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      Live Performance in New York: Here’s What to See This Spring

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      “The Notebook” and “Cabaret” land on Broadway. Olivia Rodrigo’s tour stops in Manhattan. Plus: Herbie Hancock, Heartbeat Opera and Trisha Brown Dance Company.BroadwayTHE NOTEBOOK Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel (adapted for the screen in 2004) is now a sweeping musical tale of romantic idealism and the decades-long love between Allie and Noah. The Chicago Tribune gave a glowing review to the 2022 Chicago Shakespeare Theater premiere, and several performers from the Chicago cast, including Maryann Plunkett as Older Allie, will reprise their roles. The show features a book by Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) and music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, with Michael Greif and Schele Williams directing. Now playing at the Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan.THE WHO’S TOMMY The show, with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend who wrote the book with Des McAnuff, was on Broadway 30 years ago, but this new take, which had its premiere at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, is very heavy on visual spectacle (and, egad, how theatrical effects have changed in three decades!). Tommy is a traumatized child who witnesses violence and loses his ability to see, hear and speak. He plays mean pinball, though, and in the strange spectacle becomes something of a messiah. The leads, including Ali Louis Bourzgui (Tommy), Alison Luff (Mrs. Walker) and Adam Jacobs (Captain Walker), are revisiting the roles they played at the Goodman. Choreography is by Lorin Latarro (“Waitress”), and McAnuff directs. Performances begin March 8 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan.Louis Bourzgui in “The Who’s Tommy.”Liz LaurenLEMPICKA The life of the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka was not a screamingly obvious topic for a Broadway musical, but an impressive team has collaborated on this show. The Polish-born Lempicka (1898-1980), who was married, twice, to men, but had female lovers as well, lived through two world wars, surrounded by cultural and political change in Russia, Paris and California. Rachel Chavkin directs a cast led by Eden Espinosa as Lempicka, who returns to the role that wowed critics in productions at the Williamstown Theater Festival and La Jolla Playhouse. The show features music by Matt Gould and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer; they collaborated on the book. Performances begin March 19 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan.SUFFS The hard-fought passage of the 19th amendment, which codified women’s right to vote in 1919, is the focus of this musical by Shaina Taub. In addition to the challenge of being book writer, lyricist and composer, Taub also stars as Alice Paul (1885-1977), a leader of the National Woman’s Party. She and a group of like-minded women, including Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James) and Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), battle the patriarchy and, at times, one another. Directed by Leigh Silverman. Performances begin March 26 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan.HELL’S KITCHEN Alicia Keys makes her Broadway debut with this semi-autobiographical jukebox musical about a 17-year-old girl named Ali, raised in a small Manhattan apartment by her protective single mother alongside a community of artists. The show features music and lyrics by Keys, a mix of hits, including “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” and new songs. The show’s premiere last year at the Public Theater received decent, if not exceptional, reviews, but c’mon, this girl is on fire. The book is by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. Maleah Joi Moon, Shoshana Bean and Brandon Victor Dixon will reprise their roles. The busy Michael Greif (see also “The Notebook”) directs. Performances begin March 28 at the Shubert Theater, Manhattan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

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      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Young Artists Make Back-to-Back Debuts at the Philharmonic

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      The conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s two-week Philharmonic residency included the arrivals of the violinist Esther Yoo and the pianist Bruce Liu.For the past two weeks, the New York Philharmonic’s podium has been occupied by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a Finnish conductor who with a little spontaneity and a lot of sprezzatura offers a jolt to whatever orchestra he encounters.But that’s not what has made these two weeks interesting.Rouvali, after all, led multiple programs last season, making a long-awaited return after his debut in late 2019. Having proven himself as a guest worth keeping around, he has become comfortably part of the orchestra. His latest residency, though, has been more notable for the appearances of other artists: the violinist Esther Yoo and the much-hyped pianist Bruce Liu, both in their debuts, who with any luck will be just as present as Rouvali in the years to come.Liu’s Philharmonic debut at David Geffen Hall on Thursday followed a stop last season at Carnegie Hall, where he performed works by Chopin in a nod to his winning the top prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021. As if to signal that he wasn’t at all nervous about the sudden spotlight, at Carnegie he blazed past the concert’s two-hour running time, returning to the stage for no fewer than seven encores.There was some showmanship, too, in his appearance with the Philharmonic, as the soloist in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” In the opening, his large hands, redolent of the composer’s, sprang high above the keyboard, more than was necessary; but as he settled into the performance, mannerisms like that cooled, and Liu revealed the depth behind his theatricality.He played with feline agility and lightness of touch. But, as a cat can be lethally powerful when necessary, he can also take on a muscularity that turns sensitive phrasing into tintinnabular resonance. That nimble versatility also made for fluid shifts between limpid precision and alluring rubato, between concerto virtuosity and the recital-like intimacy with which he opened the famous 18th Variation. (Liu demonstrated something similar in the pairing he made with his encores: crowd-pleasing dazzle in Liszt’s “La Campanella” and meditative warmth in Alexander Siloti’s B-minor transcription of Bach’s Prelude in E minor.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Performance by Maestro With Russian Ties Is Canceled in Vienna

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      A Teodor Currentzis concert at the Wiener Festwochen was canceled after the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv, also on the program, raised concerns about his ties to Russia.When the Wiener Festwochen, a prestigious festival that brings leading international artists to Vienna, announced this spring’s lineup, the backlash was swift and fierce.The festival had planned to make the Russian invasion of Ukraine a focus of its programming, juxtaposing an appearance by the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv with a concert by the maestro Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny over his connections to Russia. Critics, including Lyniv, had argued that the pairing was insensitive and ignored the suffering of Ukrainians.Now, after weeks of pressure, the festival has abandoned its plan, saying that it would cancel the appearance by Currentzis while moving forward with the one by Lyniv.“The decision was clear and there was no alternative,” Milo Rau, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview on Tuesday. “This was the best solution from bad ones.”Since Russia invaded Ukraine, many cultural organizations have severed ties with close associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the government there. Some institutions have been criticized for overreach after canceling performances by Russian artists with no known connections to the government. Others have grappled with how to handle artists who had less clear-cut allegiances.Currentzis, a Greek-born, Russian-trained maestro whose leadership of the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna turned him into one of the world’s most prominent conductors, has been at the center of the discussion because of his relationship with VTB Bank, a Russian state-owned institution that has been under sanctions by the United States and other countries. VTB Bank was the main sponsor of MusicAeterna. Currentzis has also drawn scrutiny for his association with Russian officials: In 2014, Putin awarded Currentzis citizenship by presidential decree.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Matthew Sheeran on Composing Electronic Music With Acoustic Instruments

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      The composer Matthew Sheeran, brother of the pop star Ed Sheeran, discusses how he translated microtonal electronic music for a chamber orchestra.If you start at the middle C of a piano and strike every key on your way up to the next C on the keyboard, you will play each of the 12 notes that make up an octave. Those 12 semitones are the foundation of most Western music.But what if they were not? What if that same octave were equally divided into 14 tones, or 16? What if Beethoven had written the “Eroica” Symphony with a scale of 19 notes, or Schoenberg had written tone rows with 23? What would their music sound like?Those were the questions that the composer Easley Blackwood Jr., a pillar of the Chicago new music community who died last year, asked in his “Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media” (1979-80). Composed for a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, each of Blackwood’s “Etudes” shows off the qualities of different, often alien microtonal octaves.It was an endeavor that took Blackwood, a composer of predominantly atonal music, in an odd new direction, said James Ginsburg, the founder and president of Cedille Records, which has released recordings of many of Blackwood’s works, including the “Etudes.”“He became so fascinated with tonal writing through writing for other tunings,” Ginsburg recalled, “that after he did this, he suddenly changed gears as a composer, and started writing everything tonally.”Blackwood recorded the “Etudes” on a synthesizer, and performing them live on acoustic instruments was practically impossible. But technology has evolved, and a new recording on Cedille, “Acoustic Microtonal,” illustrates to astonishing effect what this music might sound like if it were played by a chamber orchestra.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Pianists Make a Life Out of an Intimate Art Form

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      Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, partners onstage and off, began to play as a duo in school. Now, they are dedicating their careers to it.It looked like some kind of grand music exam. The pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy sat down at their instruments onstage at Wigmore Hall and began to play for an audience of two.The rest of their listeners were online. It was June 2020, and Kolesnikov and Tsoy were, like virtually every other musician at that time, playing a livestreamed concert. Despite the hall’s chilly emptiness, there was something heartening: Here were two musical and romantic partners sharing a bit of their domestic lives as they worked through a messy pile of sheet music spread out on a single Steinway piano.Now, things are more or less back to normal. When they sat for an interview at their elegant northwest London home recently, Kolesnikov had just returned from Copenhagen as a replacement soloist in Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, and was about to jump in — in Copenhagen again — to play Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. (He could be heard frantically recapping the piece as he walked down the street. “It’s not something you can just pull out of your pocket,” he said.)The pandemic forced Kolesnikov, 34, and Tsoy, 35, to recalibrate. After so much time spent at home together, returning meaningfully to the genre of four-hands music — through which they had met — they emerged with a desire to dedicate themselves to playing as a duo. They signed to new management as both solo artists and partners last October, and will make their duo debut at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 13, with their first album together to follow this summer.“I consider this possibly the hardest form of chamber music,” Kolesnikov said of the piano duet. “This genre is a very interesting merge of something that is extremely homely, extremely intimate and private. Then one thinks, how do you take that onstage?”A Domestic Art FormThe piano duet has always been closely tethered to the home. Grove Music describes it as a “modest, essentially domestic branch of music,” more frequently associated with a student’s early experiences than with the public-facing openness of a concert hall.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seiji Ozawa: 8 Essential Recordings

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      Ozawa, who died this week at 88 years old, left behind a catalog made with orchestras in Boston, Chicago and elsewhere. Listen to highlights.Seiji Ozawa, the eminent Japanese conductor whose death, at 88, was announced on Friday, was a force at the podium. He toured the world’s leading concert halls and helped break barriers for Asian classical musicians.He also left behind an extensive and varied discography: recordings of warhorses like Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he led for 29 years, as well as of more obscure pieces, such as Henri Dutilleux’s “The Shadows of Time.” While his live performances sometimes drew mixed reactions from critics, many of his recordings — from Boston, Berlin, Japan and elsewhere — are considered standards.“Even at my age, you change,” Ozawa, then in his 70s, told the author Haruki Murakami. “And practical experience keeps you changing. This may be one of the distinguishing features of the conductor’s profession: The work itself changes you.”Here are eight albums that offer an introduction to his music.Berlioz: ‘Symphonie Fantastique’Ozawa often spoke about feeling liberation in the music of Berlioz. “His music is crazy!” he once said. “Sometimes I don’t know what’s going on, either. Which may be why his music is suited to being performed by an Asian conductor. I can do what I want with it.” That freewheeling approach can be heard in this recording of “Symphonie Fantastique” with the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which he helped found in Japan in 1984.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seiji Ozawa, Captivating Conductor, Is Dead at 88

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      He led the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 29 years, toured widely and helped dispel prejudices about East Asian classical musicians.Seiji Ozawa, the high-spirited Japanese conductor who took the Western classical music world by storm in the 1960s and ’70s and was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1973 to 2002, died on Feb. 6 in Tokyo. He was 88.The cause was heart failure, said a spokeswoman for the Seiji Ozawa International Academy Switzerland, which announced his death in a news release. Mr. Ozawa had recently experienced health problems. He never fully rebounded from surgery for esophageal cancer in early 2010, or from back problems that were made worse during his recovery. He was also hospitalized with heart valve disease in later years.Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.For much of that time, a belief widespread even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this prejudice by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.With his mop of black hair, his boyish demeanor and his seemingly boundless energy, Mr. Ozawa captured the popular imagination early on.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More