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    Patricia Kopatchinskaja Knocks the Cobwebs Off the Violin Repertory

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    Patricia Kopatchinskaja, making her New York Philharmonic debut this week, has become one of music’s quirkiest stars by breathing new life into standards.In classical music, we think we know how the great pieces go. We hear these standards so often — they have formed our ears so thoroughly — that it can be hard to imagine why some of them were resisted when they were new. Take Tchaikovsky’s beloved Violin Concerto, which endears us with its graceful lyricism and good spirits.Not when Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays it.Kopatchinskaja, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut on Wednesday, released a recording of the Tchaikovsky in 2016. The performance is bracing and even manic, pressing toward extremes of loud and soft, fast and slow. Kopatchinskaja’s violin often sounds raw and wiry; she plays as if she’s improvising on a fiddle at a sweaty barn dance.Tchaikovsky’s Violin ConcertoPatricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; MusicAeterna; Teodor Currentzis, conductor (Sony)For once, you understand what the 19th-century critic Eduard Hanslick was talking about when he panned the piece as “stink one can hear.” “The violin is no longer played,” he wrote. “It is pulled about, torn, beaten black and blue.”Kopatchinskaja doesn’t always beat music black and blue. She can reduce her sound to a fragile whisper, or honey her tone into sweetness:Beethoven’s Violin ConcertoPatricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; Orchestre des Champs-Elysées; Philippe Herreweghe, conductor (Naïve)But she always strips away the fat, giving canonical works a breathing — indeed, panting — vitality. She grounds decorous masterpieces in the earthiness of Central European folk traditions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dudamel Leads a Premiere by a Youthful Ravel. Not Bad for a Kid.

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      The New York Philharmonic and its next music director gave “Sémiramis” its first public hearing, alongside other Ravel pieces and works by Varèse and Gershwin.It’s not every day that a critic gets to review a premiere by Ravel.He died almost a century ago, after all. And while some previously unknown works have come to light over the years, it happens considerably less than once in a blue moon.So my pen was out and alert on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic’s delightful concert at David Geffen Hall, practically vibrating with the opportunity to be among the first to weigh in on a piece by the creator of some of music’s most enduring and gorgeous classics.The work that the Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, its incoming music director, were playing, part of a program celebrating Ravel’s 150th birthday, was long assumed to be lost. Written around 1900, when Ravel was still a conservatory student stormily at odds with the musical establishment, the score for selections from a cantata called “Sémiramis” turned up at an auction in 2000, when it entered the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.An entry in the diary of one of the composer’s friends, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, indicates that it was played, probably as a class exercise, in 1902. (“It is very beautiful,” Viñes wrote.) There’s no record of it being performed in public between then and Thursday.Grave and gloomy, bronzed by the low luster of a gong, the first section rises to the dramatic punch of an opera overture. The music then accelerates into a gaudy Orientalist dance that looks back to the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” and the “Polovtsian Dances” of Borodin, one of the Russian masters Ravel adored.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Ravel Work Premieres at the New York Phil After Nearly 125 Years

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      A prelude and dance by the French master recently surfaced in a Paris library. Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic will give the world premiere.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel has premiered dozens of pieces in his career.But the score that he was giddily studying on a recent afternoon at Lincoln Center was different: a nearly 125-year-old piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel that had only recently surfaced in a Paris library.“Imagine more than 100 years later discovering a small, beautiful jewel,” Dudamel, the incoming music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, said in an interview at David Geffen Hall. “It’s precious.”On Thursday, Dudamel and the Philharmonic will give the world premiere of the five-minute piece as part of a program celebrating the 150th birthday of Ravel, one of the leading composers of the 20th century, whose works include “Boléro,” “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “La Valse.”The newly found piece, “Sémiramis: Prélude et Danse,” was written sometime between 1900 and 1902, when Ravel was in his late 20s and sparring with administrators at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition.The work, from an unfinished cantata about the Babylonian queen Semiramis, reveals a young musician still honing his voice and looking to others, like the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, for inspiration. “Sémiramis” lacks some of the lush textures and rich harmonies for which Ravel would become known — he was a master of blending French impressionism, Spanish melodies, baroque, jazz and other music — though there are hints of his unconventional style.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Philharmonic Announces Its 2025-26 Season

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      Our critics choose highlights from a lineup that includes Joshua Bell, Nathalie Joachim, Barbara Hannigan and more.Gustavo Dudamel does not officially take over as the New York Philharmonic’s music and artistic director until fall 2026. But he will be a fixture on the podium in the orchestra’s coming season, leading six weeks of concerts and several world premieres, the ensemble announced on Tuesday.Matías Tarnopolsky, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the new season, which includes a celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States as well as a centennial tribute to the eminent French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, “gives us a glimpse into a supremely exciting, joyful and embracing future with Gustavo Dudamel.”Dudamel will lead the world or local premieres of an oratorio by David Lang based on Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”; an orchestral reimagining of Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”; and a choral work by Ellen Reid, which the Philharmonic commissioned with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where Dudamel is the music and artistic director through the end of next season.At the opening night concert, in September, Dudamel will be on the podium with Yunchan Lim as the soloist in Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3. The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason will serve as the Philharmonic’s artist in residence; Barbara Hannigan will make her conducting debut with the ensemble; and stars like the violinist Joshua Bell, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the violinist Nicola Benedetti will return.Here are 10 highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZBoulez Centennial, Oct. 3-11The Philharmonic will celebrate the centennial of the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, a former music director of the orchestra’s, with two programs. First, Pierre-Laurent Aimard will present some of the composer’s early Notations for piano, and Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct Boulez’s later orchestral adaptations of those pieces, alongside works by Debussy. The following week, dancers choreographed by Benjamin Millepied will accompany Salonen and the orchestra in Boulez’s “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna.” SETH COLTER WALLSWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A New York Philharmonic Evening of Small Epiphanies

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      Marin Alsop led the orchestra in a program of works by Beethoven, Brahms and Stravinsky, as well as a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly.Near the end of the lullaby that gives way to the blazing finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite, the music slows and thins to a whisper.In the ballet, this is the moment when an evil sorcerer and his minions fall into a deep sleep. In some renditions, it registers as little more than a pause. But at David Geffen Hall on Thursday, the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Marin Alsop, restored fairy-tale mystery to that transition.Just moments earlier, she had coaxed some of the most opulently sensual playing of the evening from the ensemble, including a voluptuous bassoon solo and swooning strings. Then, as the texture tapered, she appeared to drain the music of its pulse with medicinal deliberation. An unnerving trance settled over the room. When the finale’s horn solo emerged — noble, transcendent — it felt as if it arose from a place deep inside the subconscious.There were small epiphanies like that throughout the concert, which also included works by Beethoven and Brahms, and a new violin concerto by Nico Muhly. Alsop has an ability to manipulate time to expressive effect, and the sound she drew from the Philharmonic was cohesive and malleable, the playing poised between discipline and individual dazzle.In Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3, she leaned into the uncertainty of the opening phrase, shaping each swelling chord with its own gradient from quiet to louder, its own testy relationship to the beat. When the music erupted and rushed onward, the release felt all the more liberating for having gone through such visceral hesitation.Brahms’s work Variations on a Theme by Haydn requires forensic attention to balance with ever new iterations that often need to be adjusted and contained in such a way that they just barely shine through the finicky business of the rest of the score. Alsop led a transparent reading that patiently marshaled its forces for a majestic finale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seong-Jin Cho Tackles a Ravel Piano Marathon in New York

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      Performing in New York, Seong-Jin Cho presented a marathon survey of Ravel’s solo piano works and appeared in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience?These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s recent appearances in New York. Earlier this month, he played a marathon of Ravel’s complete solo piano works at Carnegie Hall, and on Thursday he joined the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. (The program continues through Saturday.)If these concerts share anything, it’s sheer athleticism. The Ravel survey makes for a three-hour evening of intense focus and finger work; the Prokofiev concerto probably crams the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes.The similarities end there, though. And it’s in the differences that Cho revealed the state of his artistry at 30, a decade on from his career-making first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition.There was a remarkable difference, too, between his readings of the Ravel works in concert and his recording of the same material, released on Deutsche Grammophon last month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. (A related album of his, of Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these wide-ranging pieces were freer and more expressive at Carnegie; it would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Karina Canellakis Hushes the New York Philharmonic

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      Some of the most memorable moments in the orchestra’s program this week, led by Karina Canellakis, were extremely soft.The New York Philharmonic is capable of playing quietly; the orchestra just hasn’t always seemed to enjoy it. Particularly under their last music director, Jaap van Zweden, the musicians tended to approach soft dynamics unwillingly, as if they were waiting impatiently for the next explosion.So it was noteworthy that some of the most memorable passages in the Philharmonic’s excellent concert on Thursday evening at David Geffen Hall, conducted by Karina Canellakis, were the most delicate ones.There was the spooky haze at the start of Kaija Saariaho’s “Lumière et Pesanteur.” The somberly gentle woodwinds echoing the tune of a Bach chorale in Berg’s Violin Concerto. The hovering transcendence of the strings drawing to a nearly inaudible hush at the end of Messiaen’s “Les Offrandes Oubliées.” The haunting melody in a duo of flute and oboe that emerges from a mist in the third section of Debussy’s “La Mer.”The players didn’t seem like they wanted these moments to end as soon as possible; they reveled in them. That attests, of course, to the musicians themselves — and, perhaps, to their continued acclimation to the renovated Geffen Hall, in which even the most fragile sounds register clearly.But it also speaks to Canellakis’s leadership on the podium. Throughout the concert, she elicited playing of poise and patience, inspiring the ensemble to relax into phrases — which gave the music more organic energy than pressing relentlessly forward would have.For all the bits of breathtaking stillness in the performance, there were also forceful climaxes, but Canellakis arrived at them with naturalness. At the end of the first section of “La Mer,” the volume swiftly swells from pianissimo to fortissimo. While some performances land flat on the loudness, she drew out the speed ever so slightly, making the rise in dynamics feel like a thrilling wave rather than an abrupt boom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Philharmonic Looks to Philadelphia for Its Next Leader

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      Matías Tarnopolsky, who manages the Philadelphia Orchestra, will come to New York as the Philharmonic works to recover from a trying period.The New York Philharmonic announced on Monday that it had chosen a new president and chief executive: Matías Tarnopolsky, who currently leads the Philadelphia Orchestra.Tarnopolsky, 54, a veteran arts leader who oversaw the merger of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in 2021, said he saw potential for an “auspicious new chapter” in New York, pointing to the arrival in 2026 of the star maestro Gustavo Dudamel.“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help shape the future of the New York Philharmonic,” said Tarnopolsky, who begins an initial five-year contract in January. “I embrace it with all my heart.”Tarnopolsky will take the helm of the Philharmonic, America’s oldest symphony orchestra, at a critical time.The ensemble has been grappling with a series of challenges, including the sudden resignation in July of its previous chief executive, Gary Ginstling, after only a year on the job. Ginstling left amid friction with Dudamel, board members, staff and musicians. Since then, Deborah Borda, a veteran Philharmonic leader, has run the orchestra on an interim basis.Borda, who led the orchestra from 2017 to 2023, has worked to stabilize the organization. After months of tense negotiations, the administration reached a labor deal in September with musicians, offering 30 percent raises over three years. And last month, the orchestra, hoping to bring to an end a long-running issue, dismissed two players over accusations of sexual misconduct.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yunchan Lim Plays Chopin With the New York Philharmonic

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      Performing with the New York Philharmonic and Kazuki Yamada, Lim played Chopin’s F minor Concerto with imperturbable calm and eloquence.David Geffen Hall is very nearly sold out for the New York Philharmonic’s performances this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So jump, if you can, at the vanishing chance to hear Yunchan Lim play Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F minor.In the spirit of the season, let’s give thanks for this 20-year-old pianist from South Korea. On Wednesday at Geffen Hall, Lim played in the spotlight as if he’d been doing it for decades, with such imperturbable calm and eloquence that it was hard to believe that two and a half years ago he was essentially unknown.It was June 2022 when he burst onto the international scene as the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition with a rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto that became a YouTube sensation. The two blockbuster Rachmaninoff concertos have been early calling cards for Lim, but this year has included a lot of Chopin, including an astonishing traversal of all 24 études at Carnegie Hall and on a new recording.Chopin, with his restrained refinement, is an even more natural fit for Lim than Romantic warhorses like Rachmaninoff. Lim’s playing never feels seething or sweaty; he seems like he has all the time in the world, without ever giving a sense of showboating or indulgence.In the first movement of the concerto on Wednesday, he was dreamily flexible in his phrasing without ever losing the music’s pulse. The slow central Larghetto was achingly poised, its 10 minutes framed by two perfect notes, both A flats: the first deep and softly buttery, the last a pinprick of starlight.This movement is an opera aria without voices and, like a great bel canto singer, Lim understands that coloratura ornaments mustn’t distract from, but actually emphasize, the long, sustained central line of the music. In the finale, he exuded graciousness, attentive to details of touch, as in a passage whose texture moved swiftly from silvery to steely without ever losing smoothness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More