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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

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      Review: Dalia Stasevska Returns to the New York Philharmonic

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      Dalia Stasevska returned to the orchestra’s podium with a world premiere and subtly linked works by Tchaikovsky and Sibelius.The opening of the New York Philharmonic’s concert on Friday took a step toward solving one problem while exposing another.Wang Lu’s “Surge,” given its world premiere at the top of the show, is the product of an initiative by the League of American Orchestras to commission new works from six composers — all women — that will be guaranteed performances from ensembles across the country.So far, so good. Too often, premieres have short rehearsal periods; then, unless future performances are lined up, or unless soloists champion concertos written for them, the music can easily disappear. The League’s project at least gives contemporary work a fighting chance at longevity.I hope, however, that the other premieres to come out of this initiative don’t have the running time of “Surge.” At a mere six minutes, it was shorter than all but one movement in the classics that followed at David Geffen Hall on Friday: Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Sibelius’s Second Symphony.Larger commissions are certainly possible. A week ago, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis” took up the first 20 minutes of the Philharmonic’s program; last season in Los Angeles, an entire evening was given over to Thomas Adès’s 100-minute “Dante.” Imagine the League’s group of orchestras nurturing music on the scale of symphony. Then they might tackle what is perhaps the problem of world premieres: that, as brief curtain-raisers unrelated to the rest of a concert, they tend to just read as perfunctory exercises in box-ticking.That said, Wang’s piece has the elements of an enormous score skillfully accordioned into the shape of a much smaller one. From the flourish of its first measure, “Surge” is a restless succession of swinging gestures, martial flashes and exercises in disparate, assertive voices coming in and out of focus, then occasionally finding common ground in a tutti mass. It all had the feel of a TikTok binge: an endless and entrancing stream of much of the same in short, slightly different bursts. The music ended before it became exhausting — but, like TikTok, left you wanting more.At the podium was Dalia Stasevska, in her second appearance with the Philharmonic. Her debut last season proved her bona fides in contemporary music, with a whirlwind trio of works by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams. Friday’s premiere was equally impressive; Stasevska led the Wang with verve, commitment and, above all, clarity (despite distractingly wide-armed conducting mannerisms that could qualify as a cardio workout).The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, a longtime outspoken critic of Russia, performed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in a gown design to resemble the Ukrainian flag.Chris LeeThe rest of the program was another kind of test: standard repertory. For the Tchaikovsky, she was joined by the Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, in characteristically elegant and modestly electrifying form, with a focused, penetrating sound. In this piece, the orchestra mostly plays a supporting role to the singingly Romantic solo part. But ensemble moments were nevertheless distinct; the introduction alone seemed to inhale and exhale its phrases, and the cellos’ freely beating fifths in the finale set the tone for the rubato and joyously dancing liveliness that Batiashvili has previously brought to folk-inflected music by the likes of Szymanowski.It was the kind of performance that, without trying to, had audience members roaring with applause after the first movement, then, at the end, immediately rising for a standing ovation — one of the most passionate I’ve heard at Geffen Hall this season. They had a similar response to the Sibelius, which here was anxiously brisk and occasionally furious.The symphony can come off as an exercise in motivic obsession on the level of Beethoven’s Fifth, and even has that work’s style of a soaringly ecstatic finale. But Stasevska’s heavily opinionated interpretation was unusual from the start; the slurred tenuto phrases of the strings, rather than gentle waves approaching a shore, were a ride along a bumpy road. With a liberal treatment of tempo markings, passages were pushed and pulled, some relished and others simply rushed. The last movement was an uncertain triumph, with a suggestion of continuing struggle, until Stasevska savored the radiance of the closing measures’ chords.Throughout, it was difficult to avoid seeing this idiosyncratic account as a personal one. Stasevska lives in Finland but was born in Ukraine, which she has been fervently supporting — through fund-raising, through driving trucks packed with supplies across its border — since Russia’s invasion nearly a year ago. Batiashvili, too, has long been outspoken against Russia and the classical musicians who have benefited from its leadership, especially the conductor Valery Gergiev. On Friday, she performed wearing a gown in the stark blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was written in the glory days of Imperial Russia — an empire that included Finland as a grand duchy subjected, by the time Sibelius’s Second Symphony premiered in 1902, to severe policies of Russification. Sibelius denied as much, but listeners heard in this work an outcry for national pride and independence. To them, the music could never be met with a neutral response. And it’s just as impossible to have one to Stasevska, neither to her life nor to her passionately argued performance.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Around New York, Different Ways of Hearing Handel’s ‘Messiah’

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      Two performances, at Trinity Church Wall Street and the New York Philharmonic, were similar yet showed how beauty emerges in divergence.We have arrived at that point in the holiday season when it seems as though you could attend a different performance of Handel’s “Messiah” every few days.On Friday and Saturday, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street returned to their newly restored home, Trinity Church Wall Street, for their first “Messiah” there since 2018. The fresh stained-glass facade, illuminated from within, shined like a beacon to concertgoers approaching from down the street. Inside, the narrow nave seemed to huddle everyone together for a communal purpose.A few days later, on Tuesday, the New York Philharmonic, joined by the Handel and Haydn Society, began a five-day “Messiah” run at its own recently remodeled home, David Geffen Hall. The lobby — conceived as a gathering space with seating areas, a bar and furnishings so mundane they must have been designed to be unintimidating — bustled with audience members and laptop users. Poinsettias lined the brightly lit stage in the auditorium.The venues did more than set a mood; they participated in the performance. Each one’s distinctive acoustics complemented the ensemble’s style. If Trinity felt more immersive, and the Philharmonic more pro forma, they both offered memorable qualities that made a case for the city’s annual “Messiah” abundance.The Trinity players were performing “Messiah” in their home venue for the first time since 2018.Calla KesslerIn the coming days, the festivities accelerate. Kent Tritle leads two ensembles in “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall: on Monday, the Oratorio Society of New York, which takes a cast of hundreds approach with its massive choir; and on Dec. 21, Musica Sacra, which uses Baroque bows to add a dash of period style. The National Chorale will rent Geffen Hall for a participatory “sing-in” on Sunday. And there are free “Messiah” singalongs at Christ Church Riverdale in the Bronx on Saturday, and “Hallelujah” flash mobs around Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 21.Trinity, which offered one of the first performances of “Messiah” in New York, in 1770, and the Philharmonic, whose founder conducted its first full concert in the city, can both lay claim to a piece of the work’s history. This season, both had the advantage of a Baroque-music specialist at the helm, with Andrew Megill at Trinity and Masaaki Suzuki at the Philharmonic. They even used the same performing edition from Oxford University Press.But beauty emerged in the places where they diverged.Trinity’s period-instrument ensemble and choir produce a light, precise, nimble sound that gains warmth and richness in the church’s acoustic. At Saturday’s performance, which was livestreamed, the use of an organ, played by Avi Stein, as opposed to a harpsichord, provided a mellow, cloudlike underlay. The string players rendered every flourish as fresh arcs of sound.The countertenor Reginald Mobley, front, at David Geffen Hall, where Masaaki Suzuki led the New York Philharmonic in “Messiah.”Chris LeeTo get a sense of just how well-drilled Trinity’s choir is, you can strip away the church acoustic by watching a video of its 2019 “Messiah,” conducted by Julian Wachner at St. Paul’s Chapel while its home church was being renovated. In the chorus “And he shall purify,” taken at a breakneck yet sprightly pace, the notes tumble evenly in time.The Philharmonic uses modern instruments whose boldness gains clarity in the clean resonance of its new auditorium. In the opening Symphony, the players sliced through the air with dramatic fervor, their trills landing a little heavily in Suzuki’s stately tempo. The harpsichord, folded into the texture, emitted an appealingly gentle tinkle. Over the course of the evening, though, Suzuki’s tempos lagged, and the players seemed to meander through the music unless it had theatrical flair — common in Handel’s operas, but rare here.Where Trinity’s choir prizes dexterity, the choristers of the Handel and Haydn Society make evocative use of timbral contrast. In “And he shall purify,” the choral sections stacked atop one another in staggered entrances that amassed into a smoothly luxuriant texture. “For unto us a child is born” was a marvel of color: The tenors offered a sense of wonder; the altos, excitement; the basses, appreciation; the sopranos, confidence.The baritone Jonathon Adams made a singular Philharmonic debut. Adams, who identifies as two-spirit — the term used by Indigenous communities for those who are nonbinary — did not put on airs. Dressed humbly in loose black clothes, they sometimes hunched over their score, almost crumpling into it, before opening their mouth to reveal a magnificently sonorous timbre. Adams enunciated words like a deep-toned voice-over artist and used classic Handelian word painting in the aria “The people that walked in darkness,” adopting a shadowy tone before opening up into resplendent high notes on the word “light.” This was good old-fashioned oratorio style, in which singing is an elevated form of recitation.For its “Messiah,” the Philharmonic was joined by the Handel and Haydn Society chorus.Chris LeeThe Philharmonic’s other soloists included the soprano Sherezade Panthaki, who scrupulously shaped her music by approaching top notes with a diminuendo. In slow passages, the countertenor Reginald Mobley spun a gossamer sound that frayed at faster tempos. The tenor Leif Aruhn-Solén, whose glimmering voice didn’t cut in any register, showed questionable taste in ornaments, dynamic contrast and his pantomime of the text.Trinity doled out Handel’s solos to the members of its choir. Many of them, with vocal techniques built for tonal blend and rhythmic precision in a chorus, favored a straight tone that gleamed like white light but also exposed waywardness in pitch. Still, period style doesn’t mean stilted: Some of the singing in the more fiery arias was positively gutsy. Male altos, who created an intriguing softness within the aural fabric of the chorus, contributed solos so subtle they almost evaporated. The soprano Shabnam Abedi showed lovely warmth in “How beautiful are the feet”; and the bass-baritone Brian Mextorf had a light, handsome tone in “The trumpet shall sound.”Trinity would appear to have the more heartfelt and historically informed performance but for one moment at the Philharmonic: As the audience in Geffen Hall stood in respectful attention for the exalted music of “Hallelujah,” Adams could be seen at the side of the stage, singing heartily with the bass section.As Clifford Bartlett, the editor of the Oxford edition, noted in his introduction to the score, the soloists in Handel’s time likely sang the choruses as well. I couldn’t hear Adams, but I shared the reaction of their fellow soloists, who appeared both delighted and disarmed by Adams’s sincerity of expression — a reminder that “Messiah,” after all the variance in instrumentation, style and performance practice, is an act of community. More

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      Review: Klaus Mäkelä, Rising Star of Conducting, Arrives in New York

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      Klaus Mäkelä, a young yet already accomplished maestro, made his New York Philharmonic debut with a performance that prioritized clarity.Now New Yorkers know what the hype is all about.The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.Chances are, he will not go to the New York Philharmonic, where he made his debut on Thursday. (For those keeping track, Leonard Bernstein was just a year younger when he got his unexpected big break.) This orchestra — whose music director, Jaap van Zweden, will depart at the end of next season — needs a new conductor much sooner than Mäkelä is available. But perhaps he has a future as a frequent guest; his first outing with the Philharmonic was a promising one, under an even bigger spotlight than planned, with a program of only symphonic works after the concerto soloist, Truls Mork, withdrew because of an injury.The Philharmonic, at its most exasperating, can be a brash and unbalanced ensemble. Under Mäkelä’s baton on Friday morning, however, it was largely measured in delivering what has become, to mixed results, his trademark clarity. He brought a transparent, levelheaded approach to the emotional extremes of two Russian, B-minor symphonies premiered nearly a half-century apart — the Sixths of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich — as well as to a contemporary work, Jimmy López Bellido’s “Perú Negro.”López Bellido is a favorite of Mäkelä’s among living composers. It’s easy to hear why; this is music that, on the surface, sounds like a successor to other works in Mäkelä’s repertoire that employ enormous orchestral forces, such as the Ballets Russes scores of Stravinsky that he will take to the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, or the post-Romantic symphonies of Mahler that he has toured.Unlike those, however, “Perú Negro” — premiered in 2013 as part of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s centennial and originally conducted by López Bellido’s friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya — thrills and entertains, but reveals itself all too readily.This piece has the hallmarks of López Bellido’s style, such as rich orchestration and maximal gesture, along with homages to the folk songs and rhythms of the Black Peruvian music that the title hints at. Although Mäkelä was up against the newly renovated David Geffen Hall’s bright acoustics in taming the Philharmonic’s sound, he led a lively account, which was met with a standing ovation.But the memory of it was quickly swept aside by the Shostakovich that followed — in particular the similarly grand, breakneck finale. There, you could hear what was lacking in “Perú Negro”: ambiguous exuberance, Janus-faced passages that misdirect and provoke, both inviting and impenetrable, forever irreconcilable. López Bellido could take a lesson from that, as someone who clearly knows how an orchestra can sound, but not necessarily what it can say.The Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky symphonies were studies in letting a score speak for itself. Whether that works is largely a matter of taste, and ensemble. I heard a similar touch in a Mahler Four that Mäkelä conducted last year in Munich; there, the cool performance didn’t deliver on the symphony’s heavenly climax. But his Mahler Six in Amsterdam this summer was a revelation of terror directly expressed.At the Philharmonic, Mäkelä kept some of the orchestra’s characteristic imbalances in check — such as the outsize sounds that rendered the winds section virtually invisible in the Beethoven Nine led by van Zweden in October — but hadn’t quite rewired the players. He did, though, manage to lend both symphonies a legible, compelling shape, if at a bit of a remove. The most evocative moments came not from the entire group but from soloists: Frank Huang’s violin fleetly galloping in the Shostakovich; Judith LeClair’s bassoon dolefully opening the Tchaikovsky; and Anthony McGill’s clarinet reprising that work’s second theme with rending sweetness.The third movement of the Tchaikovsky, a perennial audience favorite, especially benefited from Mäkelä’s lucid reading, whose transparency brought equal attention to the itinerant melodic line and the dense orchestrations surrounding it. There was a sense of what the composer might have been thinking when he wrote to his publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, that he was “happy in the knowledge that I have written a good piece.”I found myself, though, wanting to know more than how Tchaikovsky viewed his own music. Mäkelä’s conducting was so deferential to the score, it was tempting to shake him and ask, “But what do you really think?” Classics like this symphony warrant not just recitation, but also repeated examination.Then again, it’s helpful to remember that we are talking about a 26-year-old. Who hasn’t changed drastically throughout their 20s — in life, in work, in worldview? It will be interesting, and worthwhile, to see where that growth takes Mäkelä. He has proved that he can wrangle the war horses. Now it’s time to see what else he can do.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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      The Philharmonic Tests Its New Home With the Classics

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      David Geffen Hall reopened with a month of concerts that sketched a possible future for the New York Philharmonic. Now it’s back to business.The new David Geffen Hall has opened — and opened, and opened.In 1962, one performance was enough to cut the ribbon on the New York Philharmonic’s home at Lincoln Center. Sixty years — and many tweaks later, big and small — it took four weeks of festivities to celebrate the acoustically and aesthetically troubled hall’s decades-in-the-making, $550 million gut renovation.A month of opening nights: Call it inflation.I was in the hall for nearly all of those nights. For a crowd-pleasing concert dedicated to the people who constructed it. For a sober jazz-meets-classical, multimedia exploration of the history of the neighborhood razed to build the center.For an evening with the folksy mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, the coziness of which shocked anyone who had ever been to the drafty, dingy barn that was the hall pre-renovation. For the unveiling of three series in the glassed-in Sidewalk Studio. For the flashing lights, booming electronics and pitch-bending vocal octet of a slew of premieres.For not one but two fund-raising galas: first, a genial if never showstopping parade of Broadway stars like Bernadette Peters, Lin-Manuel Miranda and, the urbane highlight, Vanessa Williams; then, two days later, a brusque romp through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (which PBS will air and stream on Friday).For an open house last weekend with aerialists rappelling down the building’s facade, and a test of the 50-foot screen that will simulcast concerts to those who wander into the lobby. (The quality of the video is already crisp; the sound is a work in progress.)Members of Bandaloop performed an aerialist act as part of Geffen Hall’s open house weekend. Richard Termine/Lincoln CenterBy Wednesday, the confetti had settled. And after all that, we were deposited back into the standard repertory.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.Who Is David Geffen?: The entertainment magnate, who jump-started the renovation, has become avidly sought by culture and education leaders looking to finance a wave of new construction.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Expert Assessment: Right after the reopening our critic wrote that the renovation had a mightily improved sound. In the weeks that followed his feelings became more complicated.Because, for all of Geffen’s intended uses — as a community center and high school graduation spot, as a pop venue and corporate event rental — it is, first and foremost, a traditional orchestra hall. If Wednesday’s program, a Mozart piano concerto and a Bruckner symphony, didn’t work here, nothing else would matter — not the more spacious lobbies or the auditorium’s wraparound seating or the stylish restaurant.Beethoven’s Ninth had been a return to the wholly unamplified and wholly familiar, but in one-night-only, hastily rehearsed form. Wednesday was the back-to-business moment: the real opening night, a culmination of a month’s testing of the space, its acoustics and its house band.Weeks of performances under the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, had begun to form a portrait of Geffen’s sound: clear, clean and adroitly balanced, but a little colorless and cool, even chilly. Soft passages glistened, solos popped, and there was a palpable sense of the bass frequencies that had struggled in earlier iterations of the hall. Reducing audience capacity by 500 and pulling the stage forward to let seating encircle it resulted in a far more engaging experience.But especially when the playing was loud and densely massed, the clarity muddied, and there was little sense of the enveloping richness that is one of the great joys of hearing an orchestra live. The music blared at your face when it should have surrounded you.There was appealing intimacy and considerable warmth on Wednesday, though, in an account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 that featured Yefim Bronfman — a veteran too often taken for granted — playing with lucid, gentle eloquence. He was the first real, acoustic concerto soloist in the new space, and he was a gallant partner; the piano, properly, sounded somewhere both inside and in front of the orchestra. In the slow second movement, silky, misty strings made a poised counterpart to familial interplay in the winds.Van Zweden, as in his breakneck second movement in Beethoven’s Ninth, pressed the third-movement Allegro of the Mozart a few shades past comfort. You get the sense that he thinks this kind of breathlessness transmits excitement, but it comes off as harried rather than thrilling or witty.His briskness can bulldoze eddies of feeling. A few moments before the end of the Mozart, the rambunctious mood suddenly shifts for maybe 10 seconds of wistful sublimity. The passage is over before you know it, whisked back to a spirited rondo, but it epitomizes the piece’s — and its composer’s — mixing of the jovial and aching. Van Zweden zipped through it to the final bars.And in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, his prioritization of lyrical flow — overall, a welcome sense of naturalness from a conductor better known for punchy climaxes — pressed the Adagio slightly too fast to allow for the building of what can be excruciating intensity. The Finale was, unusually, more moving, with its seesawing between peace and war; in van Zweden’s smooth, happy-minded rendition of the work, neither too heavy nor hectoring, it was no surprise which side eventually triumphed.The playing wasn’t flawless. There was a lack of depth in the mesmerizing unwinding lines for the violins in the Adagio, and some iffy intonation in the brasses. But there wasn’t the sense I had had in earlier concerts, particularly when I was sitting on the ground level, of distance or almost clinical detachment in the sound.Jaap van Zweden leading the Philharmonic in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22, featuring Yefim Bronfman as soloist.Fadi KheirOr of that blare. Even if the brasses sometimes felt overly bright at top volume, there was more transparency and better blend at those heights. The consistent problem since the opening remains the hard, strident sound that the violins take on at the top of their range and force.This may be the playing of an orchestra that tends aggressive — in other words, something that can be fixed — rather than a feature of the room itself. Or it might be a shortcoming of the hall, a slight but consequential lack of sufficient reverberation.Only time will tell: Such are the ambiguities of acoustics. But some of the concerns about the basic sound of the place that I’d had over the past few weeks were assuaged on Wednesday; the orchestra is, as expected, adapting to its new home, so impressions are evolving, too.This Mozart-Bruckner pairing signals a return to the classics after the showy progressivism of the opening month’s programming. That multimedia event early in October, Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” was essentially an 80-minute land acknowledgment, mustering narration, archival images, poetic filmed reconstructions of street life early in the 20th century, oral history, notation and improvisation to sketch a lost community.After the piece opened with a long set by a jazz ensemble, the Philharmonic awkwardly shuffled onstage in the wake of a section called “Destroyer”: interlopers invading an already vibrant culture. The self-castigating aspect felt very much of our moment. Then, of the two October subscription programs, the first was dominated by living composers. The second featured a half-hour premiere by Caroline Shaw and was anchored by a rediscovered symphony by Florence Price; in an inversion of the usual format, the opener was the standard — Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” — rather than a new piece.This is all hardly the model for what is coming up. There are intriguing scores being performed: Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion gets a rare hearing in a couple of weeks, and the Philharmonic has never played Shostakovich’s 12th Symphony, which is scheduled for the beginning of December.But while there’s no shortage of contemporary pieces this season, living composers — or even unusual selections from the past — get that anchor slot at the end of the concert only a few times. October sketched a possible future for the Philharmonic; it didn’t describe the present.That future will be guided by a new music director; van Zweden, hardly a driving creative force even before the pandemic break separated him from the ensemble, is leaving after next season. Over the coming months both promising younger artists (the likes of Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Makela) and veterans (Marin Alsop, Gianandrea Noseda) make guest appearances. Gustavo Dudamel, the star maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who returns in May, is the elephant in the room.Whoever ends up with the job will be a crucial part of the continuing adjustment to the new hall, a process that will not be over soon. The promise of the space is clear. The building is far more spacious and comfortable than it was, even if the public spaces evoke the mid-market casualness of an airport terminal — usable but disposable — more than an inspiring house of culture.Every aspect of the hall seems to have embraced this half-vulgar, half-lovable ethos. First I cringed, then I giggled, at one of the orchestra’s cellists, who has recorded the “please silence your cellphones” announcement that plays as the lights dim.“Now here,” she concludes with goofy, irresistible relish, like she’s channeling Ed McMahon, “comes the music!” More