Dudamel, Gustavo

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      Gustavo Dudamel in New York: Selfies, Hugs and Mahler

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      Our photographer followed the maestro when he came to town to conduct Mahler’s Ninth — his first time leading the New York Philharmonic since being named its next music director.The violins were tuning, the woodwinds warming up and the trumpets blaring bits of Mahler. Then the musicians of the New York Philharmonic began to whistle and cheer.Gustavo Dudamel, one of the world’s biggest conducting stars, strode onto the stage this month for his first rehearsal with the Philharmonic since being named the ensemble’s next music director. On the program was Mahler’s epic Ninth Symphony.“I will have the opportunity in the next few days to hug everybody,” he told the musicians, smiling and pumping his fist. “I’m very honored to become part of the family.”As it happened, the orchestra’s new hall, the recently renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, was occupied that day, so Dudamel’s first rehearsal took place at its old home, Carnegie Hall. Dudamel said he felt a connection to Mahler, who conducted the Philharmonic at Carnegie when he was its music director from 1909 to 1911.At his first rehearsal, in Carnegie Hall, Dudamel offered a mantra for his tenure: “We will have a lot of fun.”James Estrin/The New York TimesWhile the orchestra rehearsed Mahler, Dudamel rushed to the center of David Geffen Hall to briefly assess the acoustics.Dudamel, one of the world’s biggest conducting stars, is known for his bouncy curls and fiery baton.The violinist Ellen dePasquale warmed up backstage before a rehearsal of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, one of the repertory’s most sweeping and profound works.“This was Mahler’s orchestra,” he said, noting Mahler’s ties to New York when he wrote it. “Even if they are not the same musicians, they have that heritage of Mahler.”While Dudamel does not take the podium in New York until 2026, his five days with the Philharmonic this month, for rehearsals and performances of the Mahler, were an unofficial start. They came at a moment of transition for him in more ways then one: a week later he would announce that he was resigning as music director of the Paris Opera. But New York felt like a new beginning, and as he got to know the orchestra and the city, he offered a mantra for his tenure: “We will have a lot of fun.”Dudamel took a pause backstage before going to meet with percussionists during a break in rehearsal.“I’m very honored to become part of the family,” Dudamel told the Philharmonic’s players.Dudamel grabbed a sip of coffee in his dressing room during a break in rehearsal.Dudamel examined a Mahler score that once belonged to Leonard Bernstein, a predecessor. He said he felt a connection to Mahler, who led the Philharmonic from 1909 to 1911. “Even if they are not the same musicians,” he said, “they have that heritage of Mahler.”Judith LeClair, the Philharmonic’s principal bassoon, embraced Dudamel after a rehearsal. He was greeted as a rock star by the orchestra, with musicians lining up for selfies and hugs.There were hours of intense rehearsals, during which Dudamel urged the players to embrace Mahler’s operatic impulses and his varied style.There were Champagne toasts and rites of passage. In his dressing room Dudamel examined a Mahler score that once belonged to Leonard Bernstein, a predecessor and noted Mahlerian. There were hours of intense rehearsals, during which Dudamel urged the players to embrace Mahler’s operatic impulses and his varied style.“It’s not bipolar, it’s tripolar,” he said of one passage. “This is Freud. A new character — a new spectrum of humanity.”When Dudamel and the orchestra got back to Geffen Hall for the final rehearsals and performances, there were some surprises.After a spectral whirring sound surfaced during an open rehearsal, he turned to the audience. “Maybe it’s Mahler,” he said.Dudamel spoke backstage with members of the Philharmonic’s artistic team about the timing of a rehearsal break. A few seconds before walking onstage for his first concert at the newly renovated Geffen Hall, Dudamel adjusted his tie.The Philharmonic was warmly received at its performances with Dudamel. On the first night, the ensemble got a seven-minute standing ovation.Dudamel’s appearances were highly anticipated by music fans eager to catch a glimpse of the Philharmonic’s next music director. All three concerts sold out.Dudamel abstained from solo bows, gesturing instead to highlight the contributions of the members of the orchestra.Dudamel in his dressing room. “To arrive here, to achieve this connection with you, is for me a prize of life,” he told musicians at a reception. “We will develop this love, this connection.”Throughout his visit, Dudamel was greeted as a rock star, with musicians lining up for selfies and hugs.“You’re part of my family,” Cynthia Phelps, the principal violist, told him at a reception. “Welcome.”Dudamel thanked the musicians, saying he never imagined he would one day lead one of the world’s top orchestras.“To arrive here, to achieve this connection with you, is for me a prize of life,” he said. “We will develop this love, this connection.”At the opening concert, Dudamel was nervous. As is his custom, he conducted the symphony, one of the repertory’s most sweeping and profound works, from memory. At the end of the piece, Dudamel abstained from solo bows, gesturing instead to highlight the contributions of the members of the orchestra.Backstage, an aide handed Dudamel a glass of scotch.“My God,” he said. “What a journey.”Dudamel with his longtime friend and mentor, Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, who lured him east from Los Angeles. More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Leads His New York Philharmonic

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      Performing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the superstar maestro conducted the orchestra for the first time since being named its next music director.Gustavo Dudamel began his reign at the New York Philharmonic on Friday with an ending.Greeted with a roar from the audience as he appeared with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall for the first time since being named its next music director, this superstar maestro conducted Mahler’s ninth and final completed symphony, one of the repertory’s great evocations of farewell. Few works survey the span of a life — its highs and lows — more thoroughly and unsparingly, from the pastoral to the hysterical, from raucous existence to pianississimo death.The program was planned long before Dudamel’s appointment, but it turned out to be ideal for this moment. Nearly an hour and a half long, Mahler’s Ninth fills a concert on its own. No overture; no soloist; no intermission.On Friday it provided a long, focused communion between a conductor and the players he’ll be leading in the years to come. (Dudamel’s predecessor, Jaap van Zweden, finishes next season and, because of classical music’s ludicrously slow planning cycles, Dudamel, currently at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, won’t officially start his five-year contract until 2026.)The Ninth was ideal for the moment, too, because this orchestra has a particular claim on Mahler, who briefly but indelibly served as its chief conductor around the time he was finishing the symphony, just before his death in 1911. While hardly a rarity, the Ninth is a piece that the Philharmonic has mostly entrusted to its music directors — including Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein, two of the 20th century’s most influential Mahlerians.With the weight of this history palpable, Dudamel achieved in this sprawling, complex and bracing score a kind of casualness. He gave a sense of this as just another piece.This Ninth wasn’t a hothouse flower or a religious rite. Leading with easy flow and, especially in the great Adagio fourth movement, a tendency toward briskness, Dudamel had no interest in the self-seriousness that can easily bend this symphony toward exaggerated solemnity. The goal seemed to be bright freshness more than autumnal glow.Conducting without a score in front of him or a podium railing behind — there are, he seemed to be saying, no barriers between me, the players and the audience — Dudamel persuasively and naturally guided the score’s many slight, important shifts of pace. The deceleration to the end of the first movement was artful, and the complicated transitions at the close of the third were lucid. The music never felt bullied, manipulated or artificially inflated.At the start of the finale, the strings that interrupt a funeral dirge in the bassoon weren’t a slap in the face, but a swift tidal inundation. Those strings had earlier played with mossy darkness in the first movement’s passionately strange “Leidenschaftlich” passage.Throughout the symphony, the trumpets had the right coppery bite. The principal harp, Nancy Allen, brought the smooth, slightly unearthly resonance of temple bells to her music. Ryan Roberts, on English horn, played with his usual flawless poetry in small yet meaningful solos, especially near the end. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, offered both tenderness and tanginess.And yet missing from the evening was a certain degree of personality and depth.If the beginning of the first movement was clear and straightforward, it also lacked mystery and poignancy — an establishment of mood beyond mere accuracy. The murky, brooding music later in that movement, a nod to Wagner’s depiction of the magical, shapeshifting Tarnhelm in his “Ring,” passed without phosphorescent eeriness.There was a sense of celebration as Dudamel took the podium for the first time since being named the Philharmonic’s next music director.James Estrin/The New York TimesWhile there was understandably a sense of celebration in the sold-out hall on Friday, which bled into the performance, it’s not clear that love-fest is the right mood for much of Mahler’s Ninth. In the second movement, bouncing up and down at the knees and making smiling cues with a flared left hand, Dudamel led a ländler dance that was more sweetly rustic than ominously rough. And there was a breezy, circuslike feel to the waltz it transforms into, rather than anything sinister. This was not a rendition of the Mahler who prefigured Shostakovich.Some restraint in that second movement — even some sunniness — might make sense so as to leave somewhere to go in the unquestionably more explosive third. But on Friday, that Rondo-Burleske third movement wasn’t really intense, either.While the first measures were sumptuously grand, there was no sense of grotesquerie, self-mockery or more than slight pepperiness in what followed, so the sudden slowing into the consoling, contrasting theme — like a roof opening to reveal the full expanse of the starry night sky — didn’t have the necessary impact. Dudamel hadn’t brought us to a place from which we needed to be consoled.This wasn’t particularly light-textured playing, but the feeling was nevertheless almost airy, with a reticence in the lower strings. Eighty minutes seemed to pass quickly — perhaps too much so.With the orchestra’s principal horn position currently vacant, Stefan Dohr, who fills that role for the Berlin Philharmonic, was a guest, to uneven effect. In his crucial part here, Dohr was steady, but the mellow solidity of his tone, shading into leadenness, didn’t seem quite in the same sound world as his colleagues. The passing around of solos through the winds in the fourth movement offered a feeling of humanity but, like this performance as a whole, felt a bit stranded: neither elegant nor raw.The Philharmonic still tends to gesture toward super-soft playing rather than really achieving it, let alone relishing it. And with an edgy thinness to the orchestra’s sound at full cry, rather than rounded, blended warmth, I felt a revival of my concerns from the fall opening of the renovated Geffen Hall about the space’s clear but stark acoustics.Under Dudamel’s baton, the symphony’s final minutes, as the strings gradually dim to nothingness, were as sensible as I’ve ever heard them. This was a pleasantly even-keeled lullaby rather than a radical or wrenching depiction of life draining away. The playing was poised, but it left a ways to go in profundity.It was an ending. But for this conductor and this orchestra, it felt like a place to start.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Boston Symphony Picks Chad Smith of L.A. Philharmonic as New Leader

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      The departure of Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, is another loss for that orchestra, whose maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, is also leaving.Chad Smith, a veteran arts leader who has helped turn the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the most innovative orchestras in the United States, will leave his post this fall to become president and chief executive of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, both ensembles announced on Monday.Smith, 51, who has been the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive since 2019, said in an interview that the pandemic had made him rethink his priorities.“I really have thought a lot about my journey here, and I’m ready for a change,” he said. “Change is also healthy for everyone.”Smith’s departure is a significant loss for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which is still reeling from the announcement in February that its superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would leave in 2026 to become the next music director of the New York Philharmonic.Smith said that his move was unrelated to that of Dudamel, with whom he has worked closely in promoting contemporary music and expanding the orchestra’s youth education programs. He said that he felt it was the right moment now that the worst of the pandemic appears to be over and audiences are once again returning to concert halls.“My decision was my own, and I know that Gustavo’s decision was his own,” he said. “It will provide the opportunity for the organization in L.A. to have a new artistic and executive leadership team to really move into the future.”Smith will take the helm of the Boston Symphony at a time of tumult and division.The orchestra has in recent years built a reputation for artistic and financial success, winning Grammy Awards and amassing an endowment of $484 million. But after the retirement in 2021 of the orchestra’s longtime leader, Mark Volpe, the organization entered a chaotic period.A long list of senior leaders and staff have departed, including Volpe’s successor, Gail Samuel, the orchestra’s first female president and chief executive, who abruptly resigned in December, just 18 months into her tenure. (Samuel also came from the Los Angeles Philharmonic.)The turmoil has alarmed the Boston Symphony’s musicians, staff, board and patrons. The orchestra’s leaders, including the board chair, Barbara W. Hostetter, a philanthropist, have declined to speak publicly about the problems. In a statement on Monday, she praised Smith’s appointment, saying that it would “usher in a new era of many exciting opportunities.”Smith said he was not intimidated by the troubles in Boston, adding, “The B.S.O. is going through things that all organizations go through at certain times.” He said he would work to bring stability to the orchestra and to help it rethink its identity and mission.“There are a lot of questions you have to ask,” he said. “Who do we want to be? What are those things that are absolutely essential? And where can we can continue to grow and expand and think differently about who we are and how we connect with audiences in our communities?”Smith said that he would work to bring more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the orchestra, which is less diverse than some of its peers. And he said that he was eager to keep Andris Nelsons, the music director in Boston since 2014, whose contract expires in 2025, calling him an “extraordinary musician.”The challenges in Boston are familiar to Smith, who has spent 21 years at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, previously serving as its chief operating officer and vice president of artistic planning, developing a reputation for innovative programming and for forging ties to contemporary composers. He became chief executive in 2019 after the abrupt resignation of Simon Woods, who had been in the job for less than two years.Like the Boston Symphony, the Philharmonic has been known for its artistic and financial success. Both institutions have benefited from having robust, and highly lucrative, outdoor summer offerings: the Hollywood Bowl in California, and Tanglewood in Massachusetts.The loss of Smith will create a void in Los Angeles, where the orchestra is in the beginning stages of a search for a successor to Dudamel. Thomas L. Beckmen, the chair of the orchestra’s board, said in a statement that the Philharmonic was “confident our next leader will carry forward our values and vision and inspire the L.A. Phil to even greater heights.”Dudamel expressed his gratitude to Smith in a statement, noting that the “only constant in life is change” and pledging in his remaining years to “give everything I can to the L.A. Phil and our wonderful audiences.”Smith’s move to Boston will be a homecoming of sorts. He studied European history at Tufts University and has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in vocal performance from the New England Conservatory, and often attended Boston Symphony concerts while Seiji Ozawa was music director.He recalled a memorial concert for the composer Aaron Copland. “I still get chills thinking about that,” Smith said. “It’s something I come back to very often about why I love the orchestral world and the orchestral music.” More

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      What Gustavo Dudamel’s Recordings Reveal About His Conducting

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      Seven years ago, not long after Jaap van Zweden had been proclaimed the music director of the New York Philharmonic, I listened to every commercial recording of his that I could lay my hands on, to get a better sense of his conducting. I do not remember it exactly as a fun experience, when I have to remember it at all, nor one that flattered him that much.Now that the Philharmonic’s next music director has been named, it’s Gustavo Dudamel’s turn.This time, the exercise is a different proposition, and thankfully nowhere near as enervating. Van Zweden was hardly a household name when the Philharmonic hired him, and even avid collectors could have been excused for not staying abreast of his latest releases. Dudamel is a Hollywood-starred celebrity who enjoys a longstanding relationship with the Deutsche Grammophon label. On May 19, he leads Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in his first Philharmonic appearances since his appointment, which takes effect in 2026.The Philharmonic has high hopes for Dudamel, 42, but it probably has not hired him first and foremost to commit agenda-setting Beethoven and Brahms to disc, though he will make records anyway. It expects him to be a grander figure, a talisman who will gladden the jaded and enthuse audiences the orchestra has yet to enthuse.His conducting has always been somewhat overshadowed by the blinding hype that surrounds his vision of music-making as a transformative social force. Claims that he is the “savior of classical music” are no longer as common as they once were, but other clichés have endured since he shot to stardom in the mid-2000s: that he stands musically for impetuous exuberance, say, or for perpetual youth. He still has to say, as he did to The New York Times in February, that he is “not a young conductor anymore.”Dudamel himself has often suggested that he never was one. When he was 26, Bob Simon of “60 Minutes” asked if he was too young to be a conductor; he replied that he had been conducting since he was 12, adding that he still had a lot to learn. “I’m not so old. I’m 30,” he told the critic Mark Swed in 2011. “But I feel old.” Likewise, plenty of critics have, over the years, described Dudamel’s approach as that of a much more senior musician; Alex Ross of The New Yorker has lately suggested that “he was, in a way, too mature from the start.”Perhaps, then, it is best to listen to Dudamel’s recordings not only to hear a prodigy on the rise, but also for what he quickly became: a musician of significant experience who has had access to a starry cast of mentors for much of his career, and has been working with the finest orchestras in the world for nearly two decades now. On that basis, his discography ought to draw a warmer endorsement than it reasonably can.Dudamel’s photos on buttons from Venezuela, where his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra is based.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesThat’s not to say it’s bad. Most of Dudamel’s recordings are perfectly listenable, and some are impressive, like his set of the Ives symphonies with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he has led since 2009. Few of them anger or appall, though they tend not to support the supposed Dudamel of all-star energy; some of his readings are frankly rather staid. On the whole, he comes off as a very capable musician, but one who, as of yet, has not acquired the flair for details and the brilliance of imagination that marks a conductor as extraordinary.Ives, Symphony No. 2: FinaleLos Angeles Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon)IT’S HARD NOW to recall fully the superheated hysteria that Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela generated when they started mamboing through the concert halls of Europe and North America in their yellow, red and blue jackets. I was still a teenager when I unsuspectingly attended their near-mythical concert at the London Proms in 2007; a grown adult snatched one of those jackets out of my hands as the players hurled them into the euphoric crowd. That same year, one critic called Dudamel and the Bolívars “the greatest show on Earth.”El Sistema, the education program from which the Bolívars emerged, later found itself caught in the darkening of Venezuelan politics; it took the fatal shooting of a young violist from the program, Armando Cañizales, during protests, for Dudamel to publicly oppose the regime of President Nicolás Maduro in 2017. He remains the music director of the Bolívars, who aged out of their youth orchestra billing long ago, and, last November he finally felt able to visit his homeland again after a long absence. In August, he will conduct the Bolívars for the first time in six years at the Edinburgh Festival. He sounds at his freest with this ensemble, which he calls “my family,” and their records together give a good, basic sense of his musical personality.Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5: FinaleSimón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (Deutsche Grammophon)At the heart of Dudamel’s ethos is joy in musicianship, and nowhere is that more apparent than in “Fiesta,” his infectious recording of Latin American music. Early on, he thrived on heightening the emotional content of a score, which explains the tempo extremes that make his Tchaikovsky — one release of “Francesca da Rimini” and the Fifth Symphony, the other of Shakespearean fantasies — so thrillingly explosive when he finally gets to the quick stuff. That trait he has since moderated, although a recent Los Angeles Philharmonic account of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony suggests that he has not wholly abandoned it.Other elements of Dudamel’s style are present and correct. He likes to emphasize the melodic shape of a work more than its harmonic grounding; a “Tristan” Prelude and Liebestod on an iffy Wagner collection is therefore pretty, but slack. There’s a certain rhythmic fluffiness, too, a reluctance to grant rhythms a precise character. That means a fervent “Rite of Spring” falls short of being properly barbaric, and the same issue weighs down the entirely different repertoire of his 2017 New Year’s Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, whose waltzes and polkas are often charming, but equally often lead-footed.A lot of this has to do with the sound that Dudamel prefers, or at least grew up with. The Bolívars were a colossal orchestra, a visual as well as a musical spectacle, and their tonal mass was blunt, overpowering. It’s no surprise that their conductor favors a full sound. That’s not necessarily a problem; what is, though, is that his sound, as microphones catch it, can seem flat.Sometimes that doesn’t matter so much: There is a patient Bruckner Ninth that satisfies despite its longueurs with the Gothenburg Symphony, which hosted Dudamel for an apprenticeship as its principal conductor from 2007 to 2012. But there isn’t enough tonal differentiation to enliven his Mussorgsky from Vienna or his Strauss with the Berlin Philharmonic, and the same issue creeps into some of his Mahler, including a Fifth Symphony with the Berliners that is more cautious and altogether less entertaining than the sweeping Fifth, with an endearingly drawn-out Adagietto, that he and the Bolívars set down in 2006. A Third from Berlin is similar: lucid, but not much more.Beethoven, Symphony No. 7: FinaleSimón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (Deutsche Grammophon)Then there is Dudamel’s Beethoven. His first recording with the Bolívars paired an unstable Fifth with a driving, bracing Seventh that is still astonishing to hear; alas, a subsequent “Eroica” is not; nor is a self-published cycle of the symphonies that dates to concerts in Venezuela in 2015. Slow and not entirely steady, this is such back-to-the-future Beethoven that it might have felt conservative two or three generations ago. I wouldn’t mind that if more of those readings were like his gratifying Fourth, and had the formal security and dramatic tension that this aesthetic demands.Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2012.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesIF THE LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC indeed became “the most important orchestra in America” during Dudamel’s tenure there, as the New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe wrote in 2017, that success has been only partially audible on record. The dismal economic realities of the streaming age are such that not even Dudamel, for all his fame, gets the chance to tinker with his interpretations in a studio as earlier generations of conductors could.Nor has Dudamel been able to preserve completely the loyalty to new music that he and his players have shown in performance. His recordings of Andrew Norman’s “Sustain” and Thomas Adès’s “Dante” ballet are hugely valuable, though I have heard Adès conduct parts of his score more audaciously. If nothing else, Dudamel’s Los Angeles discography matters as testimony to his support for John Adams: As well as pioneering accounts of “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” and “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?,” there is a wonderfully spirited “Slonimsky’s Earbox.”Brahms, Symphony No. 4: First MovementLos Angeles Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon)Caveats duly lamented, there is still enough to go on here. Dudamel’s early years at Walt Disney Concert Hall are well documented. Highlights include the exhilarating but soft-focused Bartok “Concerto for Orchestra” of his debut in January 2007, and an ambitiously mighty Brahms Fourth that won a Grammy Award. Most of the concert relays from that time are routine, though, and the uneven Mahler First from his inaugural gala in 2009 is worth hearing mostly as a baseline for the improvement in his later Los Angeles Mahler recordings. The warm, compassionate Ninth from 2012 could do with more snap and bite, but a tightly controlled Eighth from 2019 is effective.What remains odd, however, is that records that should have been easy home runs are not. It took five years for Deutsche Grammophon to release Dudamel’s “Nutcracker” after concerts in 2013, and although it is agreeable enough on a first listen, on a second it becomes clear why: rhythmic timidity, along with colors that are a few shades duller than fairy-light bright. For every touching moment in Dudamel’s 2019 homage to his friend John Williams, similar reservations lurk. When Williams conducts the “Imperial March,” he can both scare you with the Empire’s fully-operational battle power, as with the Berlin Philharmonic, and mock its vainglory, as with the Vienna Philharmonic. Dudamel makes no comment on it at all.It’s these kinds of things that make you wonder. The New York Philharmonic has hailed Dudamel as Leonard Bernstein resurrected, as the man who will return the orchestra to the stature that it has, in truth, enjoyed only periodically in its history. But whatever else Bernstein was, he was a distinctive conductor. Who knows? Maybe Dudamel can become one, too. But he has work to do. More

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      Classical Music to See and Hear in Spring 2023

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      This spring, Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director, conducts the big deal symphony, the Met Opera stages Terence Blanchard’s “Champion”; and in Chicago, Riccardo Muti says farewell.It was a hint about as subtle as a siren when the New York Philharmonic announced its current season a year ago: Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would be coming to New York as a guest in May 2023 to lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.One of the repertory’s most sprawling and profound works, Mahler’s Ninth has been played by the Philharmonic almost exclusively under the batons of its music directors. It’s not an assignment the orchestra gives rising hotshots or conductors it sees once a decade. It’s the kind of musically knotty, deeply emotional score you want led by the artists closest to you.That was just one of many suggestions that Dudamel, 42, would, before too long, join the ranks of New York music directors, a group that has included eminences like Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein and Boulez. And so it came to pass: Earlier this month, the Philharmonic said that he would succeed Jaap van Zweden in the position, for a five-year term beginning — because of classical music’s oddly glacial planning cycles — in the 2026-27 season.But before all that comes Mahler’s Ninth, which Dudamel has convincingly, with tenderness and naturally unfolding intensity, recorded with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The three New York performances, May 19-21, were already sure to be well attended, given the famous conductor and the beloved piece. Now, since the concerts will be Dudamel’s first appearances on the Philharmonic’s podium since the announcement, these will be some of the hottest tickets in town this spring.When Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–22 season, in a run that sold out several performances, it was a landmark: the first time the company had put on the work of a Black composer. Now Blanchard’s earlier opera, “Champion,” from 2013, is coming to the house, beginning April 10.As in “Fire,” themes of identity, sexuality and the negotiation of traumatic memories dominate. “Champion” tells the true story of the closeted gay boxer Emile Griffith, who knocked out his opponent, Benny Paret, during a 1962 title bout; Paret never recovered consciousness and died 10 days later. At the Met, two bass-baritones share the role of Griffith: Ryan Speedo Green plays him as a young athlete in his prime, and Eric Owens, as an aging man looking back on his complicated past.A scene from Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” in James Robinson’s production at Opera Theater of Saint Louis.Ken Howard/Opera Theatre of Saint LouisIn the wake of the box-office success of “Fire,” the Met — which has been struggling with ticket sales and said in December that it would withdraw $30 million from its endowment to cover costs — rushed “Champion” into production, part of a coming burst of contemporary operas aimed at broadening the audience. The staging reunites members of the team that helped make “Fire” vivid: the director James Robinson, the choreographer Camille A. Brown — the step dance routine that she conceived for “Fire” stopped the show — and the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Three veterans, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe and Paul Groves, round out the cast.It is unusual for the Met (or any company) to unveil two new productions of Mozart operas back to back. And even rarer for both to be led by one conductor: in this case, Nathalie Stutzmann, a former mezzo-soprano turned maestro making her Met debut on the podium for “Don Giovanni” and “Die Zauberflöte.”Replacing a dreary, unilluminating Michael Grandage production on May 5, the new “Giovanni” is an import from the Paris Opera, where the much-discussed Dutch director Ivo van Hove and his colleagues put onstage what Joshua Barone described in The New York Times as “a de Chirico-like set populated by handsomely dressed people in a state of sexy desperation.” (It can hardly help but be an improvement on the Grandage.)Stutzmann, who started at the Atlanta Symphony this season — the only female music director leading one of the 25 largest American orchestras — conducts a promising cast, including Peter Mattei, a star in the title role at the Met for the past 20 years, as well as Adam Plachetka, Federica Lombardi, Ana María Martínez, Ying Fang and Ben Bliss.The situation with “Die Zauberflöte,” opening on May 19, is slightly complicated. The Met is planning to retain its existing production — which the director Julie Taymor and the designer George Tsypin filled with plexiglass and fanciful puppets — in its abridged, English-language, family-friendly form as “The Magic Flute,” now a holiday-season tradition.Performed in full and in German, the new-to-the-company “Die Zauberflöte,” a much-traveled staging directed by Simon McBurney, has the orchestra spilling over onto risers placed onstage and contemporary-style costumes. Stutzmann’s cast here includes Erin Morley, Lawrence Brownlee, Thomas Oliemans, Kathryn Lewek and Stephen Milling.Dudamel’s appointment is perhaps the biggest news in music this season: a new beginning. But the other crucial conductor move in America this spring signals the end of an era.Riccardo Muti is bringing his 13 years leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to a close in June.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAt 81, Riccardo Muti — a fixture on the country’s major podiums since the 1970s and the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the ’80s — is bringing to a close a 13-year tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with performances of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25.Despite being an experienced Beethoven interpreter and a specialist in huge choral works, Muti stayed away from the notoriously thorny “Missa Solemnis” for decades, until he led it — with radiant dignity and grandeur — at the Salzburg Festival in 2021.“I always felt too small,” he said in an interview last year on Chicago radio, “never I felt ready to perform this huge monument, because it’s so deep, so vast.” Muti and other great conductors are not known for this kind of humility or patience, so these performances will be the fruit of uncommonly many years of study and thought.Given that the Chicago Symphony has not yet appointed his replacement, Muti will remain a crucial presence next season, and possibly beyond. But this “Missa Solemnis” — with the chorus coached by a distinguished guest, Donald Palumbo, the chorus master at the Met — is nevertheless sure to be a love fest between a superb orchestra and a conductor it has revered. More

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      Gustavo Dudamel, Superstar Maestro, Meets New York

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      On his first visit to the city since being named the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, he eagerly played the role of celebrity conductor.Gustavo Dudamel, groggy after a late-night flight from Los Angeles but still in good spirits, wandered into a roomful of New York Philharmonic employees, board members and donors on Monday afternoon and beamed.“I feel like Mickey Mouse,” he said as people approached to shake hands and pose for photos.It was Dudamel’s first visit to New York since being named the Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director — a post he will assume in 2026, after the conclusion of his tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic — and he was already playing the role of celebrity conductor.During his two-hour appearance at David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home, Dudamel, 42, offered few specifics about his vision, saying he needed more time to get to know the city and the orchestra. But he put on full display some of the qualities that made him the Philharmonic’s choice: charisma, charm and an ability to bring fresh excitement to classical music.He took part, with childlike giddiness, in a contract-signing ceremony. (“Are these presidential pens?” he asked as he prepared to put his name on the five-year document, which he had already signed electronically earlier this month, when the Philharmonic, in a major coup, poached him from Los Angeles.)He took questions from the Philharmonic’s leaders and the news media, weighing in on the future of classical music; his tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he has led since 2009; and his sports allegiances. (After initially declining to take sides in Mets versus Yankees, he said he was a fan of the Cardenales de Lara of Barquisimeto, Venezuela, his hometown; but also of the Los Angeles Dodgers, because of their Brooklyn heritage; and finally he declared, with an air of hesitation, “I love the Yankees, too.”)Dudamel with Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive. “I always said you would have a ticker-tape parade when you came to New York,” she said.James Estrin/The New York TimesAnd he mingled with the orchestra’s musicians, praising their sound; discussing Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, which they will perform together in May; and thanking them for the gifts they had provided while the orchestra worked to woo him. (He told the cellist Maria Kitsopoulos that her homemade cheesecake was a crucial reason he had decided to move to New York.)Christopher Martin, the orchestra’s principal trumpet, who helped lead the search for a music director, embraced him. Among the orchestra’s players, Dudamel was the favorite from the start.“This is like a dream, seeing you here,” Martin said. “Nobody can believe it.”Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, who hired Dudamel in Los Angeles in 2007, when he was 26, and spent the past year trying to lure him East, led a conversation with Dudamel on the stage of Geffen Hall before he took questions from the media.“I always said you would have a ticker-tape parade when you came to New York,” she said after cheers and whistles erupted in the hall.Dudamel said it was too early to lay out his plans for the orchestra, saying he did not want to impose his vision yet. But he reiterated his interest in creating an education program in New York similar to Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, known as YOLA, which is modeled on El Sistema, the Venezuelan social and artistic movement in which he trained.He quoted the Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in describing the need to do more to connect with residents, particularly in poor neighborhoods: “The freedom of the people is in their culture.” When a reporter suggested he might call the New York version of his youth orchestra “YONY,” Dudamel smiled, saying, “I love the name.”“This is part of my DNA: to work with young people, to work with communities, to bring the orchestra to the community,” he said. “The New York Philharmonic, as the center of the artistic and musical life of this city, has to play a role, a very important role, in education.”Dudamel will be the first Hispanic leader of the Philharmonic in a city where Latinos make up about 29 percent of the population. When a reporter from Telemundo, the Spanish-language network, asked what Dudamel made of this milestone, he said he had not given it much thought. Then he said he hoped his journey from Barquisimeto to some of the world’s most prestigious stages would be an inspiration.“This can be a model so that girls, boys, young people, can have the certainty that dreams can always be achieved,” he said. “You have to work deeply, have a lot of discipline, and a lot of love for what you do, but it can be achieved.”Throughout the day, a recurring topic was Dudamel’s hair, which has been a subject of fascination since he broke onto the international scene in his early 20s.During a reception, a board member, Angela Chen, asked why he kept it shorter now, compared with his early days. “It feels more fresh this way,” he said, moving his fingers through his famous curls, which have started to gray. “One day it will be very white.”Sort of presidential: Dudamel at the ceremonial signing, with the board co-chairs, Peter May, left, and Oscar Tang. Behind him are Gary Ginstling, the orchestra’s executive director, and Deborah Borda.James Estrin/The New York TimesAt the news conference, Dudamel said he was no longer a “young promise” but that he still felt connected to the energy of his youth.“When I was 24 — 23, 24, 25 — it was crazy; I was a wild animal, not only because of my hair,” he said. “I keep that wild animal Gustavo that is always there — only with less hair.”Dudamel at moments seemed to be still processing his coming move to New York, which he has described as one of the most difficult decisions of his life.When he saw the actor and filmmaker Bradley Cooper, a friend, before the news conference, he said being in New York felt surreal.“I don’t know where to place myself right now,” he told Cooper.On his phone, he showed Cooper a photograph he had seen in Geffen Hall of Leonard Bernstein, a storied predecessor at the Philharmonic with whom he is often compared. (Cooper is directing and starring in a coming film about Bernstein.) In the photo, Bernstein is standing in an elevator after a performance with his eyes closed.“That says everything,” Dudamel said. “That exhausted look. He gave everything for music.”At the end of his visit, Borda led Dudamel on a tour of Geffen Hall, which reopened last fall after a $550 million renovation. As Dudamel looked on, she scrolled through a digital display of the Philharmonic’s past music directors — Toscanini, Mahler, Pierre Boulez, Bernstein — comparing the length of their tenures. They stopped by the new restaurant adjacent to the lobby; on the way out, Dudamel, a whisky fan, marveled at a bottle of 18-year-old Macallan.In a brief interview before leaving, Dudamel said he was exhausted but happy to finally celebrate his appointment with the orchestra, which he has conducted 26 times since making his debut in 2007.“I feel that I am blessed in life to have the opportunity to come here — to have the opportunity to extend the family that I have built in Los Angeles,” he said. “There’s a connection between all of this. It’s a big step. It’s beautiful.” More

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      Gustavo Dudamel: A Maestro at a Crossroads

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      LOS ANGELES — Gustavo Dudamel paused mid-Rachmaninoff the other morning and flashed a mischievous smile at the 92 players of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.“This part,” he said as they rehearsed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, “is like that aunt who kisses you too much.” He puckered his lips loudly three times. “My dears,” he said, looking toward the violins, “let’s try it again.”He was back on the same podium where, just two days earlier, he had broken the news to the musicians, in a shaky and uncertain voice, that he would leave his post as their music and artistic director in 2026 to take on the same job at the New York Philharmonic. It was, he said, one of the hardest decisions of his life. But now he was back in his element, making music, swaying his hips and throwing his fist into the air, and imploring the players to “liberate every bit of gravity” from their playing — “to levitate.”Dudamel, 42, the rare maestro whose fame transcends classical music, finds himself at a crossroads: not only planning to move to a new orchestra, but also into a new phase of his career. Even as his curls have started to gray, he has never quite shed the image of a wunderkind, who at the age of 12 led his first orchestra in Venezuela, where he was born, and at 26 landed the job in Los Angeles.Dudamel backstage on Thursday at his first performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since he announced his move to New York.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“You cannot imagine how I have changed in these last years,” he said in an interview. “I’m not a young conductor anymore.”As Dudamel prepares to take the podium in New York, he is working to establish himself as a seasoned interpreter of the repertory — a maestro fluent in the symphonies of Mahler and Beethoven as well as less common fare, like a ballet by Ginastera. And he wants to continue to bring works by living composers into the mainstream.He is also eager to expand his legacy as a social activist — he was trained in El Sistema, the Venezuelan program that teaches music to children, many of them from poor families — from his coming platform in New York.“I see New York as a capital of the world, where I can send a message to the world that music is an important element of life — not only entertainment, but transformational,” he said.Dudamel has a devoted following in New York, where he was so admired that the Philharmonic decided to forgo a typical search for a music director, focusing its efforts instead on pursuing Dudamel like a “heat-seeking missile,” said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive. Players admire his passion and humility; unlike most conductors, he in known for abstaining from solo bows after performances, instead preferring to gesture to highlight the contributions of the members of the orchestra.The film composer John Williams, a friend and mentor, described Dudamel as a “blessing to music” and predicted that he would be a transformative force in New York.“I can’t think of another conductor, man or woman, that I know that derives more sheer joy from music,” he said. “I don’t think you could have a better leader — a more positive person — to admit freely all kinds of things into our world, and at the same time maintain all the best traditions.”Dudamel stepping onto the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesSome have likened Dudamel to earlier titans like Leonard Bernstein, a predecessor at the New York Philharmonic, speaking of his potential to become a larger-than-life figure and to elevate the orchestra’s standing in American cultural life. Others question whether he is the product of hype. It is a lot of pressure.“Of course we will have challenges,” he said. “That is part of the beauty. Every day that you are in front of an orchestra, that you’re in front of a score of music, it’s a new challenge.”“To be afraid or worried about the risk of making mistakes is not in my head,” he added. “Never! Because I think risk is a part of life.”GUSTAVO ADOLFO DUDAMEL RAMÍREZ was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, on Jan. 26, 1981, the son of Oscar Dudamel Vásquez, a trombonist who played in a salsa band, and Solange Ramírez Viloria, a voice teacher. His arms were too short to play trombone like his father, so he took up the violin.His grandparents initially tried to discourage his studies, worried about having another musician in the family.“One time my husband told me, ‘Can you imagine if our grandson is a violinist? Who will be able to stand all the noise in the house?’” Engracia Vásquez de Dudamel, his grandmother, recalled in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper Hoy in 2009.But the family relented, and Gustavo enrolled in El Sistema, where his talents as a conductor were soon recognized by José Antonio Abreu, the celebrated Venezuelan educator who had founded what became El Sistema in 1975.Abreu took on Dudamel as a pupil, teaching him rhythm and phrasing, and honing his technique as a conductor, telling him to feel sound in his hands the way a flying bird feels air. He appointed Dudamel to lead the national youth orchestra and inculcated in him the zeal of an evangelist, enlisting him in his effort to spread the “social mission of art.”Dudamel said that he wants to “send a message to the world that music is an important element of life — not only entertainment, but transformational.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIn 2004, Dudamel became a sensation after he won the first Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany. One of the jurors in the competition, the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (then the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) phoned Borda (then the orchestra’s president) and told her he had just seen “a real conducting animal.”She invited Dudamel to make his American debut at the Hollywood Bowl the following year, in a program of works by Tchaikovsky and the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas.“In his U.S. debut Tuesday night, a 24-year-old conductor from Venezuela with curly hair, long sideburns and a baby face accomplished something increasingly rare and difficult,” the Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote of that performance. “He got a normally restive audience’s full, immediate and rapt attention. And he kept it.”Dudamel’s New York Philharmonic debut, in 2007, was just as memorable — especially after he broke a baton once used by Bernstein, which the orchestra had lent him, near the end of the concert, in the last few measures of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. (The baton, still in two pieces, remains in the Philharmonic’s archives.)At his New York Philharmonic debut in 2007, Dudamel was given one of Leonard Bernstein’s batons. It broke during the last few measures of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Philharmonic ArchivesWhen he began his tenure in Los Angeles, in 2009, Dudamel quickly became a celebrity, forging ties with Hollywood and capturing the imagination of audiences who were unaccustomed to classical music.He set out to develop the ensemble’s sound; he has hired 42 of its musicians, about 40 percent of the orchestra. And he sought to continue Abreu’s mission, creating the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, known as YOLA, which was modeled on El Sistema.During his directorship, the Philharmonic continued to rethink the role of a modern orchestra, making the promotion of new music a priority. The ensemble, one of the most financially secure in the United States thanks to the box office revenues it gets from the Hollywood Bowl, has commissioned more than 200 works during Dudamel’s time there and brought in pop and jazz stars, helping cement its reputation for innovation.The composer John Adams, a frequent collaborator, said that Dudamel arrived in Los Angeles a “babe in the woods when it came to contemporary repertoire.”“Then he discovered he liked it,” Adams said. “And now he’s not only a wonderful interpreter, but just a wonderful champion.”As part of his focus on new music, Dudamel has sought to elevate composers from Latin America, often lamenting that the region’s composers are barely known compared to its writers and visual artists.The Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz said that Dudamel had been crucial in promoting her music, adding that it could be difficult for female composers from Latin America to gain recognition. She recalled a 2017 concert at which he featured one of her compositions before a performance by the Mexican pop singer Natalia Lafourcade, greatly expanding the audience for her music.“He’s an extremely generous person,” she said. “I’ve never felt I was with this infamous conductor where always there is some huge distance. I’ve always felt very, very close.”In 2021, Dudamel became the music director of the Paris Opera, looking to expand his repertory and build more ties to Europe, where he has been a welcome guest at prestigious orchestras including the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. (His wife, the Spanish actress and filmmaker María Valverde, is from Madrid, and the couple maintain a home there.)Dudamel is known for forgoing solo bows, often preferring to highlight the contributions of the orchestra. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesDudamel’s ties to Venezuelan leaders, whose support was vital for El Sistema, have drawn scrutiny. He conducted at the funeral of President Hugo Chávez, and for years he resisted criticizing the government, even as a series of social and economic crises worsened in the country.In “¡Viva Maestro!,” a documentary about Dudamel released last year, he spoke about the pressure he faced, not wanting to harm El Sistema. “I’m a leader of a program,” he said. “It’s not Gustavo only. It’s thousands of children, millions of young people.”After a young El Sistema-trained viola player was killed during a street protest in 2017, Dudamel decided to speak out. “It was very difficult to see my people fighting, to see my people suffering and getting to a very violent moment,” he explained in the documentary.He issued a statement that said “enough is enough” and wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times, criticizing a government plan to rewrite the constitution. President Nicolás Maduro responded by canceling overseas tours by Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, which he has led since 1999. Many players in that group, which had been a source of national pride, left the country. And Dudamel, who had last visited Venezuela in 2017, felt unable to return, even for the funeral of Abreu, his mentor, who died the following year. Instead he arranged a memorial concert in Santiago, Chile.Dudamel finally returned to Venezuela a few months ago, shortly after touring with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Boston, New York and Mexico.As he pondered his next steps, he went to Barquisimeto to reconnect with what he described as “the genesis of my life as a musician.” He caught up with friends and family. He met with students and teachers in El Sistema. And he visited Abreu’s home, sitting in his studio and looking through his books.Dudamel said that his teacher, whom he calls “maestro” and speaks of as a father, remained “in my soul and in my brain.” He contemplated what Abreu would have made of his move to New York.“I was part of a vision — of his vision,” he said. “He saw me when I was a 9-year-old boy in Barquisimeto. I think he saw this. He saw me being in New York with the New York Philharmonic. I’m sure of that.”He added: “I can see him. I can feel him. And I believe he is happy. He’s very happy.”Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Joshua Barone from New York. More

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      Review: No Dudamel Yet, but a Celebration at the Philharmonic

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      Esa-Pekka Salonen led the New York Philharmonic the day after Gustavo Dudamel was named as its next music director.If critics ruled the world — hope springs eternal — Esa-Pekka Salonen might be the New York Philharmonic’s music director right now. A conductor and composer, incisive and dryly funny, with a broad and quirky repertory, he was favored by some of us during the process that resulted in the selection of Jaap van Zweden in 2016.Who knows how long Salonen would have stayed in the job, but van Zweden is leaving after next season, just a few years into his tenure. And on Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced that Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would replace him.Dudamel, though, is conducting on the West Coast this week. He’s coming to New York for a news conference on Feb. 20, then doesn’t lead his new orchestra until May. Because of classical music’s glacial planning cycles, it won’t be until 2026 that he officially takes up the podium.So, by coincidence, it was Salonen — Dudamel’s predecessor in Los Angeles and now the music director of the San Francisco Symphony — who led the Philharmonic’s first concert since the appointment, on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall. (One for the annals of bad timing: Just last week, the two men and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony unveiled, with much hoopla, the California Festival, a coming joint venture.)If any performance could have captured the excitement the Philharmonic is feeling —  look at the photo published in The New York Times of Judith LeClair, the principal bassoon, erupting when she learned the Dudamel news — it was the joyful rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that closed Wednesday’s program.Under Salonen, the first movement steadily gained tension and excitement from the alternation — and sometimes the superimposition — of rough, abrupt accents and silkily long legato lines. He was unafraid of dramatic elongations of transitional passages: the short prelude to the Vivace section, the exchange of quietly wistful material through the winds later on.The Allegretto second movement, which under some batons can feel like an adagio dirge, was here remarkably flexible, neither too slow nor too heavy. The third movement began with a blitheness that gave the weighty trio section true grandeur by contrast. A whooshing start to the finale was soon, once again, grounded in those legato lines, headlong but fundamentally guided.It was interesting to compare with the excellent interpretation of Beethoven’s Second Symphony here last month by Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Written merely a decade before the Seventh, it is a vestige of the vanishing world of Classicism, and Rouvali scrupulously avoided breathlessness, any sense of losing rhythmic clarity and control.But in Salonen’s take on the more bacchic Seventh, you got a sense of revelry in the way this music is intricately constructed to seem on the verge of falling apart. Near the end of the first movement, there was the proper, slightly exhilarating, slightly queasy-making impression of different parts of the orchestra simultaneously speeding up and slowing down.It was appropriate in a week of Philharmonic pride that the soloist earlier in the program was drawn from the ranks of the orchestra: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet, who was featured in the American premiere of Salonen’s “kínēma.” Replace the “k” with a “c” and you get the idea; the piece was drawn from plans for a film score.Salonen said from the stage that the roughly half-hour work, composed during the pandemic lockdown and scored for strings alone, was “practically” a clarinet concerto — made up of five “scenes” that he compared to individual rooms, each without the ranging or development we usually expect within concerto movements. (For those who wanted development, he said to laughter, there was the Beethoven symphony to come after intermission.)The first scene is a shining, dewy dawn; the second, a soft, easygoing aria over a steady repeating bass line; the third, a bright, pizzicato accompaniment to a skipping, spattering clarinet; the fourth, a restrained elegy punctuated by sudden, swiftly abandoned surges.The fifth begins with hymnlike solemnity, reminiscent of a sunset, with the violins making a high, smooth spearing sound that shades into the tone of the clarinet. Unexpectedly aggressive, sharply rhythmic music follows — this seems to be the material that Salonen joked earlier was an echo of “Psycho” — accompanied by siren cries from the soloist.It felt odd to be unleashing so much drama at the very end, a big release of something that was never quite built up. But “kínēma” isn’t unpleasant, and McGill was a stylishly reserved soloist, not one to impose himself even in virtuosic passages — his tone mellow yet direct, sweet and refreshing.The concert — beginning with Luciano Berio’s elegantly wry, 20th-century layering of four versions of an 18th-century Luigi Boccherini quintet — was a spirited union of new and old, and an aptly stirring celebration of exciting news.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More