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      The New York Philharmonic’s Season of Mixed Boons

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      The orchestra’s renovated hall and Gustavo Dudamel, its next leader, have kept ticket sales robust, but cool acoustics curb the music’s impact.David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s gut-renovated home at Lincoln Center, isn’t perfect.The decorating tends cheesy and clashing — even if seating that wraps around the stage has done wonders for intimacy. And the sound, for all its improvements on the old acoustics, leans coolly antiseptic.But for the orchestra, which ends its first season in what is essentially a new hall this weekend, Geffen has been a kind of talisman.Last fall, when performing arts groups around the country were blindsided by theaters half-full (and worse), the excitement of the hall’s reopening insulated the Philharmonic from a similar fate. Sales have been robust all season.In February, another talisman appeared: the star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who was named the orchestra’s next music director. Though Dudamel won’t raise his baton at Geffen next season — and though classical music’s bizarrely stretched planning cycles mean he won’t officially start until 2026 — there was already a clear sense of his power as an audience draw in his three sold-out concerts in May.Dudamel is probably the only figure capable of putting such an exclamation point on the unveiling of the hall, a $550 million project. And an exclamation point on the season, as he conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony — an extreme and emotional, expansive yet focused piece particularly treasured by this orchestra, which its composer conducted for a brief but memorable stint just before his death in 1911.Gustavo Dudamel, who will succeed van Zweden as music director, conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May.James Estrin/The New York TimesI attended all three performances, trying to get the fullest possible sense of what might come from the relationship of this maestro to this orchestra and this space. The message was mixed.The first performance, a Friday evening, sounded fine, the players poised. But poise is hardly the takeaway you want from Mahler’s harrowing Ninth; there was nothing intense or uncomfortable about this interpretation, nothing personal or inexorable.The first movement progressed with bland serenity. The middle movements danced pleasantly, without a hint of the manic. The Adagio finale, its own epic journey of agony and relief, was mild-mannered. The third performance, a Sunday matinee, was much the same.But the middle go, on Saturday night, offered a glimpse of a more vital alchemy. The quality of the playing remained high — and was now infused with some of Dudamel’s oft-mentioned but not always apparent vibrancy.Those inner movements had taken on menacing bite, whipping between contrasting sections; the Adagio was a deeper evocation of stillness and fragility. This was not profound or moving Mahler, but it had a spark.At these concerts, as throughout the season, there was a sense that Geffen Hall, rather than bringing together this mass of instruments in a blooming blend, was etching the sound, hard, in the air.While orchestras take a good, long time to fully adjust to new homes, after a full season it can be said: Geffen’s acoustics seem lucid and balanced, but also stiff and stark, the sonic equivalent of the blond-wood auditorium’s cold, harsh lighting, which makes you squint a bit as you enter and floods the stage during performances.These qualities make it better suited to certain repertoire — Romantic sumptuousness is particularly hard to come by — and the Philharmonic is going to have to work hard to build the richness of its sound if the hall isn’t going to help.Susanna Mälkki conducting Claire Chase (on flute) and Esperanza Spalding (singing, on bass) in Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto.Chris LeeWhat also isn’t going to help, unfortunately, is the Philharmonic’s current music director, Jaap van Zweden, who has seemed an overshadowed guest at his own party since Geffen’s reopening and Dudamel’s appointment. Van Zweden, who finishes his short tenure next season, has a tough, blunt style — a “Pines of Rome” of bludgeoning volume in October, a sludgy “Turangalîla-Symphonie” in March — that emphasizes the hall’s acoustic shortcomings rather than relieving them.The concerts at which those shortcomings were least noticeable were, by and large, led by guests. The conductor Hannu Lintu made his Philharmonic debut in November with a cogent, precise program of Stravinsky, Bartok (the rarely played Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion), Kaija Saariaho and Sibelius. At the end of that month, the hall’s acoustics were actually a boon, helping cut the fat in what could have been an overly indulgent program of French works, led by Stéphane Denève with a kaleidoscopic sleekness well suited to the space.Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted a raucous rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in February, a week before Thomas Adès’s superb 2008 piano concerto “In Seven Days” — which should be a repertory staple — returned to the Philharmonic for the first time in 12 years. Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto, an exuberant showcase for Claire Chase (on a battery of flutes) and Esperanza Spalding (singing and playing double bass), had a sensational New York premiere in March under Susanna Mälkki.Last month, a blistering program of Prokofiev’s Third Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, with the dazzling, preternaturally mature 19-year-old Yunchan Lim as soloist, was as much a showcase for the gifted conductor James Gaffigan as it was for Lim. When will Gaffigan get an American orchestra?The conductor James Gaffigan and the teenage pianist Yunchan Lim joined for Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto in May.Chris LeeBut there was no more poignant and musically stimulating spectacle this season than the return to the podium in February of Herbert Blomstedt, who, at 95, guided with utter control Ingvar Lidholm’s sternly elegant “Poesis,” a work whose premiere Blomstedt presided over in 1963.Back in those days, the Philharmonic’s then-new hall was already being criticized for its acoustics. For decades there didn’t seem to be the will to fix it, and the current leaders of the orchestra and Lincoln Center deserve great praise for finally bringing the project over the finish line.The public areas are roomier now, and capacity has been cut; you still wait for the bathroom at intermission, but not nearly as long as you used to. In quiet, glistening music, like some of John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives” in October, Geffen offers a transparent sonic window.But in concertos by composers as varied as Mozart, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, whether for violinist or pianist, the soloists recede a bit too thoroughly into the orchestral textures. At top volume and density, there’s blare where there should be grandeur. And when real warmth is needed, as in the symphonies of Mahler or Florence Price, there’s the small but important lack of bloom and build, of resonance.The audiences and excitement are there in the hall. But the full impact of the music isn’t. More

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      Review: Julia Wolfe’s ‘unEarth’ Is Crowded Out by Multimedia

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      Not for the first time this season at the New York Philharmonic, a premiere was muddled by obvious, sometimes intrusive video art.Since moving back into David Geffen Hall this season, the New York Philharmonic has tried to use its newly renovated, technologically adept space to give extra multimedia glamour to a few premieres.Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill” opened the season in October, and dealt directly with the midcentury displacement of economically vulnerable populations on the blocks that became Lincoln Center. “The March to Liberation,” a program in March featuring the music of Black composers, was accompanied by video art.On both occasions, I felt that the multimedia — however sensitively rendered — undercut my experience of the music. During “San Juan Hill,” Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, would be building a real rapport, and momentum, with Charles’s group Creole Soul; but then there would be a pause for a lengthy new interjection of video commentary. And a new work by Courtney Bryan during “The March to Liberation” was so transporting, I at times found myself closing my eyes to avoid having my experience filtered so strongly through the lens of another artist.I felt the need to close my eyes again on Thursday, when van Zweden led the Philharmonic in another buzzy premiere that showed off the multimedia capabilities of Geffen Hall. It happened during the imaginative second movement of Julia Wolfe’s “unEarth” — the latest in her recent series of oratorio-like protest efforts, which served as the opening of two weeks of ecologically minded programming.During that second movement, Wolfe — a Pulitzer Prize winner and a founder of the influential Bang on a Can collective — amasses a powerful mix of sonorities: chattering, antiphonal choral music (often heard uttering the word “tree” in different languages); percussion indebted to gamelan tradition; punchy orchestral writing; intense electric guitar lines that, as played by her regular collaborator Mark Stewart, were biting but not too imitative of rock styles.After the solemn choral writing in the first movement — which drew on the combined talents of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and male singers from the Crossing — this mix of sounds was a welcome transition. The writing for Stewart’s guitar was a reminder of the muscular verve heard in the “Breaker Boys” movement from Wolfe’s “Anthracite Fields” (2014), for which she won that Pulitzer. And in moving from dry orchestral ruffling to powerful tutti riffing, this section of “unEarth” also recalled the “Factory” movement of her “Fire in my mouth” (2019), which the Philharmonic premiered and memorably recorded.When the soprano Else Torp entered — with beaming, stratospheric straight-tone singing that quoted Emily Dickinson’s “Who robbed the woods” — this movement of Wolfe’s piece proved delightfully, consistently weird. But it was a weirdness in service of dramatically clear ends, since the whole thing worked as a sonic commentary on the wonders of biodiversity.The piece was designed for both amplified and acoustic sounds, which van Zweden kept in balance. The animated projections that accompanied “unEarth,” however, were far less imaginative than the score; the video played instead like a slideshow of each language’s word for “tree,” along with some local arboreal information at the margins. The music was an impassioned litany; the multimedia amounted to a listicle.When a stage director (Anne Kauffman), projection designer (Lucy Mackinnon), two animators and four video technicians are listed in the program — while soloists like Stewart and the electric bassist Gregg August are not — that’s another sign that the multimedia urge has transgressed a bit much on the Philharmonic’s presentation of, you know, music.This same literalism of the video art held sway, in sound and image, during the third and final movement of “unEarth,” in which Wolfe sets some texts contributed by the younger singers to droning yet anxious music. Here, the projections — portraits similar to screen tests, featuring members of the Young People’s Chorus — were of a piece with the music: serious, but a bit too obvious to be moving.The entire concert was something of a muddle, down to the random-seeming pairing of “unEarth” with Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, in which the solo part’s difficulty was often audible in the account by Frank Huang, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster.Next week’s program seems to be on firmer conceptual footing, though. The orchestra will present Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes From ‘Peter Grimes,’” Toru Takemitsu’s “I hear the water dreaming” and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s majestic “Become Desert.”Most important: On those nights, the focus will be entirely on the music.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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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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      Review: András Schiff Wears Two Hats at the New York Philharmonic

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      Taking a cue from Mozart, András Schiff appeared with the New York Philharmonic as both piano soloist and conductor.There was a time, during darker days of the pandemic, when orchestral concerts departed from their usual formats — worn-down cookie cutters of a curtain-raiser, concerto and symphony — and turned into something more unpredictable, and open-minded.Out of an abundance of caution, ensembles avoided repertoire like the immense works of Mahler and instead turned to smaller-scale music, sometimes rarities and often from the Classical and Baroque eras. String quartets shared billing with Lieder and chamber symphonies. Concerts began to look more like variety shows.But as masks requirements loosened and vaccine records stopped doubling as passports, classical music started to look more like its old self, and not for the best. Once again, any concert with more than three works stands out as a treat — such as the New York Philharmonic’s performance with the pianist András Schiff acting as both soloist and conductor, at David Geffen Hall on Friday.Like a concert from the era of pandemic livestreams, it consisted of two Classical piano concertos and two orchestral works, with a changing ensemble size that, at its largest, was still small. Schiff’s appearance was part of his residency with the orchestra, a series that began with a solo recital on Tuesday and continues this week with a comparatively traditional program in which he will play Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, and a chamber music afternoon at the 92nd Street Y next Sunday.Schiff approached Friday’s program more as he would one of his recitals, which these days are long but often rewarding, essayistic assemblages announced from the stage rather than advertised in advance. He contrasted concertos in D major and minor, and made explicit the connections between two Mozart works — arguments that were more persuasive from the keyboard than from his perch as conductor.Leading from the piano is a throwback to Mozart’s time, and can be fascinating to witness. When Mitsuko Uchida does it, for example, she treats the orchestra as an extension of her instrument — a mode of expression somewhat perversely, but beautifully, in service of her interpretation. Onstage at Geffen Hall, Schiff had more the appearance of a fan beating along to a recording, gesturing with the music instead of truly guiding it.Because of that, the purely orchestral sections of the program were the weakest. Schiff, as in his touch at a keyboard, relished the extremes of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony — the opening truly pianissimo, the forzando notes truly explosive. But without much else in the way of an overarching vision, the piece grew indistinct by the second movement, which, in taking its time, also lost its sense of shape and direction, an andante con moto without its moto. After intermission, the Overture from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” music that punishes any performance that falls short of precise, was more of the same: hellfire-frightening chords at the start, then an insistent emphasis on articulation, patient to the point of slackness, over broader phrasing.It was nevertheless a gift to hear this repertoire — beloved, if overprogrammed — in the renovated Geffen Hall for the first time. So far, as the Philharmonic adjusts to its new home and the auditorium undergoes further tuning, smaller-scale works have benefited most from the more generous acoustics. The last time I came across Schubert’s “Unfinished” there, under Alan Gilbert’s baton in 2015, the low strings were virtually inaudible in the mood-setting, crucial opening bars; on Friday they rumbled, immediate and under the skin.And the hall’s transparent sound rewarded the lean wit of Haydn’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in D, at the top of the program. Here, Schiff was more in his element: stately, with a kind of dry humor in the cadenzas, his touch often gentle but, when sharp, amplified by the bright sound of his Bösendorfer piano.He followed the “Don Giovanni” Overture, attacca, with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 — treating them as one, and emphasizing their shared dark-to-light journeys from D minor to major. Schiff’s entrance in the first movement may have been overly strong, turbulent where moody would do, but his solos in the Romanze were exquisitely arialike.Schiff’s most characterful work, though, was in the Rondo finale, in which he rendered the cadenza as a grander conclusion, interjecting the “Don Giovanni” chords, then layering the overture and the concerto in clever counterpoint. Playful and unexpected, it was reflective of an artist who, even if not thoroughly successful on one night, possesses an undeniably brilliant musical mind.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats on Sunday and Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Lincoln Center Chooses Hearst Chief as Next Board Chair

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      Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, will replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Lincoln Center faces a series of challenges in the coming years: recovering from the pandemic, reaching new audiences and making its campus more welcoming to the public.Now it will have a new board chair to help tackle those priorities: Steven R. Swartz, president and chief executive of Hearst, whom the center announced on Thursday would replace Katherine G. Farley, the longtime chair, in June.Swartz, who has been a Lincoln Center board member since 2012, said in an interview that he would continue the vision of Farley and Henry Timms, the center’s president and chief executive, who have worked to broaden its appeal beyond classical music and ballet into genres like hip-hop, poetry and songwriting.“We’ve really done an amazing job of making our campus and our programming open and accessible and inclusive,” he said. “We just want to keep it going.”Farley, who took over as board chair in 2010, said in an interview that she thought it was time for a change after the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, which reopened last fall, a year and a half ahead of schedule.Farley was a major force behind the renovation, a project that had languished for years, working with the leadership of the New York Philharmonic, including its president and chief executive, Deborah Borda, and the chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang. She secured a gift of $100 million from Geffen, the entertainment mogul, in 2015 to help kick-start the renovation. (Lincoln Center, the nation’s largest performing arts complex, owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord.)“The hall is finished, all the money’s been raised, our budget is balanced,” Farley said. “It just seemed like this was the right time to pass the baton.”During her tenure, she worked to bring more racial and gender diversity to Lincoln Center’s executive ranks, helping create a fellowship to build a pipeline of board members for the entire campus.She also faced criticism during her tenure, including during a turbulent time in the mid-2010s when the center endured leadership churn and financial woes.Swartz praised Farley, describing her tenure as an “extraordinary chairmanship.” She will remain on the board’s executive committee.He said that under his leadership the center would try to reach the broadest possible audience.“Now as the city looks to recover from the pandemic,” he said, “I think the arts give us hope and give us inspiration, and they give people across the city, from all walks of life, just much-needed entertainment.” More

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      Yo-Yo Ma Makes His Encore a Call for Peace, With a Nod to Casals

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      The celebrated cellist capped a concert with the New York Philharmonic with a work that Pablo Casals often played to protest war and oppression.Listen to This ArticleAfter a rousing performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to the stage for an encore.But rather than rush into a familiar crowd-pleaser, Ma began speaking from the stage of David Geffen Hall to the sold-out crowd. He explained the work he would play: “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song that was a favorite of the eminent cellist Pablo Casals, who performed it as a call for peace and to evoke his native Catalonia, which he had fled when he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Elgar Cello Concerto was written in 1919, right after the Great War — the Great War that we said would never happen again,” Ma told the audience of about 2,200 people, speaking without a microphone.Then he spoke of Casals who, after World War II, suspended his concert career to protest the decision of the Allies not to try to topple Franco in Spain. “And the only times he would play would be to play this piece,” Ma noted, “which is from his native Catalonia, a folk song that he thought symbolized freedom.”In a telephone interview, Ma said his aim was to remind people of their shared humanity at a time when there is so much strife and suffering in the world, including in Ukraine.“The question is, why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” he said.Ma said that music was a way of coping “in a world where we have both empathy deficit and empathy fatigue.”“How many of us think about World War I or World War II?” he said. “How many of us think about Rwanda or about the Rohingya? These all become distant very quickly in our first world. But for people in other parts of the world, it’s constant, it doesn’t go away.”“I don’t have an answer,” he added. “I’m trying to find a way of coping myself. And maybe at some level playing music is a way of engaging people in the common search of who we are, and who we want to be.”Ma has long been fond of “Song of the Birds,” which he has often performed in the past.In the interview, he said the piece was powerful in part because it highlighted the special abilities of birds.“They literally can have altitude and perspective on our world and have the freedom to cross all our boundaries and borders,” he said. “There is something just wondrous about that. And we’re part of the same world. Can we learn from that and hopefully not make the same sort of mistakes over and over again?”Since the Russian invasion last year, Ma has used music to show solidarity with Ukraine. He performed the Ukrainian national anthem last year with the pianist Emanuel Ax and the violinist Leonidas Kavakos before a concert at the Kennedy Center. He also played a Bach cello suite on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.Casals, regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time, fled Spain in the late 1930s, saying he would not return until democracy was restored. Living in the French border town of Prades, he worked to raise money for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, writing letters to officials, charities, journalists and others seeking support.He would perform “Song of the Birds,” or “El Cant dels Ocells,” at the end of his music festivals in Prades and the scattered concerts he played in exile. He played it in 1961 at the White House for President John F. Kennedy. And he performed it again when he visited the United Nations in 1971, two years before he died, to deliver an antiwar message.“The birds in the sky, in the space, in the space, sing ‘peace, peace, peace,’” Casals said. “The music is a music that Bach and Beethoven and all the greats would have loved and admired. It is so beautiful and it is also the soul of my country, Catalonia.”Ma has often paid tribute to Casals, calling him a hero. He played for the eminent cellist in 1962, when he was 7 and Casals was 85. Casals helped launch Ma’s career when he brought the prodigy to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who introduced Ma at a performance at the White House that same year before an audience that included President Kennedy.In the interview, Ma recalled visiting Casals’s summer home in Spain in 2019, which now houses a museum, where he saw his letters of protest and pleas to help refugees.“Casals showed me, even as a young boy, that he had his priorities,” he said. “He was a human being first, a musician second and a cellist third.”Audio produced by 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