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      Around New York, Different Ways of Hearing Handel’s ‘Messiah’

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      Two performances, at Trinity Church Wall Street and the New York Philharmonic, were similar yet showed how beauty emerges in divergence.We have arrived at that point in the holiday season when it seems as though you could attend a different performance of Handel’s “Messiah” every few days.On Friday and Saturday, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street returned to their newly restored home, Trinity Church Wall Street, for their first “Messiah” there since 2018. The fresh stained-glass facade, illuminated from within, shined like a beacon to concertgoers approaching from down the street. Inside, the narrow nave seemed to huddle everyone together for a communal purpose.A few days later, on Tuesday, the New York Philharmonic, joined by the Handel and Haydn Society, began a five-day “Messiah” run at its own recently remodeled home, David Geffen Hall. The lobby — conceived as a gathering space with seating areas, a bar and furnishings so mundane they must have been designed to be unintimidating — bustled with audience members and laptop users. Poinsettias lined the brightly lit stage in the auditorium.The venues did more than set a mood; they participated in the performance. Each one’s distinctive acoustics complemented the ensemble’s style. If Trinity felt more immersive, and the Philharmonic more pro forma, they both offered memorable qualities that made a case for the city’s annual “Messiah” abundance.The Trinity players were performing “Messiah” in their home venue for the first time since 2018.Calla KesslerIn the coming days, the festivities accelerate. Kent Tritle leads two ensembles in “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall: on Monday, the Oratorio Society of New York, which takes a cast of hundreds approach with its massive choir; and on Dec. 21, Musica Sacra, which uses Baroque bows to add a dash of period style. The National Chorale will rent Geffen Hall for a participatory “sing-in” on Sunday. And there are free “Messiah” singalongs at Christ Church Riverdale in the Bronx on Saturday, and “Hallelujah” flash mobs around Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 21.Trinity, which offered one of the first performances of “Messiah” in New York, in 1770, and the Philharmonic, whose founder conducted its first full concert in the city, can both lay claim to a piece of the work’s history. This season, both had the advantage of a Baroque-music specialist at the helm, with Andrew Megill at Trinity and Masaaki Suzuki at the Philharmonic. They even used the same performing edition from Oxford University Press.But beauty emerged in the places where they diverged.Trinity’s period-instrument ensemble and choir produce a light, precise, nimble sound that gains warmth and richness in the church’s acoustic. At Saturday’s performance, which was livestreamed, the use of an organ, played by Avi Stein, as opposed to a harpsichord, provided a mellow, cloudlike underlay. The string players rendered every flourish as fresh arcs of sound.The countertenor Reginald Mobley, front, at David Geffen Hall, where Masaaki Suzuki led the New York Philharmonic in “Messiah.”Chris LeeTo get a sense of just how well-drilled Trinity’s choir is, you can strip away the church acoustic by watching a video of its 2019 “Messiah,” conducted by Julian Wachner at St. Paul’s Chapel while its home church was being renovated. In the chorus “And he shall purify,” taken at a breakneck yet sprightly pace, the notes tumble evenly in time.The Philharmonic uses modern instruments whose boldness gains clarity in the clean resonance of its new auditorium. In the opening Symphony, the players sliced through the air with dramatic fervor, their trills landing a little heavily in Suzuki’s stately tempo. The harpsichord, folded into the texture, emitted an appealingly gentle tinkle. Over the course of the evening, though, Suzuki’s tempos lagged, and the players seemed to meander through the music unless it had theatrical flair — common in Handel’s operas, but rare here.Where Trinity’s choir prizes dexterity, the choristers of the Handel and Haydn Society make evocative use of timbral contrast. In “And he shall purify,” the choral sections stacked atop one another in staggered entrances that amassed into a smoothly luxuriant texture. “For unto us a child is born” was a marvel of color: The tenors offered a sense of wonder; the altos, excitement; the basses, appreciation; the sopranos, confidence.The baritone Jonathon Adams made a singular Philharmonic debut. Adams, who identifies as two-spirit — the term used by Indigenous communities for those who are nonbinary — did not put on airs. Dressed humbly in loose black clothes, they sometimes hunched over their score, almost crumpling into it, before opening their mouth to reveal a magnificently sonorous timbre. Adams enunciated words like a deep-toned voice-over artist and used classic Handelian word painting in the aria “The people that walked in darkness,” adopting a shadowy tone before opening up into resplendent high notes on the word “light.” This was good old-fashioned oratorio style, in which singing is an elevated form of recitation.For its “Messiah,” the Philharmonic was joined by the Handel and Haydn Society chorus.Chris LeeThe Philharmonic’s other soloists included the soprano Sherezade Panthaki, who scrupulously shaped her music by approaching top notes with a diminuendo. In slow passages, the countertenor Reginald Mobley spun a gossamer sound that frayed at faster tempos. The tenor Leif Aruhn-Solén, whose glimmering voice didn’t cut in any register, showed questionable taste in ornaments, dynamic contrast and his pantomime of the text.Trinity doled out Handel’s solos to the members of its choir. Many of them, with vocal techniques built for tonal blend and rhythmic precision in a chorus, favored a straight tone that gleamed like white light but also exposed waywardness in pitch. Still, period style doesn’t mean stilted: Some of the singing in the more fiery arias was positively gutsy. Male altos, who created an intriguing softness within the aural fabric of the chorus, contributed solos so subtle they almost evaporated. The soprano Shabnam Abedi showed lovely warmth in “How beautiful are the feet”; and the bass-baritone Brian Mextorf had a light, handsome tone in “The trumpet shall sound.”Trinity would appear to have the more heartfelt and historically informed performance but for one moment at the Philharmonic: As the audience in Geffen Hall stood in respectful attention for the exalted music of “Hallelujah,” Adams could be seen at the side of the stage, singing heartily with the bass section.As Clifford Bartlett, the editor of the Oxford edition, noted in his introduction to the score, the soloists in Handel’s time likely sang the choruses as well. I couldn’t hear Adams, but I shared the reaction of their fellow soloists, who appeared both delighted and disarmed by Adams’s sincerity of expression — a reminder that “Messiah,” after all the variance in instrumentation, style and performance practice, is an act of community. More

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      Review: Klaus Mäkelä, Rising Star of Conducting, Arrives in New York

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      Klaus Mäkelä, a young yet already accomplished maestro, made his New York Philharmonic debut with a performance that prioritized clarity.Now New Yorkers know what the hype is all about.The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.Chances are, he will not go to the New York Philharmonic, where he made his debut on Thursday. (For those keeping track, Leonard Bernstein was just a year younger when he got his unexpected big break.) This orchestra — whose music director, Jaap van Zweden, will depart at the end of next season — needs a new conductor much sooner than Mäkelä is available. But perhaps he has a future as a frequent guest; his first outing with the Philharmonic was a promising one, under an even bigger spotlight than planned, with a program of only symphonic works after the concerto soloist, Truls Mork, withdrew because of an injury.The Philharmonic, at its most exasperating, can be a brash and unbalanced ensemble. Under Mäkelä’s baton on Friday morning, however, it was largely measured in delivering what has become, to mixed results, his trademark clarity. He brought a transparent, levelheaded approach to the emotional extremes of two Russian, B-minor symphonies premiered nearly a half-century apart — the Sixths of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich — as well as to a contemporary work, Jimmy López Bellido’s “Perú Negro.”López Bellido is a favorite of Mäkelä’s among living composers. It’s easy to hear why; this is music that, on the surface, sounds like a successor to other works in Mäkelä’s repertoire that employ enormous orchestral forces, such as the Ballets Russes scores of Stravinsky that he will take to the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, or the post-Romantic symphonies of Mahler that he has toured.Unlike those, however, “Perú Negro” — premiered in 2013 as part of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s centennial and originally conducted by López Bellido’s friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya — thrills and entertains, but reveals itself all too readily.This piece has the hallmarks of López Bellido’s style, such as rich orchestration and maximal gesture, along with homages to the folk songs and rhythms of the Black Peruvian music that the title hints at. Although Mäkelä was up against the newly renovated David Geffen Hall’s bright acoustics in taming the Philharmonic’s sound, he led a lively account, which was met with a standing ovation.But the memory of it was quickly swept aside by the Shostakovich that followed — in particular the similarly grand, breakneck finale. There, you could hear what was lacking in “Perú Negro”: ambiguous exuberance, Janus-faced passages that misdirect and provoke, both inviting and impenetrable, forever irreconcilable. López Bellido could take a lesson from that, as someone who clearly knows how an orchestra can sound, but not necessarily what it can say.The Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky symphonies were studies in letting a score speak for itself. Whether that works is largely a matter of taste, and ensemble. I heard a similar touch in a Mahler Four that Mäkelä conducted last year in Munich; there, the cool performance didn’t deliver on the symphony’s heavenly climax. But his Mahler Six in Amsterdam this summer was a revelation of terror directly expressed.At the Philharmonic, Mäkelä kept some of the orchestra’s characteristic imbalances in check — such as the outsize sounds that rendered the winds section virtually invisible in the Beethoven Nine led by van Zweden in October — but hadn’t quite rewired the players. He did, though, manage to lend both symphonies a legible, compelling shape, if at a bit of a remove. The most evocative moments came not from the entire group but from soloists: Frank Huang’s violin fleetly galloping in the Shostakovich; Judith LeClair’s bassoon dolefully opening the Tchaikovsky; and Anthony McGill’s clarinet reprising that work’s second theme with rending sweetness.The third movement of the Tchaikovsky, a perennial audience favorite, especially benefited from Mäkelä’s lucid reading, whose transparency brought equal attention to the itinerant melodic line and the dense orchestrations surrounding it. There was a sense of what the composer might have been thinking when he wrote to his publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, that he was “happy in the knowledge that I have written a good piece.”I found myself, though, wanting to know more than how Tchaikovsky viewed his own music. Mäkelä’s conducting was so deferential to the score, it was tempting to shake him and ask, “But what do you really think?” Classics like this symphony warrant not just recitation, but also repeated examination.Then again, it’s helpful to remember that we are talking about a 26-year-old. Who hasn’t changed drastically throughout their 20s — in life, in work, in worldview? It will be interesting, and worthwhile, to see where that growth takes Mäkelä. He has proved that he can wrangle the war horses. Now it’s time to see what else he can do.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: A Shostakovich Symphony Finally Reaches the Philharmonic

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      The composer’s 12th, from 1961, is being played by the orchestra for the first time under the conductor Rafael Payare, also making his debut.When the stirring central tune of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 first emerges, a few minutes into the piece, it’s very soft in the cellos and basses. The model for this moment is clear: Very softly, in the cellos and basses, is how the “Ode to Joy” is introduced in Beethoven’s Ninth.Beethoven’s Ninth, of course, is at the center of the repertory, while Shostakovich’s 12th, “The Year 1917,” had never been played by the New York Philharmonic before Thursday, when it was a vehicle for the conductor Rafael Payare’s debut with the orchestra at David Geffen Hall.Why has this symphony been neglected? Shostakovich’s reputation in the West, even after the Cold War ended, was founded on a sense of him as a kind of dissident of the heart, his music covertly opposed to the Soviet regime he outwardly served — or at least attempted to make peace with.But it’s hard to find ambivalence or coded irony in the 12th, which tells a triumphal tale of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and is dedicated to that struggle’s hero, Lenin. It premiered in 1961, a year after its composer finally joined the Communist Party. (How willingly he joined is one of the many questions that persist, unanswerable, about his true beliefs, and so about the relationship between his music and the dangerous political situation he faced.)Unlike his 11th Symphony from a few years before, into which some read secret sympathies with the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, there seems to be little in the 12th but positivity; even in quieter moments, blazing victory is never far away. I suppose the dark undercurrent that briefly pursues Lenin in his countryside hiding place outside St. Petersburg in the second movement could also suggest the fear Shostakovich might have felt. But here, that feels like a reach.The 12th wouldn’t, at this point, need to be disqualified from programs merely for being sincerely created propaganda — though I wouldn’t follow the program note’s glib assurance that we can forget the historical context, since “‘The Year 1917’ was over a century ago, and the Soviet Union is gone.” Tell that to the current president of Russia.It was valuable to get a chance to hear this symphony live, but it does come off a bit repetitive and thin, however wearyingly loud and dense it gets. You will not want to hear that earworm central tune again.In 40 minutes — its four movements flowing together without pause, and revolutionary songs quoted liberally throughout — the piece depicts a Petersburg (then Petrograd) simmering with chaos and tension, ready for battle; then Lenin’s retreat to plan his next move; the thunderous beginning of the revolution; and “The Dawn of Humanity,” the fortissimo, major-key utopia of Soviet life.It’s not the fault of Payare, 42, the music director of the San Diego Symphony and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, that it’s difficult to build tension in those final 10 minutes or so, which manage to be both relentless and fitful.His neat, spirited rendition of the work didn’t stint the mellower second movement, in which successive solos — the bassoonist Judith LeClair, the clarinetist Anthony McGill, the trombonist Colin Williams — advanced an atmosphere of doleful meditation. The Philharmonic seems to be steadily acclimating to its newly renovated hall, though the brasses remain extremely bright-sounding at full force, sharpened rather than golden.As the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, regularly shows, a conducting style that fits the punchy extremity of Shostakovich is not always right for Beethoven, whose Piano Concerto No. 2 was overemphatic and sluggish on Thursday, particularly in a plodding Adagio. The veteran soloist, Emanuel Ax, seemed to be searching for a middle ground between his pearly geniality and Payare’s starker phrasing, and the results sounded unsettled. Ax seemed more suavely at ease in his encore, Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s “Ständchen.”The concert opened with another Philharmonic premiere, William Grant Still’s brooding “Darker America” (1924), an ambiguous, 13-minute dreamscape of haziness, low-slung blues and a subdued conclusion.This was the first time the orchestra has put Still’s work on a subscription program in over 20 years, and it will be followed in March by his Symphony No. 2, “Song of a New Race.” To hear so much new to this ensemble — even Beethoven’s Second, while hardly a rarity, is probably the least played of his piano concertos — is a heartening sign of searching artistic leadership.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      At 26, the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s Star Keeps Rising

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      Having assumed the podium of three major orchestras and appeared on the world’s prestigious stages, he debuts next at the New York Philharmonic.AMSTERDAM — It’s impossible for an artist to avoid making an entrance at the Concertgebouw, one of the world’s most storied spaces for classical music.Double doors behind the stage are flung open, making way for a soloist or conductor to descend a flight of steps leading to the spotlight. When Klaus Mäkelä, a sharply dressed young Finnish maestro, did so on a Friday night in August, he was greeted with the kind of applause typically reserved for the end of a concert. With each stride, the ovation became stronger until, as he stood at the podium, the audience let out a sustained cheer.“That was amazing,” Mäkelä said in an interview later. “It feels like an eternity, to walk down to the stage, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the warmth of an audience in that way.”You could understand the enthusiasm. The house band, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, had been without a chief conductor since Daniele Gatti was abruptly dismissed over sexual assault allegations in 2018. After years of guest batons and speculation, the news had come at last in June that Mäkelä, just 26, would take the podium. This night was his first appearance since the announcement.Mäkelä, perhaps the fastest-rising conductor of his generation — beloved by players and administrators, if not always by critics — already leads two orchestras, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris. When he accepted the job here in Amsterdam, it was as “artistic partner,” a title he will hold until he officially becomes chief conductor in 2027, when his contracts with the other groups expire.Mäkelä conducting the Orchestre de Paris. “I haven’t found someone in the orchestra with something bad to say,” Nikola Nikolov, a violinist in the ensemble, said.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut that is bureaucratic speak for what is effectively the beginning of his tenure, with a starting commitment of five weeks this season. That’s on top of guest appearances that will add to his résumé of prestigious ensembles like those in Berlin, Vienna, Chicago and Cleveland; next up is the New York Philharmonic, where Mäkelä makes his debut on Dec. 8, leading a contemporary work by Jimmy López Bellido and symphonies by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.Again, he is 26.But age has virtually never been a barrier, neither to his ambition nor to the way older colleagues regard him. Christian van Eggelen, a first violin in the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the chair of the group’s artistic committee, described Mäkelä’s first visit to the hall as “love at first sight.”“He was 24, and the second-youngest person onstage,” van Eggelen added. “Yet after three minutes, it was very clear that we were dealing with the most precocious conducting talent that we’ve seen in the past 50 or 75 years.”MÄKELÄ WAS BORN in Helsinki to music teacher parents — his father, cello, and his mother, piano. They both had students who attended a local German school, and decided to enroll Klaus there as well.“Everyone who went there was very efficient,” Mäkelä said, as he often does, with a wide smile but soft tone. “So they must have thought the same would happen to me.”The school might have taught discipline, but Mäkelä was already, in his words, a very nerdy child. He listened to the works of specific composers obsessively like immersive projects, and happily practiced his cello and sang in choruses, including in “Carmen” at the Finnish National Opera. It was there, backstage and watching the conductor on the monitor, that he first had the urge to pick up a baton.“I remember that we all had free ice cream,” he recalled. “But I also remember that I was completely mesmerized. I think it was the music, but also that the conductor was able to play all of this, which is a kind of instrument on a large scale.”His primary focus, though, was still the cello, which brought him to the famed Sibelius Academy’s youth department. While there, he made it into a conducting class with Jorma Panula, the teacher of luminaries like Susanna Mälkki, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Osmo Vänskä.“He had a very specific taste, which is that less is more,” Mäkelä said of Panula. “We all had to be able to conduct without moving at all. And then after that, we could do whatever we wanted. Conducting isn’t very difficult; one can learn it very quickly. But we never learned that. He never lectured, but instead felt us out. I think that was just his way of being: asking questions and always searching.”When the time came to attend the Sibelius Academy proper, Mäkelä continued with cello — though he never graduated — and played in the Helsinki Philharmonic, under conductors including Mälkki. That orchestra, no minor ensemble, was the first to ask him to conduct. From there, the invitations flooded in.By 20 — a time he refers to in conversation as “when I was younger” — he had an agent, the classical music power broker Jasper Parrott, and began to put a personal stamp on the programs he conducted. His championed the works of Jimmy López Bellido, whose name continues to dot Mäkelä’s concert calendar.A breakthrough came when he took the podium of the Oslo Philharmonic, in 2020. That orchestra, Mäkelä said, “feels like my baby.” The ensemble had offered him the job of chief conductor after only one visit; it’s a relationship, he added, that “started with this crazy trust, but has been one of the most fruitful things of my life.”Principally, it has led to an ambitious recording project of Sibelius’s complete symphonies, released this year on Decca. (Mäkelä is only the third conductor in the label’s history to have an exclusive contract.) The cycle reveals a lot about the strengths and shortcomings of Mäkelä’s career so far. Reviewers found it to be an uneven account, both glorious and forgettable, with what David Allen in The New York Times called “ups and downs” that were “sensationally played throughout.”That last part is essential to characterizing Mäkelä’s style. He elicits clean, skillful playing. And he falls somewhere between those conductors known for unfamiliar, occasionally counterintuitive readings of repertory classics — like Teodor Currentzis or Santtu-Matias Rouvali — and those who prioritize composer intentions with little need for additional insight. His performances are rarely sensational, nor do they seem to strive for novel arguments; yet they are unwaveringly honest and deferential to the score.“Maybe that’s the only moment where one could say, maybe, he is young,” van Eggelen said. “He doesn’t turn a score around and search for things to prove himself. What is noticeable is that there is this search for colors and the meaning of these different colors. Nothing’s dogmatic, though. It is, simply put, extremely pleasurable to work with him.”That was the feeling, too, at the Orchestra de Paris, which hired Mäkelä in 2020. (Together, they will be in residence at the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, with a triptych of Stravinsky scores for the Ballets Russes, and in a coming season as the pit orchestra in a new “Frau Ohne Schatten” directed by Barrie Kosky.) Nikola Nikolov, a violinist in the ensemble, said in an interview translated from French that although the players initially had doubts about him because of his age, they were quickly won over. Mäkelä, he added, doesn’t make aggressively distinct choices but comes with a clear interpretation and executes it with exactitude.“I haven’t found someone in the orchestra with something bad to say,” Nikolov said. “Klaus has confidence in people, and in this way he is a good conductor.”Mäkelä is also, players have said, remarkably efficient in rehearsals. His phrasing is direct without being dictatorial, and he doesn’t leave musicians waiting. “There are conductors who flip through pages when we are done,” Nikolov said. “Him, never. He always knows what he wants to talk about, and what he wants to say. That’s magic.”That is one reason Mäkelä attracts admirers among musicians in both Europe and the United States, where he first played with the Minnesota Orchestra but has developed steadier relationships with the Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. In Cleveland, he debuted at a summer Blossom Music Festival concert but made a more spectacular impression filling in last minute for Jaap van Zweden in a program that culminated with Beethoven’s Seventh.Mäkelä isn’t sure what he will do when his contracts expire in Oslo and Paris. “I love them both to death,” he said, “and they’ve been teaching me so much.”Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThe Clevelanders, musicians who are not easily impressed, took a quick liking to him. So did the local press; The Plain Dealer’s review of the Beethoven performance began, “Let there be a substitute every week, if every substitute can be like conductor Klaus Mäkelä.” He is the only guest with a two-week engagement there this season.Speculators may already be wondering whether there’s more of a future in Cleveland for Mäkelä if that orchestra’s music director, Franz Welser-Möst, departs at the end of his contract in 2027, after what will have been 25 years with the ensemble. But for now, Mäkelä would prefer to keep his attention on the orchestras he already has.HIS CONCERTGEBOUW DEBUT took place in an empty hall during the pandemic. Van Eggelen recalled that the orchestra had braced itself for Mäkelä’s arrival, being told to “watch out, apparently he’s amazing.” Mostly, van Eggelen said, the first rehearsal felt more like a homecoming than a visit from a star. “It was a way of working which we recognized, which brought us back to how wanted to be,” he said. “He was meticulous and at the same time let things go and let us make music. This combination of precision, which you need in our hall, and freedom — that was something that shook the whole orchestra up.”Chief conductors at the Concertgebouw Orchestra are elected by the players, who were in no rush to make a decision until they found what felt like a right fit. Other names had been in circulation, but a vote came quickly for Mäkelä because, as van Eggelen said, “there was an absolute, North Korean majority preference for Klaus.” They only had to offer him the post.That happened during the lockdown days of early 2021 in Paris. Mäkelä was preparing a concert there, keeping to himself because of a curfew. With only a small window of opportunity, a delegation from the Concertgebouw Orchestra went to Paris and had dinner with him. Afterward, back at the hotel, they emptied their minibars and knocked on Mäkelä’s door. Inside, they asked whether he would take the job.Thus began, Mäkelä said, a nearly year-and-a-half-long negotiation over how to keep his two orchestras while taking on Amsterdam. Eventually, they arrived at the plan to spend five years with him as artistic partner until 2027, with a commitment of five seasons as chief conductor to follow. Mäkelä had yet to play before a live audience at the Concertgebouw, but the orchestra had invested in a decade with him.The audience did finally come, that night in August, for a meaty program of Kaija Saariaho’s “Orion” and Mahler’s 80-minute Sixth Symphony. The rehearsals hadn’t been perfect, and the players were just returning from a summer holiday, but Mäkelä wasn’t worried. “They are concert animals,” he said. And he had felt as though he had been studying the Mahler, in some way, his whole life.Lifting his baton, Mäkelä said, he didn’t feel like the “cool cucumber” he appeared to be from the audience. But he relaxed the moment the Saariaho began. The evening was typical of his performances: accomplished without being overly assertive; legible and restrained with an eye toward explosive climaxes. By the end of the Mahler, the audience was even more enthusiastic than at the start. His Amsterdam era began.Mäkelä doesn’t yet know what he will do when the Paris and Oslo contracts expire in 2027. “I love them both to death,” he said, “and they’ve been teaching me so much.” But three music directorships won’t be possible, and with effectively all of them filling out his calendar now, he can feel the jet-setting, rising-star lifestyle of his early 20s begin to calm down.“That’s a conscious decision,” he said. “In a way, I’m trying to concentrate more. Guest conducting is fun, but a deep connection with the musicians — in Oslo, in Paris and now with the Concertgebouw — that’s my next big thing, to get to know them really well.” More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Taste of Holiday Bounty

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      Stéphane Denève leads a program of extravagantly colorful French works, with the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson as the soloist in a Ravel concerto.Thanksgiving came a day early at the New York Philharmonic this year: the calories, the juicy fat, the whipped cream, the fun, the sense of endless bounty. The orchestra’s program at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday was an immersion in richness and in flashing, warming colors, and it left you like a good holiday dinner does: a little dazed, even happily drowsy, stumbling toward the subway truly full.Conducted by Stéphane Denève, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony, the concert was très French — down to the tender Rameau encore played by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Ravel’s Concerto in G. (The program repeats on Friday and Saturday.)At the center of that concerto is a time-suspending Adagio. But in Ólafsson’s performance, the dreaminess — the slight blur, the delicacy — bled into the two outer movements, too. Some pianists lean on the factory-machine regularity, the bright lucidity, of those parts to hammer home a contrast with the slow movement. But, as he also showed in a very different repertory at his Carnegie Hall debut in February, Ólafsson resists vivid contrasts.It’s not that his touch is diffuse; it’s as clean as marble. And it’s not that the tempos he and Denève chose for the framing movements were slower than normal. But the effect Ólafsson got throughout, of a kind of virtuosic reticence, could be described in the same words I used for his performance in February: a “silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.”“Céléphaïs” (2017), a nine-minute section from Guillaume Connesson’s symphonic poem inspired by the fantastical writings of H.P. Lovecraft, opened the concert with an extravagance that offers proof of the survival of the orchestrational panache of the French tradition: its lurid lushness and sly squiggles, brassy explosions and sensual strings.Connesson’s precursors in that tradition got a hearing after intermission. The audience even got a second helping: The big, sweet slice of cake that is the Suite No. 2 drawn from Albert Roussel’s 1930 ballet “Bacchus et Ariane” was followed by another slice, the Suite No. 2 from another mythological ballet of the early 20th century, Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé.”On paper this seemed like overindulgence; it kind of was, but who doesn’t like their potatoes two ways every now and again? And while there’s a familial similarity between these works, Roussel’s style is ever so slightly more angular, with an underlying feeling of logic distinct from Ravel’s billowy scene painting.The Philharmonic played well throughout, riding the many waves and swerves of intensity and pigment, from dewy dawns to mellow dusks. There were some particularly notable contributions to the potluck: Ryan Roberts, just a few years into his tenure as the orchestra’s English hornist but already a pillar of the ensemble, matched Ólafsson’s eloquent introspection in the Ravel concerto’s slow movement.The principal flute, Robert Langevin, unspooled his instrument’s classic glistening solo in “Daphnis et Chloé” with conversational ease. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, had a russet-color turn in the Roussel, and Roger Nye, unusually seated in the first bassoon chair for that work, played with honeyed serenity.Unlike at most Thanksgiving dinners, by the end the fullness didn’t feel like bloat. The clear, cool acoustics of the new Geffen Hall work against textures getting too heavy; they favor breezy sleekness, which is perfect for Denève, whose music-making exudes relaxation without losing forward motion. A couple of hours later, I would have been more than ready to eat — I mean hear — some more.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      New York Philharmonic Was Once All-Male. Now, Women Outnumber Men.

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      The New York Philharmonic, which was an all-male bastion for most of its 180 years of existence, currently has 45 women and 44 men.When the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center in 1962, its new hall had no women’s dressing rooms. That’s because there were no women in the orchestra.But this fall, as the Philharmonic opens its newly renovated home, David Geffen Hall, its players have returned not only to more equitable facilities backstage, but to a milestone onstage: For the first time in its 180-year history, the women in the Philharmonic outnumber the men, 45 to 44.“It’s a sea change,” said Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, who joined the orchestra in 1992. “This has been a hard-won, long battle, and it continues to be.”The orchestra’s new female majority could prove fleeting — it currently has 16 player vacancies to fill, in part because auditions were put on hold during the pandemic — but it still represents a profound shift for an ensemble that had only five women at the beginning of the 1970s. That was the decade it began holding blind auditions, with musicians trying out by playing behind screens.The pipeline now teems with female candidates: At the Philharmonic, 10 of the 12 most recent hires have been women.“This certainly shows tremendous strides,” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive and a pioneer in the field of orchestral management. “Women are winning these positions fair and square.”“All we seek is equity,” she said, “because society is 50-50.”Women now make up roughly half of orchestra players nationwide, but they are still substantially outnumbered by men in most elite ensembles, including in Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.Jaap van Zweden conducting the women and men of the Philharmonic this month at the newly-renovated David Geffen Hall. Fadi KheirThe Philharmonic still falls short by several measures. Women hold only about a third of its leadership positions, including its principal positions and assistant or associate principals, which are the best-paid positions for players. The orchestra has never had a female music director. Some sections remain noticeably divided by gender: 27 of its 30 violinists are now women, for example, while the percussion section is made up entirely of men. There is still a glaring lack of Black and Latino members.Still, many artists hailed the new prevalence of women in the Philharmonic as a significant development. Symphony orchestras were long seen as the dominion of men. And turnover is generally extremely slow at leading ensembles like the Philharmonic, whose players are tenured and can remain in their posts for many years. Meaningful demographic change can take decades.“It’s more of a family now,” said Sherry Sylar, associate principal oboe, who joined the orchestra in 1984. “There are moms and pops both.”For much of its history, the Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, was closed off to women. At the time of its founding in 1842, women were not only discouraged from pursuing careers in music — it was rare for them to attend evening concerts unless they were with men. (In “Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra,” Howard Shanet wrote that during the 19th century, the ensemble’s public rehearsals on Friday afternoons were popular with “unaccompanied ladies who could venture forth by day with more propriety than they could by night.”)It was not until 1922 that the Philharmonic hired its first female member, Stephanie Goldner, a 26-year-old harpist from Vienna. She departed in 1932, and the orchestra became an all-male bastion again for decades.Then, in 1966, Orin O’Brien, a double bassist, was hired as the Philharmonic’s first female section player. Often described as the first woman to become a permanent member of the orchestra, she was at the vanguard of a pioneering group of female artists who opened doors for other women to join. The orchestra’s move toward blind auditions in the 1970s was seen as making the process fairer. By 1992, there were 29 women in the orchestra.Even as representation increased, however, female musicians often faced discrimination. Sexism was widespread in the industry (the maestro Zubin Mehta, who opined in 1970 that he still did not think women should be in orchestras because they “become men,” was named the orchestra’s music director six years later). Fewer women got the best-paid principal positions, and some who did found that they earned far less than their male counterparts. In 2019, the Boston Symphony settled a lawsuit in which the principal flutist of the orchestra said she was being paid less than a male colleague, the principal oboist.Judith LeClair became the first woman to take over a first chair at the Philharmonic when she joined as principal bassoon in 1981, at the age of 23. She described her early days in the orchestra, when she was one of 17 women, as lonely. She said she had to fight to be paid as much as her male colleagues, hiring a lawyer to help negotiate contracts. It took at least 20 years, she said, before she reached parity.Sheryl Staples, the orchestra’s principal associate concertmaster; Qianqian Li, its principal second violinist; and Lisa Eunsoo Kim, the associate principal second violinist, during a recent rehearsal. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“I did feel I was taken advantage of in the very beginning because I was a woman, and young and naïve,” she said. “It felt humiliating and demeaning.”Some male colleagues took to calling the women in the orchestra “the skirts.”“It minimized the role that we played in the orchestra,” said Sylar, the oboist. “It felt like you had to be better to gain the respect of the other musicians. It was just a constant struggle of always pushing myself to be better.”The nickname was not her only encounter with sexism. Shortly after she joined the orchestra, she recalled that Erich Leinsdorf, a frequent guest conductor, during a meeting in his dressing room, asked why she did not wear dresses during rehearsal (she preferred pants).“It just sort of floored me,” she said.It was not until 2018 that the Philharmonic changed its dress code to allow women to wear pants at its evening concerts. Before that they were required to wear floor-length black skirts or gowns.In recent years, as women have taken on more leadership roles in the orchestra, the climate has become more inclusive, several players said.“It’s so welcoming and warm and it feels just like a big family,” said Alison Fierst, who joined as associate principal flute in 2019, and had been moved by getting the chance to get to play alongside some of the pioneering women who had broken barriers in the orchestra.There are some outliers — the St. Louis Symphony, for example, has had a female majority for a decade — but men still outnumber women at most leading orchestras in the United States. Elsewhere, progress has been slower: The Vienna Philharmonic did not allow women to audition until 1997. It is now about 17 percent female.When the orchestra moved to Lincoln Center 60 years ago, it had no women in it. Now, it is majority female. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesThe lack of women in leadership roles in orchestras — the principal players in each section can earn much more than their colleagues — has also drawn criticism. The vast majority of principal positions still go to men, and the conducting field is overwhelmingly male: Only one of the 25 largest ensembles in the United States is led by a woman, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, whose new music director is Nathalie Stutzmann.Michelle Rofrano, a conductor who is a founder of Protestra, an orchestra and advocacy group focused on social justice, said that more needs to be done to ensure that women rise to leadership roles.“Diversity shouldn’t be just a box to check; it requires mentorship and support,” she said. “We’re missing out on perspectives and an array of people who bring their unique talent.”The Philharmonic has sought to play a role in promoting change, including by hiring more women as guest conductors in recent years and by commissioning works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred states from denying women the right to vote (one of the works it commissioned, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize). Some of its players have privately urged the Philharmonic’s leaders to select a woman to replace the orchestra’s outgoing music director, Jaap van Zweden, who is set to step down in 2024.After spending decades in an industry in which men have been so dominant, some Philharmonic members say they are still getting used to the sight of so many women onstage. This fall, as the orchestra celebrates its remodeled home and the Philharmonic makes history with its female majority, some feel that a new chapter has begun.Sylar said she was struck by the artistry of the women who have recently joined the ensemble.“I’m not saying I want this to be an all-women orchestra either,” she said. “It just nice to see that women are being recognized for their talent.” More

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      The Philharmonic Tests Its New Home With the Classics

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      David Geffen Hall reopened with a month of concerts that sketched a possible future for the New York Philharmonic. Now it’s back to business.The new David Geffen Hall has opened — and opened, and opened.In 1962, one performance was enough to cut the ribbon on the New York Philharmonic’s home at Lincoln Center. Sixty years — and many tweaks later, big and small — it took four weeks of festivities to celebrate the acoustically and aesthetically troubled hall’s decades-in-the-making, $550 million gut renovation.A month of opening nights: Call it inflation.I was in the hall for nearly all of those nights. For a crowd-pleasing concert dedicated to the people who constructed it. For a sober jazz-meets-classical, multimedia exploration of the history of the neighborhood razed to build the center.For an evening with the folksy mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, the coziness of which shocked anyone who had ever been to the drafty, dingy barn that was the hall pre-renovation. For the unveiling of three series in the glassed-in Sidewalk Studio. For the flashing lights, booming electronics and pitch-bending vocal octet of a slew of premieres.For not one but two fund-raising galas: first, a genial if never showstopping parade of Broadway stars like Bernadette Peters, Lin-Manuel Miranda and, the urbane highlight, Vanessa Williams; then, two days later, a brusque romp through Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (which PBS will air and stream on Friday).For an open house last weekend with aerialists rappelling down the building’s facade, and a test of the 50-foot screen that will simulcast concerts to those who wander into the lobby. (The quality of the video is already crisp; the sound is a work in progress.)Members of Bandaloop performed an aerialist act as part of Geffen Hall’s open house weekend. Richard Termine/Lincoln CenterBy Wednesday, the confetti had settled. And after all that, we were deposited back into the standard repertory.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.Who Is David Geffen?: The entertainment magnate, who jump-started the renovation, has become avidly sought by culture and education leaders looking to finance a wave of new construction.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Expert Assessment: Right after the reopening our critic wrote that the renovation had a mightily improved sound. In the weeks that followed his feelings became more complicated.Because, for all of Geffen’s intended uses — as a community center and high school graduation spot, as a pop venue and corporate event rental — it is, first and foremost, a traditional orchestra hall. If Wednesday’s program, a Mozart piano concerto and a Bruckner symphony, didn’t work here, nothing else would matter — not the more spacious lobbies or the auditorium’s wraparound seating or the stylish restaurant.Beethoven’s Ninth had been a return to the wholly unamplified and wholly familiar, but in one-night-only, hastily rehearsed form. Wednesday was the back-to-business moment: the real opening night, a culmination of a month’s testing of the space, its acoustics and its house band.Weeks of performances under the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, had begun to form a portrait of Geffen’s sound: clear, clean and adroitly balanced, but a little colorless and cool, even chilly. Soft passages glistened, solos popped, and there was a palpable sense of the bass frequencies that had struggled in earlier iterations of the hall. Reducing audience capacity by 500 and pulling the stage forward to let seating encircle it resulted in a far more engaging experience.But especially when the playing was loud and densely massed, the clarity muddied, and there was little sense of the enveloping richness that is one of the great joys of hearing an orchestra live. The music blared at your face when it should have surrounded you.There was appealing intimacy and considerable warmth on Wednesday, though, in an account of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 that featured Yefim Bronfman — a veteran too often taken for granted — playing with lucid, gentle eloquence. He was the first real, acoustic concerto soloist in the new space, and he was a gallant partner; the piano, properly, sounded somewhere both inside and in front of the orchestra. In the slow second movement, silky, misty strings made a poised counterpart to familial interplay in the winds.Van Zweden, as in his breakneck second movement in Beethoven’s Ninth, pressed the third-movement Allegro of the Mozart a few shades past comfort. You get the sense that he thinks this kind of breathlessness transmits excitement, but it comes off as harried rather than thrilling or witty.His briskness can bulldoze eddies of feeling. A few moments before the end of the Mozart, the rambunctious mood suddenly shifts for maybe 10 seconds of wistful sublimity. The passage is over before you know it, whisked back to a spirited rondo, but it epitomizes the piece’s — and its composer’s — mixing of the jovial and aching. Van Zweden zipped through it to the final bars.And in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, his prioritization of lyrical flow — overall, a welcome sense of naturalness from a conductor better known for punchy climaxes — pressed the Adagio slightly too fast to allow for the building of what can be excruciating intensity. The Finale was, unusually, more moving, with its seesawing between peace and war; in van Zweden’s smooth, happy-minded rendition of the work, neither too heavy nor hectoring, it was no surprise which side eventually triumphed.The playing wasn’t flawless. There was a lack of depth in the mesmerizing unwinding lines for the violins in the Adagio, and some iffy intonation in the brasses. But there wasn’t the sense I had had in earlier concerts, particularly when I was sitting on the ground level, of distance or almost clinical detachment in the sound.Jaap van Zweden leading the Philharmonic in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22, featuring Yefim Bronfman as soloist.Fadi KheirOr of that blare. Even if the brasses sometimes felt overly bright at top volume, there was more transparency and better blend at those heights. The consistent problem since the opening remains the hard, strident sound that the violins take on at the top of their range and force.This may be the playing of an orchestra that tends aggressive — in other words, something that can be fixed — rather than a feature of the room itself. Or it might be a shortcoming of the hall, a slight but consequential lack of sufficient reverberation.Only time will tell: Such are the ambiguities of acoustics. But some of the concerns about the basic sound of the place that I’d had over the past few weeks were assuaged on Wednesday; the orchestra is, as expected, adapting to its new home, so impressions are evolving, too.This Mozart-Bruckner pairing signals a return to the classics after the showy progressivism of the opening month’s programming. That multimedia event early in October, Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” was essentially an 80-minute land acknowledgment, mustering narration, archival images, poetic filmed reconstructions of street life early in the 20th century, oral history, notation and improvisation to sketch a lost community.After the piece opened with a long set by a jazz ensemble, the Philharmonic awkwardly shuffled onstage in the wake of a section called “Destroyer”: interlopers invading an already vibrant culture. The self-castigating aspect felt very much of our moment. Then, of the two October subscription programs, the first was dominated by living composers. The second featured a half-hour premiere by Caroline Shaw and was anchored by a rediscovered symphony by Florence Price; in an inversion of the usual format, the opener was the standard — Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” — rather than a new piece.This is all hardly the model for what is coming up. There are intriguing scores being performed: Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion gets a rare hearing in a couple of weeks, and the Philharmonic has never played Shostakovich’s 12th Symphony, which is scheduled for the beginning of December.But while there’s no shortage of contemporary pieces this season, living composers — or even unusual selections from the past — get that anchor slot at the end of the concert only a few times. October sketched a possible future for the Philharmonic; it didn’t describe the present.That future will be guided by a new music director; van Zweden, hardly a driving creative force even before the pandemic break separated him from the ensemble, is leaving after next season. Over the coming months both promising younger artists (the likes of Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Makela) and veterans (Marin Alsop, Gianandrea Noseda) make guest appearances. Gustavo Dudamel, the star maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who returns in May, is the elephant in the room.Whoever ends up with the job will be a crucial part of the continuing adjustment to the new hall, a process that will not be over soon. The promise of the space is clear. The building is far more spacious and comfortable than it was, even if the public spaces evoke the mid-market casualness of an airport terminal — usable but disposable — more than an inspiring house of culture.Every aspect of the hall seems to have embraced this half-vulgar, half-lovable ethos. First I cringed, then I giggled, at one of the orchestra’s cellists, who has recorded the “please silence your cellphones” announcement that plays as the lights dim.“Now here,” she concludes with goofy, irresistible relish, like she’s channeling Ed McMahon, “comes the music!” More