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      Timeline: The Long, Long Journey to a New David Geffen Hall

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      After decades of failed attempts, the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center are hoping that the new $550 million renovation has finally fixed the hall.The efforts to fix the New York Philharmonic’s troubled Lincoln Center home date back almost to the night it opened in 1962, when the auditorium, originally called Philharmonic Hall, was found acoustically wanting.In 1976 a gut renovation transformed the space, which had been renamed Avery Fisher Hall in honor of a large gift from the audio equipment pioneer Avery Fisher, and tried to fix its acoustics. But problems persisted. More tweaks were made in the 1990s. The Philharmonic tried to leave for good in 2003 to return to its old home, Carnegie Hall. Plans for new designs by Norman Foster and Thomas Heatherwick came and went.Now the hall, renamed David Geffen Hall after a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen, is reopening in early October after a $550 million overhaul that everyone hopes will finally get it right. Here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Sept. 23, 1962A Glamorous Opening, Troubling SignsLeonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at the opening of the hall in 1962.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesPhilharmonic Hall, which was designed by Max Abramovitz and was the first part of Lincoln Center to be completed, opens with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at a white-tie gala attended by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and other luminaries. But in his review the next day the critic Harold C. Schonberg in The New York Times notes a “decided lack of bass” in the orchestra section that worsens in the loges and at the back of the hall, where he likens it to “a high-fidelity outfit with the bass control out of the circuit.”Sept. 25, 1962“We’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.”Philharmonic Hall on opening night.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThe hall’s acoustician, Leo Beranek, tells The Times that he is “not entirely satisfied” with the sound but believes that adjustments will improve it. “In other words,” the article quotes him as saying, “we’re not going to tear down the hall and rebuild.” A series of remodeling efforts begins, but by 1974 visiting ensembles, including the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, decide to return to Carnegie Hall.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.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.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.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.1975Gutting the Hall and Starting Againvia New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesLincoln Center announces plans to gut the hall, now called Avery Fisher Hall, and to completely rebuild it under the supervision of the acoustician Cyril M. Harris and the architect Philip Johnson. “There was no point any longer taking halfway measures in relation to the hall,” Fisher says. “A fresh start was needed.”1976Avery Fisher Hall Reopens, to HopeThe philanthropist Avery Fisher, center, was in the audience when the newly renovated Avery Fisher Hall opened in 1976.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesAvery Fisher Hall reopens, and the early reviews are good. This time Schonberg writes in The Times that in “any part of the dynamic range, too, from the wispiest pianissimo to the most stupendous forte, Fisher Hall came through with extraordinary clarity.” But for all his early enthusiasm, he notes that the bass sound, while improved, “tends to be a little weak.”1992The Musicians Still Cannot Hear Each OtherSound reflectors were added around the stage to help the players hear each other.via New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesMusicians still complain that they cannot hear one another on the stage, so sound reflectors — some called “bongos” for their curved appearance — are placed on the walls and ceiling. Allan Kozinn writes in The Times that “Avery Fisher Hall’s acoustics have troubled musicians and listeners ever since it opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall. And although the 1976 renovation was considered an improvement, critics continued to complain of an overly bright brass sound and a weak bass.”2003The Philharmonic Tries to Leave Lincoln CenterThe Philharmonic stuns Lincoln Center by announcing that it plans to leave Avery Fisher to return to Carnegie Hall. The announcement throws the center’s on-again, off-again redevelopment plans into chaos (three finalists had been selected to compete to redesign Fisher: Norman Foster, Rafael Moneo and the team of Richard Meier and Arata Isozaki). But the plan, which also called for the Philharmonic and Carnegie to merge, proves unworkable and is soon abandoned.2005Norman Foster Tapped, But Nothing Comes of ItThe Philharmonic board selects the architect Norman Foster to redesign the hall, but plans stall.March 4, 2015David Geffen Gives $100 MillionDavid Geffen, center, with Katherine G. Farley, chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and Jed Bernstein, who was then its president.Richard Perry/The New York TimesDavid Geffen donates $100 million to renovate the hall, which is then named for him, after the Fisher family agrees give up the naming rights in exchange for several inducements, including $15 million.Dec. 9, 2015Heatherwick Studio Briefly on Design TeamThe London firm Heatherwick Studio, led by Thomas Heatherwick, and Diamond Schmitt Architects of Toronto are chosen to redesign the interior of David Geffen Hall. They join the acoustic design firm Akustiks and the theater design firm Fisher Dachs.2017Back to the Drawing BoardLincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic scrap the current plans and go back to the drawing board, saying that the proposals were growing too complicated and too costly, and would force the orchestra out of the hall for three seasons.2019A Plan, and a Design Team, at LastAn artist’s rendering of the plans for the new hall. New York PhilharmonicA new $550 million plan is unveiled to make the hall more intimate, cutting more than 500 seats, reducing capacity to 2,200 from 2,738. It also calls for adding seats behind the stage, fixing the acoustics, rethinking the public spaces and, yes, adding more restrooms. Heatherwick Studios is off the design team, which now consists of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (lobbies and other public spaces); Diamond Schmitt Architects (the auditorium); Akustiks (acoustics); and Fisher Dachs Associates (theater design). The hall is scheduled to open in March 2024.2021The Pandemic Shutdown Speeds ConstructionThe concert hall being rebuilt in 2021.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe pandemic, which has shut down live performance, allows the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center to accelerate the construction schedule, and to push the reopening to this fall. That keeps the orchestra’s nomadic period to just one season, which saw it play at Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater with forays to Carnegie Hall.2022David Geffen Hall Set to ReopenThe new hall, so many years in the making and remaking, will come to life this month. There will be two concerts Oct. 8 featuring the world premiere of new piece that Lincoln Center commissioned for the occasion: Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” about the vibrant neighborhood that was razed to make way for Lincoln Center. It will be performed by Etienne Charles & Creole Soul, and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Jaap van Zweden. Tickets will be available on a choose-what-you-pay basis. More

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      A Pioneering Orchestra Boss Had ‘Unfinished Business,’ So She Returned

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      Deborah Borda led the New York Philharmonic in the 1990s, and was frustrated by its subpar hall. After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, she “finally saw a path forward,” she said.When the musicians of the New York Philharmonic gathered inside what was still very much a construction site in mid-August to hear for the first time how they would sound after the $550 million renovation of their home, David Geffen Hall, Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, handed out roses to the arriving players.“This is a historic moment,” Borda, who had barely slept the night before, told them from the conductor’s podium. “Welcome to your new home.”It was a homecoming that Borda, 73, has been working toward for decades.She first led the Philharmonic in the 1990s, and left partly out of frustration that there was no will to rebuild its perennially troubled home, known then as Avery Fisher Hall, which had long been plagued by complaints about its look and, especially, its sound. She spent 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, ushering the orchestra into the acclaimed Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall and signing Gustavo Dudamel as music director. Then, just as she began to consider a new chapter, perhaps teaching, she was lured back to New York five years ago: a $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen had revived plans to remake the hall, but momentum seemed to be stalling.“It was unfinished business,” she said. “I had been dreaming about this since the 1990s. And then I finally saw a path forward.”So there was a lot on the line that afternoon in August, when she listened intently as the orchestra tuned up and then, under the baton of its music director, Jaap van Zweden, played excerpts from Bruckner’s elegiac Seventh Symphony. She felt reassured.“It sounds terrific,” she told the small crowd in attendance, including leaders from Lincoln Center, board members, sound experts and construction workers.When Borda returned to New York in 2017, arts leaders had real concerns about the health of the Philharmonic, the oldest orchestra in the United States. It had top-flight musicians and a storied tradition — over the years it has been led by giants like Mahler, Toscanini and Bernstein — but it ran deficits every year, its audience was aging and it faced competition from the many international ensembles that tour New York. When she arrived, its endowment fund had less money than when she been in charge in the 1990s.It was the Geffen gift — secured in 2015 by Katherine G. Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center, which owns the hall and is the Philharmonic’s landlord — that finally put a revamped hall within grasp. But there were still serious obstacles. Lincoln Center was going through a period of management churn as top executives came and went. The renovation plans under consideration were growing too expensive and hard to build, not to mention impractical (glass walls?) for an orchestra. Soon after Borda arrived, she and Lincoln Center officials announced they were going back to the drawing board.Undeterred, Borda kept working toward the ultimate goal. “She is a force of nature,” van Zweden said. “What she wants, she gets.”In 2019 Lincoln Center tapped Henry Timms, who formerly led the 92nd Street Y, as its president and chief executive. He returned stability to the organization, rethought the mission of the arts complex — which produces work on its own while serving as the landlord of independent constituent groups including the Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and New York City Ballet — and got the renovation project moving forward.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.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.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.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.He and Borda worked to turn the historically acrimonious relationship between Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic — which reached a low point in 2003, when the Philharmonic tried to leave and return to its old home, Carnegie Hall — into a collaborative one. That message was driven home by stickers and tote bags about the project that proclaimed, perhaps aspirationally, “Working in Concert.”Henry Timms brought stability back to Lincoln Center after a period of management tumult when he became its president and chief executive in 2019. That year he and Borda unveiled plans for the renovation of Geffen Hall, and surveyed the old hall. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms recalled meeting Borda at her home for coffee shortly before he took office, when they vowed together to finally finish the Geffen project.“It was a priority that I think we both signed up for,” he said. “But what we needed to do was make our relationship a priority.”“She could have stopped before this job and gone down in history, but she chose not to,” he said. “She went the other way and chased this final triumph.”Borda said the hard work and support of Timms and Farley at Lincoln Center, as well as the co-chairmen of the Philharmonic’s board, Peter W. May and Oscar L. Tang, had been critical. “They had the heart and the hunger and the vision to do this,” she said.Borda, whose mother was a lobbyist and whose father immigrated from Colombia and worked as a salesman, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. She attended her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was 4, and from the balcony she watched Leonard Bernstein conduct. Her parents divorced when she was 6, and when she was 12, the family moved to Boston, where they lived with Borda’s stepfather, a psychiatrist, and she played in a youth orchestra. She initially envisioned a career as a performer, studying violin and attending the Royal College of Music in London for graduate studies, and working as a freelance musician in New York. But she was drawn to management early on.In 1979, when she was 30, she landed her first major job, as general manager and artistic administrator of the San Francisco Symphony. Her appointment caught attention: She was one of the first women to lead a major orchestra in the United States. But because of her gender and sexual orientation — she is gay — she sometimes faced obstacles in the male-dominated classical field. She recalled the surprise she felt losing out on a job managing the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 1980s after being told that its maestro, Lorin Maazel, would be uncomfortable working with her because she was a woman.“It didn’t even occur to me that my gender and sexual orientation might be an impediment,” she said. “I never even thought of it.”After stints at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, she came to New York in 1991 for her first round as the Philharmonic’s chief. She balanced the orchestra’s budget and led efforts to attract more young people to concerts with innovations like short evening “rush-hour” concerts. But her tenure was also marked by feuds, including acrimonious negotiations with the orchestra’s musicians over a labor contract, and persistent tensions with Kurt Masur, who was then its music director.Borda with the music director Kurt Masur during her last stint running the New York Philharmonic, in 1991. Jack Manning/The New York TimesShe first tried to remedy some of the hall’s stubborn acoustic problems in 1992, when Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic placed curved wooden reflectors around the stage — their shape inspired her to dub them “the bongos” — to help spread the sound. But the problems persisted.She left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999, in part, she said, because she did not believe cultural leaders in New York were committed to a full-scale renovation of the hall.“I didn’t think there was the heart or the vision to get it done at that time,” she said. “It was frustrating and that’s why I left.”She flourished in Los Angeles, leading the orchestra to new heights. She more than quintupled its endowment, earned the orchestra a reputation for creative programming, helped make Dudamel a superstar and started an ambitious youth orchestra program for the city’s underserved communities. Then, just when she was thinking about retiring from orchestra management to teach or start a think-tank, New York beckoned her back.She returned in 2017, energized by the opportunity to finally remake Geffen Hall. “It was sort of like a karmic circle,” she said. (She also wanted to be closer to her longtime partner, Coralie Toevs, who oversees development at the Metropolitan Opera; the two maintained a long-distance relationship when Borda was in Los Angeles.)Back in New York she worked to balance the budget, raising $50 million to help the orchestra stay solvent. She built up its endowment, which was valued at $195 million when she arrived, lower than it had been when she led the orchestra in the 1990s, and which is now valued at around $220 million. And she championed innovative programming: she commissioned works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which barred the states from denying women the right to vote, and one work, “Stride,” by Tania León, won the Pulitzer Prize.Then the pandemic hit. The orchestra canceled more than 100 concerts — losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue — and laid off 40 percent of its staff.“I genuinely thought we could go out of business,” she said.But Timms and Borda pressed ahead, seizing on the long pandemic shutdown period to accelerate the project, which was originally scheduled to take place over several seasons.Now Borda, having made good on her promise to usher another Philharmonic into another modern home, has announced plans to step down at the end of June, when she will hand the reins of the Philharmonic to Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, in Washington. (She will stay on as a special adviser to assist with fund-raising and other matters.)But she still has work to do: planning enticing seasons to lure concertgoers to a new hall.“A hall can’t just be a monument to itself,” she said.And a critical decision looms: before she departs, Borda hopes to name a successor to van Zweden, the music director, who will leave his post in 2024. A 12-person committee of Philharmonic staff, musicians and board members is sifting through candidates. Among the likely contenders are Dudamel; Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the former music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Susanna Malkki, the music director of the Helsinki Philharmonic; and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Borda said she was looking for a leader who “clicks with the orchestra” and “clicks with New York.”On a recent day, as she led a tour of the hall for the Philharmonic’s board, her cellphone often sounded, filling the hall with her ringtone: “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” from Handel’s “Solomon.”Standing before a new digital wall in the lobby, she smiled, saying she was moved that the Philharmonic would finally have a home to match its artistic caliber.“It energizes me completely,” she said. “It’s like a dream.” More

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      After New York, Jaap van Zweden Will Lead Seoul Philharmonic

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      He will begin a five-year contract as music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra in 2024, after stepping down from the New York Philharmonic.Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, surprised cultural leaders and audiences last year when he announced he would leave his post in 2024, saying the pandemic had made him rethink his priorities.Now he has started outlining his post-New York plans: He will begin a five-year contract as music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra in January 2024, the ensemble announced on Sunday.Sohn Eun-kyung, the Seoul Philharmonic’s chief executive, said in a statement that van Zweden would help “upgrade” the quality of the ensemble and turn it into a “world-class orchestra,” according to South Korean news media reports.Van Zweden, who was in Hong Kong where he serves as music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, could not be immediately reached for comment.His publicist, Mary Lou Falcone, said: “This is about building something — the building of an orchestra, as he did in Hong Kong. That’s what he does.”The move is another unconventional choice by van Zweden, 61, an intense and meticulous maestro from the Netherlands who came to New York in 2018, only to have his tenure interrupted by the pandemic, which forced the Philharmonic to cancel more than 100 concerts and impose painful budget cuts.While the Seoul Philharmonic is among Asia’s most prominent ensembles, it has struggled in recent years with financial problems and management woes. The current music director, the Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, recently announced he would not renew his three-year contract when it expires later this year.Van Zweden, who served as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra before coming to New York, was at one point, while leading the Dallas ensemble, America’s best-paid conductor, earning more than $5 million in a single season.Van Zweden agreed to step down from his post in New York after the 2023-24 season, a year later than he had initially planned, to give the orchestra time to settle into David Geffen Hall, scheduled to open in October after a $550 million renovation, and to search for a successor. His six-year tenure will be the shortest of any Philharmonic music director since Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor who led the orchestra for six seasons in the 1970s.He will leave his post in Hong Kong in the spring of 2024, after 12 years, and assume the title of conductor laureate.In an interview last year, van Zweden said the pandemic had prompted him to reconsider his relationship with the New York Philharmonic, as well as with his family, which he rarely got to see during his time on the road. He said he felt it would be the right moment to move on, with the orchestra set to move into its new home.“It is not out of frustration, it’s not out of anger, it’s not out of a difficult situation,” he said at the time. “It’s just out of freedom.” More

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      Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

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      Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali Knows His Way Around a Score, and a Farm

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      YLÖJÄRVI, Finland — “Here I grow peas,” the conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali said, gesturing to a plot of land the size of a small room. “Why? I just love fresh peas.”That pea garden is a blip in the scale of Rouvali’s property here — a farm, dating back to the 16th century, on over 34 acres. It is among this place’s wildflowers, evergreens and moss-covered rocks that he feels most at ease, especially compared with where he’s more often seen: inside the world’s major concert halls, whether at the podium of his Philharmonia Orchestra in London or as a guest with ensembles like the New York Philharmonic, where he is a contender to become the next music director.“I was never someone who wants to be famous,” said Rouvali, 36. “But of course, with this profession it comes automatically.”Rouvali has structured his life so that he can spend as many weekends as possible on his farm, about 20 minutes outside Tampere, in the southwest of Finland. One morning this month, he was at the start of a welcome break between the Philharmonia’s performances not far away in Mikkeli and another to come in early August at the Edinburgh International Festival.Rouvali conducting the Philharmonia in 2019.Kaupo KikkasHe and his wife, Elina, live in the property’s main house but make use of all the surrounding buildings. They include a sauna, a guesthouse with music and pole-dancing studios, and a garage with a room for Rouvali to slaughter and skin the game he hunts, like ducks and deer. He fishes in the nearby lake, where he was having a beach built (along with a waterfront sauna). They eat everything he kills and fill the table with dishes made from other local ingredients, such as foraged chanterelles or new potatoes from a neighbor.“I need this,” Rouvali said, “to kind of rest and have a mental break and not really think about music.”When he is at work, Rouvali has developed a reputation as a lively conductor, one who revels in experimentation and fluid interpretations, and who has a gift — befitting his background as a percussionist — for internal rhythms and harmonies. When he returns to the Philharmonic next season, for his third engagement there, it will be with a precious two weeks of the season’s real estate, in varied programs that include repertory mainstays and local premieres by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Magnus Lindberg.In a time when every guest’s appearance with the Philharmonic has the air of an audition, ahead of Jaap van Zweden’s departure from the podium in spring 2024, Rouvali’s concerts come with added scrutiny and pressure. He acknowledged as much himself, though only at a whisper in the privacy of his own yard.The Philharmonic, for its part, doesn’t have anything to add. Its music director search, said Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, is “a very confidential and sacrosanct process, and we just don’t discuss it.”“I need this,” Rouvali said of his time at home, “to kind of rest and have a mental break and not really think about music.”Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesRouvali is a charismatic, natural leader — a trait that has endeared him to musicians in rehearsal.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesROUVALI WAS BORN in Lahti, Finland, to two members of that city’s orchestra. He played piano, and learned violin from his mother, but he eventually settled on studying percussion seriously — mostly, the mallet instruments. A fan of much music beyond the classical concert hall, he also took up jazz and rock, and was comfortable at the seat of a drum kit.Music brought him to Finland’s storied Sibelius Academy, and it was there that he made a decisive move to devote himself to conducting. “Maybe to play triangle can be a little boring,” Rouvali said. “I always loved a symphony orchestra, and as a conductor you can do more. So I thought, Why not?”He had already studied briefly with Jorma Panula, the teacher and mentor of Finnish conducting luminaries like Esa-Pekka Salonen, Susanna Mälkki and Osmo Vänskä. As a master’s student, Rouvali later worked with the podium veterans Leif Segerstam and Hannu Lintu, who gave him an essential bit of advice: You can do whatever you want at the podium, but you just have to make sure everyone understands it.In other words, Rouvali said, “It has to work, and it has to work around the world.”That freedom helped to inform his style today: one in which he retains some of a drummer’s gestures, but also in which that physicality is an expressive vessel for open, sometimes trial-and-error interpretations with a liberal use of rubato. “As a conductor, I play the orchestra,” he said. “And if I were a violin player, I wouldn’t always play the same. Sometimes, it’s not the best idea, but it makes the live performance fun.”Musicians tend to listen. Rouvali discovered at an early age that he is a natural leader, with a sense of empathy that has endeared him to instrumentalists in rehearsals. He also learned, he said, from his parents’ and his own experiences playing under various conductors. But his charisma is for the most part innate; he carries himself as if cheerfully unaware of his position in classical music.Rouvali studies scores at his piano, building out his interpretations from inner voices and rhythms.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThat may be what once made him a good candidate for the Finnish reality TV show “Not Born to Rock,” which assembled a group of classical musicians to form a band. In one episode, they were shown learning how to dress like a rock star; in another, how to party like one. As a group called Taltta, they ended up writing a song that they performed at a music festival. “Of course it was just for entertainment,” Rouvali said. “But it’s good to take part in those things.”Rouvali’s lightness belies scholarly rigor. He studies scores at the piano slowly, beginning with foundational inner voices and harmonies and working his way outward to melody. It’s a method that shows in his performances, which prioritize unexpected, often revelatory sounds other conductors might overlook; the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, rather than recurring, coursed throughout the entire work in his Mikkeli performance with the Philharmonia.He first appeared with that ensemble in 2013. Not long after, he started as the chief conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra — a tenure that comes to an end with the coming season. Another chief conductor post followed in 2017, with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. At the same time, he began as the Philharmonia’s principal guest conductor, ahead of being named as Salonen’s successor and taking over in 2021.Salonen said that when he called Rouvali to offer him the principal guest post, Rouvali was at a Finnish kiosk buying a six-pack of beer. Rouvali responded, “Yeah, that sounds great” with an emphatic expletive, then told the cashier, “I’ll have another one.”ROUVALI’S RELATIONSHIP with the Philharmonia has been a happy one so far; his appointment to chief conductor was the result of a vote by the musicians. Michael Fuller, a double bassist in the orchestra, said that Rouvali’s interactions with them are more or less nonverbal, so closely attuned are they to each other. That held true during recent rehearsals in Mikkeli, where he was shaping phrases more than keeping time — to the degree that he regularly, without warning, ran from the podium to hear the music from farther back in the hall.“He’s able to get results very quickly,” Fuller said. “There’s so much that he can do just through his beat. All the sudden he’ll do this thing, and the piccolo or harp will come out of the texture, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard this that way before.’ It’s all connected to this kind of pulse that he radiates.”Rouvali studies music in the main house of the farm, which dates back to the 16th century.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThat comes in handy, said the Philharmonia horn player Kira Doherty, because of the “unfettered” view Rouvali has of the scores they take up. “With him, it’s like he still has this fresh, almost first-time thing that, in looking at the score, brings out things that nobody has done before,” she added. “Some of them are bonkers, and later he’s like, ‘I’m not going to do that anymore.’ But he’s trying it, and it’s a way of engaging with the actual act of creativity.”The reception has been mixed. When Rouvali made his New York Philharmonic debut in 2019, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that “every gesture expressed some element of the music.” But last season, the critic Zachary Woolfe was much cooler, finding that Rouvali’s interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony “tipped into plainness.”Rouvali has nevertheless garnered praise within the industry. Salonen said that, “first of all, he conducts the orchestra, not the audience, so the gestures are really focused and all carry something essential.” He added: “The guy has got a very good rhythm, a sense of tempo, of pulse. And that gives the orchestra a certain kind of security that allows them to express themselves quite clearly.”Rouvali on his lawn, which is kept trim by a robot mower nicknamed Jens.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesBorda, the Philharmonic’s chief executive, said that their time together has often been lighthearted and fun. Once, in New York, the actor Bradley Cooper appeared in her box accompanied by Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. They all went to meet Rouvali afterward, and, according to Borda, Wintour told him, “Maestro I love your shirt, is it Prada?” He responded, simply, “No, my mom got it from a friend in Lahti.”He is, Borda, said, “a conductor very much on the rise.” Whether that rise entails a post at the Philharmonic is an open question, even for Rouvali.At the farm, while Rouvali’s robotic lawn mower, nicknamed Jens, roamed the garden like a curious dog, he thought about how he would respond to an offer from New York. “I’d probably say, ‘Let me have a beer and call you back,’” he said. There would be much to consider: what the lifestyle change would mean for his time at home — with his wife and their children, with the high school friends who join him every year for the start of Finland’s hunting season — and what it would mean for his post at the Philharmonia.“It’s hard to say yet,” Rouvali said. “Let’s see if they even ask. But has there ever been a conductor who says no to the New York Phil?”Salonen said that, regardless, he hopes Rouvali remains with the Philharmonia “for a long time.” Rouvali feels similarly, but added that if there’s a moment to take on a lot of work, it’s now, while he’s still young. He doesn’t want to be a conductor who works well into old age; he has the farm, after all.“I do find that he’s wandered out from the forest,” Doherty, the Philharmonia player, said, “and he’s going to do some amazing stuff, then one of these days just wander back into his forest-dwelling life.” More

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      A Conductor’s Career, Cut Short, Still Blazes on Recordings

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      With an abundance of albums out on multiple labels, we have as complete a portrait of the Toscanini protégé Guido Cantelli as we are ever likely to.Frost glazed the ground, and mist hung in the air, as a brand-new Douglas DC-6B took off from Orly Airport near Paris early on Nov. 24, 1956. The plane was headed for Shannon, Ireland, and then New York.It would arrive at neither.About 15 seconds after it left the ground, the plane dipped slightly below its path, clipped an unlit house, and plunged into the village of Paray-Vieille-Poste. The authorities never found the cause of the crash; all but one of the 35 people aboard died.Among them was Guido Cantelli, 36, a “comet of a conductor,” as one critic called him, and the protégé of Arturo Toscanini. In just eight years, Cantelli had shot from obscurity to a career whose brightness still blinds today. Frequently a guest of the New York Philharmonic, which he was on his way to conduct, he had been announced as the music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan a week before the crash.Brahms’s Symphony No. 3: Poco AllegrettoPhilharmonia Orchestra, 1955 (Warner)Perhaps it is the manner of Cantelli’s death, the waste of it, that explains some of the fervency of interest that has come to surround him. It is hard to think of many conductors whose careers can be examined in similarly pinpoint — if admittedly macabre — detail, to get closer to what could have been.After all, not only are all of Cantelli’s studio recordings for EMI, chiefly with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, to be found in a 10-disc Warner box, but his meteoric progress can also be tracked from week to week, as an extraordinary proportion of his radio broadcasts with the Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony and other groups have been restored and released on labels including Testament, Music & Arts and Pristine. We now have as complete a portrait of Cantelli as we probably ever will.And what a portrait. Forget the what-ifs that smoked from those Parisian flames. Forget the mystery of how the history of music in the United States might have been rewritten if Cantelli, and not Leonard Bernstein, had succeeded Dimitri Mitropoulos at the Philharmonic, as Mitropoulos had apparently wished. Forget, too, the lament that Cantelli barely had time to mature, as if the efforts of a younger musician are necessarily of inferior worth.Emerging as if fully formed in the works of Schumann and Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Debussy, Cantelli was arguably the greatest conductor who never quite was — as the New York Times critic Olin Downes wrote in 1953, one who “understands the notes and wraps his heart around every one of them.”Earnest, tense and introverted, Cantelli was not the copycat he often stood accused of being, as if the mark of Toscanini was disqualifying in a century in which his mentor’s influence was vast. Even if he wielded a tension of rhythm, a ferocity of line and a strictness of discipline that were familiar, those traits were tempered with an elegance of expression, a taste in color and a mania for details that he tortured himself and his musicians to perfect. He treated all music as song, and he sang it with the care he thought it deserved.Schumann’s Symphony No. 4: LangsamPhilharmonia Orchestra, 1953 (Warner)Singing itself played only a minor role in Cantelli’s training. Born in Novara, Italy, on April 27, 1920, he was the second son of a military bandmaster who stood him on a table to conduct a band when he was 5.Cantelli learned the piano as well as the trumpet, horn and several percussion instruments as a boy, and he was quickly taken to study with the organist of the Basilica di San Gaudenzio. He sang in the choir and first directed it at age 8; wrote a Mass at 10; and started substituting at the organ when he was 14, even playing themes from “Tristan und Isolde” during services.He could often be seen in the gallery of the Teatro Coccia, reading scores by torchlight; other evenings were spent tuning a radio he had saved for with his allowance, or with his records, those of Toscanini foremost among them. He entered the Milan Conservatory in 1939 and completed a seven-year composition course in three, but he was no composer. Shortly after graduating, in 1943, he made his debut leading “La Traviata” at the Coccia, a theater Toscanini had opened in 1888.Cantelli with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1955.via The New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives After German troops occupied Novara that September, Cantelli was sent to a concentration camp on the Baltic coast, and was worked so close to death that he ended up weighing just 80 pounds. The way the story was later told, to promote him as an antifascist just as courageous as Toscanini had supposedly been, he refused to collaborate with the Nazis and eventually became a hero of the Partisans, one supposedly hours from being shot when the Allies liberated Milan.Not quite, according to Cantelli’s biographer, Laurence Lewis, who describes him as basically apolitical. The Germans probably deported him, a weak conscript, to a labor camp because he declined to fight, if he was ever given the choice, and after a few months they drafted him to serve the rump Italian Social Republic of Mussolini. En route back, he escaped from a hospital and returned to Novara, where he forged documents for the Partisans while working at a bank. He married his sweetheart, Iris, the day Mussolini was shot.After the war, Cantelli found food scarce and opportunities scarcer. He debuted with La Scala’s orchestra outdoors in July 1945, but didn’t return until May 21, 1948. Coincidentally, Toscanini was in the theater that night, and was confronted with a vision of his youth. Within days, the world’s most famous conductor was in the Cantellis’ tiny Milan apartment, playing his latest record and inviting Cantelli to spend a few weeks conducting the NBC Symphony.Cantelli, then 28, arrived in New York at the end of December, and he was swept into a world filled with musical eminences and fawning socialites. Toscanini declared him an honorary son. Four concerts followed in January and February, each of them broadcast, each a sensation. There was a remarkably passionate account of Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony alongside elegant Haydn one week; a stingingly potent Tchaikovsky “Romeo and Juliet” with Casella the next; and a heated Bartok Concerto for Orchestra another.Haydn’s Symphony No. 93: Presto ma non troppoNBC Symphony Orchestra, 1949 (Pristine)“We sense in Mr. Cantelli a musician with a destiny before him,” Downes wrote after the last program, of music by Ravel and Franck. Toscanini took Cantelli to see the Rockettes to celebrate before his voyage home; he would return each winter, adding long stints with the Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony that outlasted his appearances with the NBC, which folded in 1954.Throughout Cantelli’s career in the United States, there were criticisms of his repertoire, which ran from Frescobaldi and Monteverdi to Barber and Dallapiccola but turned out to be repetitive from season to season. There were also more fundamental complaints that he was too much the precisionist. “Other men mature from uncontrolled passion to control,” Downes wrote after his debut with the Philharmonic, in January 1952. “Mr. Cantelli’s way may be to graduate from control to release.”That control was hard-earned. Cantelli didn’t read around a composer’s life, or consciously filter music through his own aesthetics; he just read scores, and without the memory of a Toscanini or a Mitropoulos he learned them, painstakingly, through their melodies. It was not unusual, he said in 1955, for him to pace a room singing an obscure bassoon line during the six hours a day he studied.From left, Dimitri Mitropoulos, John Corigliano Sr. and Cantelli around 1950.via The New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives He fixated on how to release notes as well as attack them, on how to give a line an end as well as a beginning, on how to attain a balance that let parts sing through. But if his fastidious lyricism endowed his Mozart and his Rossini with grace as well as drive, his ability to twist a score taut also gave his Mendelssohn, and even his Debussy, immense cumulative force.Cantelli’s perfectionism found its ultimate expression in his fanatical sessions in London with the Philharmonia. Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte,” to take one example, took him 20 tense takes to get its six minutes of music right, during which he stormed offstage, the harpist Renata Scheffel-Stein cried and the horn player Dennis Brain feared his lip would crack.Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte”Philharmonia Orchestra, 1952 (Warner)Now remastered and available on Warner, many of the resultant recordings remain impressive: Cantelli’s heavenly way with Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” his serious-minded brilliance in Dukas’s “L’Apprenti Sorcier,” his justly famous Schumann Fourth, his consuming Debussy “La Mer,” dark as the depths.In some accounts, though, he prefers suavity over the sweat-drenching volatility he could incite live. His Brahms First captivates in the studio, but it blazes with the Boston Symphony, from 1954, on Pristine. His Philharmonia Beethoven Seventh dances happily, but the same symphony stuns on a Music & Arts release from a 1953 performance that, an astonished Downes wrote, seemed to invoke the composer’s “spirit brooding gigantic over the universe.”It’s plenty enough to raise the question of why Cantelli did not take a major post until his crisply rendered “Così Fan Tutte” at La Scala in 1956 forced that house to make him an offer he could not refuse. Appearing as a guest with a handful of prestigious, quite different ensembles offered him “more in the way of interest, execution, and variety of expression than he could obtain from any single orchestra,” one profile paraphrased him as saying.The Philharmonic counterfactual is too far from the truth even to ask. At the time of his death, Cantelli had planned to devote most his time to La Scala, his cherished Philharmonia aside; his bond with the New York players had already broken.His sole recording with the Philharmonic, a Vivaldi “Four Seasons,” is his worst studio effort, and the exertion he had to put into overcoming the orchestra’s intransigence once led him to collapse in the Carnegie Hall wings. Despite outstanding performances — vigorous yet finessed — in the spring of 1956, Cantelli had been so furious at the players’ antics then that he begged the Philharmonic’s management to relieve him of his contractual obligations that November. They refused.Strauss’s “Don Juan”New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 1956 (Pristine)And then he was gone.In New York, where the ailing Toscanini was not told of his heir’s death, Mitropoulos led Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung” in his memory with the Philharmonic, a performance that — unlike Cantelli’s own rapturous accounts — seems to dissolve in grief.In Milan, La Scala’s orchestra played Handel’s “Largo,” the last piece he had led, from the pit as his hearse paused outside the theater. Its former music director, Victor de Sabata, offered to conduct; the players preferred that Cantelli do so himself, one last time. More

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      U.S. Orchestras Playing More Works by Women and Minorities, Report Says

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      The recent discussions over racial justice and gender disparities appear to have accelerated efforts to bring more diversity to classical music.American orchestras have long fallen short when it comes to performing compositions by women and people of color, sticking to a canon of music dominated by white, largely male composers.But the protests over racial justice and gender disparities in the United States appear to have prompted some change.Compositions by women and people of color now make up about 23 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, up from only about 5 percent in 2015, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York at Fredonia.The increase comes amid a concerted effort in the performing arts to promote music by women and people of color, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd.“The change that has been talked about for a very long time has suddenly been tremendously accelerated,” Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, which helped produce the report, said in an interview.The coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat to many institutions, seems to have also contributed to the change. Before the pandemic started, many ensembles took a more traditional approach to programming, planning their seasons years in advance. The virus has appeared to have led to experimentation.“The pandemic has been kind of a jolt to the patterns that we’ve known for so long,” Woods said, allowing orchestras “to be much more responsive.”Over all, ensembles seem to be embracing more music written by contemporary artists. This season, works by living composers made up about 22 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, compared with 12 percent in 2015. The report was based on data from hundreds of orchestras across the United States.Many ensembles in recent years have taken steps to nurture the composing careers of women and people of color. The New York Philharmonic, for example, in 2020 started Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote.While orchestras have shown a greater willingness to program works by living composers in recent years, several obstacles remain, including that some new music is performed only once.The League of American Orchestras, aiming to make works by living composers a more permanent part of the orchestral landscape, announced an initiative last month to enlist 30 ensembles in the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women. More

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      New York Philharmonic Chooses Arts Veteran as Leader

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      Gary Ginstling, executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, will replace Deborah Borda as the orchestra’s president and chief executive next year.Come this fall, the New York Philharmonic will have a transformed home, when David Geffen Hall reopens after a $550 million renovation. In the not-so-distant future, the orchestra will also get a new music director to replace its departing conductor.On Friday, the orchestra announced another change: Gary Ginstling, the executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, will next year replace Deborah Borda, a revered, dynamic figure at the Philharmonic, as its president and chief executive.The appointment signals the start of a new era for the Philharmonic, America’s oldest symphony orchestra, which is working to attract new audiences as it recovers from the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic. While the orchestra seems to have weathered the worst of the crisis, the pandemic has brought fresh urgency to questions about changing audience habits and expanding into the digital sphere.Ginstling, who will join the Philharmonic this fall as executive director before succeeding Borda next year, said he wanted to seize on the momentum of the Geffen Hall renovation.“This is a singular moment in time when the orchestra is coming out of a really difficult period,” he said in an interview. “This new home is going to be really transformational for the musicians, for the public, for orchestras everywhere and for the city. There’s a chance for the Philharmonic to make the most of this moment and set itself up for long-term success.”The appointment marks a generational shift at the Philharmonic. Ginstling, 56, will take the reins from Borda, 72, who led the Philharmonic in the 1990s and returned in 2017 to shepherd the long-delayed renovation of Geffen Hall. The return of Borda, one of the nation’s most successful arts administrators, who in the interim helped transform the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the country’s premier ensembles — moving it into a new home, stabilizing its shaky finances and appointing Gustavo Dudamel as its music director — was considered a coup for the orchestra, which at the time was struggling with deficits and fund-raising troubles.Borda said that with the hall reopening and the orchestra on firmer financial footing after the long pandemic shutdown, she felt it was time to step aside. She will leave her post on June 30, 2023, but stay on as an adviser to Ginstling and the Philharmonic’s board, assisting with fund-raising and other matters.Deborah Borda at the Philharmonic’s opening concert of the season in September 2021 at Alice Tully Hall.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times“Those of us in my generation, we’ve done our best, but it’s time to really support and introduce a new generation of leadership who will bring new ideas about everything,” she said in an interview. “This was the right time.”Borda began working with the board last year to find a successor. They were looking for a leader who could help guide the institution in a time of momentous transitions. After interviewing five candidates, the Philharmonic in May offered the job to Ginstling, who has managed orchestras in Cleveland, Indianapolis and Washington D.C.“We wanted somebody who had the experience, but who was also young enough to have a long runway,” Peter W. May, co-chairman of the Philharmonic’s board, said in an interview. “He also impressed us in the way he’s done outreach in the community.”After joining the National Symphony Orchestra in 2017, Ginstling experimented with new ways of reaching audiences, including by holding concerts in a 6,000-seat arena designed for rock music. He was credited with helping drive up ticket sales, subscriptions and donations. He worked closely with Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony, whose contract there was recently extended through the end of the 2026-2027 season.In New York, Ginstling will face familiar challenges. Even before the pandemic, managing orchestras was difficult. Labor costs have risen. Ticket sales have declined as the old model of selling season subscriptions has died out. Robust fund-raising has become essential, as donations make up an ever larger share of orchestra budgets.The pandemic put new strains on the Philharmonic, which was forced to cancel its 2020-21 season, lay off staff and slash its musicians’ salaries by 25 percent. (The Philharmonic announced this week that it would soon reverse those cuts.)For all its devastation, the pandemic also brought an opportunity, allowing the orchestra to speed up the renovation schedule by a year and a half (the hall is now set to open on Oct. 7). Over the past year, the orchestra has been without a permanent home, roving among several different theaters, many of them smaller than Geffen.Ginstling, a clarinetist who has degrees from Yale, Juilliard and the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he would continue the Philharmonic’s efforts to present a diverse roster of composers and conductors.“If we are in a post-Covid world, and I’m not sure whether we are yet,” he said, “the biggest challenges are rebuilding audiences and then finding ways to connect with our communities and in new and different ways.”The Philharmonic is just beginning its search for a conductor to replace Jaap van Zweden, its maestro since 2018, who announced unexpectedly in September that he would step down at the end of the 2023-24 season. Conductors like Dudamel, Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, among others, have been mentioned as possible contenders, though the field remains open.It is unclear whether the search will conclude before the end of Borda’s tenure. She said she was proceeding “full steam ahead” and would continue to offer advice if it is needed.In a statement, van Zweden, who last year said he would leave the orchestra because the pandemic had made him rethink his life and priorities, praised Borda’s stewardship of the orchestra.“The future and security of this orchestra is very important to me, and I am grateful to Deborah for leading with me from a position of strength,” he said. “I really look forward to welcoming Gary and to working with him.”The appointment is something of a homecoming for Ginstling, who grew up in New Jersey, the son of a Juilliard-trained pianist and a tax lawyer. His parents subscribed to Philharmonic concerts and he attended concerts featuring giants like Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta. He took up the clarinet in elementary school and later studied with a Philharmonic player.“I’ve long had a deep love and passion for orchestras and orchestral music,” he said, “and that really started with the New York Philharmonic.” More