experiences, musical experiences to the institution.” She added that “to have someone like her come to work with us, and partner with our musicians, is going to be transformative, because she goes for it every time as an artist.”Atlanta’s search was a thorough one. The ensemble worked its way through a longlist of 80 or so candidates after its chief for two decades, Robert Spano, announced his departure in 2018. But when Stutzmann led two streamed concerts with the orchestra during its 2020-21 season, her talent and connection with the players quickly became clear, Elizabeth Koch Tiscione, its principal oboe, recalled.“She came in and read Brahms’s Second Symphony with us,” Tiscione said. “Usually Brahms in our orchestra is played with this weightiness, and we do the same thing every time, no matter who is on the podium. She came in with this completely fresh approach.”It was crucial, Tiscione added, “that people were willing to do it, because she was so convincing. You can just tell that the way she makes music is from her truth.”BORN IN THE SUBURBS OF PARIS in 1965, Stutzmann is the daughter of two opera singers, and she grew up backstage. “I spent half of the time watching the singers, admiring them,” she said, “and half of the time in the pit, looking at these men.”She learned the piano, bassoon, cello and viola, and she attended conducting classes as a teenager; her teacher refused to let her work with an orchestra while his male students could. She turned to singing instead, though after her vocal career took off in the late 1980s, she took care to watch the conductors she worked with closely. Eventually, at the end of the 2000s, she decided to take a chance.“I sang with the best orchestras in the world, the best conductors in the world, and I felt I had achieved a lot of dreams,” she said. “Musically, it was time to try, and society was starting to change a little bit.”With Seiji Ozawa and Simon Rattle as her mentors, Stutzmann studied with Jorma Panula and started a chamber ensemble, Orfeo 55, in 2009. That group, which she dissolved a decade later, was originally intended to allow her to sing Baroque repertoire that countertenors had otherwise claimed, she said, but podium dates started to follow.“First I was asked to conduct Handel all the time,” Stutzmann recalled, “and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I love Handel, but I’m not a Baroque conductor.’ My core repertoire is Strauss, Bruckner, Wagner. I get a strong sound from the orchestra. This was also gender related. You know, women can conduct Mozart, and anything else, no. It’s so stupid.”Even if Stutzmann says she declined many invitations to avoid limiting herself, her rise has been stunningly rapid. In 2017, she became the principal guest of the RTE National Symphony Orchestra in Dublin, then the chief conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra in Norway a year later. In 2021, she picked up a post as principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which she releases an invigorating recording of Beethoven’s piano concertos (with Haochen Zhang) on Friday.Stutzmann has her own style, and even her own sound — brawny yet supple. She never wanted to be “one of those soloists who pretends to be a conductor,” she said, and if there is little risk of that now, her interpretations are propelled forward through melodies, with even minor lines in textures singing out characterfully. Fittingly, she is willing to use her voice in rehearsals.“Some conductors will get up there and give you some strange metaphor, and you’re like, you want me to play — purple?” Tiscione said. “I had one conductor tell me that he wanted a solo to sound like I cooked with too much garlic. She’ll just sing the phrase. It’s refreshing.”At a time when orchestras are generally responding to pressures to diversify, and in an Atlanta metro area where the population is now majority-minority, Stutzmann nevertheless will focus on traditional repertoire from the Baroque and Romantic eras. (One exception is a Hilary Purrington premiere in her first concerts.)“I need to be touched,” Stutzmann said, explaining her commitment to performing works in which she feels particularly inspired. “If I don’t feel touched myself, I don’t want to conduct. It’s hard, because you are asked to conduct many things. But I try to stay very strong with my identity. I will never be someone who can just conduct anything every day.”Gaetan Le Divelec, Atlanta’s vice president of artistic planning as of this season, who was, for several years, Stutzmann’s manager at the Askonas Holt agency, said that while he had learned over time not to assume anything about her, he intended to broaden the range of guest conductors who work with the ensemble, and that they would continue to venture further afield.“Part of my role is going to be to introduce Nathalie to the variety of styles that exist in music from living composers, and I certainly hope that she will be part of that picture,” he said. “But this is an important topic for any orchestra, and an orchestra’s approach to new music should, in any case, be bigger than just its music director.”Stutzmann is passionate about music that the orchestra needs more of to build up its sound, Barlament said, as well as music that Spano and his longstanding principal guest, Donald Runnicles, played infrequently, such as the works of Mozart.“I think of diversity and variety and things that are new from a lot of different perspectives,” Barlament said. “I wouldn’t say Franck’s ‘Le Chasseur Maudit’ is common repertoire, and I don’t even know when the last time is that the orchestra played Bizet’s Symphony.” (Stutzmann will conduct both pieces this season.)Stutzmann, for her part, insists that taking on an American music directorship will not stop her staying true to her identity.“You like it or you don’t like it, what can I do?” she said. “The secret is still to focus on the music.” More

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      An Opera Festival That Keeps Faith With Shutdown’s Innovations

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      Festival O, back for the first time since 2019, featured two works of dazed horror and a rare staging of Rossini’s “Otello.”PHILADELPHIA — When the pandemic goaded the performing arts to pivot to video, some institutions fared better (and more creatively) than others. Opera Philadelphia was among the most intrepid in America, commissioning a series of short films that embraced a new medium.The company produced a sober version of Tyshawn Sorey’s song cycle “Save the Boys,” as well as “The Island We Made,” a meditative nocturne by the composer Angélica Negrón, filmed by Matthew Placek and starring the drag diva Sasha Velour. The composers Courtney Bryan and Caroline Shaw contributed pieces, and Rene Orth delivered a vibrant dose of K-pop.But even, or especially, for adventurous arts groups like this one, the transition back to primarily live performance has presented a challenge: How to maintain — and even expand on — the lessons learned and experiments ventured over the past few years when returning to the kind of work made in the before times.Opera Philadelphia, once again, offers a way forward. As part of Festival O — its signature burst of productions each fall, and the first since 2019 — the company on Saturday premiered “Black Lodge,” which posited that film and live performance can productively coexist.The order of operations here was unusual: As Michael Joseph McQuilken, who wrote and directed the film element, writes in a program note, “It’s an exceedingly strange task to ‘movie a score’ … one tends to score a movie.”David T. Little’s music and Anne Waldman’s text, and even the tempos and timings, were set by the time McQuilken came on board. He wasn’t without leeway, though: Little and Waldman weren’t telling a clear story that McQuilken would need to depict, but were, rather, obliquely suggesting a grimly poetic vision of a man trapped in a post-life purgatory, reliving brutal encounters with the woman who haunts him.The music — for a rock band and amplified string quartet — embraces Little’s longstanding interest in the grittier side of pop, the dark, pounding industrial “nu metal” style of (I’ll date myself) Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down. Played live under the big screen on Saturday at the Philadelphia Film Center, this grinding score occasionally lightens for moments of mellower mournfulness. But every register, moan to scream, is handled with indefatigable goth aplomb by the charismatically wailing Timur, the film’s star and the frontman of the band, Timur and the Dime Museum.Drawing on David Lynch, William S. Burroughs and Stanley Kubrick, McQuilken’s accompaniment is a fast-cut horror-movie nightmare of ominous fluorescent-lit clinics, severed digits, screams in the desert, guns and hypodermic needles.The mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi, right, with Muyu Ruba in a raven mask in “The Raven,” based on Poe.Steven PisanoThis imagery, coupled with this sound world, evoked turn-of-the-21st-century music videos, which tended to feature starkly contrasting settings within a single piece; enigmatic or nonexistent narratives at a distance from the lyrics; luridly distorted colors; surreal staginess. There’s a reason, of course, that those music videos were three or four minutes long, as opposed to the 60-ish of “Black Lodge,” which is trippy — and wearying. (The film will stream on Opera Philadelphia’s website, at operaphila.tv, starting Oct. 21.)The theme of dazed horror at the border between life and death, past and present, continued in the festival’s production of Toshio Hosokawa’s atmospheric chamber monodrama “The Raven,” based on the classic Poe poem.“Black Lodge,” produced by Beth Morrison Projects, was presented as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, but “The Raven” felt far more in the fringe-theater tradition. Directed by Aria Umezawa, it was a collaboration with the local performance company Obvious Agency, which provided a participatory prelude to the Hosokawa.On entering the grand old Miller Theater on Saturday, the audience was divided into groups, each of which was then led away by a performer acting as a facet of Lenore, the lost love in Poe’s poem. Heading backstage, my group’s leader played Healer Lenore, a self-help guru who used a question-and-answer session to cleanse us of daemonic energy — or at least make peace with it.The tone of this half-hour was goofy, with a recurring joke on Matt Damon’s name. Perhaps this was the point, but the scrappy clowning couldn’t have had less in common with Hosokowa’s eerie, deadly serious contemporary-Noh score, often hushed, occasionally ferocious.With the audience arranged onstage on three sides around the performers — the orchestra of 12, led by Eiki Isomura, completed the rectangle — the mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi was intense both in rasped quiet and full cry. The Lenores, including one stalking the paper-strewn playing space in a mask that was part bird, part medieval plague doctor, hovered about, but too little was done with the most obvious and elegant ghostly spectacle here: a small bunch of people in a vast empty theater.Daniela Mack as Desdemona and Khanyiso Gwenxane as Otello in Opera Philadelphia’s “Otello.” Steven PisanoAnother ornate space, the Academy of Music, holds the big productions, usually one per year, that anchor Festival O amid the smaller pieces. This time it was “Otello” — not Verdi’s 1887 classic, but Rossini’s far rarer version, from 1816, which Opera Philadelphia deserves great credit for staging.And for staging so admirably. Rossini’s serious operas are serious undertakings: long, notoriously difficult for singers and without obvious means for orchestras to show off. But conducted with steady energy by Corrado Rovaris, the company’s music director, the work felt both spacious and vigorous.The libretto’s differences from the Verdi (and Shakespeare) are sweeping, not least in the absence of the crucial handkerchief and in the importance Rossini places on the character of Rodrigo, who gets some of the most daunting music. The tenor Lawrence Brownlee, Opera Philadelphia’s artistic adviser, was up for the challenge: He has one of the sweetest sounds in the bel canto world, and tautly ringing high notes. If his tone sometimes paled in fast passagework at the final performance on Sunday, he was always winning.Rossini, as was his wont, features a slew of leading tenors; here the trio was filled out by Khanyiso Gwenxane, his voice bold and forthright as Otello, and Alek Shrader, sounding newly robust and insinuating as Iago.Desdemona is, in this version, a fully formed protagonist, something like Donizetti’s Lucia, and the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack gave the character nobility and eloquence, her voice flexible enough to handle the coloratura and relish the text. She blended perfectly with the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, as her maid Emilia, who had a slightly lighter, less earthy, no less classy voice. (Rossini loves to show off tenor-tenor and mezzo-mezzo combinations, reaping excitement from the slightest distinctions.)The story, of course, takes place in 16th-century Venice and Cyprus, but for no obvious reason the director, Emilio Sagi, updated it to an unclear location in early 20th-century Europe — maybe England, maybe Switzerland — and to the whitewashed great hall of a manor house, with a huge staircase.The staging added little to what was essentially old-fashioned emoting. But with a fine cast and a steady hand in the pit, that was enough. More

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      Eight Ways of Looking at a Singular Composer

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      Lukas Foss would have turned 100 this year. Here is a selection of key works from a long and varied (and now largely overlooked) career.“You can’t pin him down, and that’s the difficulty,” the conductor JoAnn Falletta said in a recent interview.Falletta, the longtime music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, was speaking about Lukas Foss, who led that ensemble in the 1960s and would have turned 100 this year. She and the orchestra are celebrating the occasion on Monday with a concert devoted to his works at Carnegie Hall.The polymathic Foss was a skilled and wide-ranging conductor, but he thought of himself primarily as a composer. His music grazed freely among Copland-esque Americana, thorny serial, wild chance-based, angular Neo-Classical, arch Neo-Baroque and churning Minimalist styles. That eclecticism, however, has worked against his lasting popularity, Falletta believes.“He was very proud that he did everything,” she said. “He thought the more techniques you used, the richer your vocabulary was as a composer.”Born Lukas Fuchs to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1922, he was gifted musically from an early age. With the rise of the Nazis, the Fuchses fled to Paris, then to Pennsylvania, where they changed their name to Foss and where Lukas studied piano, composition and conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.“The Prairie,” an oratorio-style choral work to a long poem by Carl Sandburg, made his name as a composer when it premiered in 1944. An unabashed love letter to his adopted country, it was the start of a richly productive writing career — complemented by podium positions in Buffalo, Milwaukee and elsewhere, where Foss, who died in 2009 at 86, sought to ensure contemporary music held a position as valued as the old standards.Though Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project have made valuable recordings in recent years, Foss’s compositions — varied, yet with a singular voice and a pervasive curiosity — are played all too rarely these days.“There’s a kind of sadness that he doesn’t have many champions now,” Falletta said, adding that she hoped the Carnegie concert might in some small way help with that. “If this gives a chance to see about him and look into other things, that’s great.”In the interview, she discussed some key Foss works, including several she will be leading on Monday.‘Three American Pieces’ (1944)“This was originally a violin-piano duo,” Falletta said of a work that Foss orchestrated it in 1986, toward the end of his writing career.“When he first wrote it,” she added, “it was part of that love affair with his new country. It’s so interesting: It has this open-air quality, a little bit of that Ives or Copland language. But like Copland, it wasn’t really his language, because he was an immigrant. How wonderfully strange it is that it’s immigrants that gave us our country’s sound. Foss had no direct connection to the frontier. But there’s a mixture of folk sounds in there, blues, ragtime. I think it’s so delightful — that Americana style, the affection he had.”Symphony No. 1 (1944)“I think here he’s not only reflecting his gratitude to the United States,” Falletta said, “but you also see a kind of rhythmic vitality that’s much more like Stravinsky, and a counterpoint he must have honed with Hindemith. The tradition of the symphony is there, but the second movement is blues — in a classical symphony! And the third movement is jazz, but it’s a Scherzo, with a trio and everything. There’s structural tightness, but it’s always unpredictable. I don’t think he was one to break convention, but he really loved to bend it.”‘Griffelkin’ (1955)In the late 1940s, Foss wrote a lively opera based on the Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” It showed a gift for the kind of dramatic writing that would appeal to children, so he was a natural choice for NBC to approach in the wake of the success of the first opera it had commissioned for television, Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors” (1951).Foss’s delightful result, inspired by a fairy tale about a disobedient young devil, was broadcast on Nov. 6, 1955. It was, Falletta said, “the last part of an age when classical music was for everyone.”‘Psalms’ (1956)“When you hear this,” Falletta said, “remember that the ‘Chichester Psalms’ of Leonard Bernstein — Lukas’s great friend from their Curtis days — had not yet been written.”In the 1940s Foss had already done two cantatas for voice and orchestra, “Song of Anguish” and “Song of Songs,” that were also on biblical texts. “The most dramatic part is the middle part,” she said. “It’s very rhythmic, it’s very jazzy — very Bernstein in its own way, very vivid. The outer movements are shorter and slower.”‘Time Cycle’ (1960)Foss’s best-known piece, this work for soprano and orchestra, dates to the period in which he began to experiment with alternatives to purely notated music; in 1957, he even founded the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught. In “Time Cycle,” which the Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic premiered, four song movements (with jumpy vocal lines and texts about time and its ambiguities by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche) alternate with improvised instrumental interludes.‘Echoi’ (1963)In works for small groups, Foss was able to delve deeper into avant-garde experimentation than he generally could in writing for larger ensembles. “Echoi,” for clarinet, cello, percussion and piano, draws on the kind of chance strategies that John Cage had made increasingly famous through the 1950s. Foss’s is a raucous piece in four sections, partly structured and partly open to swerves determined by the performers.String Quartet No. 3 (1975)“He went his own way,” Falletta said of Foss. That’s true, and he was no follower of trends, but he kept his ears open to new styles and he certainly heard the groundbreaking pieces that the young Steve Reich and Philip Glass were producing starting in the late 1960s. This quartet, its textures shifting throughout, is permeated with the intense, driving regularity of classic Minimalism, but married to the kind of spiky, even gritty dissonance that didn’t really interest Reich and Glass. (“Music for Six,” from a couple of years later, also explores Glassian repetition, sometimes in a gentler, more meditative mode.)‘Renaissance Concerto’ (1985)“When I was Lukas’s assistant at the Milwaukee Symphony, my first assignment was to go to Europe on tour with the orchestra,” Falletta said. “And he was always behind on writing deadlines, so he was working on this piece. He knew I played lute, so he asked me to bring him some music, and I brought him Noah Greenberg’s anthology of lute songs.”The flute was especially close to him; with the piano, it was the instrument he played best. “The third movement,” Falletta said, “is drawn from Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo,’ with Orfeo lamenting the loss of Euridice: ‘Goodbye sun, goodbye sky, goodbye Earth.’ And then he tries to bring her back to life, and she’s following him before he turns around. And Lukas has a little offstage group of strings and the flute, following the orchestra a couple of beats behind, like a couple of steps behind. And then it disappears.” More

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      Trombone Champ Makes a Hit Video Game of an Unlikely Instrument

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      We asked several trombone players what they made of the popular new game, which laughs both at and with their instrument. Spoiler: They like it, too.LONDON — Backstage at the Royal Festival Hall, one of London’s grandest classical music venues, James Buckle, the bass trombonist for the Philharmonia Orchestra, braced himself to do something he’d never done before: play the familiar opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.Trombone players usually spend most of the symphony waiting in silence at the back of the orchestra, ignored by the audience, only getting the chance to play in the piece’s final, euphoric movement. But thanks to the popular new video game Trombone Champ — a sort of Guitar Hero for brass players — Buckle was having a go at its exhilarating opening as if he were one of the first violins. “I have to admit I’m a bit excited,” he said.Buckle, 29, who gamely agreed to test out Trombone Champ last weekend, gripped a mouse, which he would move up and down to change the pitch of his virtual trombone, and placed his left hand on the laptop’s space bar, which he would hit to play notes. Then, the game began. As a flurry of notes moved across the screen, from right to left, Buckle desperately tried to keep up. But things did not go according to plan, and what came out of the laptop’s speakers was less a Beethoven masterwork than an out-of-tune mess.“God, it sounds like me warming up!” Buckle said.As the tune ended, Buckle leaned back, grinning in delight. “This is going to sound really sad,” he said, “but it felt genuinely great getting to play that.”Over the past week, Trombone Champ has become a surprise phenomenon online, with the game’s fans going on social media to post clips of their fraught attempts to play “Auld Lang Syne,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Last week, a clip of someone mangling Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” was retweeted over 40,000 times.The game has attracted rave reviews. Christopher Livingston, in PC Gamer magazine, called it “a serious game of the year contender” (Livingston added that he wasn’t joking, in case anyone wasn’t sure). A handful of gamers have been so enamored by it, they have built trombone-shaped controllers so they can play the game more like real musicians.But what do real trombone players make of it?Trombone Champ does not take the trombone, or trombonists, very seriously. It calls the players “tromboners,” for a start. Before each song, it displays pseudofactoids about the trombone (“in England, trombone is spelt troumboune,” reads a typical one). In clips, the “tromboner” dances even while playing something serious.But Buckle, the professional trombonist, had only positive things to say about the game. “If it raises awareness or means anyone wants to pick up the trombone, it’s a great thing,” he said.Buckle, with the real thing.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesTrombone Champ is the creation of Dan Vecchitto, a web application designer at Penguin Random House, who — in partnership with his wife, Jackie Vecchitto — in his spare time makes video games in the bedroom of his Brooklyn apartment.Vecchitto, 38, said he came up with the idea four years ago while trying to think of concepts for fun arcade games. “I just got this mental picture of an arcade cabinet with a giant rubber trombone attached,” he said. After realizing that would be difficult to make, Vecchitto set about creating a version where players use a mouse to emulate a trombone’s movements, which would allow them to slide between notes.It was immediately clear the game would be a comedy, Vecchitto said, and he took every opportunity to insert jokes.Vecchitto used to play saxophone in high school bands, but said he had no experience of the trombone. Asked if he consulted any trombonists while making the game, Vecchitto said, “I meant to,” then laughed. At one point, Vecchitto bought a plastic trombone, called a pBone, “so I had some idea what this thing actually feels like,” but that was as close as he got to in-depth research.“I was a little concerned that real trombonists might take offense,” Vecchitto said, “but for the most part they’ve been extremely supportive.”Vecchitto said he had received one negative email from a jazz trombonist telling him the game was disrespectful to the instrument, but otherwise a host of players, including several trombone YouTubers, has praised it.Several trombone players said they thought the game was a positive showcase for the instrument. Xavier Woods, a star wrestler for WWE who plays the trombone in bouts and is also a well-known gamer under the name Austin Creed, said that he had not expected the game to hold his attention, but that he had ended up playing it for hours.The trombone’s joy is its versatility, Creed said: “You can make incredible jazz on it, you can play at Carnegie Hall and the most beautiful sounds will come out of this horn, and then you can play at a kid’s clown birthday and just make everyone giggle.”Alex Paxton, a British composer, said in his London apartment that clips of Trombone Champ were so filled with out-of-tune notes and microtones that they “had all the hallmarks of great experimental music.” Paxton then sat down to try the game for himself. After a few tries, he appeared to grow weary of following its rules, and just started waggling the mouse up and down rapidly to create a barrage of noise. As he did, the screen started glowing a range of psychedelic colors. Then, Paxton went and got one of his own trombones and tried to play a duet with the game.Trombone Champ was not much like playing a real instrument, Paxton said afterward. In real life, he said, notes normally go awry for beginners when a player’s lips are in the wrong position, something the game does not approximate. Even so, the game “shows how the trombone can be a license to be weird, to be yourself,” Paxton said.Whether the game will encourage any online “tromboners” to take up the real instrument remains to be seen. At the Royal Festival Hall, Buckle, of the Philharmonia, invited a colleague, Joseph Fisher, who plays the viola in the orchestra, to give it a try. After struggling with some trombone Tchaikovsky on the laptop — and giggling when he fluffed a note and the word “Meh” appeared onscreen in big letters — he was asked if he might switch instruments.“Not to the trombone,” Fisher said, “but I’m definitely going to get the game.” More

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      Star Maestro With Russian Ties to Depart German Orchestra

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      Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny for his association with a Russian bank, will step down as chief conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra in 2025.The conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has been criticized since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia, will step down as chief conductor of a prominent German orchestra in 2025, the ensemble announced on Friday.Currentzis, who has led the ensemble, the SWR Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, since 2018, will leave his post when his contract expires at the end of the 2024-25 season, the orchestra said. He will be replaced by François-Xavier Roth, who leads the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, Germany.The SWR Symphony Orchestra has faced pressure in recent months to cut ties with Currentzis because of his affiliation with VTB Bank, a Russian state-owned institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries. VTB is the main sponsor of Currentzis’s longtime ensemble, MusicAeterna.In a statement to The New York Times, the SWR said Currentzis’s departure had been decided last year and had nothing to do with concerns about his Russia ties.“The announcement of today is not related to the discussion about the financing of MusicAeterna,” Matthias Claudi, a spokesman for SWR, said. He added that the orchestra hoped to continue to work with Currentzis after he steps down.A representative for Currentzis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Currentzis, 50, is one of classical music’s most prominent conductors. Since the start of the war, his career has been complicated by questions about Russian support, with some presenters canceling or postponing engagements. He has been denounced for his silence on the war and criticized for working with associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including some who sit on the board of MusicAeterna’s foundation. Putin awarded Currentzis, who was born in Greece, citizenship by presidential decree in 2014.Working to get beyond questions about his Russian benefactors, Currentzis announced in August that he would form a new international ensemble, called Utopia, with the support of donors outside Russia. The benefactors include a private foundation called Kunst und Kultur DM, which is affiliated with Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian businessman who is a founder of Red Bull. Beginning next month, Utopia will tour Europe, continuing through next year.Currentzis has continued to perform with MusicAeterna, which he founded in Siberia in 2004, often before sold-out crowds. More

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      Review: The Philadelphia Orchestra Returns, With Force

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      Carnegie Hall’s season-opening gala featured the ensemble and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in a program of heavy-handed light fare.Carnegie Hall’s season-opening concert — featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra, a frequent visitor in the coming months — on Thursday night had light fare written all over it.Ravel’s “La Valse” and Liszt’s First Piano Concerto are dazzlers, and Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony is a font of graceful melodies. With a gala dinner afterward, the program promised to go down easy. But Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra’s music director, had other ideas.From the start, “La Valse” was heavy with portent. The snatches of waltz melodies at the beginning did not flit, flicker and come together as they have in other interpretations. The bassoons roused themselves slowly, heavily, refusing to leave their slumber. The strings swooned steadily, and the double basses laid down a menacing pulse.For his choreographic poem, Ravel imagined “an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd,” and in the sheer refulgence of the waltzes, one can see dignified couples sweeping in circles across a floor. Nézet-Séguin brought to mind a gruesome dance, woozy and foreboding. (Some have agreed with that macabre transfiguration, seeing in it a metaphor for the decay of European glory after World War I, but Ravel resisted such interpretations.) The finale was controlled pandemonium. The Liszt and Dvorak likewise careened toward their conclusions.As he did with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in June, Nézet-Séguin reveled in the power of a full orchestra. This time, though, he used a heavy hand to force pieces into uncharacteristic shapes.Dvorak’s normally uplifting symphony turned toward stone-faced implacability; even the clarinets playing in thirds moved lugubriously. In the Liszt, the brasses aimed not only for the back row but seemingly also for passers-by on the street.Elsewhere, there were moments of elegance, joy and even whimsy: a glistening violin solo from the concertmaster, David Kim, in the Dvorak, or basically anything the cellos touched with their warm, translucent feeling.Liszt’s piano concerto, the work of an established showman who wanted to be taken seriously as a composer, combines virtuosic glitter with transparently textured chamber music. One moment you’re in a clarinet sonata; in the next, a sparkling impromptu cutting through an orchestra.The soloist, Daniil Trifonov, concerned himself less with tone quality than with technical bravura. His passagework had a hard glare, and he lined up chords neatly like punctuation marks. Liszt threw down a gauntlet with 19 straight bars of trills in a piece already rife with difficulty, and Trifonov kept it sparking and spinning. It’s a miracle he has any fingerprints left. His scherzo had a wonderfully light air about it.Like Nézet-Séguin, though, Trifonov commanded respect with his prowess but left me cold.Trifonov’s encore, an arrangement of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” prompted knee-jerk guffaws from the audience, and maybe for some it’s so trite that it’s unsalvageable. But as he unspooled the music’s hardy melody over an even-keeled accompaniment, it provided a welcome palate cleanser.Gabriela Lena Frank’s dashing “Chasqui,” excerpted from a six-movement suite for string quartet and arranged for string orchestra, likewise injected new energy into the program. String pizzicatos popped like branches underfoot, and while the high strings turned wiry, the lower ones nurtured a tone that was, in its own way, implacable in its handsomeness.At Carnegie last season, Nézet-Séguin’s promotion of living female composers gave us a noble piece by Valerie Coleman and a mysteriously evocative one by Missy Mazzoli. Each brought out fresh sensitivities in him. Such advocacy could well become a part of his legacy, and it serves him as a musician as much as them as composers.Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: A Portrait Reveals a Composer With a Dramatic Edge

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      The Miller Theater’s Composer Portraits series returns with a program of Liza Lim’s music, featuring the JACK Quartet.The last time I sat down with the music of the Australian composer Liza Lim, it was to take in the broad swath of her operatic catalog — collected last year by the Elision Ensemble in its “Singing in Tongues.” That release, which included Lim’s avant-garde take on “The Oresteia,” left me hungry to hear more of her theatrical music.Alas, a Lim program at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday didn’t feature any of it. Still, the concert — the Miller’s first Composer Portrait of the season — confirmed the ways in which Lim can create drama through experimental conceits.The program offered the U.S. premiere of her “String Creatures,” written for the JACK Quartet. It also featured the cellist Jay Campbell, a member of that pathbreaking group, in the 2016 solo work “an ocean beyond earth.”Or was it a solo? In “ocean,” each string of the cello is outfitted with a cotton thread attached to the strings of a nearby violin. Campbell occasionally tugged on those threads, vibrating the violin strings independently of his instrument; at other points, he alternately bowed the connective threads and the cello’s strings. The result was an invitation to consider a range of discrete ways to produce sound across the two instruments.That work was also a good example of what distinguishes Lim. Her approach is flush with aspects of contemporary experimental music that, in other hands, threaten to become clichés (like harsh, grating string sounds and breathy extended technique). But Lim uses those now-familiar timbres as suspense-fomenting moments in music that has a sure sense of proportion — and an unmistakable direction.In “ocean,” that dramatic trajectory resulted in ever-firmer evocations of the cello’s more booming stature — with Campbell gradually moving beyond initial, wispy, cotton-string disturbances. After that came gentle yet direct bowing; then, finally, forceful pizzicato.Lim’s expressive writing takes on more power with the addition of more instruments. At the outset of the three-movement “String Creatures,” country-western “chop” accents — a percussive bowing of the strings that is repeated for rhythmic effect — lent the music propulsive momentum.There were other highlights in the piece for the JACK players: The violinist Christopher Otto had multiple, sinewy solo features; a brief lullaby teased at the end of the first movement appeared later on as a spotlight for Campbell, progressing with what sounded like microtonal intervals.Yet ghostly ensemble textures for the entire quartet were the highlight. At times, the group seemed to fall in lock step, cohering around a mechanical Minimalism. But while keeping the hushed dynamics steady, Lim bent individual string lines away from the expected polyphonic patterns.It was all gripping material. So now, after an evening like this, who will bring her richly designed dramas to New York?Composer Portraits: Liza LimPerformed on Thursday at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Manhattan. More

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      Timeline: The Long, Long Journey to a New David Geffen Hall

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      After decades of failed attempts, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are hoping that the new $550 million renovation has finally fixed the hall.The efforts to fix the New York Philharmonic’s troubled Lincoln Center home date back almost to the night it opened in 1962, when the auditorium, originally called Philharmonic Hall, was found acoustically wanting.In 1976 a gut renovation transformed the space, which had been renamed Avery Fisher Hall in honor of a large gift from the audio equipment pioneer Avery Fisher, and tried to fix its acoustics. But problems persisted. More tweaks were made in the 1990s. The Philharmonic tried to leave for good in 2003 to return to its old home, Carnegie Hall. Plans for new designs by Norman Foster and Thomas Heatherwick came and went.Now the hall, renamed David Geffen Hall after a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen, is reopening in early October after a $550 million overhaul that everyone hopes will finally get it right. Here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Sept. 23, 1962A Glamorous Opening, Troubling SignsLeonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at the opening of the hall in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesPhilharmonic Hall, which was designed by Max Abramovitz and was the first part of Lincoln Center to be completed, opens with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at a white-tie gala attended by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and other luminaries. But in his review the next day the critic Harold C. Schonberg in The New York Times notes a “decided lack of bass” in the orchestra section that worsens in the loges and at the back of the hall, where he likens it to “a high-fidelity outfit with the bass control out of the circuit.”Sept. 25, 1962“We’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.”Philharmonic Hall on opening night.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThe hall’s acoustician, Leo Beranek, tells The Times that he is “not entirely satisfied” with the sound but believes that adjustments will improve it. “In other words,” the article quotes him as saying, “we’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.” A series of remodeling efforts begins, but by 1974 visiting ensembles, including the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, decide to return to Carnegie Hall.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.1975Gutting the Hall and Starting Againvia New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesLincoln Center announces plans to gut the hall, now called Avery Fisher Hall, and to completely rebuild it under the supervision of the acoustician Cyril M. Harris and the architect Philip Johnson. “There was no point any longer taking halfway measures in relation to the hall,” Fisher says. “A fresh start was needed.”1976Avery Fisher Hall Reopens, to HopeThe philanthropist Avery Fisher, center, was in the audience when the newly renovated Avery Fisher Hall opened in 1976.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesAvery Fisher Hall reopens, and the early reviews are good. This time Schonberg writes in The Times that in “any part of the dynamic range, too, from the wispiest pianissimo to the most stupendous forte, Fisher Hall came through with extraordinary clarity.” But for all his early enthusiasm, he notes that the bass sound, while improved, “tends to be a little weak.”1992The Musicians Still Cannot Hear Each OtherSound reflectors were added around the stage to help the players hear each other.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesMusicians still complain that they cannot hear one another on the stage, so sound reflectors — some called “bongos” for their curved appearance — are placed on the walls and ceiling. Allan Kozinn writes in The Times that “Avery Fisher Hall’s acoustics have troubled musicians and listeners ever since it opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall. And although the 1976 renovation was considered an improvement, critics continued to complain of an overly bright brass sound and a weak bass.”2003The Philharmonic Tries to Leave Lincoln CenterThe Philharmonic stuns Lincoln Center by announcing that it plans to leave Avery Fisher to return to Carnegie Hall. The announcement throws the center’s on-again, off-again redevelopment plans into chaos (three finalists had been selected to compete to redesign Fisher: Norman Foster, Rafael Moneo and the team of Richard Meier and Arata Isozaki). But the plan, which also called for the Philharmonic and Carnegie to merge, proves unworkable and is soon abandoned.2005Norman Foster Tapped, But Nothing Comes of ItThe Philharmonic board selects the architect Norman Foster to redesign the hall, but plans stall.March 4, 2015David Geffen Gives $100 MillionDavid Geffen, center, with Katherine G. Farley, chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and Jed Bernstein, who was then its president.Richard Perry/The New York TimesDavid Geffen donates $100 million to renovate the hall, which is then named for him, after the Fisher family agrees give up the naming rights in exchange for several inducements, including $15 million.Dec. 9, 2015Heatherwick Studio Briefly on Design TeamThe London firm Heatherwick Studio, led by Thomas Heatherwick, and Diamond Schmitt Architects of Toronto are chosen to redesign the interior of David Geffen Hall. They join the acoustic design firm Akustiks and the theater design firm Fisher Dachs.2017Back to the Drawing BoardLincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic scrap the current plans and go back to the drawing board, saying that the proposals were growing too complicated and too costly, and would force the orchestra out of the hall for three seasons.2019A Plan, and a Design Team, at LastAn artist’s rendering of the plans for the new hall. New York PhilharmonicA new $550 million plan is unveiled to make the hall more intimate, cutting more than 500 seats, reducing capacity to 2,200 from 2,738. It also calls for adding seats behind the stage, fixing the acoustics, rethinking the public spaces and, yes, adding more restrooms. Heatherwick Studios is off the design team, which now consists of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (lobbies and other public spaces); Diamond Schmitt Architects (the auditorium); Akustiks (acoustics); and Fisher Dachs Associates (theater design). The hall is scheduled to open in March 2024.2021The Pandemic Shutdown Speeds ConstructionThe concert hall being rebuilt in 2021.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe pandemic, which has shut down live performance, allows the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center to accelerate the construction schedule, and to push the reopening to this fall. That keeps the orchestra’s nomadic period to just one season, which saw it play at Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater with forays to Carnegie Hall.2022David Geffen Hall Set to ReopenThe new hall, so many years in the making and remaking, will come to life this month. There will be two concerts Oct. 8 featuring the world premiere of new piece that Lincoln Center commissioned for the occasion: Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” about the vibrant neighborhood that was razed to make way for Lincoln Center. It will be performed by Etienne Charles & Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Jaap van Zweden. Tickets will be available on a choose-what-you-pay basis. More