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    Unsuk Chin on the Violin Concerto She Swore She’d Never Write

    Unsuk Chin was inspired by Leonidas Kavakos to return to the genre, and the result comes to Carnegie Hall on Monday.The 21st century has been a strong one for violin concertos. Think Jennifer Higdon, whose neo-Romantic showpiece for Hilary Hahn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. And Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Jörg Widmann (twice) and John Adams (the same).And also Unsuk Chin, whose exceptionally difficult, alluringly colorful 2001 concerto brought her prominence and won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004.That work, which still enchants, now has a successor, the Violin Concerto No. 2, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”). Despite the South Korean-born, Ligeti-taught Chin’s reluctance to write a second concerto for any instrument, she decided to make an exception for the violinist Leonidas Kavakos — who had met her but barely knew her music before she asked to write for him.After having its premiere delayed by the pandemic, the work was unveiled by the London Symphony Orchestra in January. It arrived in the United States last week for performances with another of its commissioners, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which joins Kavakos to perform the work under Andris Nelsons at Carnegie Hall on Monday, alongside Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” (That ensemble gives a concert performance of Berg’s “Wozzeck” at Carnegie the following night.)Pages from the manuscript of the new concerto, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”).Unsuk ChinHeard in Boston on March 4, Chin’s concerto is striking in the intensity of its demands on Kavakos and the novel breadth of the palette it invites the orchestra to play with, both of which are typical traits of her works. Also impressive is the sense of narrative it creates over half an hour as it builds out a motif of just five notes: a flourish of three harmonics that settles down to two more tones.It’s entirely different from Chin’s earlier violin concerto, but equally powerful, and another worthy addition to the growing list of contemporary contributions to its genre.Speaking by phone from Berlin, Chin spoke about the inspiration behind the work, and particularly about its opening page. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Since your first violin concerto, you have written several concertos for other instruments. Has your thinking about the concerto as a genre changed at all, in these intervening two decades?Before my first violin concerto I wrote my piano concerto, which for me is also a very important work. They were not written for a certain soloist; they were very abstract, written for the instrument, rather than a person. Then I wrote my cello concerto for Alban Gerhardt and “Su,” my sheng concerto, for Wu Wei. I also wrote a clarinet concerto for Kari Kriikku.So my musical thinking changed a little bit because I became interested in musical personalities. Before that I didn’t have so much contact with musicians. I thought about my musical ideas in my mind in a very abstract way and then wrote the pieces.But this second violin concerto is again another turning point for me, because I was really enthusiastic about Leonidas’s playing, and it was something I’d never heard before. He plays music at an absolute level.How does what you admire in his playing translate into the concerto?I know all Leonidas’s repertoire, but especially his Beethoven concerto and all the sonatas. For me, it was a completely new kind of interpretation, really convincing and really strong. Through Leonidas’s playing, I rediscovered Beethoven’s music. Very often Beethoven’s materials and themes are banal, very simple, not very interesting, but he made huge artworks out of these small cells, small motifs. Then I thought, OK, I will take some very small material and try to go deeper.The music is quite different from all my other concertos. In my other pieces I have lots of ideas and a lot of colors and many movements, but this piece is just one movement, the longest one-movement piece I’ve written. The basic material is also extremely small.The first page of the published score of the concerto, which begins with a five-note motif for the solo violin, alone.Boosey & HawkesWe hear that material right at the start of the piece, for violin alone. Where does this motif go over the course of the work?The cell in total is five notes, but the first three notes are a kind of grace note; the main notes are the two after that. At the beginning they are the same note, but soon after, it changes. A semitone comes from the first cell.This small cell, or fragment, is permanently repeated through the whole piece, but every time with a different face. Sometimes it’s very melodic, Romantic; sometimes it sounds tragic; sometimes it sounds like abstract architecture. It is always the same thing, but in different layers, with different faces. It goes from beginning to end, but there is also abrupt change.A lot of concertos pit the orchestra against the soloist, but I didn’t get the sense that is what you were aiming for here.In this concerto the most important thing is the solo violin. The orchestra sometimes gives the violinist different colors, but it is mostly supporting the violin — except in one section near the middle, where everyone is doing their own thing and the soloist does not get any support from the orchestra. That is a huge fight between him and the orchestra.Previously you had banned yourself from writing more than one concerto for a given instrument. You have now broken that rule once; can we expect you to return to the piano or cello?I don’t think so. This is a very special, exceptional case. I don’t think I will be able to write a second piano concerto, even a second cello concerto. But you never know. Maybe in 20 years. More

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    Singing Will Return to Tanglewood This Summer

    The Boston Symphony Orchestra plans to go back to full-scale programming at its bucolic warm-weather home in the Berkshires.After three years, the “Ode to Joy” will be sung again at Tanglewood.In 2020 there was only silence at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s annual warm-weather retreat in the Berkshires. And last year, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its grand choral finale — the traditional ending of the summer there — weren’t heard. During a shortened 2021 season, with limited crowds and distancing requirements, no vocal music was programmed, to reduce the risk of aerosol transmission of the coronavirus.But with a surge of virus cases, driven by the Omicron variant, seeming to ebb in Massachusetts, Tanglewood is set to return this summer — at full length and in full cry, the Boston Symphony announced on Thursday.So Beethoven’s Ninth will be there on the official closing night, Aug. 28. And the main season, which opens July 8, will also feature concert performances of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and George Benjamin’s “Lessons in Love and Violence,” in that 2018 opera’s American premiere. Among the singers appearing over the summer will be Susan Graham, Christine Goerke, Nicole Cabell, Julia Bullock, Ying Fang, Shenyang, Ryan McKinny, Will Liverman and Paul Appleby — along with the return of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.The Boston Symphony said it would announce health protocols closer to the start of the season, when the state of the pandemic will be clearer.Andris Nelsons, the orchestra’s music director, is scheduled for frequent presences on the podium. John Williams, who turns 90 this year and served as director of the Boston Pops, will be feted with a gala performance on Aug. 20. Garrick Ohlsson plays Brahms’s complete works for solo piano over four programs; Paul Lewis joins the orchestra for all five Beethoven piano concertos. There will be a host of free concerts featuring the young fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center.Familiar guests like Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma and Michael Tilson Thomas will be joined by debuting artists such as the conductors JoAnn Falletta, Cristian Macelaru and Earl Lee, the pianist Alexander Malofeev and the violist Antoine Tamestit. Classics by Rachmaninoff and Ravel will be served alongside new music from composers including Helen Grime, Fazil Say, Richard Danielpour, Jessie Montgomery, Julia Adolphe, Caroline Shaw and Elizabeth Ogonek.Beginning on June 17 with Ringo Starr and ending on Sept. 3 with Judy Collins, pop artists return for the first time since 2019 — also including the Tanglewood favorite James Taylor, Brandi Carlile and Earth, Wind & Fire.The absence of Tanglewood, a regional staple and huge moneymaker for the Boston Symphony, which has summered there since 1937, was keenly felt in 2020, even by an orchestra with secure finances and the largest endowment in its field.The thinned-out 2021 season drew a respectable attendance of 148,000, versus more than 340,000 in 2019. But it is hoped that the bucolic campus will be altogether more alive this year. Ozawa Hall will reopen, joining the main concert space, the Shed. So will the Linde Center, which was inaugurated in 2019 as a site for master classes, lectures, rehearsals and recitals — among them, this summer, the pianist Stephen Drury playing the mighty set of variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” by Frederic Rzewski, who died in June.Full programming information is available at bso.org/tanglewood. More

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    Even the Tuning Up Gets an Ovation as Tanglewood Reopens

    The mood was festive as the Boston Symphony returned to its summer home for its first in-person performances since March 2020.LENOX, Mass. — If you were brave enough, there was a time last summer when you could still turn into the drive of Tanglewood, the idyllic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra here. There were the usual local teenagers to direct you to your parking space, one pointing the way every few yards; the usual state troopers, patrol cars idling, there to tip a hat; the usual flowers, lining the path through the pristine white gates.But the familiarity stopped there. Walking through the grounds, kept open and manicured even in the absence of performances, the loneliness was overwhelming. No volunteers, overeager to help. No ice creams. No parents fretting, wondering how far from the stage to set up, safe to settle their infant when the time came. Nothing to see, the Koussevitzky Music Shed boarded up, disconsolate; no music to hear, only the birds.Well, music is coming home.The Boston Symphony opened its shortened, little-short-of-miraculous summer season here with a concert on Saturday night, the orchestra’s first in-person performance since the dark, fearful nights of March 2020, and its first with its music director, Andris Nelsons, since the January prior.Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony in a Beethoven program on Saturday night.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe program was made to please, and please it did, but the atmosphere would have been festive regardless. There were standing ovations for the orchestra, standing ovations for the conductor, standing ovations for Mark Volpe, the orchestra’s just-retired president and chief executive. The players, not normally given to outward expressions of emotion, stomped their feet when their leader, Tamara Smirnova, found the right key on the piano to invite them to tune.The authorities had set attendance at half the norm, but the rolling grounds hummed with chatter, lawn chairs crammed close; the front rows of the Shed felt full, three-foot distancing or not. There would be no intermission, though the concert still lasted nearly two hours; there would be no “Ode to Joy,” with singing still banned. I saw a single mask, amid thousands of faces.By Sunday afternoon, when a second concert took place, it all felt oddly normal: students wandering in and out of the Shed, hearing a piece then leaving to practice, or not; spectators darting for cover as the rain came down, giving up on their defenses against the bugs; the whole place glowing, despite the gloom, with the bright green tarps that were on offer at the door, some protecting bottoms from the mud, others shielding picnics from the rain. Priorities.“Reconnect, Restore, Rejoice,” the front of the program book declared. Nelsons, in his halting, earnest way, spoke from the stage of how the pandemic — seemingly thought of in the past tense, even as the world counts over four million lives lost — reminded us of “how much we need art, how much we need culture,” and of music being “comfort for our souls.”The whole place glowed and felt like normal, our critic says, with people worried about typical things, like rain and bugs.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThere would be no revolutions here, and no memorials either, just a restoration of the ancien régime: an orchestra playing what it has long played, and playing it pretty well. Beethoven it would have to be, and the Fifth Symphony, too — the Beethoven of triumph over disaster, of the human spirit, indomitable.Near enough, at least. Surely it will take time for players, even of this quality, to form a collective again, to fill out their sound, to find the attack and the togetherness that mark the best ensembles. An improvement from Saturday night was already audible on Sunday, in a peppy run-through of Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony.Before that, there were slack moments in the Beethoven, bars when balances were set aside in pursuit of sheer exuberance, passages that were allowed to drift by a conductor who has seemed to grow more standoffish as an interpreter since his arrival in Boston in 2014.But the effect was still potent, surprisingly not so much for the impact of the whole, but for glimmers of the players set free: the clarinet of William R. Hudgins, so mellow, such a balm; the flute of Elizabeth Rowe, so unusual in its woodiness; the trumpet of Thomas Rolfs, so rousing at full stretch.Nelsons conducts Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with Emanuel Ax at the piano.Jillian Freyer for The New York TimesThe same fine subtleties appealed in the work of the soloists on offer, too, neither of them ostentatious. Emanuel Ax is nobody’s idea of a spotlight-hugging pianist, preferring to share it or give it away wholesale, but what a delight it was to hear such discretion in his “Emperor” Concerto — such care taken over the voicing of a chord, such sensitivity in the way his right hand shaped phrases in response to the orchestra. Baiba Skride took much the same approach to the Sibelius Violin Concerto, an affecting account of deep, even forlorn introspection, much of it played inward, toward the violas on her left.Comfort for the soul, indeed.The question remains, however, whether this orchestra will decide to attempt more, even as salaries recover from 37 percent cuts and losses of more than $50 million in revenue cast a shadow over the budget. It has brought in a new president and chief executive, Gail Samuel, from the ambitious Los Angeles Philharmonic; an encouraging amount of its streaming energy over the past year was spent exploring music that it has for too long ignored; and the Symphony Hall season will offer new works by Julia Adolphe, Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin.But that season looks dreary compared with those being offered by similarly tradition-bound orchestras elsewhere. It speaks volumes that scant time was dedicated here to anything contemporary, even if Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers” made its mark, throbbing with frantic energy while seeming to run on the spot, with its brief response to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.The Boston Symphony returns, then — and continues merely to abide. More

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    Tanglewood Is Back This Summer, With Beethoven and Yo-Yo Ma

    Closed last year, the Boston Symphony’s warm-weather home in the Berkshires will host an abbreviated six-week season.There won’t be the traditional, grand closing-night performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its stage full of singers. In fact, to reduce the risk of aerosol transmission of the coronavirus, there will be no vocal music at all at Tanglewood this summer.But there will still be a lot of Beethoven, along with crowd-pleasing tributes to the composer John Williams and familiar guests like Emanuel Ax, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma.Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s warm-weather home in the Berkshires, announced in March that after remaining closed last year because of the pandemic, it would open this summer for a six-week season — about half the usual length — with limited crowds and distancing requirements. On Thursday, the orchestra filled in the programming: heavy on appearances by its music director, Andris Nelsons, and with a focus on Beethoven, whose 250th birthday last year was muted because of widespread concert cancellations.Nelsons will lead eight orchestral programs, including a Beethoven opener on July 10 featuring the “Emperor” Piano Concerto, with Ax as soloist, and the Fifth Symphony. On July 23, the Boston Pops will honor Williams, who turns 90 next year and is the Pops’ laureate conductor; the following evening, Mutter gives the premiere of his Violin Concerto No. 2, and on Aug. 13 Williams shares the podium for a night of film music. On July 30, the violinist Leonidas Kavakos does Beethoven trios with Ax and Ma, who also plays with the Boston Symphony under Karina Canellakis on Aug. 8. (Details are available at bso.org.)Throughout the summer, performances will last no longer than 80 minutes, without intermissions, and all concerts will take place in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, which is open on the sides. The space, which usually holds thousands, will have a reduced capacity, as will the lawn that surrounds it — a favorite spot for picnicking. Tanglewood is waiting to announce what might go forward in late summer of its well-loved series of pop performers like James Taylor.Students at the Tanglewood Music Center, the orchestra’s prestigious summer academy, will play chamber concerts on Sunday mornings and Monday afternoons, and programs are planned for the Tanglewood Learning Institute, a series of lectures, talks and master classes that began with great fanfare in 2019. The orchestra will host a two-day version of its annual Festival of Contemporary Music, July 25-26.The Knights, a chamber orchestra, will be joined on July 9 by the jazz and classical pianist Aaron Diehl for Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and selections from Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite.” Among the Boston Symphony’s guest conductors will be Thomas Adès (the orchestra’s artistic partner), Alan Gilbert, Anna Rakitina and Herbert Blomstedt; soloists include the pianists Daniil Trifonov, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Kirill Gerstein, and the violinists Baiba Skride and Lisa Batiashvili.The Tanglewood season is part of the nationwide thawing planned for this summer of a performing arts scene that has been largely frozen for over a year. The Public Theater has announced that its venerable Shakespeare in the Park will go forward, as will Santa Fe Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York. On Thursday, the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado said it would move forward with a nearly two-month season.But as they reopen, institutions are reckoning with sharp losses. As it celebrated the return of Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony said its current operating budget was $57.7 million, down from its prepandemic budget of over $100 million. The orchestra estimated that it has lost over $50 million in revenue in the last year. More