Huang, Frank (1978- )

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    Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Alisa Weilerstein Make Sparks Fly at N.Y. Phil

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    Guest conductors and the firebrand soloists Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Alisa Weilerstein brought welcome energy to David Geffen Hall.To judge by its marketing materials, the New York Philharmonic is uncomfortable with its leaderless state, created by the gap between the departure last summer of the music director Jaap van Zweden and the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel, who takes over in 2026. Dudamel’s likeness is already splashed all over Lincoln Center, as if the mere promise of him were the orchestra’s best hope for selling tickets. But the parade of visiting conductors passing through Geffen Hall has had its own rewards, shaking the ensemble from its routine and injecting a vital note of unpredictability. Week by week, the orchestra sounds different. The energy in the hall fluctuates. And when a firebrand soloist joins a smoldering conductor, sparks fly.This was the case on Wednesday in an electrifying concert that drew tumultuous ovations. The Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa teamed up with the flamboyant violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who shredded the Stravinsky Violin Concerto — and more than a few bow hairs — on a program that opened with the world premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s sumptuous “Chemiluminescence” and ended with a glowing reading of the Symphony No. 1 by Brahms.The previous week had featured another ferociously expressive soloist in another world premiere when the cellist Alisa Weilerstein performed a Thomas Larcher concerto, “Returning Into Darkness,” on a program bookended by Mendelssohn and Schumann. There, it was Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider who conducted, drawing chiseled playing from the orchestra that brought out the wit in selections from Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the intricate flow of Schumann’s Second Symphony. Under Hrusa, the collective sound seethed and simmered.Larcher’s one-movement concerto grows out of a single gesture, a swooping glissando across multiple octaves on the solo cello. On a string instrument, glissando results from the player’s finger sliding up or down the fingerboard, drawing an elastic line through all available pitches. Because it blurs the distinction between individual notes, it evokes extra-musical sounds: sirens, moans, the lowing of a wounded animal.Alisa Weilerstein performed the premiere of Thomas Larcher’s “Returning Into Darkness” last week.Chris LeeIn “Returning Into Darkness,” the swooping lines that recur in the solo cello part, interspersed with bouts of frenetic activity, convey a state of emotional emergency and a certain neurotic rootlessness, unmoored but also unwilling to commit. A similar fluidity governs the ensemble sound, which swells and tapers like a swarm of insects that can build to menacing proportions. Moment by moment, Larcher’s command of color and Weilerstein’s forceful performance were compelling, though over the course of 25 minutes, the constant slaloms induced little more than emotional whiplash.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Two Electric Debuts at the New York Philharmonic

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      An exciting program featured the conductor Elim Chan and the cellist Sol Gabetta in a pairing of music by Martinu and Rimsky-Korsakov.At a time when many orchestras are relying on entrenched repertoire and beloved artists to shore up their dwindling audiences, the New York Philharmonic on Thursday night offered three thrilling new perspectives — two from younger, female performers making their Philharmonic debuts, the third a world premiere.One of the debuting artists was the dynamic conductor Elim Chan. Born in Hong Kong, trained in the United States and already a sensation in Europe, Chan walked to the podium with confidence. Her physical ease was justified: She showed up to her first gig with the Philharmonic fully ready to harness its forces.She opened the program with the string orchestra version of “Pisachi,” commissioned by the Philharmonic from the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Originally written for the string quartet Ethel, “Pisachi” (pronounced “pih-SAH-chee”) pays homage to the desert landscape of the Southwest and the music of the Hopi and Pueblo peoples.“Pisachi” alternates between hushed, singing harmonics and piquant rhythms painted in impassioned tremolos and spiky pizzicatos. Tate’s gifts for texture and color are intensely rendered in Ethel’s feisty 2015 recording; the Philharmonic’s version was plusher. Still, Chan drew out all of Tate’s biting phrases; conducting with just her hands, her fingers fluttered in the air.The Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta made her Philharmonic debut, in Bohuslav Martinu’s First Cello Concerto.Chris LeeChan was then joined by the Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta, also making her Philharmonic debut, in Bohuslav Martinu’s First Cello Concerto — enough of a rarity that it might as well be another piece of new music. (The Philharmonic last performed it in 1976.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. 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