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      Her Symphony Reclaims an Ancestral Story, and Classical Music

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      Tamar-kali, a former punk rocker, wove episodes of Gullah Geechee history into “Sea Island Symphony,” premiering at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.When the composer Tamar-kali goes fishing in the South Carolina low country, she thinks about her ancestors — the Gullah Geechee — singing spirituals like “Wade in the Water.” And she pictures Harriet Tubman arriving with Union gunboats in the summer of 1863 when those ancestors actually had to wade in the water to their freedom.The Gullah Geechee, who called Tubman Black Moses, helped create a rich book of spirituals that fused biblical imagery with their own plight. “You think about a people who have been engaging in this faith as a form of coping with their lot in life,” Tamar-kali said, “which is the absolute removal of their agency, their humanity, as chattel slaves.”Tamar-kali, who lives in Brooklyn, is always thinking about history, and it infuses her music. The largest expression yet is her “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo,” a new work for orchestra and vocalists that is to have its world premiere on Wednesday in Manhattan as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City.The programmatic symphony paints the Gullah Geechee story from the Civil War through the rise of Robert Smalls, a Carolina man who was born enslaved and became a United States congressman in 1875.“I’m a full-concept girl,” said Tamar-kali, who began working on the piece in 2019. “I started it and then I realized: Oh, this is not something small. Because it’s like I really go with the guidance from the muses.”The symphony’s world premiere, performed by American Composers Orchestra, is the culmination of a series she curated called “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” that has included panel discussions about the complex and often neglected history of America’s Black composers and classical music. Tamar-kali said it was important to her that the piece be contextualized and that the series happen around Independence Day to emphasize that “the end of colonial British rule only symbolized independence for a very small population.”The four-movement “Sea Island Symphony” is the most ambitious addition yet to a composing and performing career that has included punk rock, film scores and opera. Tamar-kali’s eclectic output is the product of wildly varied input — her family’s juke joint in the Sea Islands, blues and jazz, and the Ashkenazi cantorial melodies and classical music she absorbed growing up in New York City.Tamar-kali, center, at Joe’s Pub in 2008.Scott Ellison SmithTamar-kali C. Brown — that’s her full name — describes herself as “a kid that classical music lost.” She received a formal music education at an all-girls Catholic school in Brooklyn in the 1980s, studying theory and singing in a classical choir. But her experience there — she called it “a post-colonial missionary mind-set institutional space” — gave her “no desire to continue that journey that basically felt, to me, like a war,” she said. “So I figured out early on that I would deal with music on my own terms.”She arrived on the New York musical scene screaming — shredding an electric guitar and belting out lyrics of resistance by way of punk rock, becoming a fixture at Joe’s Pub. Shanta Thake, the new chief artistic officer at Lincoln Center, was an early fan. “If you were just to describe her visually, walking around, she is so fierce,” Thake said. “There’s this warrior fierceness to who she is onstage, and just such a command of the audience, of the songs themselves.”Another fan from the Joe’s Pub days was the composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, now a professor at Arizona State University. Roumain was living in Harlem in the early 2000s, and he invited Tamar-kali to his apartment, where they recorded a raw electric version of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”“She was this seminal New York artist who was bold and brash, avant-garde,” Roumain said, “incredibly powerful and incredibly inventive. She was a destination, and her career was, even at that time, landmark.”Tamar-kali transcended punk to found the Psychochamber Ensemble, an all-female string and choral group that also covered Kate Bush. She was dipping back into classical music, and she realized, if only after the fact, that she was trying to recreate the fellowship she had experienced in school choir — but now in a safe space while maintaining her agency. “I didn’t even realize I was trying to heal myself,” she said.Before long, Tamar-kali’s string writing and story sense attracted film directors. She made her scoring debut with Dee Rees’s “Mudbound” in 2017. She recently scored a PBS documentary about the Gullah Geechee, “After Sherman,” and is working on John Ridley’s biopic of Shirley Chisholm starring Regina King.The film work is acoustic and often chamber sized, with a handmade quality, created in her studio in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. She often incorporates her own singing voice. Her music is always, in a way, vocal, Roumain said: It “is always boundless, is always wanting to speak. In some ways, it can’t be contained.”Tamar-kali described herself as “a kid that classical music lost.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe composes most of her music with her voice, which she then translates into software and synth mock-ups before it’s interpreted by other musicians.It was Roumain who nominated Tamar-kali in 2019 for an Arizona State commission that became the seed for “Sea Island Symphony,” a work she describes, stylistically, as Americana, a synthesis of all of her influences. “It just … it sounds like me,” she said.The finished symphony opens with a movement depicting the Port Royal Experiment of 1861, in which the Gullah were left to manage themselves in the low country’s undesirable marshlands, with text sung by a tenor representing a newly freed person.The second movement travels forward to the Combahee River Raid of 1863, when Tubman led a Union military operation to rescue more than 700 enslaved people, and reclaims the true origins of the song “Kum ba yah.” “It’s not about making amends or being all happy and sweet,” Tamar-kali said. “It’s a cry for intercession by the higher power: ‘Come by here, my lord.’”The segment culminates in a ring shout, a call-and-response circle that enslaved Africans developed to preserve their heritage while strategically not offending their white captors. The singers will be accompanied by a “shout stick,” historically often a mop or broomstick, since drums were outlawed at the time.The third movement is a scenic piece inspired by General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, an 1865 military order that granted the area’s newly freed people ownership of the Gullah Geechee corridor. The final movement traces the story of Robert Smalls, who used his navigational skills to sail to freedom; he joined the Union army and later become a congressman. Though Smalls’s name is all over his hometown, Beaufort, it’s another piece of history that Tamar-kali discovered only as an adult.Tamar-kali said she hoped eventually to take the symphony down to the low country and to Washington, D.C. She insisted on this premiere being part of free summer programming, which means it’s one night only, with a small budget and very limited rehearsal.Having grown up attending free concerts in Brooklyn and Central Park, she knows that “the most multicultural, multigenerational audiences, of the most diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, exist at free public programming,” she said, adding it was “the gateway to diversity in the halls. But it’s overlooked, and it’s underfunded.”Classical music lost her once. She wants it to find more people like her. More

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      Lincoln Center, Seeking New Audiences, Plans to Remake Its West Edge

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      The center hopes a major renovation along Amsterdam Avenue will help shed its elitist image and forge closer ties with Black and Latino residents.Lincoln Center welcomes visitors at its main entrance facing Broadway with an elegant plaza, a majestic fountain and an array of travertine concert halls and theaters.But the view from the center’s western edge, along Amsterdam Avenue, is far less convivial: An imposing wall stretches across several blocks, giving the feel of a fortress.Now Lincoln Center, hoping to draw new audiences and promote closer ties with nearby public housing complexes, schools and community centers, is planning a major renovation of its western side, the organization’s leaders announced on Tuesday. The project will likely entail tearing down parts of the wall, building an outdoor stage and renovating Damrosch Park, at the corner of Amsterdam and West 62nd Street.“As welcoming as we are to the east, we should be to the west,” Henry Timms, the president and chief executive of Lincoln Center, said in an interview.The project is partly a response to Lincoln Center’s complicated history. A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction in 1959.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It’s unclear in some places what might be behind these walls,” he added of the center’s west side. “The message is one of a different world, and I think that’s a mistake.”The renovation is the latest effort by Timms, whose tenure began in 2019, to shed Lincoln Center’s elitist image and to attract more diverse audiences, especially Black and Latino residents across the city. The center has in recent years worked to diversify its programming and expand access to its campus, including by experimenting with a choose-what-you-pay model for some events.The project is partly a response to Lincoln Center’s complicated history on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, which was home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction, which began in 1959.Lincoln Center’s leaders, invoking that history, said that getting public input for the renovation, by organizing workshops, walking tours and surveys, would be crucial. The center is working with NADAAA, a Boston architecture firm, and Hester Street, a nonprofit that specializes in urban planning and community development.In a statement, Katherine G. Farley, the departing chair of Lincoln Center’s board, said: “This process will engage the community on envisioning how we can create a beautiful and architectural welcome to our neighbors to the west, assuring that the campus beckons to everyone to come enjoy our offerings.”Across the street is LaGuardia High School, known for its music and performing arts programs, as well as six high schools inside the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesLincoln Center did not provide an estimated cost or timeline for the project. Timms said that it was a major effort that would help define the modern legacy of Lincoln Center and that it was a natural next step after the recent $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, which was also aimed, in part, at deepening community ties and attracting new audiences.“This is a very significant priority of the institution,” he said. “If we can get the idea right, I’m confident that we can work hard and get the necessary resources to create something amazing for New York City.”The area surrounding the western campus includes the Amsterdam Houses, a public housing complex that first opened in 1947 for World War II veterans. Across the street is LaGuardia High School, known for its music and performing arts programs, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex, which houses six high schools.Lincoln Center’s leaders said plans for the renovation would depend on public input, but they identified several broad aims. The area under exploration includes the stretch of Amsterdam Avenue from West 62nd to West 65th Street, as well as Damrosch Park and the northwest corner of campus, home to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.The area under exploration includes Amsterdam Avenue from West 62nd to West 65th Street, as well as Damrosch Park and the campus’s northwest corner, now home to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTimms said the spirit of the project was in line with the original mission of Lincoln Center: to make the arts accessible to all.“It’s not a new woke idea,” he said. “That was an idea at the founding — that the point of Lincoln Center was actually not to be exclusive, but to be inclusive.”Local officials praised the project, saying it was important for the city’s residents, especially those with a connection to the former San Juan Hill neighborhood, to be heard. Lincoln Center last year installed a mural on Amsterdam Avenue telling the story of the neighborhood, including its rich Afro-diasporic musical heritage.“Their stories and experiences are critical to establishing a strong foundation to a more inclusive future within the community spaces that serve this neighborhood,” Gale Brewer, a member of the New York City Council, said in a statement.Maria Guzman, a public housing resident who lives south of Lincoln Center, said she was hopeful the renovation would allow more low-income residents to experience the arts.“We used to call that wall the great divide because it felt like Lincoln Center just wanted to divide the neighborhood,” she said in an interview. “The fact that they’re finally — hopefully — tearing this wall out, I think it’s wonderful. And I think the community will welcome it.” More

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      The New York Philharmonic’s Season of Mixed Boons

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

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      New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

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      More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More

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      Lincoln Center Names Conductor for Reimagined Mostly Mozart

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      Jonathon Heyward will succeed Louis Langrée as music director of the center’s revered summer ensemble.Jonathon Heyward, the rising young conductor who this fall will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has been tapped to lead Lincoln Center’s summer ensemble, a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the center announced on Wednesday.Heyward, 30, will start a three-year contract with Lincoln Center next year. His appointment is part of the center’s changes to the revered Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, by giving it a new name, embracing a wider variety of genres and bringing more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the stage.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston can fall in love with this music, then anyone can,” Heyward said in an interview. “It has everything to do with accessibility and presentation.”Heyward succeeds the orchestra’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, whose contract expires this year. During Langrée’s 21-year tenure, he has helped rejuvenate the ensemble and cement its reputation as an acclaimed interpreter of the music of Mozart and the Classical repertoire.“The orchestra musicians and I have developed a unique bond that I will treasure forever,” Langrée said in a statement. “I wish Jonathon as many joys as those I experienced during this extraordinary journey.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some complaints from audience members, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music — which was once a fixture of the season and festivals there, but has been reduced significantly.Since the pandemic, the future of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, established in 1973, has been uncertain. The festival whose name it bears — once one of Lincoln Center’s premier summertime events — no longer exists. In its place is “Summer for the City,” featuring a wider variety of genres, including pop music, social dance and comedy.Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said that the rethinking of Mostly Mozart was aimed at “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone.”“It’s a necessary evolution,” she said. “This is an orchestra that I think has a big place in the hearts and minds of New York City, and we want to keep it that way.”The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will get a new name when Heyward takes the podium next year. Thake said that its longtime moniker felt “a little myopic right now.”“We’d love to just open up that conversation and have this orchestra be something more than just one composer, or mostly anything,” she said.The center and the orchestra are negotiating a new contract — the previous agreement expired in February — and discussing issues including auditions, the process for hiring substitutes, diversifying the ranks of the ensemble and promoting community engagement.Heyward, who made his Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra debut last year and will return this summer, said that he would work to broaden the ensemble’s repertoire, including by programming more works by contemporary composers. He mentioned Hannah Kendall, a friend, as an example of an artist he was eager to explore.“We have to continue the lineage and the storytelling of today in order to really grow the art form,” he said.Heyward said he would also seek to preserve the ensemble’s heritage. “I just don’t see that just completely disappearing overnight,” he said. “It won’t, simply.”“I don’t plan on just throwing out the Beethoven symphonies, the Schumann symphonies or Mozart,” he added. “That’s not the approach to take, and that’s not what I believe in.” More

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      A 19-Year-Old Pianist Electrifies Audiences. But He’s Unimpressed.

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      Yunchan Lim’s victory at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year made him a sensation. He says the attention makes him uneasy.After six hours of sleep and a breakfast of milk and curry rice, Yunchan Lim, the South Korean pianist, was in a rehearsal studio at Lincoln Center on Tuesday morning working through a treacherous passage of Rachmaninoff.“A little bit faster,” Lim, in a black sweatshirt and sneakers, said casually to the conductor, James Gaffigan, as they prepared for Lim’s New York Philharmonic debut this week. Gaffigan laughed.“Usually pianists want the opposite!” the conductor said.Lim — shy, soft-spoken and bookish — stunned the music world last year when, at 18, he became the youngest winner in the history of the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas. His victory made him an immediate sensation; a video of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the finals has been viewed more than 11 million times on YouTube. (He will play that piece with the Philharmonic this week, under Gaffigan’s baton.)Still a college sophomore, Lim has inspired a devout following in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has become a symbol of pride in South Korea, where he has been described as classical music’s answer to K-pop. Like a pop star, his face has been printed on T-shirts.Lim at the Van Cliburn competition, playing with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.Richard Rodriguez/The Cliburn, via Associated Press“He’s a musician way beyond his years,” said the conductor Marin Alsop, who headed the Cliburn jury and led the Rachmaninoff performance. “Technically, he’s phenomenal, and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal. He’s incredibly musical and seems like a very old soul. It’s really quite something.”But Lim is uneasy with the attention. He does not believe he has any musical talent, he says, and would be content to spend his life alone in the mountains playing piano all day. (He limits his use of social media, he says, because he believes it is corrosive to creativity and because he wants to live as much as possible as his favorite composers did.)“A famous performer and an earnest performer — a true artist — are two different things,” he said in an interview this week at the Steinway factory in Queens, where he was shopping for a piano.Born in Siheung, a suburb of Seoul, Lim had a childhood filled with soccer, baseball and music. He began studying the piano at 7, when his parents enrolled him in a neighborhood music academy. He was drawn to the piano, he said, because he had grown up hearing Chopin and Liszt on recordings that his mother had purchased when she was pregnant. He was also taken by the majesty of the instrument.Lim was taken by the majesty of the instrument when he was young. “The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“Technically, he’s phenomenal,” Alsop said of Lim, “and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal.”Ayesha Malik for The New York Times“The grand piano looked shiny and most impressive,” he said.At 13, he enrolled in a prep school at Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. His teacher, the pianist Minsoo Sohn, was impressed by the sensitivity of his interpretations.“At first he was a little bit cautious, but I immediately noticed that he was a huge talent,” he said. “He’s very humble, a student of the score and he isn’t over expressive.”Sohn initially steered his student away from competitions, worried about the pressure. But when the pandemic delayed the Cliburn competition, which is held every four years, making it possible for Lim to qualify, Sohn suggested he give it a try, telling him to treat it as a performance, not a competition.“I thought the world needed to listen to what Yunchan could play in his teenage years,” Sohn said.When Lim arrived in Fort Worth for the competition, which took place over 17 days, he said he felt the spirit of Van Cliburn, the eminent pianist for whom the contest is named.Lim sometimes practiced as much as 20 hours a day, he said, sending recordings to Sohn, who was in South Korea, for guidance. He existed on a diet of Korean noodles and stews prepared by his mother, who had accompanied him, as well as midnight snacks of toasted English muffins with butter and strawberry jam made by his host family.“I knew it was like Russian roulette,” he said of the competition. “It could turn out well, or you could end up shooting yourself in the head. It was a lot of stress.”As he prepared to walk onstage to play the Rachmaninoff concerto, he said he thought of Carl Sagan’s idea of Earth as just a “pale blue dot” in the universe.“When the stage doors open and the audience applauds, when I nervously sit down at the piano and press the first key, that moment is like the Big Bang for me,” he said. “I’m nervous, but the image of the pale blue dot gives me courage. I just think of the moment as something occurring in that small little speck.”His Rachmaninoff won ovations, but he was dissatisfied with the performance, believing that he achieved only about 30 percent of what he had hoped to accomplish. Since the competition, he said he had been able to watch just the first three minutes of the YouTube video before growing dispirited.When he returned to South Korea after the Cliburn, he said he was unchanged. “I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” he said at a news conference with his teacher.“I just want to say that there’s nothing different with me and my piano skills before and after the win,” Lim said at a news conference with his teacher.Ayesha Malik for The New York TimesLim, who is still enrolled at Korean National University of Arts, plans to transfer this fall to the New England Conservatory, in Boston, where Sohn now teaches.As a student, his international career has taken off, with a recital at Wigmore Hall in London in January and an appearance with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in February. This summer, he will reunite with Alsop to perform the Rachmaninoff concerto at the Bravo! Vail festival in Colorado and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. Next year, he will make his Carnegie Hall debut with an all-Chopin program.The New York Philharmonic booked him soon after Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, saw YouTube videos of his performances at the Cliburn — a Beethoven concerto as well as the Rachmaninoff.“I was blown away by how fluent he was in both styles,” Borda said. “He was just brilliant.”Ahead of his debut in New York, Lim has been fine-tuning his interpretation of the Rachmaninoff. In preparing the concerto’s somber opening notes, he said, he imagines the “angel of death” or cloaked figures singing a Gregorian chant, following his teacher’s advice.This performance is especially meaningful, he said. On his commute to and from middle school, he often played a 1978 recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto by Vladimir Horowitz and the Philharmonic. He said he had listened to the recording at least 1,000 times.Lim said he felt nervous to follow in the footsteps of Horowitz, one of his idols, and that he would always consider himself a student, no matter how successful his career might be. He said artists should not be judged by the number of YouTube views they received, but by the authenticity of their work.“It’s a bit hard to define myself as an artist,” he said. “I’m like the universe before the Big Bang. I’m still in the learning phase.”“I’d like to be a musician with infinite possibilities,” he added, “just like the universe.”Jin Yu Young contributed research from Seoul. More

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      Les Arts Florissants Returns to New York, Endangered

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      William Christie’s early-music ensemble, once a staple at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, finds a new home in Carnegie Hall.The pair of concerts that William Christie and his ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, offered at Carnegie Hall this week made me a little sad.Not the concerts themselves: They were excellent, occasionally exquisite. What depressed me was the question of whether there’s a future in New York for this pathbreaking early-music group, founded in France four decades ago by Christie, an American.Its longtime bases when on tour in the city, Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, have jolted away from the kind of music programming that was until recently a core part of their identities — and the kind that Les Arts Florissants embodies. But this ensemble gives the lie to the suggestion, made by certain administrators, that presenting music of the past necessarily means sleepy renditions of the standards.Sure, Christie and Les Arts Florissants don’t do contemporary pieces. Their repertoire, with its founding specialty in the French Baroque of Lully, Rameau and Charpentier, doesn’t check fashionable boxes of diversity, equity and inclusion.But that doesn’t mean they are reactionary, dull, irrelevant or unworthy of being presented alongside the best of the present day. For decades, they have been fulfilling the task of any truly important cultural institution: opening up new worlds of beauty and excitement, both emotional and intellectual. Not merely rehashing what’s known, but introducing modern audiences to works and composers overlooked for centuries.Les Arts Florissants opera productions, in particular, have been deep and poignant — and very vibrant — excavations. But the organizations with the spaces and resources to put them on in America’s cultural capital no longer seem to think that’s a meaningful endeavor. That’s a loss for New York.So gratitude is due to Carnegie, one of the city’s few remaining major presenters of early music, for offering the ensemble a place to land — at least for the moment and in spare numbers. On Tuesday, Christie and the young violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte appeared upstairs, at Weill Recital Hall. And on Wednesday, Christie led slightly (but not much) beefier forces downstairs, at Zankel Hall.Christie and Langlois de Swarte gave a version of the violin-harpsichord program they recorded a few years ago, featuring sonatas from the early 18th century that demonstrate the influence that passionate, tumblingly virtuosic Italian music had on the austere, even severe dances of 17th-century France.The revelation of that album — and the best part of Tuesday’s recital — was the work of Jean Baptiste Senaillé, a favorite of the aristocracy in his day but now an obscurity. He was particularly adept at inflaming restrained French elegance with Italian intensity, as in the inexorably winding violin line of a G minor sonata’s prelude, exploding in arpeggios that lead to a fiery yet stylish gavotte.Langlois de Swarte, his tone clear but with an appealing hint of wiry bite, played with vivacity and wit. And the Adagio harpsichord introduction to a sonata in C minor showed off Christie’s magic touch, his phrasing noble yet gentle.Both this and Wednesday’s program were canny: short enough to do without an intermission, yet focused enough to feel immersive. So many programs these days valorize variety, but to spend a bit over an hour in a single sound world can be a profound experience.Better to be left wanting more. But I ever so slighted rued that, since it consisted mostly of selections of movements, Tuesday’s recital included only one full Senaillé sonata. (The recording boasted four, alongside two by his slightly younger contemporary, Jean-Marie Leclair.)On Wednesday, Christie led from the organ an ensemble of, at its most robust, nine male singers and seven players in a set of sacred works by Charpentier, whose opera “Les Arts Florissants” gave the group its name.This was, a little belatedly, music for the Lenten period, beginning with Charpentier’s beautiful, sober yet luscious set of 10 “Meditations for Lent” — a kind of proto-Passion that charts the story of the Stations of the Cross. Soloists sing some of the lines of biblical dialogue, with the narration given a hypnotic setting for groups of voices.In these meditations and three “lessons,” traditionally sung as part of evening services during Holy Week, the instrumentalists were superbly restrained. And, if none of the individual voices were particularly impressive, the choir achieved remarkable, moving effects of hovering gauziness and almost whispered sweetness; the sound was sometimes mellow, sometimes thrillingly emphatic. Precision of attack let even this modest-size group take on fearsome grandeur when singing of the ripping of the temple’s curtain as Jesus was crucified.The almost excruciating impact of tightly shifting harmonies matched the accounts of pain and torture in the texts. The hall lights were dimmed almost to darkness; the mood, unbroken by applause until the end, was rapt.It, like Tuesday’s recital, was a performance to be celebrated. But it was hard not to feel like these bite-size concerts were whetting the appetite for a full meal that may never come this way again. More

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      Lincoln Center Revives Summer for the City, Hoping to Draw New Fans

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      The festival will include hip-hop, Korean arts, Mostly Mozart and a flock of 200 flamingo lawn ornaments.Lincoln Center will bring back its Summer for the City festival this year, the organization announced on Monday, continuing its efforts to attract new audiences by embracing a wide variety of genres, including pop and classical music, social dance and comedy.There will be a weeklong celebration of hip-hop, performances by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and a Korean cultural festival. A flock of 200 neon-pink flamingo lawn ornaments will adorn a pool near David Geffen Hall, part of a reimagining of the center’s outdoor spaces by the Broadway costume and set designer Clint Ramos.“The hope is to transform the campus — to upend people’s expectations of what Lincoln Center is,” Shanta Thake, the center’s chief artistic officer, said in an interview. “To allow people to just come and play and understand that this isn’t a precious palace on a hill, but a place to inspire joy.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked in recent years to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some grumbling among fans of more traditional genres, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music. Some elements of the Mostly Mozart rubric have been reduced in recent years, including guest ensembles, intimate recitals and performances of new music that flows out of the classical tradition.The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will perform 13 concerts over three weeks, beginning with a program on July 22 that features Mozart’s Concerto No. 2 for Flute, with the soloist Jasmine Choi, as well as the Korean folk song “Arirang” and Soo Yeon Lyuh’s “Dudurim.” The performance is also part of Korean Arts Week, which includes K-pop bands, DJs and a film festival.It will be Mostly Mozart’s last season with Louis Langrée, who has been the ensemble’s music director since 2002. His contract expires this year.Thake said that Mostly Mozart would maintain a presence after Langrée’s exit. She said that the center was in talks with the orchestra about future seasons, and that they were discussing how Mostly Mozart “fits within the values of Lincoln Center,” including efforts to reach new audiences and promote inclusivity.“There’s no doubt that the orchestra will maintain a central place in our programming going forward,” she said.Hip-hop will be front and center as part of a celebration of its 50th anniversary, with performances by J.Period, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane.An opera based on Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower,” by the folk and blues musician Toshi Reagon and the composer Bernice Johnson Reagon, will get its New York City premiere at Geffen Hall on July 14.Social dance returns on June 14 with a performance of Cuban music by the singer Lucrecia and the salsa band 8 Y Más. The giant disco ball that hung over the main plaza last year, also designed by Ramos, will be back too.More than 300,000 people attended last year’s festival, which aimed at helping New York City heal after the upheaval brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. More than three-quarters of them had never before bought a ticket to a Lincoln Center offering, according to the center.Thake said she was not overly concerned about skeptics who worry that the center’s identity has changed too much.“To those people I say, It’s wonderful that you have found a home at Lincoln Center and what a gift it has been that Lincoln Center has been a home for so many for so long,” she said. “All that we are doing right now is opening up that invitation. And really having many, many more New Yorkers be able to say the exact same thing. That’s a real gift, and something that not only we can do, but something that we really have to do.” More