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    5 Breakout Artists at the Salzburg Festival

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    The Salzburg Festival is synonymous with excellence and fame. But it’s also a place where artists on the cusp of stardom can shine.The Salzburg Festival has, since its founding more than 100 years ago, been known as a gathering place for the world’s finest musicians.That’s still true: During a visit there earlier this month, I heard Grigory Sokolov play Bach with unfussy authority; Jordi Savall lead his period orchestra in magisterial accounts of Beethoven’s final two symphonies; Igor Levit muscle through another Beethoven symphony, the bacchic Seventh, with just a piano.But Salzburg is also a proving ground for artists on the cusp on stardom. The soprano Asmik Grigorian, for example, was busy but hardly world famous until she gave a career-making performance as Salome there in 2018.This year, there were breakthroughs to be found throughout Salzburg’s theaters. If you looked past the top billing, past the Cecilia Bartolis and Teodor Currentzises, they were even at some of the most high-profile events this summer. Here are five of them.Lukas SternathThe pianist Lukas Sternath performing with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, under the conductor Adam Fischer.Marco Borrelli/Salzburg FestivalIn a bit of scheduling serendipity, Levit’s recital took place during the same weekend that the Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath, his former student, was debuting with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg. It was touching to see Levit in the balcony of the Mozarteum’s ornate Grosser Saal, looking down as Sternath eloquently performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 466) under the baton of Adam Fischer.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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      The End of a Maestro’s Era Approaches at the Philharmonic

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      Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic to lead some of his final programs as the orchestra’s music director.When the conductor Jaap van Zweden was hired for his short-lived tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, he was seen as someone who could bring some punch to heavyweight symphonies by Beethoven and Mahler.As if to hold on to that idea, Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony will be performed at van Zweden’s farewell next week. But when I look back on his six seasons with the Philharmonic, the shortest stay for a maestro since that of Pierre Boulez in the 1970s, what I’ll remember most, and most fondly, is not any 19th-century warhorse but Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”Performed last season, van Zweden’s “Passion” was one of the great surprises of his time in New York. Gone was his tendency to bulldoze and flatten a score; instead, he gave shape to nearly three hours of music, sensitively making room for reflection amid drama in an interpretation that was exquisitely clear and genuinely moving.That night felt like a glimpse of what van Zweden’s tenure might have looked like if he had been able to truly settle in — if his second season with the Philharmonic hadn’t been cut short by the pandemic; if the orchestra hadn’t returned with a nomadic season as its hall was being renovated; if, when he got back inside David Geffen Hall, he didn’t have just two years left.Unfortunately, van Zweden’s time with the Philharmonic will probably be remembered less for his conducting than for those disruptions and milestones, as well as for the overshadowing coup of the starry, charismatic Gustavo Dudamel being poached from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to succeed him.That move looked like a pendulum-swinging reaction to van Zweden’s personality as a reserved technician, which hasn’t paid off: The orchestra sounds more or less the same as when he started, evidence of a relationship that never deepened. It can be difficult to explain why musicians and conductors aren’t compatible; a maestro might thrive with one group and flop with another. For whatever reason, the Philharmonic never developed a clear identity as his ensemble.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: Igor Levit Wields Orchestral Power With Just a Piano

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      For his latest Carnegie Hall appearance, Levit played solo piano transcriptions of symphonic works by Mahler and Beethoven.Igor Levit, a pianist of awe-inspiring insight and redoubtable technique, decided to conduct himself during his solo recital at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.He was playing the Nocturne from Hindemith’s “Suite 1922,” a collection of five genre pieces like marches and rags, and there are a few moments in which the pianist only needs to use one hand. Gesturing with his left one in a downward pressing motion, he seemed to tell himself, “Gentle, gentle,” as he plucked starlight off the page and dispersed it through the air.When Levit is onstage, he seems to be in his own world. He scratches his nose, nods approvingly as a piece closes and shakes out the strain in his hands from a particularly grueling program. He doesn’t make a show of inviting the audience along; rather, he leaves the door cracked open for anyone who wants to join.Such physical quirks are of a piece with the prodigious concentration and individuality of Levit’s performances. He makes music his own and illuminates it for others. His confidence and decisiveness allow a listener to hear a piece’s architecture, the way individual figures become phrases and then entire sections.At Carnegie, Levit tested his focus and stamina with piano transcriptions of well-known symphonic works. The program opened with the relatively brief Hindemith suite before diving headlong into Ronald Stevenson’s adaptation of the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony and a nearly hourlong rendition of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, in a solo version by Liszt.It was a display of earth-rattling strength. Octaves in contrary motion smoked with ferocity in the Hindemith, and sforzandos in the Beethoven reintroduced audiences to the elemental wildness of a composer of repertory standards. Levit’s New York appearances last season, in music by Shostakovich and Morton Feldman, deployed his concentration in service of witty élan and meditative stillness. But Thursday’s recital was pure might.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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      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

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      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.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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      Inside the Shed’s Sonic Sphere

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      A hanging concert hall at the Shed in Manhattan purports to offer something “experimental, experiential and communal.” Our critic climbs the stairs.“Whoa,” a man near me said as the curtains swept open.He, I and a couple of hundred other people had been waiting in a large room at the Shed, the arts center at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Portentous, woozy background music was playing, as if an alien encounter was imminent.Then those curtains parted, and a much larger room was revealed: the Shed’s vast McCourt space, in which a sphere, 65 feet in diameter and pocked like Swiss cheese, had been suspended from the faraway ceiling and bathed in red light.This arresting — indeed, “whoa”-inducing — sight was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a concert hall design by the brilliant, peerlessly loopy composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), who inspired Germany to build the first one for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan.Stockhausen, an impresario of electroacoustic experimentation and far-out notions like a string quartet playing inside a helicopter, imagined the audiences for his “Kugelauditorium” sitting on a sound-permeable level within the sphere, so that speakers could be placed under, as well as around and over, them.During the six months that the Osaka exposition was open, hundreds of thousands of people came and heard taped music adapted for the in-the-round playback possibilities, as well as live performances. Then, for the next half century, the idea lay dormant; Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein remained intact, having not been replaced by giant spheres.Enter, a few years ago, a team led by Ed Cooke (whose biography calls him “a multidisciplinary explorer of consciousness”), the sound designer Merijn Royaards and Nicholas Christie, the project’s engineering director.They have built Sonic Spheres in France, Britain, Mexico and the United States. Each time, like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” the contraption has grown. The Shed iteration, open through the end of July, is the first to hang in midair, at a cost of more than $2 million.As in Osaka, some of the presentations offer taped music; some, live. On Saturday, I climbed the many steps to the sphere’s entrance and reclined, like everyone else, in a comfortable hammock-like seat, listening to the seductively sullen 2009 debut album by the British band the xx. Forty-five minutes after that was over, the pianist Igor Levit appeared in person to perform, for a fresh audience, Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari,” from 1986.Colors and configurations of lights on the fabric skin of the Sphere tended to shift with the music’s beat as Levit performed.James Estrin/The New York TimesLights, in colors and configurations that tended to shift with the music’s beat, played on the fabric skin of this big Wiffle ball. But for an audience that could be seeing the high-definition stadium shows of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift this summer, the visuals were blurry, rudimentary stuff; this was the aspect of the presentation that felt most trapped in 1970.And the audio experience that emerged from the 124 speakers was unremarkable at best. The xx remix did nicely separate the bass, coming up palpably but not too heavily out of the bottom of the sphere, from the voices around and above. To no compelling end, though, and the album’s whispery intimacy was supersized into a much blander grandeur.The situation was more distressing for Levit. While the spare, spacious chords of “Palais de Mari” registered more or less cleanly, with only slight fuzz, the sound was muddy for the Bach chorale he played as a prelude; it was the perennial challenge of amplifying acoustic instruments, times 124. And the jittery lighting, a collaboration between Levit and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, could hardly have been more uncomprehending of Feldman’s glacial austerity.For all the souped-up spiffiness of the Sonic Sphere, the programming on Saturday felt like a retread of artists who were more interesting when Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, presented them during his stint at the Park Avenue Armory uptown.There, in 2014, the xx did a celebrated (live) residency in front of only a few dozen people per show. Levit, the following year, played Bach as part of an ornate concentration exercise orchestrated by Marina Abramovic. (Will he, now a fixture of New York’s more unconventional spaces, end up hanging upside-down at the piano once the Perelman Performing Arts Center opens this fall?)Those Armory shows were more memorable than either Shed set. Both of them on Saturday were under 40 minutes, but I found myself getting antsy well before time was up. Perhaps the audiences at Burning Man, the techno-hippie hedonist bonanza in the Nevada desert where a Sonic Sphere was built last year, were more engrossed, experiencing it on harder drugs than the Coke Zero I’d had with dinner.Sober, none of the music was more interesting, effective, illuminated or illuminating in this space than it would have been elsewhere. It was clear that the main point was that first reveal, as the curtains opened and everyone’s phones came out, ready to post images of something big and glamorous on social media.So, millions of dollars for Instagram bait — but fine, if its creators didn’t also hype it as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.” I felt, in fact, more distant from my fellow audience members in the Sonic Sphere, even the ones reclining next to me, than I have at most any traditional concert hall.In this, the sphere is of a piece with the other current offering at the Shed: a weird virtual-reality simulacrum of a solo piano concert by the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March.The Sonic Sphere was billed as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.”James Estrin/The New York TimesEmpathy? Communal experience? No, the hologram-like specter of Sakamoto was more vivid and substantial than the other people watching with me, who, while I wore the VR glasses, faded into transparent ghostliness.The wall text in the holding room for the Sonic Sphere acknowledges that technology can isolate us from each other, but adds that mustn’t necessarily be the case: “We need it to delight and inspire us, not just passively, but in ways that provoke action.”But, as with so much ambitious, empty-headed, underwhelming, ultimately depressing tech, the action that’s provoked by this expensive spectacle is merely a passing moment of “whoa.” More

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      ‘It Has It All’: Taking on a Strange, Immense Piano Concerto

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      The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit discuss Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto, a rarity they are performing in San Francisco.There are piano concertos, and then there is Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto.Completed and premiered in 1904 by the Berlin Philharmonic with the composer, a virtuoso of Lisztian ability, at the piano, the piece retains a near mystical reputation. It is so difficult that only the most commanding of pianists dare take on its 75 minutes and five movements. In the last and oddest of them, a male chorus implores listeners to draw close to Allah, singing from the text of an early 19th-century version of “Aladdin” by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger.If the concerto is performed more often than it used to be, it is still enough of an anomaly in the repertoire that performances are a significant event, one of which is its San Francisco Symphony premiere this week, with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit, joined by the men of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.In a joint interview, Salonen and Levit spoke about the concerto and Busoni’s confounding stature today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Levit said that the Busoni concerto is so difficult, it can “widen your curse words repertoire.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesMy first question is, why?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN May I propose a counter-question? Why not? Last time we performed together, which was many years ago, we had a little chat over dinner about what to do next. We both happen to love the Busoni, and we thought, OK, let’s do it. These are decisions that are easily made over dinner, and then when you get to it, you realize what you’ve done. Still, I’m very happy, and the more I study the piece the more I like it, which is actually a very good sign, because it’s not always like that. Some of the ideas, especially harmonic ideas, are incredible.I can’t make up my mind whether it is a parody, or deadly serious, or what.IGOR LEVIT I think it’s both. It’s highly celebratory. I mean, the roof flies off the building, right? In the “All’Italiana,” it’s very satirical. It’s incredibly beautiful, it’s funny, it’s solemn. It has it all.Busoni has always been one of those role models I never met, in a way like an idol figure, regarding the way he thought and especially wrote about music, his utopian idea about what free music actually is, his idea about what the creator’s job is, which is to set up your own rules and not follow the rules of others.As a composer, as a pianist, as a thinker, teacher, we are speaking here of one of the most incredible minds of at least the 20th century. He was this larger-than-life figure, and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.We hardly ever hear Busoni’s music now, and yet he was so significant historically.SALONEN He really was a trailblazer, and he predicted lots of things that are now commonplace in contemporary music, like microtonality. He even at some point was fantasizing about computers, before the concept even existed.As a Finnish musician, I must say that we are very grateful to him, because he spent a couple of years in Helsinki. He was a very, very strange bird in Helsinki cultural life. And he was an incredibly important influence to Sibelius, because Sibelius suffered from this kind of country boy complex compared to contemporaries like Richard Strauss.Busoni and Sibelius became really good friends. I’m absolutely sure that to have somebody like that as a conversation partner and drinking buddy — they did quite a bit of that apparently — was incredibly important. They even had a little club, a group of friends who called themselves Leskovites, because Busoni’s dog was called Lesko. There’s a bar in Helsinki where they hung out and developed the new music for the next century.LEVIT One of the most important teachers I had in my life was Matti Raekallio. Matti is from Helsinki. Matti’s thesis was on Busoni’s fingering. He introduced me to the concerto when I was 19. He introduced me to the “Fantasia Contrappuntistica.” He introduced me to the way Busoni would play the piano, which is a very positional kind of playing, and not a graphic kind of playing.For, let’s say, a normal piano player, who grew up with rules and who studied in Central Europe or wherever, there is no such thing as Ferruccio Busoni, all you know is Bach-Busoni. You might know two or three of his chorale preludes. That’s it. But you don’t get in touch with the actual man. It was Matti who opened this incredible door for me into the thinking of the man and to the music. So even I know Busoni through Finland.SALONEN It’s funny: The first time I ever heard anything by Busoni was when I was a composition student in Siena, Italy, with Donatoni back in the late ’70s. There was a concert when some Italian pianist played Busoni’s arrangement of Schoenberg’s Opus 11, three piano pieces. He arranged Schoenberg’s piano pieces for the piano. And I thought that was the silliest thing I’d ever heard in my life.Igor, is the concerto as hard as everyone says it is?LEVIT Yeah, this is a piece to widen your curse words repertoire.What are the hardest things in it?LEVIT There are moments in the second movement that, I mean, they’re just beyond what should be acceptable in terms of how much you have to work to achieve a certain result. Toward the end, there’s this rather long passage with incredibly difficult jumps, which are asymmetrical between the left hand and the right hand. This alone is kind of utopian, and it’s also written such that no one in the audience will actually hear what you’re doing, because the orchestra is so massive.The cadenza and conclusion of the ‘All’Italiana’John Ogdon, piano; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Daniell Revenaugh, conductor (Warner)There is a spot in the “All’Italiana,” right after the cadenza, where the piano has these huge chords in left and right and they run toward each other. It’s sort of unachievable, and yet, so what? You constantly are aware of the fact that you as a pianist, are in the middle of playing something extraordinary.Busoni “was this larger-than-life figure,” Levit said, “and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesIt doesn’t strike me as an easy piece to conduct, either. The balances, for one thing.SALONEN Well, it’s massive, and as Igor said, there are moments that if you don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out, the piano will be drowned.LEVIT [Laughing] Please don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out.SALONEN But there are moments in Brahms’s piano concertos where the piano kind of sinks into the orchestra, and I think part of the expression is that zoom-in, zoom-out thing. It would be very boring if you had 75 minutes of the piano being completely on the surface at every moment. And in this case, the piano has different roles.What is the finale there for?SALONEN I have seen many incomprehensible, weird texts in my life that composers have used, but this one is right up there. I think he was planning to write a music-dramatic work based on the text by this Danish guy. He never got further than setting the final chorus, and then that found its way into the Piano Concerto.The story of this text is so funny, because the playwright was Danish, and he wrote the text in German, but his German was not great. He went and read it out loud to Goethe, and he read it out of the Danish version and translated it into German on the fly. I’m trying to imagine Goethe just sitting there listening to this guy go through this endless play, in bad German. And then various editors went through three or four rounds to fix the grammar, and finally, there is a version that is grammatically acceptable. However, Busoni liked the first version with all the wrong cases and wrong articles.LEVIT Of course he did.SALONEN And there’s something really fabulous about that. It’s basically the boulders in the cave where Aladdin takes the lamp back to. The boulders are very grateful, and they praise Allah for the beauty of nature. And a lot of it is completely incomprehensible.LEVIT But then again we’re speaking about Busoni, who was one of the great internationalists. You’re talking about this universally educated and universally interested guy. So it’s all incomprehensible and odd and weird, and yet not surprising whatsoever.SALONEN So, we’re fans.LEVIT Exactly. More

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      Review: Igor Levit Takes on a Shostakovich Kaleidoscope

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      The pianist returned to Carnegie Hall with the first complete performance of the 24 Preludes and Fugues there.The pianist Igor Levit presents compelling ideas with a remarkable ease.On his most recent album, “Tristan,” he casually posits a connection between the well-known grandness of Wagner and the less-recognized grandeur of the 20th-century modernist Hans Werner Henze. Outside the concert hall, Levit has mastered the art of social media — both as a musician and a passionately political civilian — and conducted sustained, substantive conversations with journalists, whether for his book “House Concert” (whose English translation comes out in the United States in January) or the recent documentary “Igor Levit — No Fear” (out now in Europe).Given his multifaceted public profile, it can be possible to lose sight of his artistry. But on Tuesday night at Carnegie Hall, Levit brought the focus back to the piano.He played just one work: Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. That music, though — inspired by Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and written in the early 1950s, during one of Shostakovich’s frequent bouts of official Soviet censure — is a marathon, a two-and-a-half-hour kaleidoscope of melodic and harmonic invention. Until Tuesday, it had never been performed in its entirety at Carnegie.Levit released a recording of the Preludes and Fugues with Sony Classical in 2021, so the evening also provided an opportunity to hear him continue a conversation with Shostakovich. On Tuesday, that dialogue was rich in risk taking, and rewarding. From the first prelude, in C, Levit’s daring tempo — much slower than on his album — made clear that he was not on autopilot, but taking advantage of the Stern Auditorium’s resonance to consider the music anew.But if the first pair seemed to signal a gentler interpretation more broadly, Levit dispelled the notion with a flashy, upbeat second prelude. Live, as on disc, he proved as fleet as Keith Jarrett (whose recording of the work came out in 1992) or Tatiana Nikolayeva (who gave it its public premiere in 1952). Yet Levit produced his devilish speed with even articulation, bringing to mind Glenn Gould’s mature Bach. And the second fugue made clear that Levit would push into louder dynamics, too.Throughout the evening’s first half, Levit offered contrast after contrast. Using Carnegie’s acoustics, he emphasized Shostakovich’s prismatic writing, as when the cautiously eerie beginning of the fourth prelude was juxtaposed with a hazy, enveloping account of its partner fugue.And Levit made connections within this mammoth work. The dotted-note patterns of the sixth prelude sounded more joyous here than on Levit’s starker recording, and suggested an affinity with the more obviously lighthearted 11th prelude. Elsewhere, a forceful bass voice in the eighth fugue served as a preview of the climactic wallops in the ninth and 12th fugues.After intermission, Levit’s account of the final 12 preludes and fugues did not move along with the same thrills. That might have been by design — a decision to slacken the pace of interpretive variation so that big moments could come across even more powerfully. Or it could have been that work’s immensity was taking its toll, since Levit frequently stretched his right arm and wrist, as though he were trying to wring out pain.Whatever the cause, some stretches felt underdramatized. Still, Levit saved enough power for the big moments — especially the 15th prelude and fugue.Officially in the key of D flat, it’s more a flirtation with crunchy, 12-tone modernism. Some artists treat every musical reference in Shostakovich as an opportunity for a broad joke, but Levit’s unalloyed sincerity as a performer steers him away from that — which paid off marvelously here as he unfurled a prelude and fugue that sang out even while rumbling and barreling along.After the conclusion of the 15th fugue, someone in the audience let out an admiring, brisk “bravo.” Then more applause rippled out from the Carnegie crowd, which up until then had been respectfully silent.There was pleasant laughter — and then even more forceful applause, which Levit gratefully acknowledged before continuing. This truly spontaneous ovation was another reminder of Levit’s power as a musician: He turned a moment of atonal imitation into the pinnacle of the evening.Igor LevitPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Decades Later, a Composer Revisits the Piano Concerto

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      William Bolcom’s recent work, written for the pianist Igor Levit, is streaming after its premiere earlier this year.It took the composer William Bolcom over 40 years to follow his first piano concerto with a second one.When Bolcom was putting the finishing touches on that first concerto, in 1976, he had already gained fame as part of the era’s ragtime revival. A pianist as well, he interpreted pieces by Scott Joplin and other originators, while also contributing to a new wave of writing for the form, on albums like “Heliotrope Bouquet.”Milestones came after the concerto’s premiere. Bolcom’s prismatic “Twelve New Etudes for Piano” — which contained a crucial dollop of ragging energy — won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1988. That decade, his expansive and astute setting of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” was a polyglot achievement, full of music that might take stylistic succor from reggae or Tin Pan Alley, from one minute to the next.Even as symphonies and other works for soloist and orchestra kept coming from the Bolcom workshop, no new piano concerto followed — a peculiar development, given his own stature as a keyboardist. But this April, that streak came to a close when Igor Levit and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra gave the world premiere performance of Bolcom’s Piano Concerto No. 2.Don’t bother asking whether the premiere took place in the United States, where major presentations of music by Bolcom, an American, have fallen out of fashion. Instead, this new concerto was presented in Germany, at the Heidelberger Frühling Festival. That organization, which commissioned Bolcom’s new concerto with Levit in mind, thankfully also documented the performance. And recently, it posted the video on YouTube.In a phone interview, Levit described Bolcom as one of “the very essential composers of our time,” and also recounted with delight the way in which this composer, now 84, participated in the rehearsal process: by video conference, from his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. “You can tell that this piece, and writing music — any music — really means the world to him,” Levit said. “He was, in the most beautiful way, childishly happy.”Bolcom, in a joint interview from his home with Joan Morris — his wife and collaborator, who finished some sentences and added cabaret-style jokes — recalled seeing, and enjoying, Levit’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at the Kalamazoo Festival in 2018.“I said,” Bolcom added, “‘Now this is a guy I could write for.’”(He also called the Beethoven “probably my favorite concerto.”)A photograph of Bolcom, left, with Joan Morris, his wife and collaborator, and the pianist Peter Mintun.Erin Kirkland for The New York Times“I’m interested in a dialogue,” he said, describing his ideal relationship between a pianist and an orchestra, “like in a Mozart concerto, in which nobody is expecting the other person to try to win over the other.”Bolcom’s second piano concerto, at a running time of 24 minutes, reflects that balance while synthesizing various musical traditions. In the early going, some tender yet mystic motifs suggest the songful chromaticism of Olivier Messiaen. But before long, in a transition that few composers could handle so successfully, stark pianistic marching leads the orchestra into the punchy environs of percussive Americana.In an accompanying documentary that the festival produced and posted online, Levit says that Bolcom described the concerto to him as “a gentle piece for non-gentle times.” There is a hint, there, of Bolcom’s proclivity for political commentary. He described the finale of his Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano, from 2017, as a “resolute march of resistance” in response to the 2016 presidential election. And as far back as that first piano concerto, written during the post-Watergate bicentennial of American independence, Bolcom wrote that it was one of “one of the bitterest pieces” he’d conceived so far.Bolcom’s new piano concerto synthesizes various musical traditions.Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesBut such steady disillusionment has not staggered Bolcom’s imagination. Whereas his first concerto ends in a parade of riotous, Ives-like quotations — a cynical pileup of putatively patriotic melodic sentiments — the second is less obvious in its moods. Its melancholy, though impossible to miss, is also leavened by some ebullient twists, all of which are well served by Levit and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Elim Chan.This blend of delight and an almost pained, Romantic yearning likewise comes to the fore in another recent recording of Bolcom’s music — by the pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who first recorded “Twelve New Etudes” and has also released an album with the first piano concerto.Hamelin’s new recording, “Bolcom: The Complete Rags,” is — truth in titling! — the only survey of this catalog that manages to sweep up a few stray syncopated pieces the composer has ventured this century. If it lacks just a touch of the rambunctious energy that Bolcom himself brought to rags like “Seabiscuits Rag,” as heard toward the end of “Heliotrope Bouquet,” Hamelin’s interpretations are a marvelous, moving account of this lushly complex music.Bolcom’s ability to move between poles of emotion, in his rags and concertos, is part of the great charm of his music. When I asked him about the surprising appearance of an electric keyboard part in his Symphony No. 3, I described it as sometimes sounding like a parody of midcentury American modernism and at other points as reminiscent of fusion-era Miles Davis. He let out a belly laugh.Morris, left, with Bolcom at their home. She has recorded works of his including his cabaret songs.Erin Kirkland for The New York Times“First of all: What’s not interesting to me is to make it all completely explicable,” he said. “It’s not explicable to me. I mean, I fly by the seat of my pants, musically.” And although he declined to be pinned down on any point of musical reference, he did admit, “Since the beginning, I’ve had love for the theater.”That’s evident not only in his comic operas, such as “Lucrezia,” but also in the wild transitions embedded within his instrumental works. The new piano concerto, too, manages to surprise even as it is not interested merely in shock value.For Levit, the concerto has “a great mastery of writing and level of seriousness and dedication to every little detail.” But for all that refinement, Levit said, it also shares a key trait with music of American artists like Esperanza Spalding, Fred Hersch and Frederic Rzewski — all of whom Levit cited as carrying a form of the colloquial spirt that is also present in Bolcom’s music.“They never lost the connection to the people who would listen to the music,” Levit said. “This wire to the audience, the wire to the dimension in the hall, is really something which I find deeply inspiring.” More

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      Review: Igor Levit Arrives at the New York Philharmonic

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      Levit, one of the world’s eminent pianists, appeared with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall eight years after making his New York debut.Eight years ago, a young pianist made his New York debut with a brazen program of Beethoven’s final sonatas.Baby-faced and wearing a bow tie, Igor Levit, then 27, took the stage at the Park Avenue Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room and proved that age is no impediment in interpreting some of the wisest and most challenging music in the keyboard repertory. “A major new pianist has arrived,” the critic Anthony Tommasini wrote of that night.Since then, each return engagement has had the air of an important event: Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations with the artist Marina Abramovic at the Armory’s drill hall, recitals with premieres at Carnegie Hall that started in its chamber-size Zankel space before moving to its main auditorium.Levit, who lives in Berlin, hasn’t brought his most madcap programming to the city — his essential, standard-setting take on Ronald Stevenson’s “Passacaglia on DSCH” or his turn in Ferruccio Busoni’s extravagant Piano Concerto — but he has graduated from newcomer to New York fixture.One important debut remained, and it came on Friday: his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic.Now 35, more scruffy than smooth and trading his bow tie for a casual black shirt, he joined the orchestra at Carnegie in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. It was one of those evenings — agonizingly, just one performance — that left you wondering whether the Philharmonic had found an artist to keep on speed dial for future seasons.Holding his own against the orchestra’s characteristic muscularity, Levit offered counterpoint in an expressive touch, an instinctual sense of shape and a gift for navigating the nuances of a piece that keeps one foot in the Classical era and the other in the Romanticism of its time.Like Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, also in D minor, the Brahms begins with a long orchestral introduction before the soloist’s softly singing entrance — passion turning into a plea. The Philharmonic, led by Jaap van Zweden, its music director, sounded more aggressive than ardent, and crisp where another ensemble might have been grand.Van Zweden’s reading didn’t necessarily register as problematic until it was brought into relief by Levit’s arrival, which achieved more tension with less force. His solos were similar to sonatas in their intimacy and breadth of expression (a sensibility that reached its height with his encore, a sonorous yet serene “Nun Komm’ der Heiden Heiland,” transcribed by Busoni from Bach). At the keyboard he was capable of conjuring not only thunder, particularly in the climax of the first movement, but also the troubling calm that can precede it and, as in the Adagio, something like the gentle parting of clouds that follows.Where soloist and orchestra most aligned was in the Rondo finale; Levit stated the first theme briskly, precisely, and the Philharmonic responded in kind. More here than elsewhere, van Zweden allowed the score to speak for itself, to build naturally toward its joyous D major coda. The piano part wraps up several measures before the end, but Levit’s skill and stage presence had been well established by then — and the audience reacted, the moment he moved to bow, with a swift standing ovation.The Philharmonic would have its moment, too, after intermission, in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. And if this work activates instruments like lights on a switchboard, then there was not a dull bulb on Friday. With brasses clear and heroic; winds eloquent and full of personality; and strings speaking as a single unit, this was an ensemble in excellent form. In the fourth movement “Intermezzo interrotto,” especially, the players found a sensitivity absent in the Brahms: lush in its folk-like melody, animated in the nightmarishly parodic interruption and, in the return of the folk tune, movingly soft, with Dvorakian wistfulness.As he did in Brahms’s Rondo, van Zweden led the Bartok Finale with a restraint that, after simply getting through the virtuosity of the breakneck pace and fugal writing, made way for an organic accumulation toward a lingeringly resonant final chord. It was a glimpse of an approach he doesn’t take often — but that would be welcome, like any appearance by Levit, with the Philharmonic going forward.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More