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      Review: András Schiff Wears Two Hats at the New York Philharmonic

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      Taking a cue from Mozart, András Schiff appeared with the New York Philharmonic as both piano soloist and conductor.There was a time, during darker days of the pandemic, when orchestral concerts departed from their usual formats — worn-down cookie cutters of a curtain-raiser, concerto and symphony — and turned into something more unpredictable, and open-minded.Out of an abundance of caution, ensembles avoided repertoire like the immense works of Mahler and instead turned to smaller-scale music, sometimes rarities and often from the Classical and Baroque eras. String quartets shared billing with Lieder and chamber symphonies. Concerts began to look more like variety shows.But as masks requirements loosened and vaccine records stopped doubling as passports, classical music started to look more like its old self, and not for the best. Once again, any concert with more than three works stands out as a treat — such as the New York Philharmonic’s performance with the pianist András Schiff acting as both soloist and conductor, at David Geffen Hall on Friday.Like a concert from the era of pandemic livestreams, it consisted of two Classical piano concertos and two orchestral works, with a changing ensemble size that, at its largest, was still small. Schiff’s appearance was part of his residency with the orchestra, a series that began with a solo recital on Tuesday and continues this week with a comparatively traditional program in which he will play Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, and a chamber music afternoon at the 92nd Street Y next Sunday.Schiff approached Friday’s program more as he would one of his recitals, which these days are long but often rewarding, essayistic assemblages announced from the stage rather than advertised in advance. He contrasted concertos in D major and minor, and made explicit the connections between two Mozart works — arguments that were more persuasive from the keyboard than from his perch as conductor.Leading from the piano is a throwback to Mozart’s time, and can be fascinating to witness. When Mitsuko Uchida does it, for example, she treats the orchestra as an extension of her instrument — a mode of expression somewhat perversely, but beautifully, in service of her interpretation. Onstage at Geffen Hall, Schiff had more the appearance of a fan beating along to a recording, gesturing with the music instead of truly guiding it.Because of that, the purely orchestral sections of the program were the weakest. Schiff, as in his touch at a keyboard, relished the extremes of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony — the opening truly pianissimo, the forzando notes truly explosive. But without much else in the way of an overarching vision, the piece grew indistinct by the second movement, which, in taking its time, also lost its sense of shape and direction, an andante con moto without its moto. After intermission, the Overture from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” music that punishes any performance that falls short of precise, was more of the same: hellfire-frightening chords at the start, then an insistent emphasis on articulation, patient to the point of slackness, over broader phrasing.It was nevertheless a gift to hear this repertoire — beloved, if overprogrammed — in the renovated Geffen Hall for the first time. So far, as the Philharmonic adjusts to its new home and the auditorium undergoes further tuning, smaller-scale works have benefited most from the more generous acoustics. The last time I came across Schubert’s “Unfinished” there, under Alan Gilbert’s baton in 2015, the low strings were virtually inaudible in the mood-setting, crucial opening bars; on Friday they rumbled, immediate and under the skin.And the hall’s transparent sound rewarded the lean wit of Haydn’s Piano Concerto No. 11 in D, at the top of the program. Here, Schiff was more in his element: stately, with a kind of dry humor in the cadenzas, his touch often gentle but, when sharp, amplified by the bright sound of his Bösendorfer piano.He followed the “Don Giovanni” Overture, attacca, with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 — treating them as one, and emphasizing their shared dark-to-light journeys from D minor to major. Schiff’s entrance in the first movement may have been overly strong, turbulent where moody would do, but his solos in the Romanze were exquisitely arialike.Schiff’s most characterful work, though, was in the Rondo finale, in which he rendered the cadenza as a grander conclusion, interjecting the “Don Giovanni” chords, then layering the overture and the concerto in clever counterpoint. Playful and unexpected, it was reflective of an artist who, even if not thoroughly successful on one night, possesses an undeniably brilliant musical mind.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats on Sunday and Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: A Concerto Makes Two Soloists a Many-Tentacled Creature

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      Felipe Lara’s sensational Double Concerto, with Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding, was played by the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki.Placing an old piece in new surroundings can make you think about it in a fresh way. Until the New York Philharmonic played Charles Ives’s short, indelible “The Unanswered Question” on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall under Susanna Mälkki’s baton, I had never thought of it as a tiny double concerto.It isn’t, exactly. A double concerto adds two soloists to the orchestra, and the Ives has five: four flutists and a trumpeter. But its structure — in which soft expanses of consoling strings are the ground for interjections of somber trumpet and bursts of talkative flute — suggests the flutes are a single many-headed unit. It’s a kind of double concerto, then, in which two solo forces have a relationship to one another and to the main ensemble.It’s no surprise that my thoughts went to this form. Felipe Lara’s sensational Double Concerto, exuberant if not always sunny, had its New York premiere on Wednesday after the Ives.Written in 2019 and given its premiere in Helsinki under Mälkki two years later, this is a true double concerto, featuring a pair of soloists, Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding. But this piece, too, complicates the form, since they each use multiple instruments: Chase, a battery of flutes — another reason the Ives was a wise juxtaposition — and Spalding, a double bass and her bright, pure voice.

      HKO Screen – Felipe Lara: Double Concerto from Helsinki Philharmonic on Vimeo.Unlike “The Unanswered Question,” which maintains a demure separation between the trumpet (for Ives, representing “the perennial question of existence”) and the flutes (attempts at answers), Lara intertwines his soloists into what Chase calls in a program note “a many-tentacled creature.”The two often play together, with the trail of one — a whipped breath of flute, a cool curve of voice, a slightly bending reverberation of bass — audible only as a comet’s tail off the joint sound. Neither stops for long over the work’s half-hour length.Which is not to say that either player is homogenized by combination. The vocabulary here is sprawling and idiosyncratic on both sides. Chase makes virtuosically parched, percussive exhalations; she can be sheerly sweet on the standard flute and has, on the enormous contrabass flute, the milky penetration of a whale’s deep-sea call.Spalding’s mellow, dancing bass plucks are a sound we know best from jazz, but are totally at home here, and her singing is guileless without being childlike. She mostly vocalizes, sometimes on the syllable “ah,” sometimes on “mm” and sometimes — most memorably at the end — on “shh.” She briefly sings a Portuguese text Lara wrote about life’s blessings, though to listeners that can blur into incantatory vocalizing, too. (From the audience it’s also hard to perceive a secret of the score: Chase is sometimes producing sound by singing into the flute.)The music is mostly notated, but in a large-scale dual cadenza Chase and Spalding improvise together, remarkably responsive, unified and relaxed, creating a miniature universe of sounds — whispery, earthy, otherworldly-woozy, underwater-translucent, simple and raucous: a paean to the joy of collaboration, of play.The orchestra, led by Mälkki with focused confidence on Wednesday, tends to be active but subdued, the way you can perceive seething activity even in a seemingly still jungle. There are hazy effusions of brass; little thickets of rattling, shivering percussion; and whooshing, glistening strings that were a textural link to the Ives, as well as to Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” which came after intermission.Performed in the pared-down orchestration Stravinsky made in 1947, decades after writing the piece, “Petrushka” here seemed both to echo and to have generated the Lara concerto’s off-kilter abruptness, fearless colors and wry enigmas.The Philharmonic, sounding poised throughout the concert, was especially evocative in Stravinsky’s humid third tableau. Alison Fierst brought nuance and a sense of mystery to her crucial solo on, yes, the flute. (The instrument could hardly get a more profound showcase than this program.) Under Mälkki, “Petrushka,” more than any other quality, had unexpected intimacy.As did Lara’s concerto. Even as it builds to flourishes of gleaming Hollywood-golden-age grandeur, and even with substantial forces — there are two full string sections onstage, one tuned slightly higher than the other — Lara has the maturity to resist doing too much.He also has the skill to shape a gorgeously varied but unbroken single movement that evolves organically over its 30 minutes to a final lullaby, pricked by starry harp. This is a complex but legible, lovable piece; a funky yet elegant ritual; thrilling and taut, if also fundamentally unhurried and unpressured.Spalding performed in a jumpsuit printed, in bold capital letters, with “LIFE FORCE,” and I felt that way about the music, too.New York PhilharmonicThis program is repeated through Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: The New York Philharmonic’s ‘St. Matthew Passion’ Is a Surprising Achievement

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      Jaap van Zweden is not known for Bach. But the “St. Matthew Passion” made for one of his finest New York Philharmonic concerts this season.You could be forgiven, recently, for not remembering that Jaap van Zweden is the music director of the New York Philharmonic.After he inaugurated the renovated David Geffen Hall in October, he disappeared from the orchestra’s performance calendar until a week ago. During that absence, the orchestra announced his successor, Gustavo Dudamel — whose visit to New York in February, to do little more than smile for the cameras and sign a piece of paper, was organized with so much fanfare, you almost felt bad for van Zweden, still the music director for one more season, as he quietly returned to the podium last Friday.His current residency, though, while just two weeks, is hardly modest. On Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced his final season, in which he will lead eight subscription programs, including, as his farewell, Mahler’s colossal “Resurrection” Symphony. And for his concerts this time around — part of a barely advertised mini festival called “Spirit” — he has taken up a pair of monumental works: Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” and Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.”The Messiaen, sprawling and operatically excessive, would seem the better fit for van Zweden, who revels in enormity. But last week, it was mostly flattened and impatient, loud but not powerful.And the Bach didn’t hold out much promise. Van Zweden has never had a true grasp of the fleet litheness of the Classical repertoire, almost never touches Baroque music with the Philharmonic. His performance of the “St. Matthew Passion” at Geffen Hall on Thursday, however, proved a pleasant surprise — perhaps his finest appearance this season.After the thick bombast of the Messiaen, it was disorienting to hear van Zweden lead a “St. Matthew Passion” of wise, often deferential restraint and transparent, balanced counterpoint. The score’s nearly three hours of music moved along at a mostly unhurried pace, a calmly flowing mood set from the start: the opening chorus gently pulsating, the layers of sound smoothly accumulating.Not that it was a consistently clean evening. The “Passion,” typically performed during the Lenten season but not limited to it, is a mammoth undertaking for double choir, double orchestra and soloists to recount the betrayal, death and burial of Christ. On Thursday, the Philharmonic — joined by Musica Sacra and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus — didn’t seem to have had enough time to prepare it.Some sections unfurled without a fault; others were messy. Arias struggled to gain traction, and at times solo instrumentalists weren’t properly integrated with the larger ensemble. What’s lost, during lapses like that, are the moments that inspire awe, replaced by a kind of white-knuckle anxiety in, for example, the grand chorus that closes the oratorio’s first part.But more memorable than those imperfections was van Zweden’s refreshingly measured treatment of the orchestra, particularly in its support for the vocal soloists.And what soloists! The tenor Nicholas Phan was a lyrical, actorly guide through the story as the Evangelist, standing alongside the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s Jesus, sung with a rich, creamy tone that, in Christ’s final words on the cross, turned compellingly momentous. The soprano Amanda Forsythe, her sound soaring and pure, shone in the longer, abstracted lines of the aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben.” Tamara Mumford’s penetrating mezzo-soprano was well shaped in “Buss und Reu” and “Erbarme dich,” even at a nervously rushed tempo.Each appearance by the tender, earnest tenor Paul Appleby felt too brief. In “Geduld,” as he sang alongside the viola da gamba player Matt Zucker — who, like the organist Kent Tritle, offered a dose of historically informed performance style — he spun trickily long melodic lines of complex rhythms so precisely articulated and elegant, you wished he would return to this piece as the Evangelist.The standout was Philippe Sly, in his Philharmonic debut. This bass-baritone has a robust opera career — assured as either Leporello or the title character in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” — and sang Jesus in a “St. Matthew Passion” with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall last season. Commandingly resonant, but also sweetly warm in his upper range, he was more satisfying as a chameleonic soloist on Thursday: bringing dramatic color to the few lines of Judas, a desperate sadness to Peter and sensitivity to arias like “Komm, süsses Kreuz.”His “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,” already a high point of the score, was the high point of the concert, while also standing in for the evening as a whole. It had an unsteady start and could have been slower, yet once it found its footing, the aria was serene, balanced and — regardless of your faith or the time of year — profoundly moving.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The New York Philharmonic Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      Jaap van Zweden’s final season as the New York Philharmonic’s music director will feature belated debuts and premieres, and a grand farewell.In his final season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Jaap van Zweden will lead a host of premieres, performances of Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony, and a residency in China, the orchestra announced on Tuesday.Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s incoming president and chief executive, said that the season would showcase van Zweden’s devotion to new music and traditional works.“This is an opportunity,” Ginstling said in an interview, “to really celebrate all the elements that Jaap brought to the New York Philharmonic.”Van Zweden will make his first appearance on Sept. 27, with a gala featuring the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.The season will feature premieres by several composers, including Olga Neuwirth, Mary Kouyoumdjian and Melinda Wagner, as part of Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission new pieces from 19 women. And in summer 2024, the orchestra will return to China for the first time since 2019, for a residency in partnership with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.New Yorkers hoping to hear a taste of the Philharmonic’s future will have to wait: There will be no appearances next season by Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who was announced as van Zweden’s successor in February. Ginstling said scheduling conflicts were to blame.Here are nine highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Oct. 11-14For those keeping track of all the ways in which the Philharmonic has followed the lead of its West Coast counterpart, the Los Angeles Philharmonic — in its leadership, in its hall’s look, in its choice of music director — here’s another one: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the lively Lithuanian conductor who is being talked of as a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will be making her debut. Daniil Trifonov, a welcome fixture at David Geffen Hall, will join for a program of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, as well as selections from Sibelius’s “Lemminkäinen Suite” and Raminta Šerkšnytė’s “De Profundis,” from 1998. JOSHUA BARONEMirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a possible successor to Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, will make her New York Philharmonic debut in October.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesLigeti’s Centennial, Oct. 19-21The Philharmonic is celebrating the centennial of Gyorgi Ligeti’s birth with multiple concerts. (Look out for pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing Études on Nov. 7.) This program, one of the most eclectic on the Philharmonic’s calendar, brings two pieces of Ligeti’s into dialogue with Brahms’s Serenade No. 1 and a piano concerto by the living modernist Elena Firsova. The Ligeti works are from relatively early in his career. (And one, “Mifiso la sodo,” is a U.S. premiere!) Evaluating their place alongside the Brahms and the Firsova, with Yefim Bronfman as the soloist, should make for a bracing ride with David Robertson at the podium. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Israel in Egypt,’ Oct. 25-26A recent performance of “Solomon” at Carnegie Hall was a reminder of the sumptuous power of Handel’s English oratorios, his genre of concert-format, loosely plotted, often biblically inspired works that made choruses the stars. The Philharmonic rarely programs these pieces — with the obvious exception of the perennial “Messiah,” conducted this year in mid-December by Fabio Biondi — so “Israel in Egypt” will be a treat. On the podium, Jeannette Sorrell makes her subscription debut with the orchestra, leading the choir of Apollo’s Fire, her Cleveland-based ensemble. ZACHARY WOOLFESound On, Oct. 27Past concerts in this chamber-focused series have delved deeply into contemporary music — and have also been relegated to smaller spaces inside Lincoln Center. But on this date, when the Ensemble Signal conductor Brad Lubman joins Philharmonic players and a wide range of guest soloists, the music will be presented in Geffen Hall proper. That bodes well for Unsuk Chin’s transporting aesthetic, which is represented here by her Double Concerto for Piano and Percussion. And there’s similar potential for a new (as yet untitled) collaborative work by Kinan Azmeh and Layale Chaker. Both are leading player-composers who also happen to improvise, and they’ll both be onstage here. SETH COLTER WALLSDessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Nov. 30-Dec. 2Bryce Dessner, one-fifth of the rock band the National, wrote his Concerto for Two Pianos for the tight, persuasive duo Katia and Marielle Labèque, who bring it to Geffen for its New York premiere. Dessner’s taste for lush transparency, evident in his orchestrations for Taylor Swift’s album “Folklore,” shows in the way he cushions the piece’s unabashedly pretty piano parts without overwhelming them. OUSSAMA ZAHR‘Vertigo,’ Jan. 23-26Playing film scores live alongside screenings has become a booming business for orchestras struggling with attendance, but the fare is usually blockbusters: the “Harry Potter” series, “Jurassic Park,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Not when the Philharmonic performs Bernard Herrmann’s lush, ominous music for Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” as audiences watch that strange, hypnotizing study in erotic obsession. (Next season also brings “West Side Story” (Sept. 12-17) — Spielberg’s 2021 version, which featured the Philharmonic on its soundtrack — and “Black Panther” (Dec. 20-23). ZACHARY WOOLFEJames Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which will be screened with a live soundtrack.Universal Studios Home EntertainmentKarina Canellakis, April 4-6I’m not entirely joking when I say this, but now that the Philharmonic has lined up its next music director, it can start thinking about who Gustavo Dudamel’s eventual successor might be. Karina Canellakis, who coincidentally occupies Jaap van Zweden’s former post as the chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, might well be on its shortlist when the time comes. This native New Yorker’s belated Philharmonic debut offers a taste of her thoughtful programming: Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung,” Scriabin’s “Le Poème de l’Extase” and Ravel’s Piano Concerto, with the soloist Alice Sara Ott. DAVID ALLENOlga Neuwirth, April 18-20Olga Neuwirth’s contribution to Project 19 in 2020 went — well, the way of many things early in the pandemic. Nearly four years after its scheduled premiere, it is finally coming to Geffen Hall, having been first unveiled instead with the Berlin Philharmonic, which streamed the unruly and delightful work for countertenor, children’s choir and orchestra on its Digital Concert Hall platform. Andrew Watts takes up the solo vocal part, making his New York Philharmonic debut alongside the conductor Thomas Sondergard, on a program that also includes Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. JOSHUA BARONEMahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony, June 6-8Those with a taste for dry humor might ask themselves what exactly it is that Jaap van Zweden plans to resurrect with these final Geffen Hall concerts as the Philharmonic’s music director, but Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at least offers him a grand farewell. He will be joined by the New York Philharmonic Chorus, the soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller and the mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova. ALLEN More

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      Review: Jaap van Zweden Returns to a Changed Philharmonic

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      Since the orchestra’s music director was last on the podium in November, his successor has been announced. He came back blaring with Messiaen.“What have I missed?” you could imagine Jaap van Zweden thinking as he stood on the podium at David Geffen Hall and looked out at the audience on Friday evening. It’s been months since van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, led this orchestra in a furious burst of activity as it opened the renovated Geffen Hall.In the meantime, the world has swiftly turned: Last month, the orchestra announced that Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would succeed van Zweden, who is departing after next season. The prospect of a Dudamel era — a throwback to the heady, celebrity-fueled, jet-set days of Leonard Bernstein — immediately overshadowed van Zweden’s comparatively modest tenure.Modesty was set aside on Friday, though, for Messiaen’s immense, very loud “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which van Zweden is ambitiously following this week with Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” for a brief residency the orchestra is calling “Spirit.”The spiritual quality couldn’t be more obvious in the austere severity of the “St. Matthew Passion.” It’s a little harder to discern in the hulking, gaudy “Turangalîla,” a 10-part, 80-minute paean to an erotic ecstasy that spills over into the realm of the cosmic.To keep things on a cosmic scale, Messiaen musters a solo piano part of concerto-level difficulty and variety. And the woozy, slippery wail of the theremin-like ondes martenot. And a glockenspiel, and a celesta. And a forest of percussion instruments, including shimmering tam-tam; curt wood blocks; and drums, both crisp and booming.Written in the aftermath of World War II, during which Messiaen spent time as a prisoner of war, the intricately conceived “Turangalîla” comes across as an explosion of long-simmering tensions: aggression and relief, energy and romantic longing, a celebration so huge it seems to encompass all the beauty and ominousness of nature, the delicacy and the granitic weight.The legacy of Stravinsky’s primal, euphorically muscular “Rite of Spring” is here, but billowing with the perfume of the French tradition of Ravel and blazing with the Technicolor brassiness of Broadway and Hollywood, returning to a few motifs — like a grim fanfare and a questioning four-note murmur — again and again.The quieter parts were the most memorable on Friday. The oscillating buzz of piano and celesta in the “Chant d’Amour II” section seemed to cast a blur over a lush melody in the violins. In “Turangalîla II,” a solo cello had the burnished strength of a horn. There was beautifully mellow playing in the winds throughout the “Jardin du Sommeil d’Amour,” the longest section, with the piano gently frisking, like a dancer in the moonlight on a foggy summer night.With van Zweden conducting, the score was forceful but slightly smudged, the textures both less lucid and less blooming than I’ve heard. I was aware, as I hadn’t been since earlier days in the renovated hall, of a hard, blaring quality to the orchestra’s sound in this space, a sense of being not surrounded, but almost assaulted.This performance felt heavier than some. But the work’s trippy grandeur and over-the-top virtuosity come through no matter what. And van Zweden’s build from misty mystery to density in the “Turangalîla I” section was persuasive, as was that from spare, forbidding march to ferocious dance in “Turangalîla III.”Jean-Yves Thibaudet, experienced at the daunting solo piano part, was both crisply powerful and self-effacingly suave. Cynthia Millar was a subtle presence at the ondes martenot — to the point that the instrument could have been more assertively amplified. We get to hear this retro-sounding relic of early electronica so rarely: Let it rip.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Michael Tilson Thomas Revels in the Present With the New York Phil

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      Thomas, who is fighting brain cancer, conducted two ruminative works, Schubert’s “Great” Symphony and his own “Meditations on Rilke.”The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always been a performer who communicates joy when sharing the music he loves. On Thursday, there was also a deep sense of gratitude: Speaking from the stage, he called his appearance with the New York Philharmonic “a lovely, affirming surprise.” Although he made no direct mention of his health, many in the audience understood the context: In the summer of 2021, Thomas, 78, learned that he had glioblastoma, an aggressive and terminal form of brain cancer. For him, every performance now is an opportunity to revel in the present.There are only two works on this program, both of them discursive and ruminative: Thomas’s “Meditations on Rilke,” which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2020, and Schubert’s “Great” Symphony.Thomas has always been a raconteur, and on Thursday he gave a 12-minute spoken introduction to “Meditations” from the podium. His speech may be more halting now, but the storytelling is as fluid as ever. And his quirky piece, which opens with a piano rag and quickly plunges into Mahlerian orchestration and psychic depths, needed at least some of that contextualization.“Meditations” is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano (the luminous Sasha Cooke), bass-baritone (an impassioned, rich-voiced Dashon Burton) and orchestra, with autumnal, meditative texts by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s also partly an instrumental fantasy based on an episode from the life of Thomas’s father, a scion of Yiddish theater giants who was thrust into a gig as a saloon pianist in an Arizona mining town (hence that opening rag); a zigzagging thesis on the similarities between cowboy songs and Schubert lieder; and a tribute to composers whose work is most deeply imprinted on Thomas, including Berg, Copland, Schubert and Mahler.Schubert’s “Great” Symphony did not need any introduction. It’s a broadly grand piece that was praised by Robert Schumann for its “heavenly length,” though many listeners have found it in need of a rigorous edit. In Thomas’s hands, it had a brilliant moment-to-moment tautness that made you forget the expanse of Schubert’s canvas, in which fine-honed details can sometimes get lost.The orchestra reveled in all those small turns — in each of the first movement’s gentle curves and crisply articulated angles, and in the surprising juxtapositions of the second movement, which shifts from proud march to sweet tenderness. Thomas, communicating with the most economical of arm gestures, made those internal transitions of mood and harmony seamless, their logic unstintingly clear. Many conductors treat the third-movement scherzo as an exercise in dance rhythm; here, the energy was certainly propulsive, but Thomas also coaxed out a riot of colors and textures.The final movement was nothing short of a joyous celebration, and more than a few of the Philharmonic’s players had barely sounded their last notes before erupting in laughter. Whether it was from the sheer pleasure of making music with Thomas or a quiet joke he might have made from the podium didn’t really matter; their delight was palpable — and shared.Michael Tilson Thomas at the New York PhilharmonicThrough Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Departs From Business as Usual

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      “The March to Liberation” offers a rarity that should be more regular: a world premiere, a symphony and an oratorio, all by Black composers.Gustavo Dudamel, recently named, to cheers, as the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, will arrive to lead the orchestra officially in 2026. But the time before then shouldn’t be thought of something to be endured or, at worst, a slog.Just look to the Philharmonic’s program this week — titled “The March to Liberation” and conducted by Leslie B. Dunner — which on Thursday had a streak of urgency and plenty of orchestral splendor.A world premiere from Courtney Bryan, “Gathering Song,” with text by Tazewell Thompson, opened the show; William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2 followed; and, after intermission, a 45-minute, oratorio-style work by the veteran composer Adolphus Hailstork, “Done Made My Vow, A Ceremony.” Squint at this sequence — a premiere from an up-and-comer, a venerable half-hour symphony, a dramatic finish — and you could almost see the outlines of a typical subscription concert.Yet an all-Black roster of composers is hardly business as usual at a mainstream institution like the Philharmonic. William Grant Still’s 1937 symphony, subtitled “Song of a New Race,” is the kind of chestnut we should be hearing American orchestras playing regularly. But his music remains a rarity. Hailstork is also too infrequently heard, despite a prolific, half-century career.A program like this ought to be big news on its own. But the Philharmonic amped up the proceedings by inviting the video artist Rasean Davonté Johnson to create a visual accompaniment for each work, multimedia playing in parallel with the music. (Thompson, the librettist for Bryan’s premiere, was credited as the show’s director.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This was tastefully done, but I tended to feel that the music didn’t need the help. From the outset, Bryan’s work proved thrilling in its polish and expressive range. In its early going, triumphal writing for brass was tugged at — and moodily complicated — by descending string motifs that traipsed across unpredictable intervals. It had the calmly challenging poise of the composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who died on Thursday at 89.Thompson’s text is voiced by a griot character, on Thursday the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, who calls out to the audience and initiates the piece’s titular sense of gathering. The lines unfurl in short lines, which Bryan paces generously in the music. Green relished every morsel, with a bright sound in his higher range and burnished roundness in lower-slung passages. (He is soon to be heard in Terence Blanchard’s “Champion” at the Metropolitan Opera, so his performance here was also something of a promising preview.)Later in the Bryan, there are fillips of Afro-Cuban rhythm and moments of thick orchestral modernism, as well as traces of stentorian, post-Minimalist American opera. But the score does not come off as a stylistic grab bag. Though prismatic, it feels carefully woven as it touches on gospel and jazz traditions as well as contemporary idioms.In Still’s Second Symphony, the Philharmonic strings in particular seemed to savor the down-home, pastoral airs of the first movement — even as flutes (one doubling on piccolo) executed their oscillations and divebombing phrases with terrific energy and articulation. Dunner sagaciously managed the call-and-response qualities of the score, though his suave, controlled reading also seemed to glide past stray bursts of piquant personality in Still’s writing.Toward the end of the second movement, Still alternates between brief flecks of lush, 40s-style Hollywood romance and noir. When Neeme Järvi recorded this work with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he played up those contrasts, whereas Dunner seemed to sand off the contrastive edges with the Philharmonic. But because I’ve heard this music in person so rarely, I’m of the mind to say: Let a thousand interpretations bloom.During Hailstork’s piece — structured as a Black American history lesson given by a character named Toil — I felt that some sparer moments were less than ideally balanced in the auditorium. Given that Toil is an amplified speaking part, those questions of balance could have something to do with the orchestra finding its acoustic footing inside the recently retrofitted Geffen Hall. Yet the climatic moments, during which the New York Philharmonic Chorus navigated the Hailstork’s setting of various psalms, came across as grandly cosmic.So forget the Philharmonic’s distant future for now. This program only runs through Saturday, and who knows how long it will be before New Yorkers can hear the music of these three composers again on the same evening?New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Yo-Yo Ma Makes His Encore a Call for Peace, With a Nod to Casals

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      The celebrated cellist capped a concert with the New York Philharmonic with a work that Pablo Casals often played to protest war and oppression.Listen to This ArticleAfter a rousing performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to the stage for an encore.But rather than rush into a familiar crowd-pleaser, Ma began speaking from the stage of David Geffen Hall to the sold-out crowd. He explained the work he would play: “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song that was a favorite of the eminent cellist Pablo Casals, who performed it as a call for peace and to evoke his native Catalonia, which he had fled when he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Elgar Cello Concerto was written in 1919, right after the Great War — the Great War that we said would never happen again,” Ma told the audience of about 2,200 people, speaking without a microphone.Then he spoke of Casals who, after World War II, suspended his concert career to protest the decision of the Allies not to try to topple Franco in Spain. “And the only times he would play would be to play this piece,” Ma noted, “which is from his native Catalonia, a folk song that he thought symbolized freedom.”In a telephone interview, Ma said his aim was to remind people of their shared humanity at a time when there is so much strife and suffering in the world, including in Ukraine.“The question is, why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” he said.Ma said that music was a way of coping “in a world where we have both empathy deficit and empathy fatigue.”“How many of us think about World War I or World War II?” he said. “How many of us think about Rwanda or about the Rohingya? These all become distant very quickly in our first world. But for people in other parts of the world, it’s constant, it doesn’t go away.”“I don’t have an answer,” he added. “I’m trying to find a way of coping myself. And maybe at some level playing music is a way of engaging people in the common search of who we are, and who we want to be.”Ma has long been fond of “Song of the Birds,” which he has often performed in the past.In the interview, he said the piece was powerful in part because it highlighted the special abilities of birds.“They literally can have altitude and perspective on our world and have the freedom to cross all our boundaries and borders,” he said. “There is something just wondrous about that. And we’re part of the same world. Can we learn from that and hopefully not make the same sort of mistakes over and over again?”Since the Russian invasion last year, Ma has used music to show solidarity with Ukraine. He performed the Ukrainian national anthem last year with the pianist Emanuel Ax and the violinist Leonidas Kavakos before a concert at the Kennedy Center. He also played a Bach cello suite on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.Casals, regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time, fled Spain in the late 1930s, saying he would not return until democracy was restored. Living in the French border town of Prades, he worked to raise money for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, writing letters to officials, charities, journalists and others seeking support.He would perform “Song of the Birds,” or “El Cant dels Ocells,” at the end of his music festivals in Prades and the scattered concerts he played in exile. He played it in 1961 at the White House for President John F. Kennedy. And he performed it again when he visited the United Nations in 1971, two years before he died, to deliver an antiwar message.“The birds in the sky, in the space, in the space, sing ‘peace, peace, peace,’” Casals said. “The music is a music that Bach and Beethoven and all the greats would have loved and admired. It is so beautiful and it is also the soul of my country, Catalonia.”Ma has often paid tribute to Casals, calling him a hero. He played for the eminent cellist in 1962, when he was 7 and Casals was 85. Casals helped launch Ma’s career when he brought the prodigy to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who introduced Ma at a performance at the White House that same year before an audience that included President Kennedy.In the interview, Ma recalled visiting Casals’s summer home in Spain in 2019, which now houses a museum, where he saw his letters of protest and pleas to help refugees.“Casals showed me, even as a young boy, that he had his priorities,” he said. “He was a human being first, a musician second and a cellist third.”Audio produced by More