New York Philharmonic

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares86 Views

    Per Norgard, Daring Symphonic Composer, Dies at 92

    by

    Considered the father of Danish contemporary music, he aspired to works in which “everything came out of a single note,” he said, “like the big bang.”Per Norgard, a prolific and daring Danish composer whose radiant experiments with sound, form and tonality earned him a reputation as one of the leading latter-day symphonists, died on May 28 in Copenhagen. He was 92.His death, at a retirement home, was announced by his publisher, Edition Wilhelm Hansen.Mr. Norgard (pronounced NOR-gurr) composed eight symphonies, 10 string quartets, six operas, numerous chamber and concertante works and multiple scores for film and television, making him the father of Danish contemporary music. Following his death, he was described as “an artist of colossal imagination and influence” by the critic Andrew Mellor in the British music publication Gramophone.Mr. Norgard’s musical evolution encompassed the mid-20th century’s leading styles, including Neo-Classicism, expressionism and his own brand of serialism, and incorporated a wide range of influences, including Javanese gamelan music, Indian philosophy, astrology and the works of the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli.But he considered himself a distinctively Nordic composer, influenced by the Finnish symphonist Jean Sibelius, and that was how newcomers to his music often approached him. The infinite, brooding landscapes of Sibelius — along with the intensifying repetitions in the work of Mr. Norgard’s Danish compatriot Carl Nielsen and the obsessive, short-phrase focus of the Norwegian Edvard Grieg — have echoes in Mr. Norgard’s fragmented sound world.The delirious percussive expressions of Mr. Norgard’s composition “Terrains Vagues” (2000), the plinking raindrops of the two-piano, four-metronome “Unendlicher Empfang” (1997) and the vast, discontinuous fresco of the Eighth Symphony (2011) all evoke the black-and-white northern vistas of Sibelius, with their intense play of light and shadow.As a young student at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen in the early 1950s, he was immersed in the music of Sibelius, writing to the older composer and receiving encouragement in return. “When I discovered there was a kind of unity in his music, I was obsessed with the idea of meeting him,” he said in an interview. “And to let him know that I didn’t consider him out of date.”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

    More stories

    • 125 Shares143 Views

      in Music

      Waiting for Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic Is Doing Fine

      by

      Between music directors this season, the orchestra has been sounding fresh, engaged and more cohesive.The New York Philharmonic is flying free.Its former music director, Jaap van Zweden, left last summer. Its next, Gustavo Dudamel, is gradually deepening his commitment — including performances of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall through Sunday — but doesn’t officially start until fall 2026.Those who follow orchestras tend to assume that their quality will dip without a devoted director to oversee things. Partly because of the myth of the indispensable, all-powerful maestro, it can be easy to fear that conductorless periods will be rudderless ones.That certainly hasn’t been the case this season at Geffen Hall. The Philharmonic has been sounding great: fresh, vital, engaged, more cohesive. The chilly blare that seemed to frost the hall’s acoustics when it reopened in 2022 after a renovation has warmed and softened.The most telling music-making of the year was in a program last month led by the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer. The final hour of the concert was given over to a rare performance of Bartok’s fairy-tale ballet “The Wooden Prince,” a sprawling, instrument-packed score that swerves from candied to bombastic, from radiant expanses to driving dances. The orchestra rose to the occasion with playing that was nuanced and colorful, and in Mozart’s “Turkish” Violin Concerto, the ensemble matched Lisa Batiashvili’s sensual flair.But in a way, I was even more impressed by the opener: Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute,” a chestnut of the kind that is often passed over quickly in rehearsal. It glowed.The true test of a great orchestra — what reveals its base line standard — isn’t how it does in the big symphonies and premieres that steal the lion’s share of attention and applause. It’s how the group sounds in little repertory standards, and that “Magic Flute” overture may have been the most encouraging seven minutes of the season.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

    • 113 Shares104 Views

      in Music

      Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic Play Philip Glass

      by

      Kate Soper’s tender, whimsical “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,” a tribute to the orchestra, had its premiere on Thursday with its composer as soloist.“Is there anything like that first strike of the bow?” Kate Soper asks at the start of her new piece for the New York Philharmonic. “A hundred players moving as one! All that splendor, all that might!”She is describing the wonders of an orchestra, and you don’t have to take her word for it. In Soper’s sweet, clever “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,” which had its premiere at David Geffen Hall on Thursday under Gustavo Dudamel’s baton, the ensemble illustrates her words as she says them, “Peter and the Wolf” style.“The highs got higher, the lows got lower,” she says, explaining the development of instruments, and we hear ethereal pitches, then loud rumbles. “Wood was lacquered,” she goes on, to delight in the oboe and clarinet. “Metal bent” elicits a horn fanfare and trombone slide.Soper soon proclaims, with disarming plainness, “That’s right everyone: I’m Orpheus!” In this half-hour monodrama for a mostly speaking, sometimes singing soprano, she offers a tender retelling of the legend of the great musician of Greek mythology. Her story blends into a poetic reflection on music’s meaning, what it can do (offer glimpses of the sublime) and what it can’t (most anything else).Soper does all this in quirkily postmodern style. Her eclectic, quick-shifting sounds, including touches of memorably ancient-feeling bass flute, are woven into a quilt of quotations from famous settings of the Orpheus myth by Monteverdi and Gluck, as well as lesser-heard ones by Sartorio, Landi, Campra and others. There are also flashes of Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart and Grieg in the mix, and the text, mostly original, interpolates passages from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus.”Modern music lovers may be reminded of Luciano Berio’s more chaotic collage “Sinfonia.” For fans of Soper, especially in her composer-performer mode, “Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus” will recall brainy, winsome works like “Ipsa Dixit” (2016), which she began by posing the spoken question, “What is art?” and attempted to answer through snippets of writers like Aristotle, Lydia Davis and Freud.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

    • 125 Shares138 Views

      in Music

      Review: New York Philharmonic, Renée Fleming and a Sub Conductor

      by

      Brett Mitchell led the New York Philharmonic in the local premiere of a song cycle by Kevin Puts, featuring the soprano Renée Fleming.The final weeks of an orchestra’s season can feel like the end of school: Everyone’s worn down and summer is beckoning. Last week’s program at the New York Philharmonic had that mood even before a late-breaking curveball that tested the orchestra further.The Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena was to be on the podium for the New York debut of Kevin Puts’s “The Brightness of Light,” an orchestral song cycle featuring the soprano Renée Fleming and the baritone Rod Gilfry, along with Ravel’s rapturous “Daphnis et Chloé.”But the Philharmonic announced on Thursday afternoon — just a day before the concerts — that Mena would not be conducting. No reason was provided, and his management did not respond to inquiries. (In January, Mena disclosed his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.)Instead, the conductor Brett Mitchell, the music director of California’s Pasadena Symphony and a newcomer to the Philharmonic, stepped in. Mitchell possesses the right credentials, having led “The Brightness of Light” at the Colorado Symphony with Fleming and Gilfry in 2019. Still, this was no easy task given his truncated rehearsal time and lack of familiarity with the players.“The Brightness of Light” is a portrait of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. For the libretto, Puts uses selections from their correspondence — from the heady rush of their early relationship through its souring and O’Keeffe’s deepening romance with the landscape of New Mexico. (This work expands on an earlier piece with Fleming, “Letters,” that relies solely on O’Keeffe’s perspective.)Puts, who also wrote the opera “The Hours” with Fleming in mind, adores her voice’s glowing luminosity; his orchestral writing often bathes her in shining halos of sound, and on Friday she returned the favor. Gilfry, who was also making his New York Philharmonic debut, handled Stieglitz with polish, though the role functions as little more than a foil for O’Keeffe’s personal and artistic evolution.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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Dismissed Players Take Aim at New York Philharmonic Misconduct Inquiry

      by

      Matthew Muckey and Liang Wang, who were fired by the orchestra last fall, filed amended complaints saying an investigation by the Philharmonic was biased against them.Two musicians who were fired by the New York Philharmonic filed amended complaints against the orchestra on Thursday that assert they were wrongfully dismissed and that an inquiry by the ensemble had been biased against them.The players — the associate principal trumpet, Matthew Muckey, and the principal oboist, Liang Wang — were fired in October, after the Philharmonic said an investigation had uncovered what it described as credible claims against them of sexual assault and harassment.It was not the first time the orchestra had tried to dismiss them.The orchestra initially tried to fire them for misconduct in 2018, but their union challenged their dismissals and an arbitrator ordered the orchestra to reinstate them. But last year, after New York magazine reported new details of the accusations against them, the Philharmonic conducted a new investigation, suspended them and then moved to fire them. This time their union is not challenging their dismissals.The two musicians had originally filed suit against the Philharmonic and the players’ union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, last spring when the orchestra suspended them. They were later fired, and the amended complaints filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan are responses to those dismissals, which Mr. Muckey and Mr. Wang contend were based on an arbitrary and opaque inquiry designed to find fault against them.Mr. Muckey’s complaint said the Philharmonic and the union had engaged in a “sham process calculated to achieve a predetermined finding of wrongdoing.” Mr. Wang’s lawsuit said the inquiry was “neither impartial nor open-ended.”The Philharmonic declined to comment. (The orchestra has previously said that its inquiry uncovered “patterns of sexual misconduct and abuse of power” by the two men.)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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Alisa Weilerstein Make Sparks Fly at N.Y. Phil

      by

      Guest conductors and the firebrand soloists Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Alisa Weilerstein brought welcome energy to David Geffen Hall.To judge by its marketing materials, the New York Philharmonic is uncomfortable with its leaderless state, created by the gap between the departure last summer of the music director Jaap van Zweden and the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel, who takes over in 2026. Dudamel’s likeness is already splashed all over Lincoln Center, as if the mere promise of him were the orchestra’s best hope for selling tickets. But the parade of visiting conductors passing through Geffen Hall has had its own rewards, shaking the ensemble from its routine and injecting a vital note of unpredictability. Week by week, the orchestra sounds different. The energy in the hall fluctuates. And when a firebrand soloist joins a smoldering conductor, sparks fly.This was the case on Wednesday in an electrifying concert that drew tumultuous ovations. The Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa teamed up with the flamboyant violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who shredded the Stravinsky Violin Concerto — and more than a few bow hairs — on a program that opened with the world premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s sumptuous “Chemiluminescence” and ended with a glowing reading of the Symphony No. 1 by Brahms.The previous week had featured another ferociously expressive soloist in another world premiere when the cellist Alisa Weilerstein performed a Thomas Larcher concerto, “Returning Into Darkness,” on a program bookended by Mendelssohn and Schumann. There, it was Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider who conducted, drawing chiseled playing from the orchestra that brought out the wit in selections from Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the intricate flow of Schumann’s Second Symphony. Under Hrusa, the collective sound seethed and simmered.Larcher’s one-movement concerto grows out of a single gesture, a swooping glissando across multiple octaves on the solo cello. On a string instrument, glissando results from the player’s finger sliding up or down the fingerboard, drawing an elastic line through all available pitches. Because it blurs the distinction between individual notes, it evokes extra-musical sounds: sirens, moans, the lowing of a wounded animal.Alisa Weilerstein performed the premiere of Thomas Larcher’s “Returning Into Darkness” last week.Chris LeeIn “Returning Into Darkness,” the swooping lines that recur in the solo cello part, interspersed with bouts of frenetic activity, convey a state of emotional emergency and a certain neurotic rootlessness, unmoored but also unwilling to commit. A similar fluidity governs the ensemble sound, which swells and tapers like a swarm of insects that can build to menacing proportions. Moment by moment, Larcher’s command of color and Weilerstein’s forceful performance were compelling, though over the course of 25 minutes, the constant slaloms induced little more than emotional whiplash.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

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Patricia Kopatchinskaja Knocks the Cobwebs Off the Violin Repertory

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares149 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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