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      His Conducting Wasn’t Always Pleasant. But It Was the Truth.

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      Michael Gielen’s precise, intellectually charged work made him one of the most stimulating maestros of the 20th century. Now a set of 88 CDs offers the deepest insight yet.Read the reviews that the German conductor Michael Gielen received during his career, and you find a running theme.“He looks like an academician,” Raymond Ericson reported in The New York Times after Gielen’s New York Philharmonic debut in 1971. “His baton technique is not flamboyant; it is clear and precise.”A year later, the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, of a concert with the National Orchestra of Belgium at Carnegie Hall, that his Mahler “was almost painfully literal.”“A sensuous approach is exactly what the unsentimental Mr. Gielen is unprepared to give,” he added.Eleven years after that, Donal Henahan complained of a Carnegie visit with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Gielen led for six seasons in an initially confrontational, eventually admired tenure: “Even Bruckner wants to sing and dance at times. This rather schoolmasterish performance denied him that pleasure.”These were meant as barbs. But Gielen gloried in the critical discomfort, in defying the expectations of a culture industry he thought had its priorities all wrong. When a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter asked in 1982 if he was too cerebral an artist for his own good, Gielen said, “If I compare what I do to what I hear of certain less intellectual colleagues, then I must say I agree myself. Nothing is more horrible than stupid music-making.”Nobody could possibly accuse Gielen, who died in 2019, of that. One might now think him narrow in his doctrinaire modernist focus; or see him as misguided, even elitist, in forcing listeners to hear what he thought good for them; or not share the ever more pessimistic leftism that informed his work.But Gielen raised fundamental questions in his conducting. He interrogated music for what it had said at its creation, and asked what it had to say to the present. He insisted that old and new works said similar things in different accents, and he thought audiences lazy if they could not hear that. He believed it dishonest to settle for easy answers: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so troubled him in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that he spliced Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw” between its slow movement and its “Ode to Joy” finale, a choice that expressed his lifelong commitment to shattering complacency.“Art offers the opportunity to encounter the truth,” Gielen wrote in 1981 to Cincinnati subscribers who were rebelling against his rule. “And that’s not always pleasant.”Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw”Gunter Reich, speaker; Stuttgart Radio Symphony (SWR Music)Even if Gielen mellowed a little over the years, pleasant would be the wrong word to describe the recently completed “Michael Gielen Edition” from SWR Music: 88 CDs that cover five decades of recordings and offer the deepest insight yet into this conductor’s work, from Bach to Zimmermann.Many have been available before; some are new to disc; other important releases must be found elsewhere. But there is more than enough in its 10 volumes to confirm Gielen as one of the most stimulating conductors of the 20th century.He made the bulk of these recordings with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, the radio ensemble that he led from 1986 to 1999 — and worked with until just before its demise in 2016 — in part with the intention of using its practically unlimited rehearsal time to make an archive of recordings as close as possible to his intentions.Those intentions were often provocative, in the best sense. With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could, which had immense payoffs in Mahler, even in Beethoven. His Haydn does not chuckle as freely as it might; his Mozart is robust, not prettified; his Bruckner has little interest in storming the heavens he denied, though it does plumb the depths he saw all around him.But relaxation or enjoyment could more properly be found “eating well, or taking a good shower,” than in engaging with music, Gielen told The Times in 1982. His recordings were made for the head more than for the heart. Gielen’s was conducting to think with, and he is worth thinking with still.Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Music and politics were combined from the start for him. Born in Dresden in 1927 to Josef Gielen, a theater and opera director, and Rose Steuermann, a soprano noted for her Schoenberg, Michael and his family fled the Nazis, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1940.Surrounded in Argentina by refugees who had no sympathy for the style of the conductors who stayed behind to serve the Third Reich, Gielen, a répétiteur and budding conductor at the Teatro Colón, gravitated toward the textual literalism of his two antifascist idols, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini. He shunned what he called the “gigantomania” of Wilhelm Furtwängler, under whom he would uncomfortably play continuo for Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in 1950.Back in Europe, Gielen focused on opera during the first half of his career, though not exclusively so. He was a staff conductor at the Vienna State Opera, then had spells leading the Royal Swedish Opera and the Netherlands Opera, before eventually triumphing as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, then the most aesthetically ambitious house in Germany, from 1977 to 1987.Lamentably little of Gielen’s operatic legacy survives. But working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, he built Frankfurt into a crucible of Regietheater — or “director’s theater,” in which the director’s vision tends to dominate — hoping to restore something like the original shock of pieces that he thought had become bland under the weight of performance traditions.With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could.Manfred Roth/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesFor Gielen, there were two ways to do something similar in the concert hall. One was to come up with programming that radicalized the old and contextualized the new. So he made a montage out of Webern’s “Six Pieces” and Schubert’s “Rosamunde”; put Schoenberg’s more classically-inclined works next to Mozart’s more Romantic ones; and stuck Schoenberg’s Expressionist monologue “Erwartung” before Beethoven’s “Eroica.”Gielen’s other method remains bracingly apparent on record: an interpretive technique that prized restraint. Other musicians working at the same time explored period instruments as a way to recover the shock of the worn, but he thought that path illusory (even if he invited Nikolaus Harnoncourt to conduct in Frankfurt). “Putting on a wig doesn’t make me an 18th-century man,” he wrote in his memoirs.Instead, Gielen tried to clarify structures through a careful analysis of tempo relationships, and to expose details, though not so many as to muddy the overarching form. Critics often suggested that he aimed for an “objective” interpretation, but he knew that there were many ways to expose the truths he found in a work. The three accounts of Mahler’s Sixth that are available on SWR, from 1971, 1999 and 2013, take 74, 84 and 94 minutes: the earliest brisk, streamlined; the middle one the dark heart of his essential complete Mahler survey; the last unbearably slow and heavy, consumed from the start with a desperate nihilism.Gielen thought he would be remembered as an exponent of the Second Viennese School and of contemporary music, and the two SWR sets dedicated to that work are exemplary. There is anguish in his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also a forlorn lyricism; like much of Gielen’s conducting, these sit somewhere between the clinical angularity of Pierre Boulez and the warm intensity of Hans Rosbaud, Gielen’s predecessor in Baden-Baden. The six-disc volume of post-World War II music — one CD, dedicated to Jorge E. López’s astonishing “Dome Peak” and “Breath — Hammer — Lightning,” comes with a health warning for its extremes of volume — is a despairingly intense affair. Ligeti’s Requiem, which Gielen premiered in 1965, practically smokes with rage.Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama”SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)But Gielen’s approach generated equally fascinating, complicated results in other music, too. His taste for detail fully convinces in late Romanticism, where his repertoire was particularly broad. Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead” comes off as a colossal masterpiece; Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” is given expansive treatment, a Klimt glittering blindingly; Schreker’s “Vorspiel zu einem Drama” has never sounded so glorious.Gielen’s ability to seem as if he was getting out of the way of the music he conducted lets these kinds of scores stand in full bloom, with the effect of demonstrating exactly why later composers reacted so strongly against them — including Gielen himself, in his few, stark works.Elsewhere, Gielen felt it necessary to stamp out overkill in Romanticism where it was unwarranted — above all in his Beethoven, which still has unusual energy, even if many conductors have since come around to Gielen’s once-unusual insistence on trying to keep up with the composer’s controversial metronome markings.That energy is not at all benign; for Gielen, the violence in Beethoven’s scores is as much a part of their humanity as their idealism is. While the “Eroica” was for him a genuinely revolutionary piece that built a “new social existence” around individual dignity in its finale — he recorded it repeatedly, and enthrallingly — the Fifth Symphony he believed a “terrible awakening.” The relentless C major hammering of its finale evoked not triumph or freedom, Gielen wrote, but “affirmation without contradiction, and with it the trampling of any opposition, imperial terror.” If his 1997 recording does not fully convince — it sounds empty, even barren — you suspect it’s not supposed to.Beethoven’s Fifth SymphonySWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg (SWR Music)Complexity where others found simplicity; enigmas where there might seem to be answers. For Gielen, there was no escape. “You see me helpless before the confusing picture of the last century,” he wrote near the end of his autobiography.All that was left was to think about music. That always had more truths to offer. More

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      Review: An Audition Season Begins at the Philharmonic

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      Jakub Hrusa is the first of several guest conductors appearing with the orchestra in the coming weeks as it searches for its next music director.It’s audition season at the New York Philharmonic.Well, not officially. But ever since the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, announced that he would step down in 2024, every guest conductor’s appearance has carried the weight of speculation. When an outsider takes the podium these days, it’s hard to get through the concert without thinking: Could this be our future?And, for the next six weeks, the Philharmonic’s calendar is filled with nothing but guests.It began Thursday with Jakub Hrusa, a conductor with an ear for rarities and the skill to make persuasive cases for them. Next up are Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a charismatic and promising young talent; Manfred Honeck, a master of the standard repertory; Herbert Blomstedt, an elder statesman who, now in his mid-90s, is unlikely to be a music director again; and Gustavo Dudamel, who is being given substantial real estate with a Schumann festival in March. (That’s an awful lot of Y chromosomes, though other notable appearances in recent months have included Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young and Susanna Mälkki.)Hrusa last led the Philharmonic in 2019 — as it happens, at the end of another stretch of guest programs. Beyond bringing out a dynamic sound often absent from van Zweden’s indelicate style, Hrusa had a subtle gift then of giving the audience something it would enjoy but not necessarily ask for: Dvorak, say, but the underrated Sixth Symphony.That happened again with this week’s concerts at Alice Tully Hall. (I attended the one on Friday.) The evening had the surface-level same-old of dead European dudes — Central Europeans, to be exact — but was rich with novelty and spirited throughout, enough to inspire applause in the middle of a symphony. Two of the three works had never been played by the Philharmonic, and the centerpiece concerto, featuring the pianist Yuja Wang, hadn’t been on a subscription program since the 1980s.Even among those rarities were names you should but don’t see here often: Zoltan Kodaly and Bohuslav Martinu.Kodaly was represented by his Concerto for Orchestra, which premiered in 1941 — ahead of the more famous work of the same name by his Hungarian compatriot Bela Bartok. The piece harkens back to Bach, in its “Brandenburgs”-like treatment of the ensemble and contrapuntal writing, but with a folk flavor.Under Hrusa’s baton it had the feel of a festive opener, and the Philharmonic players responded accordingly: a big sound delivered at a breakneck pace, yet crisply articulated (which helps at Tully, whose acoustics tend to punish grandeur with muddle). The score is not without its swerves, though, and Hrusa navigated them by dropping to a whisper in an instant for lyrical, chamber-size passages and making space for intriguing sonorities that arose from, for example, the doubling of cello pizzicato in the bassoon.Martinu’s Symphony No. 1, from 1942, was comparatively quiet — at least at first, because Hrusa took a long, almost theatrical view of the piece, building toward a climax and threading the four discrete movements. With a soft approach, his opening, of upward chromatic scales passed around the orchestra, was a garden of strangely beautiful flowers in bloom.Those scales recur later, but Hrusa didn’t overemphasize them. Rather, they arose gracefully amid the work’s shifting character: the unsteady and rapidly escalating second movement, with strings given fleeting fragments of a phrase that could just as easily soar, the shards of a Dvorak melody; the thick textures of the darker third movement; and the dancing finale, in which even dolce passages sprint as if sprung.Yuja Wang performed Liszt’s First Piano Concerto wearing chunky white sunglasses — doctor’s orders, but readily accepted by an audience familiar with her blend of glamour and thoughtful artistry.Chris LeeIt was heartening to see that nearly all of the audience had stayed after intermission for the Martinu, given that the evening’s clearer selling point had come earlier: Wang playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat.Wang has Liszt’s storied star power as a performer: easily able to command a stage and entertainingly showy, yet sensitive and never excessively emotive. Her glamour is so established, she came out wearing chunky sunglasses — doctor’s orders as she recovers from a recent procedure — and the audience simply greeted it, with cheers, as a fashion statement.She played the opening with muscularity and precision, matched by the orchestra’s vigorous reading of the first movement’s theme. But later, in a nocturne-like solo, Wang exquisitely flipped the piece’s scale to that of an intimate recital. She made the concerto sound better than it actually is.In the spirit of Liszt, she returned with an encore of crowd-pleasing, breathless athleticism: the Toccatina from Kapustin’s Opus 40 Concert Etudes. But then she came back — still virtuosic, yet expressive and absolutely lovely — for Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” (Op. 67, No. 2). As she played, Hrusa listened from the conductor’s podium, his eyes closed and his head nodding in bliss, a stand-in for all of us there.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Without a Note of Beethoven, an Orchestra Shines

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      At Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave pride of place to a once-forgotten Florence Price symphony, alongside new works and a classic.The vast majority of the music the Philadelphia Orchestra is playing in its eight concerts at Carnegie Hall this season is by Beethoven.Under its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, this ensemble plays the master with warmth and verve. And alongside the nine classic symphonies, it is presenting contemporary works written in response, a tried-and-true technique to scooch in the new with the old, spoonful-of-sugar style. They’ve been worthy performances.But even though three of the concerts are yet to come — Beethoven’s First and Ninth on Feb. 21, then his “Missa Solemnis” and a John Williams gala in April — I reckon that nothing the Philadelphians do at Carnegie this season will be more impressive than Tuesday’s performance.There was not a note of Beethoven. Nor, for that matter, any piece that could be considered a standard audience draw. The closest thing to a chestnut, Samuel Barber’s 1947 soprano monologue “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” bloomed in the fresh company of two new works and Florence Price’s once-forgotten Symphony No. 1.When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the Price in 1933, it was the first work by a Black woman to be played by a major orchestra. While women and composers of color are now better represented on programs, it is still all too rare for them (or for anything but a canonical piece) to have the anchor position at a concert’s end.So it was a progressive, even inspiring statement for Philadelphia — which released a recording of Price’s First and Third symphonies last year — to close with the First. And the players gave it the same vitality and subtlety they’ve brought to Beethoven.The opening bassoon line was here less a solo showpiece than a mellow song nestled modestly within the textures of the strings. In that bassoon call — along with the blending of folk-style melodies and classical sweep, and a dancing finale — Price’s symphony bears the unmistakable influence of Dvorak’s “New World.” But it is very much its own piece, with an arresting vacillation between raging force and abrupt lyrical oases in the first movement and a wind whistle echoing through the vibrant Juba dance in the third.Price clearly knew she had a good tune in the slow second movement, a hymnlike refrain for brass chorale that she milks for all it’s worth. But the many repetitions, with delicate African drumming underneath, take on the shining dignity of prayer. And the ending, with rapid calligraphy in the winds winding around the theme, rises to ecstasy, punctuated by bells.Sounding lush yet focused and committed, Nézet-Séguin’s orchestra even highlights a quality I hadn’t particularly associated with Price: humor, in her dances and in the way a clarinet suddenly squiggles out of that slow hymn, like a giggle in church.The concert opened with a new suite by Matthew Aucoin adapted from his opera “Eurydice,” which played at the Metropolitan Opera last fall. At the Met, Aucoin’s score swamped a winsome story, but in an 18-minute instrumental digest, it was easier to appreciate his music’s dense, raucous extravagance, the way he whips an orchestra from mists into oceans, then makes pummeling percussion chase it into a gallop. Ricardo Morales, the Philadelphians’ principal clarinet, played his doleful solo with airily glowing tone, a letter from another world.There was grandeur, too, in Valerie Coleman’s “This Is Not a Small Voice,” her new setting of a poetic paean to Black pride by Sonia Sanchez that weaves from rumination to bold declaration. The soprano Angel Blue was keen, her tone as rich yet light as whipped cream, in a difficult solo part, which demands crisp speak-singing articulation and delves into velvety depths before soaring upward to glistening high notes. Blue was also superb — sweet and gentle, but always lively — in the nostalgic Barber.In its inspired alignment of old and new, the concert recalled last week’s program at the New York Philharmonic, which also closed with a rediscovered symphony by a Black composer. When it comes to broadening the sounds that echo through our opera houses and concert halls, change can be frustratingly slow. But to hear, within a few days, two of the country’s most venerable orchestras play symphonies by Julius Eastman and Florence Price did give the sense of watching the tectonic plates of the repertory shift in real time.Philadelphia OrchestraAppears next at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, on Feb. 21. More

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      John Williams, Hollywood’s Maestro, Looks Beyond the Movies

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      The composer of “Star Wars” and “Jaws,” who turned 90 this week, says he will soon step away from film. But he has no intention of slowing down.UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, when film production came to a halt and recording studios shuttered, John Williams, the storied Hollywood composer and conductor, found himself, for the first time in his nearly seven-decade career, without a movie to worry about.This, in Williams’s highly ritualized world — mornings spent studying film reels and improvising at his Steinway; a turkey sandwich and glass of Perrier at 1 p.m.; afternoons devoted to revisions — was initially disorienting.But in the months that followed, Williams came to relish his freedom. He had time to compose a violin concerto, immerse himself in scores by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, and go for long walks on a golf course near his home in Los Angeles.“I welcomed it,” Williams said in a recent interview. “It was an escape.”Now the film industry is back in action, and Williams, who turned 90 on Tuesday, is once again at the piano churning out earworms — pencil, paper and stopwatch in hand.Even as he plans to slow down his film scoring, Williams is focused on conducting and composing concert music for collaborators like Yo-Yo Ma.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Williams, whose music permeates popular culture to a degree unsurpassed by any other contemporary composer, is at a crossroads. Tired of the constraints of film — the deadlines, the need for brevity, the competition with ever-blaring sound effects, the work eating up half a year — he says he will soon step away from movie projects.“I don’t particularly want to do films anymore,” he said. “Six months of life at my age is a long time.”In his next phase, he plans to focus more intensely on another passion: writing concert works, of which he has already produced several dozen. He has visions of another piece for a longtime collaborator, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and he is planning his first proper piano concerto.“I’m much happier, as I have been during this Covid time, working with an artist and making the music the best you can possibly make it in your hands,” he said.Yet the legacy of his more than 100 film scores — the “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and “Harry Potter” franchises among them — looms large, to say nothing of his fanfares, themes and celebratory anthems for the likes of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Sunday Night Football,” the Olympics and the Statue of Liberty’s centennial.The Music of John WilliamsThe composer of “Star Wars” and “Jaws” has been a fixture in the film industry for half a century.Beyond the Movies: The 90-year-old Hollywood maestro will soon step away from film to focus on another passion: writing concert works.In the Concert Hall: Williams’s symphonic pieces tend to be skillful but less imaginative than his film scores. Here are five examples.A Source of Inspiration: “Star Wars” is rooted in the classics, and so is Williams’s music for the soundtracks. Listen to these comparisons.“He has written the soundtrack of our lives,” said the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, a friend. “When we listen to a melody of John’s, we go back to a time, to a taste, to a smell. All our senses go back to a moment.”Williams’s music harkens back to an era of Hollywood blockbusters, when crowds gathered at theaters to be transported. He has excelled at creating shared experiences: instilling in every member of an audience the same terror about a menacing shark, conjuring a common exhilaration in watching spaceships take flight.The pandemic has robbed Hollywood of some of that magic. But Williams’s admirers say his music, with its appeal across cultures and generations, is an antidote to the isolation of the moment.“We need him more now than we’ve ever needed him before,” said Hans Zimmer, another storied film composer.Leatherbound scores for a small sampling of the many films Williams has worked on, including the “Harry Potter” series and “War of the Worlds.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWilliams — a fixture in the industry since the 1950s, with 52 Academy Award nominations, second only to Walt Disney, and five Oscars — recognizes that he might be the last of a certain type of Hollywood composer. Grandiose, complex orchestral scores, rooted in European Romanticism, are increasingly rare. At many film studios, synthesized music is the rage.“I feel like I’m sort of sitting on an edge of something,” he said, “and change is happening.”Born in New York, Williams became interested in composing as a teenager, entranced by the orchestral scores and books brought home by his father, a jazz percussionist.After stints as a studio pianist in Hollywood in his 20s, he found work as a film and television composer, making his feature film debut at 26, in 1958, with “Daddy-O,” a comedy about street racing.In the 1970s, Williams’s work caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, then an aspiring filmmaker searching for someone who could write like a previous generation of Hollywood composers: Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann.“He knew how to write a tune, and he knew how to support that tune with compelling and complex arrangements,” Spielberg recalled in an interview. “I hadn’t heard anything of the likes since the old greats.”The two began a partnership that has spanned a half century and more than two dozen films, including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Schindler’s List” and “Jaws,” for which Williams’s two-note ostinato became a cultural phenomenon.“When everyone came out and said ‘Jaws’ scared them out of the water, it was Johnny who scared them out of the water,” Spielberg said. “His music was scarier than seeing the shark.”Williams pointing to a sketch of a Tyrannosaurus rex chase scene from “Jurassic Park.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn 1974, when he was 42, Williams suffered what he called “the tragedy of my life” when his first wife, the actress Barbara Ruick, died suddenly.“It taught me who I was and the meaning of my work,” he said, but added that the next several years were difficult, and he struggled as a single parent of three children with a busy career. “Star Wars,” which premiered in 1977, brought a new level of fame and marked the beginning of a four-decade-long project that has encompassed nine films, dozens of musical motifs and more than 20 hours of music.George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” said Williams was the “secret sauce” of the franchise. While the two sometimes disagreed, he said Williams did not hesitate to try out new material, including when Lucas initially rejected his scoring of a well-known scene in which Luke Skywalker gazes at a desert sunset.“You normally have, with a composer, giant egos, and wanting to argue about everything, and ‘I want it to be my score, not your score,’” Lucas said. “None of that existed with John.”Williams’s career as a conductor also took off. In 1980, he was chosen to succeed Arthur Fiedler as the leader of the Boston Pops. Over the next 13 years in the position, he worked to promote film music as art, and forged friendships with leading classical artists.In 1993, when he was working on “Schindler’s List,” he called the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. “I hear a violin,” he said, according to Perlman. To this day, Perlman added, the aching theme from that film remains the only piece that audiences specifically request to hear at his concerts.Perlman said Williams had a talent for conveying the essence of disparate cultures: evoking Jewish identity in “Schindler’s List,” for example, or Japanese traditions in “Memoirs of a Geisha.”“His music has a fingerprint,” he said. “When you hear it, you know it’s John.”Williams’s bookshelves at home, with a bust of Aaron Copland and a copy of Cole Porter’s lyrics. “I hadn’t heard anything of the likes since the old greats,” Steven Spielberg says.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWilliams’s concert works, more abstract than much of his film music, have been less widely embraced. But Ma, for whom Williams has written several pieces, said curiosity and humanity anchored his works. In 2001, moments before Ma was to begin a recording session of “Elegy,” a piece for cello and orchestra, he recalled that Williams told him he had written the music in honor of two children who had been murdered.“I think of him as a total musician, someone who has experienced everything,” Ma said. “He knows all the ways that music can be made.”Inside his studio on the back lot of Universal Studios Hollywood, Williams is surrounded by mementos: a miniature bust of Beethoven, vintage movie posters chosen by Spielberg and, on a coffee table, a yellow bumper sticker reading, “Just Say No.” A model of a dinosaur, a nod to “Jurassic Park,” watches over the piano.At 90, he is astute and energetic but soft-spoken, looking much the same as he has the past two decades: black turtleneck, faint eyebrows and a wispy white beard.This year, he will complete what he expects to be his final two films: “The Fabelmans,” loosely based on Spielberg’s childhood, and a fifth installment in the “Indiana Jones” series.“The Fabelmans” has been particularly emotional, he said, given its importance to Spielberg. On a recent day, he recounted, the director wept as Williams played through several scenes on the piano.Williams said that he expected “The Fabelmans” would be the pair’s final film collaboration, though he added that it was hard to say no to Spielberg, whom he considers a brother. (Spielberg, for his part, said that Williams had promised to continue scoring his films indefinitely. “I feel pretty secure,” he said.)“Music has been my oxygen,” Williams says, “and has kept me alive and interested and occupied and gratified.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAt the end of his film career, Williams is making time to pursue some longtime dreams, including conducting in Europe. His works were once considered too commercial for some of the great concert halls. But when he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2020, players asked for photos and autographs.The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter said she was disappointed that there had been skepticism about his music.“Everything he writes is art,” said Mutter, for whom Williams wrote his second violin concerto, which premiered last year. “His music, in its diversity, has greatly contributed to the survival of so-called classical music.”And his peers say he has helped establish, beyond doubt, the legitimacy of film music. Zimmer, who wrote the music for “Dune,” said he is “the greatest composer America has had, end of story.” Danny Elfman, another film composer, called him “the godfather, the master.” Dudamel drew comparisons to Beethoven.Williams is more modest, describing himself as a carpenter. “I don’t know if it’s a passion,” he said of composing, “as much as an almost physiological necessity.”He said he still gets a thrill when people tell him that his music has been formative in their lives: He was delighted several years ago when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said he had insisted on playing “Star Wars” at his bar mitzvah, over his parents’ objections.Williams said he tries not to fixate on age, even as hundreds of ensembles around the world — in Japan, Australia, Italy and elsewhere — host concerts to mark his birthday. And he said he does not fear death; he sees life as a dream, at the end of which we awaken.“Music has been my oxygen,” he said, “and has kept me alive and interested and occupied and gratified.”Williams recalled a recent pilgrimage to St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, where Bach once worked as a cantor. He listened intently as a pastor described the efforts to protect the great composer’s remains during World War II; he marveled at the dedication to preserving Bach’s legacy.On his way out of the church, he paused. An organist was filling the grand space with the hymn-like theme from “Jurassic Park.”Williams, beaming, turned to the pastor.“Now,” he said, “I can die.” More

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      John Williams in the Concert Hall: An Introduction

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      Listen to five works that Hollywood’s reigning composer has written for symphony orchestras and star soloists like Yo-Yo Ma.John Williams has been Hollywood’s leading composer for over half a century. A keeper of the Golden Age flame of soaring grandeur and indelible melodies, he is the musical mind behind the two-note terror of “Jaws,” the operatic fanfare of “Star Wars” and the mischievous charm of “Harry Potter” — along with the sounds of some 50 other Academy Award-nominated scores.Over the years, Williams has also maintained a robust career in the concert hall. But while his soundtracks are the stuff of cultural immortality, his symphonic works have never found a foothold in the repertory. Even now, as his music is programmed by the storied ensembles of Vienna and Berlin, it’s more likely to be “E.T.” than his “Essay for Strings.”Williams’s concert works tend to be skillful but less imaginative than his film scores. And some — particularly pièces d’occasion like the larky “Soundings,” written for the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003 — are understandably obscure. At his best, though, he is a vivid tone painter with a masterly command of orchestration and form. Here are five examples.Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1976)Reminiscent at times of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto and, like it, written in the wake of loss — for Williams, the sudden death of his wife — this entry into the genre moves fluidly, and often unpredictably, in and out of lyricism, volatility and breathlessness. Premiered in 1981 by Mark Peskanov, it found a broader audience when recorded three decades later by Gil Shaham and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with which Williams has a long association.‘The Five Sacred Trees’ (1993)More or less a bassoon concerto, this commission for the New York Philharmonic’s 150th anniversary opens with a long solo that conjures the first (and wisest) of five trees from Celtic mythology. The movements that follow are arboreal portraits in music: a puckish, dancing duet for the bassoon and a violin; a mysterious nocturne; curlicue phrases choked into fragments; and patient brooding.Cello Concerto (1994)Williams composed this for Yo-Yo Ma to inaugurate Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. (Among Williams’s works for the instrument, it has aged better than Three Pieces for Solo Cello, a 2001 meditation on Black history with titles like “Pickin’.”) Tailored to its soloist like a film score to its scenes, the concerto is designed to reflect different angles of Ma’s artistry: as a heroic virtuoso, a nimble genre-hopper and, in the ruminative finale, an expressive communicator.Horn Concerto (2003)Dale Clevenger — the Chicago Symphony Orchestra horn master for whom this was written, and who died last month — once told an interviewer that he had requested an “audience-friendly” concerto from Williams. The result is difficult to play yet often warm, while also being nearly programmatic in its succession of tone poems that verge on the Coplandesque in the third-movement Pastorale.‘Markings’ (2017)If this atmospheric and discursive work seems like the start of something larger, it kind of is. Written at the urging of the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and leaning into her trademark eloquence, it was the first in a series of collaborations that have since included an album of Williams’s film music arranged for her and orchestra, as well as his Second Violin Concerto, which premiered last year and comes to Carnegie Hall in April. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Music for Dance

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      Reggae, house, step, ballet, tap, jazz: Listen to the sounds that have inspired great choreographers.In the past we’ve chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ and mezzo-sopranos.Now we want to convince those curious friends to love music — of many different styles — made to be danced to. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Brian Seibert, Times writerI think I first heard it in a TV commercial for beef, but Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” was written for ballet. A particularly American ballet — about a cowgirl! — choreographed by Agnes de Mille in 1942. Like Copland’s “Billy the Kid” and “Appalachian Spring,” written for Martha Graham, “Rodeo” forged a mythical sound of Americana that was taken up by pops concerts and advertisers. But this is dance music, as you can feel from the start, when the scene-setting of open spaces accelerates into a trot and then kicks into the broncobusting, heel-cracking main theme. That Justin Peck’s 2015 choreography for New York City Ballet successfully ditched the story and held onto the rhythms is a testament to their power.Copland’s “Rodeo”New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Camille A. Brown, choreographerWhen we did “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” this fall at the Metropolitan Opera, we included step dance, an African-American social dance form used in fraternities, sororities, H.B.C.U.s. I connect it to Juba dance; enslavers would sometimes take the drums away from the enslaved, who would continue to use their bodies as a way of communicating.It’s about the body being an instrument — using your hands and feet and body to create rhythms that are a musical composition. I tried to create a score, a rhythmic score, inside of Terence Blanchard’s opera score. This was the first time that step dance had been on the Met stage, and I tried to honor the ancestors and what this movement means as best I could.“Fire Shut Up in My Bones”Camille A. Brown, choreographer (Metropolitan Opera)◆ ◆ ◆Taylor Stanley, New York City Ballet principal dancer“Apollo” is full of nuance. After Apollo’s first solo, there is a musical shift when he’s introduced to the three muses. You can hear the delicacy of each muse, and there’s this coy energy as the god discovers himself through dancing with them. Stravinsky’s score is so layered and intricate; you hear melody on top of melody, just as Apollo supports all three women as a partner. And then those layered melodies culminate in a really lush, beautiful resolve. It’s the music that creates this image of openness and fills the space with density. It’s a moment of harmony that melts my heart.Stravinsky’s “Apollo”London Symphony Orchestra; Robert Craft, conductor (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Siobhan Burke, Times writerThe first time I saw “Grace,” Ronald K. Brown’s 1999 hit for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, I had to check the fine print in the program. What was that song? The one that had me itching to get up and move along with the dancers? Thus began my habit of listening on repeat to Roy Davis Jr.’s “Gabriel,” featuring Peven Everett. The 1996 British garage track — with its infectious house beat, luminous trumpet and mellow yet passionate vocals — was made to be danced to in contexts other than a theater. But in Brown’s hands, it’s equally at home onstage, where his intricate, cyclical movement slinks into the music’s subtler grooves and widens its spiritual dimensions.Roy Davis Jr. and Peven Everett’s “Gabriel”(XL)◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Barone, Times editorMany people’s first experience with live ballet is “The Nutcracker.” It was mine, too, and though I knew nothing about dance, I couldn’t get enough of Tchaikovsky’s score. I later loved the symphonic drama of his “Swan Lake” and then came to “The Sleeping Beauty,” immediately hooked by its famous Rose Adagio. A moment of stasis yet suspense, the fairy tale scene is set by a flowing harp, followed by Romantic strings and dignified brasses as Aurora receives and rejects a series of suitors. The ending, regal and rattlingly loud, is a triumph not only for the princess, but also for any ballerina who emerges unscathed.Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty”Vienna Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor (Decca)◆ ◆ ◆Phil Chan, Final Bow for Yellowface co-founderA good piece of dance music is an aural guide for the body to explore the freedom of movement. It changes directions. It grabs onto your heartbeat and pulses through your veins. It makes you tap your feet. One of my favorite pieces of dance music is for the Tinikling, the national folk dance of the Philippines, which emulates the swift footsteps of the tikling bird. The virtuoso melody provides variations on a theme, syncopated rhythms, changing tempos to build excitement and, finally, a crescendo release. Fair warning: Only the most musical dancers avoid the sore ankles that come with the closing snap of the bamboo poles.The TiniklingUCLA Samahang Pilipino Cultural Night, 2017◆ ◆ ◆Robert Battle, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic directorThere is a mystery to “Reflections in D,” unlike many other songs by Duke Ellington, who called his compositions “American music” rather than jazz. Though abstract, the song suggests a poignant story behind the haunting, bittersweet melody. In 1962 Alvin Ailey was moved to create a dance to this music, so when we listen to it now, we see and hear the prowess and vulnerability of both these great artists. Though the piece is brief, it says everything needed, with nothing superfluous, something that can only be achieved by masters of their craft. Our own memories are freed by the tranquil poetry. “Reflections in D” is a meditation on being.Duke Ellington’s “Reflections in D”(Blue Note)◆ ◆ ◆Zachary Woolfe, Times classical music editorTwyla Tharp’s 1986 masterpiece “In the Upper Room” has many moments of quiet intimacy. But as you can guess from the music alone, the final section is a relentless full-ensemble Olympics. In the score Tharp commissioned from Philip Glass, she got the sonic equivalent of her surging, athletic choreography, with the dancers (by this point dripping in sweat) soaring through the fog and shadows created by Jennifer Tipton’s lighting. Many, many people have set Glass to movement, never more exhilarating than this.Philip Glass’s “Dance IX”(Orange Mountain Music)◆ ◆ ◆Lauren Lovette, choreographerI respect and value “Trio per Uno” for the sheer genius behind the percussion syncopation, and its variety of color and mood. I have always been drawn to percussion for dancing because of its obvious physicality and the impulse to move from places internal. But I often find that single-movement percussion works fall too far into a single rhythm, making the dance one-dimensional. So when I came across this piece I was immediately taken by its changes in direction throughout, and how recklessly it ends. The duet I set to it is one of my favorite pieces of my choreography.Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic’s “Trio per Uno”Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic, Benjamin Toth, Fernando Meza, percussion (Bis)◆ ◆ ◆David Allen, Times writerGiven its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1931 as the successor to his “The Spider’s Feast,” Albert Roussel’s undeservedly overlooked “Bacchus et Ariane” is a magnificently symphonic kind of ballet — painted in bright, bold colors, graced with soaring lyricism and driven along with grinding, mechanistic rhythmic force. After Bacchus’s kiss leads into a gloriously rapt dance for Ariane, a pounding bacchanal cavorts out of control, before Ariane reaches her apotheosis and is crowned in stars. There are more graphic accounts of this music out there, but nobody matches Jean Martinon and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for finding the beauty in the carnage.Roussel’s “Bacchus et Ariane”Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Jean Martinon, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Justin Peck, choreographerWhat I love about dance music is that it can be anything. It can be a piece that inspires me to choreograph a ballet for the stage, or something that causes me to glide in synchronized rhythm around my kitchen as I prepare dinner. It’s all fair game. In the case of “Become a Mountain” by Dan Deacon, it’s all of the above: the centerpiece of a longer dance that I choreographed a few months ago for the Juilliard School Class of 2022, and also a stand-alone track that gets my blood pumping on these frigid winter days in New York.Dan Deacon’s “Become a Mountain”(Domino)◆ ◆ ◆Ayodele Casel, tap dancer and choreographerArturo O’Farrill is a musician with great love of and respect for the art of dance. Our collaborations have explored both the freedom of improvisation, composing music on the spot, and working with his vast catalog for choreographic inspiration. “The Sandbox” is one of our many improvisational moments, recorded for my show “Chasing Magic.” Playfully we flow through Latin, jazz, classical and blues music in five minutes. Our interaction reflects the freedom, tradition, stop-time, call-and-response nature of jazz and tap. We always surprise ourselves when our rhythm and cadence uncannily sync, like magic.Arturo O’Farrill and Ayodele Casel’s “The Sandbox”(Ayodele Casel)◆ ◆ ◆Benjamin Millepied, choreographerThe sabar is a dance form of the Wolof people, who mainly live in parts of Senegal and Gambia. The dancing is accompanied by a style of drumming with the same name. I grew up in Senegal, with this musician’s family as a neighbor. The sophisticated rhythmic language of sabar inspired me to begin dancing at an early age. It is a freeing way to approach dance, as individuality and improvisation are key elements, and the energetic, mathematical polyrhythms triggered a lifelong desire in me to choreograph my own variations on movement.Doudou N’Diaye Rose’s “Rose Rhythm”(Real World)◆ ◆ ◆Kyle Abraham, choreographerWith its slick grooves, percussion, guitar licks and beautiful vocals, “Betray My Heart,” by D’Angelo and the Vanguard, is one of the rarest love songs I know. I included it in my newest evening-length work, “An Untitled Love,” because it is so pure, honest and sincere that I’m given a glimpse into what the joys of love should feel like. There’s something in the song’s lyrics and arrangement that makes me want to cry, and then get up and dance with the biggest smile on my face. My backbone slips, my shoulders roll, my heart thumps, and my head bops in its declaration.D’Angelo’s “Betray My Heart”D’Angelo and the Vanguard (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Gia Kourlas, Times dance criticHindemith’s score for Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments” — known in dancer shorthand as “Four T’s” — resulted in a groundbreaking merging of music and dance exploring the notion that in every person there are four humors, or temperaments. “Phlegmatic,” the third variation, evoking the unemotional, indifferent side of the psyche, starts out with strings that make the body droop and rise. The spare, strong notes of the piano part are like light cutting through mist to pave the way for a melody that builds and bounces, all the while conjuring physical sensations: gliding, floating, flying. The music’s spirit may belong to Balanchine, yet somehow it makes room for more — within it, there are so many dances waiting to be danced.Hindemith’s “The Four Temperaments”Los Angeles Philharmonic; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (Sony)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times writerNew York boasts plenty of places where you can check out improvising composers plying their craft — but not nearly so many spaces to dance while they play. That has made live concert interventions like the pianist Jason Moran’s “Fats Waller Dance Party” particularly inviting at venues like Harlem Stage. On Moran’s accompanying album, “All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller,” he keeps alive the social aspect of early jazz, with a contemporary twist. During a track like “Lulu’s Back in Town,” Moran injects rhythmic fillips that call to mind producers like J Dilla, while still doing honor to Waller’s rendition from the 1930s.Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s “Lulu’s Back in Town”Jason Moran, piano (Blue Note)◆ ◆ ◆Javier C. Hernández, Times classical music and dance reporterProkofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet” has a tortured history. Its premiere was repeatedly delayed; the music was derided as impossible to dance to; and the score was subjected to Soviet censorship. But it has become one of his most beloved works — by turns fiery, lyrical and haunting. There are also moments of irreverence, such as in this carnival-like dance featuring the mandolin. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, under Marin Alsop, brings anguish and electricity to the score.Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop, conductor (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Charmaine Warren, dancer and teacherI am Jamaican, and I love reggae music. Chronixx, one of Jamaica’s celebrated young singers, known for his rapturous songs, invites listeners to hearken back to the Rasta skank of Bob Marley. In “Smile Jamaica,” he starts off by singing about a girl he’s met; they exchange names and sweetly, just when the beat drops, we find that her name is Jamaica. He sings: “And I said smile, girl, smile. Smile for me, Jamaica.” In Jamaica we say “di music sweet mi,” and so I can’t help but drop my head, drop deeper into my swaying hips, pump my bent arms, smile, and sing along with the chorus.Chronixx’s “Smile Jamaica”(Silly Walks Discotheque)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Review: International Orchestras Are Finally Back at Carnegie

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      The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London was the first foreign ensemble to play at the hall since February 2020.What sets a cultural capital apart is not just the quality of its music-making, but also the quantity and variety. No American symphonic ensemble, for example, is better than the Cleveland Orchestra, but it stands largely alone at home. Few big groups travel to Cleveland the way they do to New York.Or did. The city’s performing arts landscape has blossomed again following long pandemic closures, but virus surges, visa issues, quarantine requirements and financial concerns have meant that orchestral tours — usually the meat of Carnegie Hall’s season — are still slumbering, almost two years later.But tours, too, are slowly reawakening. The marquee offering comes later this month, when the mighty Vienna Philharmonic comes to Carnegie for a three-night stand. A landmark arrived on Monday evening, however, when the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London became the first international orchestra to appear at the hall since the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique on Feb. 24, 2020.The Royal Philharmonic, with a solidly spirited concert under its new music director, Vasily Petrenko, also celebrated its own milestones: its 75th season, and its first appearance at Carnegie in 25 years. (If you want to talk about a real cultural capital, the group, founded by the conductor Thomas Beecham in 1946, is one of at least five major orchestras based in London.)Kian Soltani was the soloist in Elgar’s Cello Concerto.Richard TermineThe program was standard-issue: the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes,” Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Holst’s mammoth suite “The Planets” — British composers, all. There is, in an era of thoroughly internationalized ensembles, something quaint and a little silly about the notion of touring with your country’s repertory.Particularly when the works are, like these, chestnuts done all the time. I endorse British ensembles advocating British music, but “The Planets” is hardly in need of advocacy, and the Royal Philharmonic, for all its liveliness, didn’t sound in it much different than, say, the New York Philharmonic would have. The number of orchestras with actual sonic or interpretive idiosyncrasies in music of their compatriots is by now almost or actually zero.But with Petrenko a tall, animated presence on the podium — bouncing up and down, shimmying, and hypnotically curling the long fingers of his left hand, witchlike — it was a pleasant evening. From the Britten on, the orchestra’s winds and brasses were particularly mellow and secure, sounding dewy in Holst’s “Venus” and adding to the bronzed ominousness of “Saturn” and the sensual hush of “Neptune,” which also featured the offstage voices of Musica Sacra, under Kent Tritle.The cellist Kian Soltani, the soloist in the Elgar, played with buttery understatement and intimacy, and considerable wit in the Lento. It speaks to his collegiality that his encore included five of the orchestra’s cellists in his arrangement of an excerpt from Shostakovich’s film score for “The Gadfly.” At the end of the concert, the full ensemble’s encore also abandoned Britain for Russia, with a cheerful rendition of the “Dance of the Tumblers” from Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Snow Maiden.”Royal Philharmonic OrchestraPerformed on Monday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Conductor in Demand, and in Control

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      MUNICH — Let’s get this out of the way: Don’t expect Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla to be the music director of a major American orchestra any time soon.“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer,” Gražinytė-Tyla, 35, said in a recent interview at the Bavarian State Opera here, where she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”It’s an unusual statement coming from a young conductor in demand, especially one whose current appointment — as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain — concludes this spring. Even more unusual since Gražinytė-Tyla, along with the likes of Susanna Mälkki, is often mentioned as a leading contender to fill vacancies on the horizon at top American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.But as administrators search for a conductor of her stature, as well as for someone to tip the scale of gender balance in the United States — where there won’t be any female music directors among the country’s 25 largest orchestras until Nathalie Stutzmann starts with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season — Gražinytė-Tyla is a defiant rarity: an anti-careerist who has resisted industry pressure in favor of artistic and personal fulfillment.Her star might be on the rise, but she is keeping it on a short leash. Gražinytė-Tyla designed her calendar this season so that it was dominated by “The Cunning Little Vixen” — both in concert, as in Birmingham, and staged, as in Munich. She has retained a remarkable amount of control over her schedule, ensuring time for family: her partner and two sons in Salzburg, Austria, with a third child on the way. (The Birmingham orchestra recently announced that, because of the pregnancy, she would no longer conduct her planned final concerts in June.)“She’s very in tune with herself,” said Barrie Kosky, who directed the new “Vixen,” which runs through Feb. 15. “She’s very sure her decisions are the right decisions for her. She couldn’t care less about all the tra-la-la.”Born to a family of professional musicians in Lithuania, and finding early success with the baton, Gražinytė-Tyla (pronounced grah-zhin-EE-tay teel-AH) was teed up for the typical life of a conductor: jet-setting hustle and steppingstone appointments — leading, perhaps, to a prestige podium.But she also long had a streak of independence. She began to study music formally at 11 against the wishes of her parents, who wanted to spare her the difficulties of an artistic life. Although experienced as a singer, she wasn’t a trained instrumentalist, so she joined the only school program that was available: conducting. She was a natural and, at 16, took first prize at a Lithuanian competition.Gražinyte-Tyla rehearsing at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. “She’s very in tune with herself,” said the stage director Barrie Kosky.Roderick Aichinger for The New York Times“I remember thinking, Oh no, what am I going to do now?” Gražinytė-Tyla said. “There was this pressure, and I knew it would be so hard to maintain that level. It was a huge challenge, but also a mix of joy and responsibility.”The pressure didn’t end there. Completing her studies, adding Tyla (the Lithuanian word for silence) to her professional name, and winning the Salzburg Young Conductors Award, she was then given a fellowship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she would go on to serve as an assistant, then associate, conductor. She first appeared with the C.B.S.O. in summer 2015, and by the following January had been appointed its music director.The speed of all that, Gražinytė-Tyla said, “puts you into shape and can give you a good kick to do something fast.” But, she added, it also made her value an introspective pause. “I think it is incredibly important to stay very aware of what is happening inside, because a person shouldn’t be a machine, and shouldn’t be a little part of this big mechanism that says, ‘You go this way and this way.’”“People are different,” she continued. “But I think I need time where I am not studying or conducting or traveling or rehearsing to just be a whole human being.”A breakthrough came during a conversation with the violinist Gidon Kremer. She recalled him telling her that her career would always feel like it had two different doors. Behind one would be record labels, managers, festivals and a variety of conflicting demands; behind the other, “all your dreams are there, and your imagination, and the things you can go for and explore.”She has opened both doors. Insistently private, she speaks strategically, at times even euphemistically, about her home life. Her partner hasn’t been publicly identified beyond having a job with the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg; in the interview, she referred to family time as “human relations.”Yet she did take the job in Birmingham, which has a high profile and a reputation as a star-maker, with such recent music directors as Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons. A recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon followed her appointment. In both cases, she was a first: as a woman on the Birmingham podium and as a female conductor with that storied label. Those milestones were noted publicly, Gražinytė-Tyla said, but only in passing.“This is something that our generation has to be incredibly grateful for,” she said, referring to the struggles of female conductors. “There have been a lot of painful memories for our colleagues in the past, and I have had some small experiences myself, but nothing in the amount that someone in Susanna Mälkki’s generation had to go through.” (Mälkki is 52.)Gražinytė-Tyla was warmly received by the players in Birmingham, said Oliver Janes, a clarinetist with the ensemble. “She has this rehearsal technique where you forget you’ve ever played a piece before,” he added. “And once you’ve completely forgotten how it goes, you feel like you’re starting again.”She also, he said, gave the orchestra — and its public — a jolt. At their first BBC Proms appearance under her direction, they encored with Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” and the moment it ended she shouted to the audience inside the vast Royal Albert Hall in London, “See you in Birmingham!”She has released several Deutsche Grammophon recordings with the orchestra, including as part of a benchmark pairing of symphonies by the often overlooked Mieczyslaw Weinberg — a reflection, she said, of her tendency to take a project-based approach to conducting. Just as there will be more Weinberg to come, she is in the midst of a “Vixen” immersion.“I am totally aware that this is a complete luxury,” she said. “Some people see the profession of a conductor as: You have to be incredibly fast and know all the repertoire. These are fantastic qualities. On the other hand, for myself I only can say I believe less and less I could be such a type of conductor.”Over time and multiple performances, she added, “Vixen” has revealed its “incredible jewels and connections” to her. Janes, the clarinetist, said that in Birmingham, she knew every corner of the text, to the point where, “if all the singers went ill, she could do the whole concert and sing every part.”When Kosky started planning the Munich production with Gražinytė-Tyla, he said, she wanted their first conversation to be about text, “which delighted me from the top of my head to my toes.”“I said to her, ‘That’s all the work,’” he added. “The work itself is how the text is propelled by the music. She breathes the text, and she breathes with the music. Without that in Janacek, you’re dead.”“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer.”Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesText was central even at her recent rehearsals with the Bavarian State Opera’s orchestra. Standing at the podium, her small frame belying a deep voice that commands as easily as it lets out booming laughter, she alternated between straightforward notes and explaining scenes in detail — especially in relation to Kosky’s staging. She later did the same when the cast joined for the sitzprobe, the first meeting of the singers and instrumentalists.The tenor Jonas Hacker, singing the role of the Schoolmaster, said that Gražinytė-Tyla’s directions tend to be “very color-motivated” and that she “breaks things down into tiny segments,” which, he added, comes from the score itself: “Janacek tends to be so fragmented, she’ll just take a few bars and figure out really what is the text saying and what its mood is, and really taking the time.”Throughout, Kosky said, he has remained convinced that she is “a theater person, which to me is so fundamental.”“There aren’t many opera conductors in the world,” he added. “You can be a great symphony conductor and be a lousy opera conductor. And there is an absolute shortage of genuinely talented opera conductors. It’s a bit of a worry; get your truffle pig out at the moment. But Mirga is one of them.”Gražinytė-Tyla hasn’t announced future performances beyond a brief revival of “Vixen” during the Munich Opera Festival this summer. But for now, she is confident that whatever follows will not be a long-term post with any orchestra.“The luxury to focus on the ‘Vixen’ — I think it will remain a very important point for me to deal with certain repertoire in the rhythm I feel is the right one, right now, for me,” she said, adding with a hearty laugh: “I’m not sure the big orchestras will be interested in having me if I say I’ll do only ‘Vixen’ for the whole season.” More