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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

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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