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      A Mighty Generation of Musicians. A Moving Final Chapter.

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      The conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Daniel Barenboim have continued to perform as aging and illness loom.LOS ANGELES — At the beginning of the final movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the strings play a mellow, stirring hymn. Then a solo bassoon silences the warmth: A funeral dirge is passing through. But just a few moments later, the strings flood back, violas and violins swooping up through a sudden chord that conjures folk fiddling, energy, passion, life itself.No, they seem to cry. Not death. Not that. Not yet.I have rarely heard the strings’ rich, defiant answer to the bassoon as effusive, as certain, as it was on Sunday afternoon, in the last of three performances of Mahler’s Ninth at Walt Disney Concert Hall here, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by Michael Tilson Thomas.It has been nearly a year and a half since Thomas, at 78 one of the world’s leading musicians for more than half a century, announced he would be undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer. And five months since he told The New York Times that he had been contemplating the music he wants played at his memorial service.Yet M.T.T., as he is widely known, is still with us, and still vital. Conducting Mahler’s valedictory masterpiece, whose ending is the repertory’s great evocation of letting go, he took his time on Sunday but refused to wallow in the obvious, unbearable emotions.The performance came just days after another miracle of a concert from an eminent maestro lately forced to reckon with mortality. On Jan. 6, Daniel Barenboim, 80, stepped down from the podium of the Berlin State Opera, a position he has held since the early 1990s, after a year buffeted by health problems. The following day, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a program streamed live.Thomas comes from a generation of older musicians who have long ruled the classical music landscape, but who are reaching the twilights of their careers.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesLike Thomas’s Mahler, Barenboim’s Schumann and Brahms were autumnal but vigorous, more present-tense than elegiac. While neither man seemed interested in denying reality, both made clear their intention to affirm life while it lasts.Not that. Not yet.Together, these were among the most poignant spectacles I’ve witnessed as a concertgoer. However sketchy and inevitably arbitrary such milestones are, the recent struggles and remarkable late-career concerts of these two men will always mark for me the passing from the scene of their generation of artists — a generation that has loomed over the musical landscape, and stubbornly refused to cede it, for decades.Although in fine health, Riccardo Muti, 81, is stepping down as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this season. The pianist Martha Argerich, also 81, who grew up with Barenboim in Buenos Aires and joined him in Berlin, has lately had her own health issues. At the Salzburg Festival last summer, the pianist Maurizio Pollini, yet another 81-year-old, canceled a recital because of heart trouble after the audience was already in its seats. Last year, a fall caused Herbert Blomstedt, 95, to briefly interrupt his calmly authoritative, jaw-dropping tour of the world’s top orchestras, which will continue at the New York Philharmonic in two weeks.The fact that more attention is being paid to Blomstedt now than 30 or 40 years ago is telling about the field. While classical music has always been fascinated by child prodigies, it is a performing art in which older performers truly hold sway. Even as audience draws: Brian Lauritzen, the host of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s radio broadcasts, wrote on Twitter that Sunday afternoon’s concert was the most full he had seen Disney Hall since before the pandemic.So audiences are sometimes witness to aging bodies pressing up against their limits. I was at Carnegie Hall in 2000 when the great tenor Carlo Bergonzi, who had never sung the title role of Verdi’s “Otello,” finally had to admit, after two painful acts, that his 75-year-old vocal cords were no match for the part and bowed out of the rest. At Salzburg this summer, Barenboim appeared a frail shell of his former self, straining to mount the podium as he led the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the youth ensemble he founded with Edward Said.But while his physical infirmity was disconcerting, what has stayed with me most was the sensitivity showed him by the superstar pianist Lang Lang, the soloist that evening. As they walked on and off and as they played, Lang both deferred to and deftly guided his maestro mentor in a way that did not ignore what was happening but granted Barenboim a full measure of dignity, and provided him the opportunity to make music as best as he was capable.Martha Argerich, left, and Daniel Barenboim — musical companions since the 1940s — appeared together with the Berlin Philharmonic as Barenboim announced his resignation from the Berlin State Opera.Monika RittershausIt was a moving reminder that even amid the little humiliations — when Thomas first returned to the podium after his cancer treatment, in November 2021, his slipping pants had clearly not yet been tailored to the changes in his body — aging and illness open a space for both performers and us in the audience to be vulnerable and graceful. To be connected to a long line of transmitted knowledge and beauty. To be grateful.After he canceled a much-anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Ring” in October, it seemed possible that Barenboim might not conduct again. And when he did return, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on New Year’s Eve, critics’ accounts painted a grim picture, focusing mainly on the performance’s distended length.But a week later, with the Berlin Philharmonic, he balanced natural flow and robust urgency in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Second Symphony. Without lacking vividness, the Brahms had a gentle cast in its opening; the Allegro finale sent off bright energy, but its colors were the blaze of a sunset rather than daylight brashness. It was just the right amount of goodbye.And after the high-spirited delicacy of the Schumann, Barenboim joined Argerich, a musical companion of his since the 1940s, at the keyboard for Bizet’s four-hand piece “Little Husband, Little Wife” from the suite “Children’s Games”: a moment of aching tenderness.Barenboim took the handful of stairs to the stage carefully but without relying on the handrail, and his motions on the podium were sometimes wide and sweeping. But he often seemed to be overseeing as much as conducting: leading with watchful eyes but keeping his arms down, experienced enough to know what the orchestra didn’t need from him.Thomas, too, told The Times in August that his illness had forced him to be more efficient in his gestures. On Sunday he was fluent but restrained, sometimes keeping a simple beat; sometimes slicing his baton horizontally; sometimes pumping his arms firmly downward; sometimes raising his hands, cupped around an invisible ball, as if both to summon and catch the sound.There was the straightforwardness that has always characterized his Mahler. (Among many recorded cycles of the symphonies, his no-nonsense, beautifully performed set with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led for 25 years, was my choice to play straight through on a long road trip last year.) Here in Los Angeles, his pace was patient even in the middle movements, which, more than sardonic or sour, felt proud and feisty. Here I am, they seemed to say. Take me or leave me.The work’s glacial final minutes, with the strings slipping past one another as the beat grows amorphous, seemed, more than ever in my experience, to describe the haziness of the end of consciousness.But there was not, in the silence that follows the dying of the sound, the usual game of chicken between an audience raring to applaud and a conductor unwilling to release. On Sunday there was no battle of wills, no self-indulgence, before the ovation. Thomas let the quiet come, then let it go. More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Comes to Town, Megawatt Appeal on Display

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      Dudamel led his Los Angeles Philharmonic in two concerts at Carnegie Hall that included a scorching New York premiere by Gabriela Ortiz.Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Gustavo Dudamel defied expectations.Dudamel is the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — one of the country’s top orchestras — a collaborator of choice for pop artists like Billie Eilish and the voice of Wolfgang Amadeus Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour.”But at Carnegie, this celebrity conductor refused to take a solo bow, choosing instead to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Los Angeles players and absorb one standing ovation after another as part of their rank. The only thing that made him pop — besides, of course, his megawatt charisma, corkscrew curls and elegantly powerful restraint on the podium — was his white dress shirt amid a sea of black.Dudamel’s personal appeal and his ability to fire a city’s — and donors’ — enthusiasm for classical music have landed him on wish lists for the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic if he doesn’t renew his contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which ends in 2026. (Jaap van Zweden, New York’s maestro, is leaving in 2024.)On Tuesday night, Dudamel conducted the New York premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s blazing violin concerto “Altar de Cuerda,” with the stupendous soloist María Dueñas, and Mahler’s First Symphony. The next night, he and his players unveiled two more local premieres — Ortiz’s brief “Kauyumari” and, with the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, Arturo Márquez’s “Fandango,” along with Copland’s Third Symphony.The new pieces brought undeniable pizazz to Dudamel’s tightly conceived programs, in which passing similarities among the works encouraged listeners to draw connections.“Altar de Cuerda,” or “String Altar” — the seventh of Ortiz’s “Altar” pieces — set a high bar that was unsurpassed over the two nights. It begins with a scorching statement in the violin, with whacks of triangle and crotales (spooky sounding cymbals) that rise off the stage like puffs of smoke in a roiling brew. At a few points, the woodwind and brass musicians played tuned crystal cups that conjured ritualistic magic.Little of what Ortiz wrote for the solo violinist is classically beautiful, yet Dueñas was wholly captivating. Her tone was scratchy and possessed in fiendish runs, leaps and double and triple stops. She could also produce brilliance and high-frequency top notes that pinged like artificial sound effects. Low-pitched trills had a guttural quality, and she slashed at the violin so furiously she could have drawn blood from its strings.Dueñas, the soloist in Ortiz’s “Altar de Cuerda,” was wholly captivating.Chris LeeFor the cadenza, Dueñas played a series of repeated figures in a free tempo, like an actor teasing out the subtleties of a line with different inflections. The emotions, though, weren’t merely joy and sadness; there was also worry, self-consciousness, maybe even shame.Remarkably, Dueñas is just 19 years old.Dudamel expertly controlled the coiled tension of “Altar de Cuerda,” a feat he repeated with the Ortiz piece that opened the second night’s program. He clearly connects with her compositions; he organized the irrepressible energy of “Kauyumari” into a churning engine of sound, and its fanfares presaged the arrival of Copland’s symphony — with its interpolation of “Fanfare for the Common Man” — after intermission.Where “Kauyumari” draws on a Mexican creation story, Márquez’s “Fandango” draws on that country’s music, turning the orchestra into a lively rhythm section that allowed Meyers’s violin to sing with a silky tone, even if her passagework could be difficult to hear.The Mahler and Copland symphonies, the evenings’ longest pieces, took pride of place after intermission on their programs. Each begins with the falling interval of a fourth in the woodwinds, supported by strings, but the effect couldn’t be more different. In the Mahler, there’s traditionally an eerie evocation, a world of frost gently warming to life. Dudamel’s rendition felt plain; he seemed much more at ease with the hopeful yearning of Copland’s open octaves — upright, columnar, blindingly bright.In both symphonies, Dudamel subverted tradition. Conductors tend to emphasize the grotesque elements of Mahler’s First, but Dudamel aligned himself with the flute’s fluttery bird song over the clarinet’s bizarre, intriguing cuckoo calls and the heroic horns over the blaring, nasally trumpets. In the Copland, you would never have recognized the second movement’s almost twee character in Dudamel’s insistent, spirited treatment of its delicately interlocking motivic cells.Ultimately, he brought the pieces closer together — making the Mahler a little more human in its warm, unrushed spaciousness, and the Copland a little more mysterious.Coming out for an encore on Wednesday, Dudamel held up his index finger, as if to say, “OK, we’ll do one more,” and the audience roared. After a brief, whirring, mischievous selection from Copland’s ballet “Billy the Kid,” Dudamel exited, this time for good, and the lights went up.It was the kind of tease that leaves audiences wanting more. And with the question of the New York Philharmonic hanging in the air, it remains to be seen how much more New Yorkers will get.Los Angeles PhilharmonicPerformed on Tuesday and Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Pioneering Orchestra Boss Had ‘Unfinished Business,’ So She Returned

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      Deborah Borda led the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s, and was frustrated by its subpar hall. After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, she “finally saw a path forward,” she said.When the musicians of the New York Philharmonic gathered inside what was still very much a construction site in mid-August to hear for the first time how they would sound after the $550 million renovation of their home, David Geffen Hall, Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, handed out roses to the arriving players.“This is a historic moment,” Borda, who had barely slept the night before, told them from the conductor’s podium. “Welcome to your new home.”It was a homecoming that Borda, 73, has been working toward for decades.She first led the Philharmonic in the 1990s, and left partly out of frustration that there was no will to rebuild its perennially troubled home, known then as Avery Fisher Hall, which had long been plagued by complaints about its look and, especially, its sound. She spent 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ushering the orchestra into the acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and signing Gustavo Dudamel as music director. Then, just as she began to consider a new chapter, perhaps teaching, she was lured back to New York five years ago: a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen had revived plans to remake the hall, but momentum seemed to be stalling.“It was unfinished business,” she said. “I had been dreaming about this since the 1990s. And then I finally saw a path forward.”So there was a lot on the line that afternoon in August, when she listened intently as the orchestra tuned up and then, under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden, played excerpts from Bruckner’s elegiac Seventh Symphony. She felt reassured.“It sounds terrific,” she told the small crowd in attendance, including leaders from Lincoln Center, board members, sound experts and construction workers.When Borda returned to New York in 2017, arts leaders had real concerns about the health of the Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the United States. It had top-flight musicians and a storied tradition — over the years it has been led by giants like Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein — but it ran deficits every year, its audience was aging and it faced competition from the many international ensembles that tour New York. When she arrived, its endowment fund had less money than when she been in charge in the 1990s.It was the Geffen gift — secured in 2015 by Katherine G. Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center, which owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord — that finally put a revamped hall within grasp. But there were still serious obstacles. Lincoln Center was going through a period of management churn as top executives came and went. The renovation plans under consideration were growing too expensive and hard to build, not to mention impractical (glass walls?) for an orchestra. Soon after Borda arrived, she and Lincoln Center officials announced they were going back to the drawing board.Undeterred, Borda kept working toward the ultimate goal. “She is a force of nature,” van Zweden said. “What she wants, she gets.”In 2019 Lincoln Center tapped Henry Timms, who formerly led the 92nd Street Y, as its president and chief executive. He returned stability to the organization, rethought the mission of the arts complex — which produces work on its own while serving as the landlord of independent constituent groups including the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet — and got the renovation project moving forward.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.He and Borda worked to turn the historically acrimonious relationship between Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic — which reached a low point in 2003, when the Philharmonic tried to leave and return to its old home, Carnegie Hall — into a collaborative one. That message was driven home by stickers and tote bags about the project that proclaimed, perhaps aspirationally, “Working in Concert.”Henry Timms brought stability back to Lincoln Center after a period of management tumult when he became its president and chief executive in 2019. That year he and Borda unveiled plans for the renovation of Geffen Hall, and surveyed the old hall. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms recalled meeting Borda at her home for coffee shortly before he took office, when they vowed together to finally finish the Geffen project.“It was a priority that I think we both signed up for,” he said. “But what we needed to do was make our relationship a priority.”“She could have stopped before this job and gone down in history, but she chose not to,” he said. “She went the other way and chased this final triumph.”Borda said the hard work and support of Timms and Farley at Lincoln Center, as well as the co-chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, had been critical. “They had the heart and the hunger and the vision to do this,” she said.Borda, whose mother was a lobbyist and whose father immigrated from Colombia and worked as a salesman, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was 4, and from the balcony she watched Leonard Bernstein conduct. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and when she was 12, the family moved to Boston, where they lived with Borda’s stepfather, a psychiatrist, and she played in a youth orchestra. She initially envisioned a career as a performer, studying violin and attending the Royal College of Music in London for graduate studies, and working as a freelance musician in New York. But she was drawn to management early on.In 1979, when she was 30, she landed her first major job, as general manager and artistic administrator of the San Francisco Symphony. Her appointment caught attention: She was one of the first women to lead a major orchestra in the United States. But because of her gender and sexual orientation — she is gay — she sometimes faced obstacles in the male-dominated classical field. She recalled the surprise she felt losing out on a job managing the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 1980s after being told that its maestro, Lorin Maazel, would be uncomfortable working with her because she was a woman.“It didn’t even occur to me that my gender and sexual orientation might be an impediment,” she said. “I never even thought of it.”After stints at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, she came to New York in 1991 for her first round as the Philharmonic’s chief. She balanced the orchestra’s budget and led efforts to attract more young people to concerts with innovations like short evening “rush-hour” concerts. But her tenure was also marked by feuds, including acrimonious negotiations with the orchestra’s musicians over a labor contract, and persistent tensions with Kurt Masur, who was then its music director.Borda with the music director Kurt Masur during her last stint running the New York Philharmonic, in 1991. Jack Manning/The New York TimesShe first tried to remedy some of the hall’s stubborn acoustic problems in 1992, when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic placed curved wooden reflectors around the stage — their shape inspired her to dub them “the bongos” — to help spread the sound. But the problems persisted.She left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999, in part, she said, because she did not believe cultural leaders in New York were committed to a full-scale renovation of the hall.“I didn’t think there was the heart or the vision to get it done at that time,” she said. “It was frustrating and that’s why I left.”She flourished in Los Angeles, leading the orchestra to new heights. She more than quintupled its endowment, earned the orchestra a reputation for creative programming, helped make Dudamel a superstar and started an ambitious youth orchestra program for the city’s underserved communities. Then, just when she was thinking about retiring from orchestra management to teach or start a think-tank, New York beckoned her back.She returned in 2017, energized by the opportunity to finally remake Geffen Hall. “It was sort of like a karmic circle,” she said. (She also wanted to be closer to her longtime partner, Coralie Toevs, who oversees development at the Metropolitan Opera; the two maintained a long-distance relationship when Borda was in Los Angeles.)Back in New York she worked to balance the budget, raising $50 million to help the orchestra stay solvent. She built up its endowment, which was valued at $195 million when she arrived, lower than it had been when she led the orchestra in the 1990s, and which is now valued at around $220 million. And she championed innovative programming: she commissioned works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote, and one work, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize.Then the pandemic hit. The orchestra canceled more than 100 concerts — losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue — and laid off 40 percent of its staff.“I genuinely thought we could go out of business,” she said.But Timms and Borda pressed ahead, seizing on the long pandemic shutdown period to accelerate the project, which was originally scheduled to take place over several seasons.Now Borda, having made good on her promise to usher another Philharmonic into another modern home, has announced plans to step down at the end of June, when she will hand the reins of the Philharmonic to Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, in Washington. (She will stay on as a special adviser to assist with fund-raising and other matters.)But she still has work to do: planning enticing seasons to lure concertgoers to a new hall.“A hall can’t just be a monument to itself,” she said.And a critical decision looms: before she departs, Borda hopes to name a successor to van Zweden, the music director, who will leave his post in 2024. A 12-person committee of Philharmonic staff, musicians and board members is sifting through candidates. Among the likely contenders are Dudamel; Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the former music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Susanna Malkki, the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic; and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Borda said she was looking for a leader who “clicks with the orchestra” and “clicks with New York.”On a recent day, as she led a tour of the hall for the Philharmonic’s board, her cellphone often sounded, filling the hall with her ringtone: “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s “Solomon.”Standing before a new digital wall in the lobby, she smiled, saying she was moved that the Philharmonic would finally have a home to match its artistic caliber.“It energizes me completely,” she said. “It’s like a dream.” More

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      Review: Thomas Adès Charts a Journey Through Hell and Heaven

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      At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the composer’s “Dante” is an extreme rarity in orchestral music: a new evening-length work.LOS ANGELES — Step into Walt Disney Concert Hall here this weekend, and you’ll find one of the rarest creatures in classical music: a new evening-length work.Premieres are most often relegated to the realm of curtain raisers. At best, composers can hope for the post-intermission pride of place almost always reserved for classic symphonies. A full program, though? Practically unheard-of.But the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the most adventurous of America’s major orchestras, is a reliable exception. And on Thursday it gave the U.S. premiere of Thomas Adès’s “Dante,” a more than 90-minute journey through hell and the spheres of heaven, a musical analogue to “The Divine Comedy” that, in its expansive yet discrete sound worlds, rises to meet its source material.“Dante” got its start here three years ago, when the first section — “Inferno,” a love letter to Liszt, whom Adès has referred to as “my Virgil” — was one of many substantial premieres celebrating the Philharmonic’s centennial. The full work landed in London last fall as “The Dante Project,” an ambitious commission by the Royal Ballet, choreographed by Wayne McGregor and featuring designs by the artist Tacita Dean.Not all ballet music belongs in the concert hall; there’s a reason the stage scores of Adolphe Adam or Léo Delibes are rarely programmed. Although Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty” is his most appropriately balletic music, orchestras more readily take up the symphonic drama of “Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker,” a consummate tone poem that — like Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and his other early works — is satisfyingly evocative in any context.Put “Dante” in the pantheon of great ballet scores that stand alone — thrive, even — outside the pit and the proscenium. As seen in a streamed video from the Royal Ballet, it nearly overpowered the contributions by McGregor and Dean. But at Disney Hall, under the enthusiastic and commanding baton of Gustavo Dudamel, the music’s tempos were freer; the dense textures, more clearly defined; the mastery of craft, impossible to miss.Dudamel led “Dante” enthusiastically, and with command.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesAdès’s work here is something of a modern answer to Liszt’s “Dante” Symphony — another work that traces the trilogy of “The Divine Comedy” with a choral finale — though there is more varied inspiration (and more Liszt) throughout. In that sense, it is typical Adès: referential, if not reverential, and slippery. Before you realize you’ve spotted an allusion, it’s gone. And it might not have even been real; that is the strange magic of his music, which manages to feel at once fresh and familiar.It’s no surprise that “Dante” was met with prolonged, fervent standing ovations on Thursday. Adès is by no means an avant-gardist, and this work, for all its sophistication, is entirely approachable — legibly fun, vivid and, by the end, glorious. With the exception of recorded song deployed in “Purgatorio,” he writes with virtually the same means as a composer of a century ago: a happy reminder of how alive and well the orchestra can be as a medium and instrument.In “Inferno,” he follows the path of Dante’s text — beginning, in the section “Abandon Hope,” with piercing darkness and a downward plunge reminiscent of the “Dante” Symphony. But although Liszt haunts “Inferno,” the craft is Adès’s: hallmarks like full-bodied, divisi strings; excess at both ends of the dynamic spectrum; and meter that changes by the measure.From there, the circles of hell serve as ready-made divertissements, characterful episodes that conjure, however obliquely, the poetic justice delivered to Dante’s sinners. There are sections of sensuality and sludgy stasis; strings that chatter and murmur with mischief; and martial horrors similar to, well, hellfire. Chromatic runs, up and down on unsteady ground, recall Liszt’s “Bagatelle Sans Tonalité.” Does Adès also nod to “E sempre lava!” from Puccini’s “Tosca”? Maybe Tchaikovsky and the Dies Irae, too? You can never be sure.Liszt reappears, more explicitly, in the climactic “Thieves” section, a cacophonous dance that would seem parodic if it didn’t so affectionately resemble the “Grand Galop Chromatique.” Here, liberated from any choreographic constraints, Dudamel gradually pressed the tempo in a desperate race that had the audience applauding mid-performance; and how could they not?With a running time of about 45 minutes, “Inferno” takes up roughly half of the “Dante” score, but doesn’t loom over the distinctive personalities of “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” which came after an intermission.Those two are more abstractly inspired by Dante. “Purgatorio” doesn’t follow the text canto by canto so much as echo its predawn mood and preoccupation with song. Adès employs an ancient Jewish prayer for early morning from Syria, now preserved in a recording from the Ades Synagogue in Jerusalem. After an opening without pitch — waves of wind blown through instruments, or bowed on the bridge in the strings — the cantor’s singing, amplified from the stage, enters, and occasionally overtakes the orchestra.At one point, like the inverted world of purgatory, the amplification moves up to the ceiling, from focused to spatial. And its sounds guide the orchestral writing; trumpets herald a “Heavenly Procession” with a tune that is quickly revealed to be a transcription. Because the prayer ends at dawn, the music does, too, with the luminous, Pearly Gates grandeur of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.And so Adès arrives at “Paradiso,” a glassy upward spiral in constant motion. Even as it descends, it does so with a weightless shimmer, and never for long. You wouldn’t think a composer could sustain a slow ascent for some 25 minutes, and the conceit appears to wear thin until its spell takes hold — a step outside time, cosmic and courting a hypnotic daze. When the climb reaches an untenable height, the orchestration teeming and begging for harmonic resolution, an offstage choir (the Los Angeles Master Chorale) provides it with a halo of heavenly consonance.From this celestial perspective, the scattered chaos of “Inferno” is a distant memory. Everything in between has been a journey indeed — a range difficult to fathom for a single work. That, perhaps, is the real achievement of “Dante”: Like the poetry of “The Divine Comedy,” it seems to contain the entirety of life itself.Los Angeles PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; laphil.com. More

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      Singing, and Signing, Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ in Los Angeles

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theater are working on an innovative production conceived for both hearing and deaf operagoers.LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign-language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.Indi Robinson and Gregor Lopes, deaf actors, rehearse a scene from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (singing and signing), and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that usually just accommodates an orchestra.“We are creating the dance of the double-cast,” said Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is portrayed by both a singer and an actor. “We have been conceiving ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we want to create to create an opera for a deaf audience as well. From the first bar of the opera.”For the actors, who are accustomed to performing in musicals including “Spring Awakening,” which has been part of Deaf West’s repertory, adapting to a more operatic style has been something of an adjustment.“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor playing Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene where he took Leonore to the dungeon to see her husband (husbands: a singer and an actor) sleeping on the floor. “I have never done anything like this before.”Josh Castille, a deaf performance artist acting the role of Florestan, left, worked with the director, Alberto Arvelo, center, and Ian Koziara, the tenor singing the role of Florestan.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and one that few of them know, so lip-reading is not an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the florid, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature for opera singers used to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with signs, the big moments when a singer sends a single note soaring through the hall.“Oh gosh — it is stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor portraying Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to get a job in the jail where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held, in the hopes of saving him.“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held that long,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to understand because I don’t hear. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience will understand me and understand why I’m holding this out, because it’s not natural to the language to hold a sign that long.”This production of “Fidelio” is opening less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Troy Kotsur, who used to be member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for best supporting actor, the first deaf man to be so honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of “CODA.” (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview they had seen the movie three times.)This production is steeped in classical music history, since Beethoven experienced hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others,” the composer and musician wrote in 1802 in an anguished letter addressed to his brothers that came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.)María Inmaculada Velásquez Echeverria, the artistic director of White Hands Choir.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThat history intrigued Dudamel as he was arranging a 250th anniversary celebration of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how to make the opera be part of these two worlds — the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.And it is what drew Deaf West to this project; its members considered what Beethoven faced writing and conducting while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.“Maybe he did it through feeling the vibrations of the music?” Kurs said. “I don’t know Beethoven’s exact process, but there’s a similarity to how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in my entire life, but I think that I understand it.”There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about Beethoven’s level of hearing at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to the substantially revised version of 1814. By 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. By 1818, he began carrying pads of paper for people to write down what they were saying to him. While he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate because he was wildly creative throughout his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University, who has written extensively about Beethoven.Jan Swafford, a Beethoven biographer, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “He would not have lost pitch as much as color,” he said of its onset.In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production was to be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. After the tour through Europe was canceled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time working with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the renowned Los Angeles-based theater.Dudamel is familiar with the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the music director for the Paris Opera. But this week, he will also be leading the deaf and hard-of-hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel, left, worked with members of the opera’s cast and chorus at a recent rehearsal.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDudamel told Kurs he had to some extent been prepared for this because of his work at the podium, especially as someone who conducts orchestras all over the world, with players who speak many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain overly verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)“In a way, a conductor needs to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You cannot say anything. You can only show them.”Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir as her husband led it in rehearsal.The aspirations of this performance will be signaled from first notes of the overture.The Venezuelan choir will use choreography and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture which opens the opera: The other day, it was wide smiles and hands raised to the air in a representation of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is especially optimistic,” Arvelo, the director said. “In such a dark story, the overture starts with this moment in major tones. We were like: How can we transmit this with images?”During the spoken stretches of the opera, the audience will hear nothing: the actors will communicate the dialogue in sign language, which will be translated on supertitles cast above the stage.The production will last for three nights.“I think it’s going to be a mixed audience,” said Chad Smith, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be a lot of the L.A. Phil audience who are coming to hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works from the canon.”Smith added that the hope was to also have people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are in the space for “perhaps the first time.”The experience has proved to be as powerful for the opera singers as for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart to Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he had ever witnessed.“People want to see themselves onstage,” he said. “For once in my life, I’m going to be someone’s voice and they’re going to be my action. He is my body and my action and my intent and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing audience. We are one entity — Rocco. He is attached to me, as much as I am attached to him.” More

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      William Kraft, Percussionist and Force in New Music, Dies at 98

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      A mainstay of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he also composed music that elevated overlooked instruments like the timpani.Lamenting the abundance of what he called “rat-a-tat, boom-boom” music for drums, William Kraft set out to create more sophisticated offerings that would bring greater respect to instruments he felt were too often taken for granted in orchestras.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” he wrote in 1968. “The last of orchestral families to be exploited, they have come of age in the 20th century.”Mr. Kraft, who as both a composer and a percussionist became a force in contemporary music, elevating overlooked instruments like the timpani and developing a style that drew on jazz and Impressionism, died on Feb. 12 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. He was 98.His wife, the composer Joan Huang, said the cause was heart failure.A spirited performer, Mr. Kraft was acclaimed for his work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he spent 26 years, 18 of them as principal timpanist.But he was perhaps best known as a composer. A frequent collaborator with Igor Stravinsky, Mr. Kraft helped lend legitimacy to contemporary music in the United States, founding ensembles to showcase modern composers at a time when many classical musicians were skeptical of straying too far from the traditional canon.“The days of percussionists being second-class citizens in the musical society are clearly over,” Mr. Kraft wrote.Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesPlaying his music — deliberate yet freewheeling, flashy but spiritual — became a rite of passage for percussionists, and his works were heard in band rooms and concert halls alike.William Kraft was born in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1923, the son of Louis and Florence (Rogalsky) Kashareftsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia. (His father changed the family name from Kashareftsky to Kraft upon arriving in the United States.) When William was 3, the family moved to San Diego, where his parents opened a delicatessen and, at his mother’s urging, he began studying piano.While he adored the music of French Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel (“my great idols,” friends say he called them), he did not initially anticipate making composition a career.“I just thought they were gods and not to be touched,” he said in a 2020 interview with Ching Juhl, a producer and violist. “They were influences, but I never thought I could write the style.”During World War II, when he worked as a drummer and pianist in American military bands stationed in Europe, he began exploring composition more seriously.His roommate at the time, a trumpet player, asked him to produce an arrangement of the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust.” Mr. Kraft agreed, but he wanted to do it his way, composing an elaborate introduction based on the musical interval of the fourth.Mr. Kraft earned a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University in 1954. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic the next year and rose through the ranks, becoming principal timpanist in 1963. On the side, he continued writing his own works, including percussion pieces in the style of Baroque suites and a series of compositions that he called “Encounters,” pairing percussion with a variety of other instruments, including trumpet and harp. He called himself an “American Impressionist.”Mr. Kraft, center, in Los Angeles in 2008 after a concert by the ensemble Southwest Chamber Music honoring him on his 85th birthday. He was joined by the ensemble’s John Schneider, left, and Ricardo Gallardo.Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesZubin Mehta, who served as the Philharmonic’s music director from 1962 to 1978, described Mr. Kraft as a nimble musician. He recalled Mr. Kraft rearranging the timpani part for Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for one player, rather than two as was standard, making it easier for the Philharmonic to perform while on tour.“He knew the pieces so well,” Mr. Mehta said in an interview. “It just came naturally.”Mr. Mehta elevated Mr. Kraft to the post of assistant conductor, which he held from 1969 to 1972. Mr. Kraft sold his instruments and retired from playing in the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1981 to become the orchestra’s composer in residence.Stravinsky, who moved to California in the 1940s, had a significant influence on Mr. Kraft. (Mr. Kraft once said hearing “The Rite of Spring” for the first time as a teenager “changed my life.”) The two men worked together often. Mr. Kraft played timpani in Stravinsky’s ensembles and helped edit the percussion parts for Stravinsky’s musical play “The Soldier’s Tale.”Mr. Kraft’s music, with its emphasis on rhythmic freedom, often seemed to pay homage to Stravinsky. Mr. Kraft was also fond of virtuosic feats; one of his concertos demands the performer play 15 timpani.“He was one of the few atonal composers who really somehow wrote very uplifting music,” said the composer Paul Polivnick, a friend. “While he had his mathematical formulas, he let his music be based in creating a sense of emotional and dramatic power.”In 1956 he organized the First Percussion Quartet, made up of players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The ensemble, which later grew in size and changed its name to the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Players, promoted works by composers including Stravinsky, Alberto Ginastera and Edgard Varèse.In 1981, Mr. Kraft founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. He also had a busy teaching career, serving as chairman of the composition department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1991 to 2002.“He put Los Angeles on the map as a hot spot for contemporary music,” said Joseph Pereira, the current principal timpanist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “We are still reaping the benefits of Kraft’s impact on the Philharmonic, and on the new music community.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Kraft is survived by a son, Patrick; a daughter, Jennifer; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.He composed until the end of his life, sitting at the piano each day to sketch out ideas. At his death he was working on a piece called “Kaleidoscope” as well as a rearrangement of a piano concerto.The day before he died, Ms. Huang said, Mr. Kraft asked about his unfinished pieces, and she promised to complete them.“He just loved composing,” she said. “It was his language.” More

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      A Conductor Considers Her Future

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      Susanna Mälkki is at the top of her field as major American orchestras search for their next music directors.HELSINKI, Finland — It was late morning recently, not long after sunrise, as members of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra unwrapped their scarves, unpacked their instruments and settled in for rehearsal at the Musiikkitalo concert hall here.The orchestra’s chief conductor, Susanna Mälkki, walked in from the wings, stopping to banter with players as she made her way to the podium. Once there, she removed her medical mask with a feigned look of relief and raised a baton. With no words and barely a pause, a Lamborghini going from zero to 60 in the blink of an eye, the orchestra launched into the galloping grandeur of Szymanowski’s Concert Overture.Mälkki’s rehearsals tend to unfold like this, with seamless shifts between cordiality and efficiency. A former orchestral cellist, she understands the value of concision in a conductor and precisely articulates what she wants. With results: Her performances often strike a remarkable balance of clarity and urgency, whether shepherding a premiere or reinvigorating a classic.The classical music field has taken notice. At 52, Mälkki is one of the world’s top conductors, widely sought between her appearances in Helsinki and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which she is the principal guest conductor. And with openings on the horizon at major American orchestras — especially the New York Philharmonic, which she leads at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 6, and which is searching for a music director to succeed Jaap van Zweden in 2024 — her name is on leading wish lists.“I’m counting my blessings, that I get to work with all these orchestras,” Mälkki said during a series of interviews this fall. “Any speculation — there’s no need for that.”She is aware of the eyes on her, and of the pressure to appoint women in the United States, where there are currently no female music directors among the largest 25 orchestras. (Nathalie Stutzmann takes the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s podium next year.)“My standpoint has always been that since I do not wish that my gender is something that is held against me, I also shall not use it to benefit from it,” Mälkki said, adding, “Music, with the capital M, remains its own independent entity — and that, for me, is the best part.”Her work, she said, should speak for itself. And it does: “Susanna has to be at the top of anyone’s list,” said Chad Smith, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive.Mälkki leading the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, where she is the chief conductor, in early December.Maarit KytöharjuBorn in Helsinki in 1969, Mälkki has almost always led a life that revolved around music. She played multiple instruments as a child but settled on the cello, rising to become the principal cellist of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in her mid-20s. But she also studied conducting and longed to move into that field, which would have been virtually unthinkable for a woman when she was growing up.Among the first major conductors to see Mälkki wield a baton was her compatriot Esa-Pekka Salonen, at a workshop in Stockholm. “He came to me afterward,” she recalled, “and, unbelievably, he said, ‘You look like you’re in the right place.’ So, if you get rotten tomatoes thrown to you later, you can still think, ‘Well, you know, maybe I’m doing something right.’”In 1998, she made the leap to full-time conducting and gave up her post in Gothenburg, where the orchestra’s manager told her, “I’m sure you’re very talented; it’s just a pity that you can never become anything.”Mälkki said the remark was so hurtful that “for years I couldn’t even tell people about it. But again, it comes back to the music, because I was not thinking of myself; I was thinking of all the things I wanted to do with the music.”She first made a name for herself in contemporary repertory, and moved to Paris to serve from 2006 until 2013 as the director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the group founded by Pierre Boulez. (She still lives there, while also keeping an apartment near the Helsinki waterfront, where she likes to go for restorative walks.)“Those years of all those world premieres — it was an incredible school,” she said. “My brain was overheated many times, but it was actually a really fantastic way to learn the craft, because you have to be able to read your score and organize the rehearsals so that the musicians understand what their part is in the big context.”From left, the singer Fiona McGown, the composer Kaija Saariaho and Mälkki preparing Saariaho’s opera “Innocence” in France.Jean-Louis FernamdezIn 2016, Mälkki became the first female chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic. She had made guest appearances with the orchestra before, but this was a homecoming that felt, she said, “like the chance to make a contribution to Finnish music life after the fantastic education I had received.”Her players now included old classmates from the nearby Sibelius Academy, the prestigious school that has produced other conducting luminaries, such as Salonen, as well as emerging talents like Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Mäkelä.That same year, Mälkki was named the principal guest conductor in Los Angeles, at an orchestra she had first led in 2010. The ensemble had not had a principal guest since Michael Tilson Thomas and Simon Rattle, then rising stars, in the 1980s. But the players liked her, and she was invited back repeatedly after her debut.At the time, the orchestra was run by Deborah Borda, who is now the New York Philharmonic’s chief executive. Mälkki had made an impression with her “very deep connection to the music,” Borda recalled recently.“She’s very passionate, but it’s a quiet passion, a quiet charisma,” Borda added. “It’s stunning: More than an outward manifestation, this is like a flower that opens.”During a rehearsal in Los Angeles in October, Mälkki was, as in Helsinki, amiable and assertive. Carolyn Hove, the Philharmonic’s English horn player, described Mälkki as “100 percent prepared” by the time she arrives at the podium, and that “when a conductor is really efficient, it just makes our jobs so much more fun.”While running through Scriabin’s “Le Poème de l’Extase,” Mälkki gestured to sections of the ensemble but also let her gaze shift upward. (“Some people listen with their eyes closed,” she said, “and I guess my way of looking up is the same, that I want to free my ears.”) All the while, she kept notes in her head that she rattled off as soon as the playing stopped.Those notes were thorough, and crucial, as the orchestra rehearsed for the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Vista,” a piece dedicated to Mälkki, who is a leading navigator of Saariaho’s idiosyncratic sound world. “I always trusted her, and she understands my music,” Saariaho said in June, shortly before Mälkki conducted the world premiere of her opera “Innocence” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.Over the past two decades, their relationship has developed to the point where, Saariaho said, “we don’t need to verbalize very much.” When “L’Amour de Loin” arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, Saariaho insisted that Mälkki conduct it. (She will return to the Met to conduct Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” this spring.)Mälkki’s specialty in living composers like Saariaho is one of the reasons she was brought to Los Angeles, Smith said. “The other part,” he added, “was just the way she thinks about programming, which is unique.” He used that October concert as an example: opening with “Vista,” followed by Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and the “Poème.”Mälkki rehearsing a program of works by Saariaho, Tchaikovsky and Scriabin with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“On paper those things are not related to each other, but there’s this remarkable thread that goes from the Kaija through the Scriabin,” Smith said. “You experience it as a listener, as a musician. It informs the way each piece is played.”Mälkki continues to learn new works — “little by little,” she said. “Some young people want to do the Mahler right away, and we know many of those, whilst I actually waited quite a long time because I wanted to make sure that I had all my tools.”Some composers, she added, demand maturity — like Bruckner, whose symphonies she is studying now. And, experienced in 21st-century operas by Saariaho and Unsuk Chin, she is looking back toward Wagner.“It’s just quite extraordinary to think that there’s all this repertoire,” she said, “and I could actually just keep exploring that endlessly.”The question is what comes next. The Helsinki Philharmonic recently announced that Mälkki would step down in summer 2023 and become the orchestra’s chief conductor emeritus. A mix of symphonic and opera appearances will follow. Where or whether a music directorship fits into that is anyone’s guess.Borda, the chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said that a list of candidates for her orchestra’s opening is “always going” in her head. But, she added, “you cannot rush one of these searches,” and at any rate she is more focused at the moment on the renovation of David Geffen Hall, which is set to be completed by fall 2022.Though the orchestra has never had a female music director, Borda added that she is “not striving to demonstrate a social agenda in this appointment.”“We are striving to make the right choice,” she said. “It’s a chemical equation. There has to be combustion, no matter what. Even if you have social goals and aims, you have to, in working with the musicians and the board, make sure that it’s the best person for the job.”There’s also the matter of whether Mälkki would want it.“I think this is a question that will be carefully thought about if it comes up,” she said with diplomatic care. After a pause, Mälkki continued: “There are all sorts of things to be considered, and it would be wrong to choose something just for the prestige of it. It’s ultimately a choice of artistic fulfillment. We’ll see.” More

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      From a Burger King to a Concert Hall, With Help From Frank Gehry

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s ambitious new home for its youth orchestra is the latest sign of the changing fortunes of Inglewood.INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Noemi Guzman, a 17-year-old high school senior, usually has to find a corner someplace to practice violin — the instrument she calls “quite literally, the love of my life.” But the other Saturday morning, Guzman joined a string ensemble practicing on a stage here that is nearly as grand and acoustically tuned as the place she dreams of performing one day: Walt Disney Concert Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.“This is beautiful,” Guzman said during a break from a practice session at the Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center, her voice muffled by a mask. “To have a space you can call your own. It is our space. It is created for us.”Inglewood, a working-class city three miles from Los Angeles Airport that was once plagued by crime and poverty, is in the midst of a high-profile, largely sports-driven economic transformation: The 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, which opened here last year, now the home of the Rams and the Chargers, will be the site of the Super Bowl in February and will be used in the 2028 Summer Olympics. Construction is underway on an 18,000-seat arena for the Los Angeles Clippers, the basketball team.But the transformation of Inglewood, historically one of this region’s largest Black communities, is also showcased by the 25,000-square foot building where Guzman was practicing the other morning. The building, which opened in October, is the first permanent home for the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, and is the product of a collaboration involving two of the most prominent cultural figures in Los Angeles: Gustavo Dudamel, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which oversees YOLA, and Frank Gehry, the architect who designed Walt Disney Concert Hall.Mario Raven, right, led students in a singing and music reading class: “Here we go — one, two, three!”Rozette Rago for The New York Times“This was an old bank,” said Dudamel, who has long been friends with Gehry, a classical music lover who can often be spotted in the seats of the hall he designed. “Then it was a Burger King — yes, a Burger King! Frank saw the potential. What we have there is a stage of the same dimensions as Disney Hall.”The $23.5 million project is a high-water mark for YOLA, the youth music education program that was founded here 15 years ago under Dudamel and that he calls the signature achievement of his tenure. It serves 1,500 students, from ages 5 to 18, who come to study, practice and perform music on instruments provided by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was patterned after El Sistema, the youth music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel studied violin as a boy.And it is one of the most vivid examples of efforts by major arts organizations across the country to bring youth education programs out into communities, rather than concentrating them in city centers or urban arts districts. “You can’t just do it downtown,” said Karen Mack, the executive director of LA Commons, a community arts organization. “If you really want it to have the impact that’s possible with that program you have to bring it out to the community. It has to be accessible.”Gehry called that idea the “whole game.”“It becomes not the community having to go to Disney Hall,” he said, “but the Disney Hall coming to the community.”For Inglewood, the new YOLA Center is a notable addition to what has been a transformative wave of stadium and arena construction, which has spurred a wave of commercial and housing development (and with that, concerns about the gentrification that often follows this kind of development). Until 2016, Inglewood was known mainly as the home of the Forum, the 45-year-old arena where the Lakers and Kings once played before moving to what was known as the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, and Hollywood Park Racetrack, which closed to make way for SoFi stadium.Some instruments cannot be played through masks; those lessons are often held outdoors these days.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“We’ve never been known for cultural enrichment,” said James T. Butts Jr., the mayor of Inglewood. “That is why this is so important to us. What’s happening now is a rounding out of society and culture: we will no longer be known for just sports and entertainment.”Even before Beckmen Center opened, YOLA could be a heady experience for a school-age student contemplating a career in music. Guzman, who joined the youth orchestra seven years ago, has played bow to bow with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the baton of Dudamel. YOLA musicians have joined the Philharmonic at Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and on tours to places including Tokyo, Seoul and Mexico City.Christine Kiva, 15, who started playing cello when she was 7, is now studying with cellists from the Philharmonic. “It’s helped me develop my sound as a cellist, and work on a repertoire for cello,” she said.Inglewood is the fifth economically stressed neighborhood where the youth organization has set up an outpost. But in the first four locations, it shares space with other organizations, forced to fit in without a full-fledged performing space or practice rooms. “We were making the project work in spaces that weren’t specifically designed for music,” said Chad Smith, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.Now, the words “Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center,” named after the philanthropists and vineyard owners who made the largest donation to the project, stretch out across the front of the renovated building overlooking South La Brea Avenue and the old downtown. Dudamel has an office there. Members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic regularly show up to observe practice and work with students.This building has plenty of rooms for students to practice. There are 272 seats on benches in the main hall, which can be retracted into a wall, allowing the room to be divided in half so two orchestras can practice at once. The acoustics were designed by Nagata Acoustics, which also designed the acoustics at Disney Hall.YOLA, the youth music education program founded 15 years ago, now serves 1,500 students from ages 5 to 18.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThe building had been owned by Inglewood, which sold it to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “When we first walked into it, it still had the greasy smell of a Burger King,” said Elsje Kibler-Vermaas, the vice president for learning for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gehry, who had worked with Dudamel on projects before — including designs for the opera “Don Giovanni” in 2012­ — agreed to take a look at the building, a former bank that opened in 1965.He said that when they brought him there, he was struck by the low ceilings from its days as a bank.“I said, ‘is it possible to make an intervention?’” recalled Gehry who, even at 92, is involved in a series of design projects across Los Angeles.By cutting a hole in its ceiling and putting in a skylight, and cutting a hole in the floor to make the hall deeper, he was able to create a performance space with a 45-foot-high ceiling, close to what Disney Hall has. “The kids will have a real experience of playing in that kind of hall,” he said.That turned out to be a $2 million conversation; the total price, including buying the building and renovating it, jumped from $21 million to $23.5 million to cover the additional cost of raising the roof, installing a skylight and lowering the floor.The building was bustling the other day. Students had come for afternoon music instruction from elementary schools, most in Inglewood, and after snacks — bananas, apples, granola bars — they raced to their lessons in reading music, percussion and how to follow a conductor.“Pay attention!” said Mario Raven, leading his students in a singing and music reading class. “Here we go — one, two, three!”The brass players were outdoors because of Covid-19 concerns (it’s hard to play a French horn while wearing a mask). As planes flew overhead, they performed High Hopes by Panic! at the Disco, suggesting that a youth orchestra need not live by Brahms and Beethoven alone.Students typically sit through 12 to 18 hours a week of instruction for 44 weeks a year. About a quarter of them end up majoring in music. Smith said that was reflected in the broader aspirations for the program. “Our goal wasn’t we were going to train the greatest musicians in the world,” he said. “Our goal was we were going to provide music education to develop students’ self-esteem through music.”Dudamel said his experience as a boy in Venezuela had been formative in bringing the program to Los Angeles. “I grew up in an orchestra where they called us, in the press, the ‘orchestra without a ceiling,’” he said in a Zoom interview from France, where he is now also the music director of the Paris Opera. “Because we didn’t have a place where to rehearse. We have materialized a dream where young people have the best things they can have. A good hall. Great teachers.”“Look, this is not a regular music school,” he added. “We don’t pretend be a conservatory. Maybe they will not be musicians in the future. But our goal is that they have music as part of their life, because it brings beauty, it brings discipline through art.” More