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      Review: The Philharmonic’s Conductor Returns to His Perch

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      Jaap van Zweden led the orchestra after seven weeks away in works by Julia Perry, Shostakovich and Beethoven.He’s back: After six weeks of guest conductors — including some prominent contenders to succeed him as music director when he leaves in two years — Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic on Thursday.And he’s back, too: A month after swooping into Carnegie Hall as a last-minute replacement for an artist with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the pianist Seong-Jin Cho was once again in Manhattan.They joined at Alice Tully Hall for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” its opening orchestral chord full and rounded; the balances between the strings and the winds, which had heavily favored the violins at Tully earlier this season, equitable; the tempos judicious.Cho, who played a tour date with the Philharmonic in 2019 but on Thursday made his subscription series debut, was most memorable when most delicate: his silvery playing under the horn just after his cadenza in the first movement; his gentleness in the questioning chords wandering from the second movement to the third; his shimmering trills at the end of the piece.His forcefulness in his right hand sometimes tipped into rawness — which, in passages of worried repetition, added an intriguing note of obsessiveness but otherwise felt too steely for such an intimate space. In the Rondo finale, though, he and the orchestra shared a graceful mixture of lightness and weight.In 1965, the Philharmonic premiered the final version of Julia Perry’s “Study for Orchestra,” but hadn’t reprised it until a one-off last year. Also known by an earlier title, “A Short Piece for Orchestra,” it is certainly that: Barely seven minutes long, it opens punchily, with heated strings and sardonic brasses, then enters a slower section of poetic winds and quietly suspended harmonies. The music turns blocky and dramatic again, with the vehemence of a Bernard Herrmann film score, before a softening ensemble, with touches of celesta and piano, is surprised by a brief, fierce coda.Perry’s “Study” felt connected — across the Beethoven concerto and the intermission that followed — to Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, another work whose swaths of high spirits are tinged with a bit too much aggression, a clenched grin. And both pieces relax into melancholy passages of seeming sincerity, haunted by eerie mists.Shostakovich wrote it as World War II came to an end, and originally planned something huge and triumphant, akin to Beethoven’s full-chorus Ninth. When he delivered a slighter, merrier piece, less than half an hour long, some were charmed, while others — including, dangerously, officials in Stalin’s government — felt he had failed to meet the historic moment.The degree to which the music is ironic — its bubbly passages even politically subversive — is unclear, a familiar ambiguity from a composer adept at playing all the angles. Its sprightliness in a sober time recalls Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, written three decades earlier, which the Philharmonic played under van Zweden in February.Sharp, precise performances of this kind of repertory are the main reason van Zweden — known in past positions as a martinet of polish — was hired, and the orchestra played on Thursday with pep and something close to unity. The slower sections were particularly impressive, with icy waves of violin, brasses ominously smoldering, Anthony McGill’s clarinet aching and Judith LeClair’s bassoon offering eloquent humanity, without schmaltz.What are the piece’s politics? The jury is, and always will be, out.But playing the work makes its own political statement as Putin went on television on Friday to decry what he called instances of the West canceling Russian composers like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff to protest his invasion of Ukraine. This is, of course, largely his fantasy, a message of division meant to rally his people against phantoms he imagines to be demeaning and destroying Russia’s cultural heritage.For the Philharmonic to play this Ninth Symphony — and, next week, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev — is a gesture, however small, against that message.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Music for the Dark at an Experimental Festival

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      British fans gathered to enjoy an overnight program of alternative classical music — a loose, soothing genre that many have discovered during the pandemic.GATESHEAD, England — Early on Saturday evening, the final strains of Gavin Bryars’s looping “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” faded into silence at a vast concert hall here. After some polite applause, several hundred audience members prized themselves out of chunky beanbag chairs and headed off to find their next listening experience.Ambling across the arts complex attached to the hall would have brought them to Kinbrae’s nature-themed synth landscapes. On an expansive concourse, they could have chilled out to Echo Juliet’s gently probing D.J. set, or held on for a sonic barrage from the electro duo Darkstar.All were on offer at the inaugural After Dark Festival, organized by the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, in Sage Gateshead, a shiny, undulating arts venue on the banks of the River Tyne in northeast England. The festival’s diverse lineup of music evades an easy collective term: Neo-classical? Experimental? Crossover? Alternative classical?Echo Juliet’s gently probing D.J. set was one of the more chilled out musical experiences at the festival. Mary Turner for The New York TimesDescribing it is a simpler task: United by its commitment to cross-pollination, the program combined approaches from improvisation, pop, jazz, spoken word and electronic music with a variety of traditional classical music signifiers. As well as slower rates of changes, it preferred curves over edges, minimal over maximal. Electronic elements frequently cropped up, as did multimedia collaboration, evident in the evening’s selection of tableaus, projections and animations.This loose genre has offered stress relief and calm to increasing numbers of British music fans during the coronavirus pandemic. Coinciding with the spring equinox, After Dark was also an all-night affair, a continuous thread of sound flowing from Chelsea Carmichael’s fluttering sax lines at dusk to the sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun’s set at daybreak. The overall effect was of one unbroken sound installation, with washes of sound always surreptitiously present.Elizabeth Alker, whose Radio 3 show “Unclassified” gives a platform to new composers and performers, said that the appeal of such music can be the portal it offers to less turbulent worlds. It has “a lot of space you can naturally escape into, particularly at a time when we don’t have much space in our daily lives — both head space and, during lockdown, physical space,” she said in a telephone interview.Alan Davey, who runs Radio 3, echoed this. “This music has really come into its own during the pandemic,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s possibly an escape inward, but it’s definitely an escape.”Jasdeep Singh Degun closes the festival with a traditional Indian raag, associated with the morning and played on a sitar. Mary Turner for The New York TimesChunky beanbags offer festivalgoers a comfy listening experience.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAndrew Hayes, left, and Matt Brown perform thrashing improvisations as Run Logan Run.Mary Turner for The New York TimesOver the course of the pandemic, a number of long-form performances have offered such escapism. In 2020, Max Richter’s eight-hour “Sleep” was simultaneously broadcast on radio stations across Europe, the United States and Canada during the Easter weekend. Later that year, the pianist Igor Levit streamed a 20-hour rendition of Erik Satie’s beguiling composition “Vexations.” Then this past January, the London Contemporary Orchestra presented a 24-hour program at the Barbican Center, featuring some of the longest pieces ever written.Staging the Gateshead festival’s 12-hour program overnight made sense, Davey said, since this kind of music has a “late-night vibe — it’s music in the dark, for when everything around is quiet.” But as the evening wore on, exiting one performance for another created a series of exciting jolts between worlds: leaving the BBC newsreader Viji Alles’s unnervingly chilled renditions of stormy Shipping Forecasts and meeting Darkstar’s set head-on; popping out of Christian Löffler’s atmospheric techno remixes and into the Bristol duo Run Logan Run’s thrashing improvisations; finding Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” being piped into a deserted cafe area at 4 a.m.A plurality of experience also existed among the festivalgoers. At 7 a.m., a group of bleary-eyed friends who’d used the second half of the night as an extended after-party to their own event explained the music’s appeal.“It’s the kind of stuff I listen to when I’m overwhelmed,” Kate Bradley, 25 and a visual artist, said of Degun’s sunrise sitar set. Clara Hancock, 25, instead uses ambient and lo-fi music as background sound for work, and prefers to decompress to “super-fast happy music.”Tilly Pitt, 20, a student at nearby Durham University, said she discovered the genre as an escape from studying. “During lockdown, I spent so much time staring at the screen, so it was nice to focus on something else for a while,” Pitt said.And while some listeners plied themselves with coffee, intent on an evening’s hard concentration, others settled in for the night, nestling in sleeping bags and seeking opportunities for a tactical snooze.The Royal Northern Sinfonia, an orchestra local to Gateshead, performs a series of contemporary classical pieces as part of the festival. Mary Turner for The New York TimesHowever listeners approach it, the music’s extended duration actively encourages the mind to wander. During the pandemic, people listened to Radio 3 “for longer, and they were appreciating that chance to reflect,” Davey said. “For me, music is an abstract art form, but it does help you use the space to think and reconsider, and I think ambient classical music is that writ large,” he added.Some of the music at After Dark fits the ambient description, but experimentation also abounds, as it does on Corey Mwamba’s improvisation-focused Radio 3 show “Freeness,” which also hosted artists at the festival. It’s noticeable that, although there’s a growing audience in Britain for this music, its creators often come from places without a dominant classical tradition, like Scotland, Canada and Scandinavian countries. Alker’s Radio 3 show was born after she witnessed groups of talented classical musicians branch out into other disciplines.“There’s a generation of musicians who had this classical training, and they wanted to hold on to making music in a classical idiom, but socially and culturally, they have the same experiences as everybody else, going to clubs and karaoke bars,” Alker said. She cites Nils Frahm and the recent work of Jonny Greenwood, formerly of Radiohead, as examples of music which is, in its essence, classical, and yet stands slightly removed from the usual traditions.Despite the relaxation their music may have brought through lockdowns, it’s been a different story for artists. “During the pandemic, I was just trying to keep things together,” said Degun, the sitarist, in a telephone interview a few days before his performance at the festival. “Music for me during the pandemic was quite stressful,” as he had to adapt quickly to new ways of performing, recording and working.Many fans discovered the escapism of experimental, soothing classical music during the pandemic.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIndependent music-making can be precarious work, and the music on the program at After Dark was made by composers and performers without consistent institutional backing. One of the twins who make up Kinbrae made this point as they began their final track. “There were times when we felt we were never going to be able to do this again,” he told the crowd.Like Kinbrae, Degun relished the return to appreciative audiences, but decided on a more traditional set than the cross-genre compositions for which he’s known. “When Radio 3 contacted me and said they wanted me to play at sunrise, I really wanted to just play Indian classical music,” he said. He rarely gets the opportunity to perform raags — a particular melodic mode linked to times of the day — associated with the morning, he said, since “usually all our concerts are in the evening.”For Davey, the festival’s aim is both to celebrate alternative classical’s existing, late-night audience and to introduce a wider group of listeners to the genre’s soothing affects. As the sun rose slowly over the Newcastle skyline, and the sound of Degun’s expansive raag closed the festival, there was certainly ample space to think. More

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      Richness in Stasis: La Monte Young Finally Releases ‘Trio’

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      The breakthrough Minimalist, not known for making albums, has at last put out an authorized recording of his 64-year-old “Trio for Strings.”La Monte Young, now 86, has released a lot of music in the past few years.In 2018, this composer and multi-instrumentalist, famed as a progenitor of Minimalism, reissued a six-hour, 24-minute take on his mammoth work “The Well-Tuned Piano.” Last year, a significant portion of his slender back catalog, some of it long out of print on CD, reached the digital platform Bandcamp.Most recently, Young has at last released a recording of his breakthrough composition, “Trio for Strings,” which he originally wrote in 1958, as he was beginning a period of study at the University of California at Berkeley.All this activity is a bit of a surprise, because the student composer who shocked colleagues with “Trio” — a nearly hourlong piece that almost exclusively used long, sustained tones — has been famous for not putting out albums. For decades, you had to hunt down a bootleg of the piece to experience it.Its streak of official unavailability finally ended late last year, when the Dia Art Foundation released a four-LP boxed set of a 182-minute live performance of “Trio” that was recorded during a concert series in 2015.Over the decades, Young wasn’t merely sitting on the material; he was continually working on it, even designing a new tuning in just intonation, to better express some of its harmonic content. Speaking to William Robin for The New York Times ahead of the live performance captured on the new release, Young said of the newly tuned and lengthened version, “It’s the way it really should have been, and can be, and will be.”By then, “Trio” was devised for an augmented string quartet including two cellists, to prevent the need to hold double-stops in tune for impractically long stretches. The new boxed set lists the dates of composition as “1958-1984-1998-2001-2005-2015,” a 57-year gestation.Young (in 2015) originally wrote “Trio for Strings” in 1958, as he was beginning a period of study at the University of California at Berkeley.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe new release is undeniably pricey, at $196. Aside from the four LPs, the box also includes a download code for a single-track, CD-quality file of the three-hour work, via Bandcamp. (Young’s other digital albums on Bandcamp range between $14 and $49 — the most expensive being the price for an audio version of that six-hour-plus performance of “The Well-Tuned Piano.”)Is this “Trio” worth it? I got my copy for free — but as someone who paid secondhand prices for Young bootlegs and out-of-print discs in my pre-critic days, I can’t imagine not saving up to buy it if I had to.The trip begins with a 33-minute exposition section, in which Young’s organizing 12-tone row is enumerated, very gradually. Compared with the recapitulation of these notes around the two-hour, nine-minute mark, the entry of certain notes during the exposition hits more harshly.But the players — Charles Curtis and Reynard Rott on cellos, with Erik Carlson and Christopher Otto both doubling on viola and violin — have such a precise feel for intonation that the material maintains its blissfully harmonious profile. That’s true even during the exposition’s most hot-to-the-touch passage, a high-flown tetrachord of B, F sharp, F and E that emerges in the 16th minute. (The lack of any discordant acoustic beating is thanks to the just intonation tuning and to these players’ precision.)Approximately two hours later — after the serial-style transformations of the exposition have run their course — this same chord comes back during the recapitulation. But it’s now beautiful in a different way, thanks to changes in voicing.Otto, the violinist, wrote in an email that this is his favorite passage in the performance, citing “how the whole sonority fuses and resonates” and adding, “We also stagger the bow changes in a particular way that becomes a beautifully meditative ritual.”The original score for “Trio,” a nearly hourlong piece that almost exclusively used long, sustained tones.La Monte YoungThis recording of “Trio” is essential in helping us understand not just Young’s growth but also that of Minimalism. Otto, a composer himself, has taken insights gleaned from Young and used them in his own writing practice, as on the recent release on the Greyfade label “rag′sma” and in his vertiginously beating drone composition “Violin Octet.”“I had been interested in just intonation and making connections with mathematical structures, influenced especially by Babbitt and Xenakis,” Otto said, “and Young’s music really made me aware of the richness within apparent stasis.”Let that be a word of warning to anyone impatient. If you try to skip ahead to a supposedly dramatic climax, it won’t pay off. In Young’s work, you can’t feel the peaks of intensity without taking in the whole.And besides, you’ll miss much else that transports. During the long development section of “Trio,” I adore a few briefer groupings of notes that reflect Young’s early enthusiasm for the Second Viennese School — particularly Webern’s epigrammatic style. That you can also hear bluesy Americana in some harmonies speaks to the world’s broad stylistic synthesis.An essay by Young in the accompanying booklet, though, lays out his thoughts on the limitations of serialism. “Composers such as Webern, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote little points distributed in time,” he writes. “The tonal aspects of the system were underplayed and the democratic aspects of the system were emphasized, probably because, within the system of equal temperament, it was so inharmonious to sustain the tones for a long time.”That’s a sharply observed insight about 20th-century music. But while processing this extended new recording of “Trio,” I also found myself thinking about recent long duration works in the world of film. After watching Paul Schrader’s latest movie, “The Card Counter” — a hypnotic slow burner starring Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish — I picked up Schrader’s book “Transcendental Style in Film.”This early 1970s text gives Schrader’s thoughts on directors who move slowly and decisively, yet unpredictably. Even more intriguing is a new preface that he wrote for the book’s latest edition, in 2018. Here Schrader distinguishes the “transcendental” style of Ozu and others from what came afterward, namely, the “slow cinema” movement — think of directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Hou Hsiao-hsien — that is by now familiar to film festival attendees.“They push the viewer away from the ‘experience,’ that is, from immediate emotional involvement,” Schrader writes of slow cinema, adding, “This is different from modernistic distancing devices in the other arts to the same degree that cinema is different from earlier art forms.”I underlined my copy and made a note: “Paul Schrader needs to hear ‘Trio for Strings.’”With this latest just intonation version of “Trio,” Young has perfected his response to the serial tradition. And in doing so, the composer has taken an inverted route from the one Schrader has witnessed in the world of film: Young started out with works that confronted audiences with slow, conceptual provocations, and has since steadily turned his insights toward even more expressive, transcendental ends — whether in his final performance of “The Well-Tuned Piano,” in his droning blues-rock album “Just Stompin’” or in this new “Trio.”Or at least that’s my take. The composer might hold a different analysis. But now that more of Young’s music is in wider circulation, a broader community of listeners can begin comparing our own notes. Now, as I experience the final dyad of G and C in the cellos, I hear an even broader sense of emotional distance traveled over the course of the work. (This conclusion could even work as an alternate soundtrack for the final shot of “The Card Counter.”)La Monte Young’s “Trio for Strings Original Full Length Version” (1958–1998–2015)An excerpt from the composer’s 2015 performance at the “Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House” in New York City.To my ear, Young has revisited his student exercise — the original Minimalist big bang when it comes to sustained tones — and made space for greater feeling, and more emotional release. That he’s done this while stretching its length to a newly demanding scope makes his achievement all the more noteworthy. More

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      William Kraft, Percussionist and Force in New Music, Dies at 98

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      A mainstay of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he also composed music that elevated overlooked instruments like the timpani.Lamenting the abundance of what he called “rat-a-tat, boom-boom” music for drums, William Kraft set out to create more sophisticated offerings that would bring greater respect to instruments he felt were too often taken for granted in orchestras.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” he wrote in 1968. “The last of orchestral families to be exploited, they have come of age in the 20th century.”Mr. Kraft, who as both a composer and a percussionist became a force in contemporary music, elevating overlooked instruments like the timpani and developing a style that drew on jazz and Impressionism, died on Feb. 12 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. He was 98.His wife, the composer Joan Huang, said the cause was heart failure.A spirited performer, Mr. Kraft was acclaimed for his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he spent 26 years, 18 of them as principal timpanist.But he was perhaps best known as a composer. A frequent collaborator with Igor Stravinsky, Mr. Kraft helped lend legitimacy to contemporary music in the United States, founding ensembles to showcase modern composers at a time when many classical musicians were skeptical of straying too far from the traditional canon.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” Mr. Kraft wrote.Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesPlaying his music — deliberate yet freewheeling, flashy but spiritual — became a rite of passage for percussionists, and his works were heard in band rooms and concert halls alike.William Kraft was born in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1923, the son of Louis and Florence (Rogalsky) Kashareftsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia. (His father changed the family name from Kashareftsky to Kraft upon arriving in the United States.) When William was 3, the family moved to San Diego, where his parents opened a delicatessen and, at his mother’s urging, he began studying piano.While he adored the music of French Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel (“my great idols,” friends say he called them), he did not initially anticipate making composition a career.“I just thought they were gods and not to be touched,” he said in a 2020 interview with Ching Juhl, a producer and violist. “They were influences, but I never thought I could write the style.”During World War II, when he worked as a drummer and pianist in American military bands stationed in Europe, he began exploring composition more seriously.His roommate at the time, a trumpet player, asked him to produce an arrangement of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust.” Mr. Kraft agreed, but he wanted to do it his way, composing an elaborate introduction based on the musical interval of the fourth.Mr. Kraft earned a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University in 1954. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic the next year and rose through the ranks, becoming principal timpanist in 1963. On the side, he continued writing his own works, including percussion pieces in the style of Baroque suites and a series of compositions that he called “Encounters,” pairing percussion with a variety of other instruments, including trumpet and harp. He called himself an “American Impressionist.”Mr. Kraft, center, in Los Angeles in 2008 after a concert by the ensemble Southwest Chamber Music honoring him on his 85th birthday. He was joined by the ensemble’s John Schneider, left, and Ricardo Gallardo.Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesZubin Mehta, who served as the Philharmonic’s music director from 1962 to 1978, described Mr. Kraft as a nimble musician. He recalled Mr. Kraft rearranging the timpani part for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for one player, rather than two as was standard, making it easier for the Philharmonic to perform while on tour.“He knew the pieces so well,” Mr. Mehta said in an interview. “It just came naturally.”Mr. Mehta elevated Mr. Kraft to the post of assistant conductor, which he held from 1969 to 1972. Mr. Kraft sold his instruments and retired from playing in the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1981 to become the orchestra’s composer in residence.Stravinsky, who moved to California in the 1940s, had a significant influence on Mr. Kraft. (Mr. Kraft once said hearing “The Rite of Spring” for the first time as a teenager “changed my life.”) The two men worked together often. Mr. Kraft played timpani in Stravinsky’s ensembles and helped edit the percussion parts for Stravinsky’s musical play “The Soldier’s Tale.”Mr. Kraft’s music, with its emphasis on rhythmic freedom, often seemed to pay homage to Stravinsky. Mr. Kraft was also fond of virtuosic feats; one of his concertos demands the performer play 15 timpani.“He was one of the few atonal composers who really somehow wrote very uplifting music,” said the composer Paul Polivnick, a friend. “While he had his mathematical formulas, he let his music be based in creating a sense of emotional and dramatic power.”In 1956 he organized the First Percussion Quartet, made up of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The ensemble, which later grew in size and changed its name to the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Players, promoted works by composers including Stravinsky, Alberto Ginastera and Edgard Varèse.In 1981, Mr. Kraft founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. He also had a busy teaching career, serving as chairman of the composition department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1991 to 2002.“He put Los Angeles on the map as a hot spot for contemporary music,” said Joseph Pereira, the current principal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “We are still reaping the benefits of Kraft’s impact on the Philharmonic, and on the new music community.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Kraft is survived by a son, Patrick; a daughter, Jennifer; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.He composed until the end of his life, sitting at the piano each day to sketch out ideas. At his death he was working on a piece called “Kaleidoscope” as well as a rearrangement of a piano concerto.The day before he died, Ms. Huang said, Mr. Kraft asked about his unfinished pieces, and she promised to complete them.“He just loved composing,” she said. “It was his language.” More

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      The Philharmonic Plans Its Return to Geffen Hall, With Fanfare

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      The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its renovated home.For the past two years, the only sound coming out of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been the clamor of construction. That will change in October, when it reopens after a $550 million renovation.And the Philharmonic will announce its return there with fanfare: Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which is the first work of the orchestra’s 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts and events unveiled on Monday.Among the season’s highlights are a monthlong festival to inaugurate the hall; a series of premieres by composers, including Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw; concerts exploring issues like racism and climate change; and appearances by conductors who could replace the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, after he steps down in 2024.After losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue during the pandemic lockdown, and spending much of the past year without a permanent home during the Geffen Hall renovation, the Philharmonic hopes the coming season will restore a sense of normalcy and rebuild its audience.The renovated Geffen Hall will feature wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.Diamond Schmitt Architects“It’s a moment for us not only to reunite with people who have come before, but as we look to the future, to develop and nurture new audiences,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We can’t just expect people to come. We have to invite them.”The Philharmonic recently announced that the renovation is fully funded and on track to finish in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic. The new space will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.There will also be additions meant to draw people in, including a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public, and a studio looking out onto Broadway. The goal, Borda said, is for the hall to be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”The season begins Oct. 7 with a program called “Thank You Concert,” led by van Zweden, for an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas, and an open house weekend, will follow later that month.Opening festivities include the world premiere, performed at two free concerts, of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the trumpeter Etienne Charles, who is known for blending jazz with the music of his native Trinidad. Several other contemporary works will be featured, including the American premiere of a piece by Shaw; and the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter.Some of the new works were written specifically for the renovated hall. “The early weeks are designed to be an exploration,” Borda said.Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the renovated hall should be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”Tod Williams Billie Tsien ArchitectsAs the Philharmonic continues its search for a new music director, guest conductors will get more attention than usual.Several familiar names will take the podium, including Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. In March, another prominent contender, Susanna Mälkki, the outgoing chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, will conduct the New York premiere of a double concerto by Felipe Lara, featuring the flutist Claire Chase and the bassist Esperanza Spalding, in their Philharmonic debuts.Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s young principal conductor, is the only guest who will get two weeks of concerts, leading the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Yuja Wang, in January. The following week, he will shepherd the American premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” in a program that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”Given the dearth of female conductors among the largest American orchestras, some have argued that the Philharmonic should choose a woman as its next music director. Several rising conductors, many of them women, will make their debuts with the ensemble next season, including Karina Canellakis, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruth Reinhardt, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony; and Nathalie Stutzmann, who takes the podium of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season.Borda declined to comment on the music director search, except to say that the upcoming season was “obviously an opportunity to see some returning talent and some wonderful new talent as well.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who will play Ravel’s piano concerto in November, and Cynthia Millar, playing the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Sinfonie,” alongside the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in March.The season includes concert series designed to address modern issues, including “Liberation,” about social injustice; “Spirit,” about “humanity’s place in the cosmos”; and “Earth,” about the climate crisis.As part of “Liberation” in March, the Philharmonic will premiere a work by Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson. “Spirit,” that same month, will include Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” which the Philharmonic has not performed since 2008.“Earth” will close out the season in June, with the world premiere of Wolfe’s “unEarth,” a multimedia oratorio that explores forced migration, loss of nature and adaptation. John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” will get its New York premiere.Borda said that throughout the new season, the Philharmonic wants people to feel that “their lives have been touched and changed.”“If we accomplish that,” she added, “we could all be very proud.” More

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      Planned Before War, a Festival Embraces New Ukrainian Music

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      Marked by performer absences because of the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival returned for its third edition.The Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival returned for its third edition this weekend, with a slate of works related to themes of nature and mythology. During an introduction at Merkin Hall, the audience was told that while the event may have become newly relevant in recent weeks, its spirit remained unchanged. (Indeed, it was planned long before the Russian invasion.)Yet the war loomed over these performances: Some artists couldn’t leave Ukraine, and the concerts were adapted to accommodate their absences. And the festival’s very existence has always been a rejection of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia’s assertion that there is no real Ukrainian culture.Our critics were at two of the three programs: “Forest Song” on Friday, and “Anthropocene” on Sunday.‘Forest Song’The festival’s first concert was a travelogue through the trees, fields and mountains of Ukraine: an agriculture-rich landscape that has inspired the months of the country’s calendar; been the subject of Hitler’s envy; and suffered under modern disasters like Chernobyl and the recent invasion.Some of the works were transcription-like tributes. Ivan Nebesnyy’s “Air Music 1” (2001-04), paired the vocal group Ekmeles with four flutes and Sean Statser — the evening’s busiest player, on percussion — for variations of extended technique that rendered entirely human something intangible. The percussion’s lingering final note was a reminder of how indebted music, or any sound, has always been to air.There was imitation, too, in Zoltan Almashi’s “An Echo From Hitting the Trunk of a Dry Mountain Spruce in Rycerko Gorna Village” (2015), whose prepared piano recalled the tapping of a dead tree. A slowly screeching violin was like a bending branch; the clarinet, a melancholy folk tune performed in its shadow. And Ostap Manulyak’s “Trees,” from 2012, was an arboreal examination from the ground up, with ever-higher pitches airily played by a violin and cello where their strings meet the tailpiece — and, at the top, piano tinkling like birdsong.The other two pieces were more abstract, and more haunting. Anastasia Belitska’s “Rusalochka” (2019), a purely electronic work of distorted found audio from the Chernobyl zone, recounted a traditional Mermaid’s Easter celebration as warped as the ecosystem there. Alla Zahaykevych’s “Nord/Ouest” (2010) accomplished much of the same, its search of vanishing folklore in northwestern Ukraine documented over 50 discursive minutes whose flashes of folk song — in voice and violin — felt like precious discoveries.“Nord/Ouest” normally features percussion, voices and live electronics. But, because its creators could not leave Ukraine, it was reworked on Friday for Statser, alone with his drum kit, next to a laptop carrying the sounds of his fellow performers. This spectacle, like the music’s ghostly dispatches from a fading history, spoke for itself. JOSHUA BARONESteven Beck performing Alexey Shmurak’s “Greenland,” a solo piano reflection on the climate crisis.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times‘Anthropocene’Sunday afternoon’s program, too, was disrupted: Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko, the composers who had planned to perform their post-apocalyptic “Chornobyldorf Partita” on the second half of the concert, could not travel to New York. So they sent a 45-minute film, a selection from a seven-hour performance of “Mariupol” that they streamed on March 16 from Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, where they are sheltering.Conceived as a new part of “Chornobyldorf Partita” and named after the city currently under siege, “Mariupol” is written for dulcimer and a microtonally retuned bandura, a lutelike folk instrument. The two men sat facing each other, their instruments nearly touching, the bandura’s strings facing up like the dulcimer’s.With both instruments struck with drum sticks, the sound evolved from a rustling metallic crunch to a shimmering coppery drone to clattering, astringent industrial noise. This was defiant, ritualistic music — aggressive and forlorn, but with poignant warmth from its creation as a duo.On the first half of the program, the pianist Steven Beck played Alexey Shmurak’s “Greenland” (2020-21), a reflection on another crisis, that of the planet’s climate. In the Minimalistic first two sections, repeating figures worked through gradual but unexpected transformations, often turning — thawing — from chilly to warmly nocturnal and back again and, in the opening “Railway Étude,” taking on some of the relaxed swing of a rag. By far the longest section of this 45-minute work is the third and final one, “Icy Variations,” which stretches a Bach-style chorale theme to glacial expansiveness, wandering through subtle, organic shifts. ZACHARY WOOLFE More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Wraps Up a Philharmonic Audition

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      The superstar conductor, a possible successor to the New York Philharmonic’s podium, led a cycle of Robert Schumann’s symphonies and two premieres.If concerts had the “previously on” introductions of television, on Thursday the New York Philharmonic would have recapped last week’s installment of its Robert Schumann symphony cycle: lithe yet energetic, hardly Romantic yet fully alive.This week we are in the same series but what feels like a new story arc. The First and Second symphonies, on the earlier program, have been followed by readings of the Third and Fourth that, on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, were for better and worse grander and more emotive, with swerving contrasts — and a premiere to match by Andreia Pinto Correia.The symphonies are being presented as a festival called “The Schumann Connection,” led by Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a contender for the podium here in New York when Jaap van Zweden departs in 2024. That series is also an oblique exploration — through two new works by women — of Robert’s relationship with Clara Schumann, his wife, a notable pianist and composer who largely stopped writing after they married.Clara haunts this festival, and not just in the title of last week’s premiere, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Clara.” Although the series has relegated her music to appearances on chamber programs far from the main stage, she looms over her husband’s major works.Robert’s Piano Concerto in A minor, played by the Philharmonic in October, bears the mark of her earlier one in the same key. And elements of her concerto subtly inform his Fourth Symphony — in its through-composition and fantasia form, in its Romanze second movement and in a first one characterized by its abandonment of the traditional recapitulation. A more satisfying “Schumann Connection” might have paired these two pieces.To the Philharmonic’s credit, though, the concerts have featured those premieres, even if the fact that both are based on Clara and Robert sets off a Bechdel test alarm. Pinto Correia’s “Os Pássaros da Noite” (“The Birds of Night”) is inspired by the sadness shared by the couple in their correspondence, and by a letter to a friend in which Robert wrote that “the melancholy birds of night still flit round me from time to time.”The 15-minute work is the account of one harrowing night, in which strings, droning or in a haze of harmonics, underlie the sorrowful cries of a trumpet. A wearying set of nocturnal episodes, it would be a fitting horror soundtrack, its mood transparent in gestures like upward runs in the winds — a sinister curlicue of moonlit fog — accompanied by matching upward glissandos in the violins. As in any night of sleepless anxiety, the darkness lingers, seemingly interminable, until it doesn’t.“Os Pássaros da Noite” was a sharp contrast to the preceding symphony: the Third, nicknamed the “Rhenish” for its tonal tributes to the Rhine River — where in 1854, just a few years after it was written, Schumann would attempt suicide. But that gloom is absent from the score’s buoyant, dancing mood, and from Dudamel’s conducting. The heroic opening heralded a propulsive interpretation, guided by hemiola rhythms but emphasized in mighty sforzando accents and thrillingly veering dynamics.The Philharmonic’s playing was warmest in the ländler-like Scherzo. But its tendency toward excessive expression made for a Feierlich (“solemn”) movement strangely heavy on vibrato. Schumann’s music here is a portrait of the awe-inspiring Cologne Cathedral, with a chorale and orchestration that, if articulated correctly, closely resembles the sound of an organ. A little of that came through, but for the most part this was a scene with more emotion than solemnity.The Fourth Symphony, in D minor, was composed nearly a decade earlier, in a wave of productivity that included Schumann’s First; but he withdrew it, later revisiting it and premiering the revision in 1853. This version had more darkness and heft, but retained the elegance of the earlier one, which the scholar John Daverio captures in his claim that “Beethoven may have been primarily a ‘dramatist’ and Schubert a ‘lyricist’; Schumann straddles both categories by treating his fundamentally lyric themes with a dramatic urgency.”Dudamel sensitively wove that belief throughout, with strands of melody emerging from the opening chord that were by turns fiery and gentle — especially in the second movement’s flowing violin solo from the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, Frank Huang. In its extremity, its grand finale, this was Schumann at his most Romantic of the cycle.When “The Schumann Connection” concludes on Sunday, so will a long stretch of programs led by guest conductors, many of whom are being watched as potential successors to van Zweden. Of them, there is immense promise in Dudamel — charismatic, eager to lead new works and, crucially, followed by the Philharmonic players with apparent ease.In terms of programming, he fared better than two other contenders, Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, who have triumphed with the Philharmonic in the past but in recent months had mixed outings in repertory of mixed quality. It’s difficult to avoid imagining what impression they would have made with a platform like Dudamel’s festival.Any of the three, though, would be a welcome change at the Philharmonic. And they are just a selection of the talent that has passed through this season. It’s still far too early to guess who the orchestra’s next music director will be. But regardless, its future seems one worth looking forward to.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Sunday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?

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      César Franck’s only symphony was a pillar of the repertory for decades. But it’s now a rarity.Whatever Leopold Stokowski’s thirst for celebrity, he was not known for caving to audience pressure. During his long tenure conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, from 1912 to 1938, Stokowski gave the American premieres of scores as challenging as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and Berg’s “Wozzeck,” with little concern for box office.But near the end of most of his seasons in charge, this great showman did bow to mass taste. Philadelphia’s subscribers were invited to vote for their favorite works, with the promise that Stokowski would lead the winners on a closing “request program.”For years, the victor was Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique,” a sorrowful symphony so popular that other orchestras had been, the critic Lawrence Gilman wrote in 1925, “so sure of the outcome of similar voting contests that they sent their programs to press before the date of the election.”But at the end of the 1923-24 season, a challenger dealt the Tchaikovsky a knockout blow: César Franck’s Symphony in D minor.“Is it inflating the symphony of the lovable Belgian,” Gilman wondered in the New York Herald Tribune, “to rank it above the dolorous swan song of Tchaikovsky?”Probably, Gilman concluded. But the Franck, which the composer completed in 1888, would not be downed.Stokowski leading the openingPhiladelphia Orchestra, 1927 (Music & Arts)“What is there in the texture of the music itself to explain its popularity?” Gilman pondered, reporting another landslide in 1929, when the Franck beat Beethoven’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and Sixth, and Brahms’s First. In 1924, Gilman had scorned “the more than occasional triteness and inferiority of its musical expression,” and though he admitted that it had an “unforgettably noble distinction of contour and gesture,” it was in his view no match for the greats.Perhaps, Gilman wrote, “the public taste is itself part of the problem.” Yet, he added, “the interest and the oddity of the verdict remain.”Quiet, sincere and more famous in his lifetime as an organist and teacher than as a composer, Franck celebrates the bicentenary of his birth this year. But it’s unlikely that American orchestras will bring to the celebration the fervor with which they once performed his sole symphony. In one of the stranger stories in the history of the canon, the work — which from the 1920s until the ’60s was such a hit that the New York Philharmonic thought it a solid bet to fill Lewisohn Stadium on a hot summer’s night — is now all but absent from concert halls.Decline of a Once-Popular SymphonyPremiered in 1889, Franck’s Symphony in D Minor surged in popularity during Germany’s World War I occupation of the composer’s native Belgium. But interest has tapered off in the last 50 years. More