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      Review: Igor Levit Arrives at the New York Philharmonic

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      Levit, one of the world’s eminent pianists, appeared with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall eight years after making his New York debut.Eight years ago, a young pianist made his New York debut with a brazen program of Beethoven’s final sonatas.Baby-faced and wearing a bow tie, Igor Levit, then 27, took the stage at the Park Avenue Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room and proved that age is no impediment in interpreting some of the wisest and most challenging music in the keyboard repertory. “A major new pianist has arrived,” the critic Anthony Tommasini wrote of that night.Since then, each return engagement has had the air of an important event: Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations with the artist Marina Abramovic at the Armory’s drill hall, recitals with premieres at Carnegie Hall that started in its chamber-size Zankel space before moving to its main auditorium.Levit, who lives in Berlin, hasn’t brought his most madcap programming to the city — his essential, standard-setting take on Ronald Stevenson’s “Passacaglia on DSCH” or his turn in Ferruccio Busoni’s extravagant Piano Concerto — but he has graduated from newcomer to New York fixture.One important debut remained, and it came on Friday: his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic.Now 35, more scruffy than smooth and trading his bow tie for a casual black shirt, he joined the orchestra at Carnegie in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. It was one of those evenings — agonizingly, just one performance — that left you wondering whether the Philharmonic had found an artist to keep on speed dial for future seasons.Holding his own against the orchestra’s characteristic muscularity, Levit offered counterpoint in an expressive touch, an instinctual sense of shape and a gift for navigating the nuances of a piece that keeps one foot in the Classical era and the other in the Romanticism of its time.Like Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, also in D minor, the Brahms begins with a long orchestral introduction before the soloist’s softly singing entrance — passion turning into a plea. The Philharmonic, led by Jaap van Zweden, its music director, sounded more aggressive than ardent, and crisp where another ensemble might have been grand.Van Zweden’s reading didn’t necessarily register as problematic until it was brought into relief by Levit’s arrival, which achieved more tension with less force. His solos were similar to sonatas in their intimacy and breadth of expression (a sensibility that reached its height with his encore, a sonorous yet serene “Nun Komm’ der Heiden Heiland,” transcribed by Busoni from Bach). At the keyboard he was capable of conjuring not only thunder, particularly in the climax of the first movement, but also the troubling calm that can precede it and, as in the Adagio, something like the gentle parting of clouds that follows.Where soloist and orchestra most aligned was in the Rondo finale; Levit stated the first theme briskly, precisely, and the Philharmonic responded in kind. More here than elsewhere, van Zweden allowed the score to speak for itself, to build naturally toward its joyous D major coda. The piano part wraps up several measures before the end, but Levit’s skill and stage presence had been well established by then — and the audience reacted, the moment he moved to bow, with a swift standing ovation.The Philharmonic would have its moment, too, after intermission, in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. And if this work activates instruments like lights on a switchboard, then there was not a dull bulb on Friday. With brasses clear and heroic; winds eloquent and full of personality; and strings speaking as a single unit, this was an ensemble in excellent form. In the fourth movement “Intermezzo interrotto,” especially, the players found a sensitivity absent in the Brahms: lush in its folk-like melody, animated in the nightmarishly parodic interruption and, in the return of the folk tune, movingly soft, with Dvorakian wistfulness.As he did in Brahms’s Rondo, van Zweden led the Bartok Finale with a restraint that, after simply getting through the virtuosity of the breakneck pace and fugal writing, made way for an organic accumulation toward a lingeringly resonant final chord. It was a glimpse of an approach he doesn’t take often — but that would be welcome, like any appearance by Levit, with the Philharmonic going forward.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Monkish Conductor Who Expressed His Faith Through Music

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      A new 69-disc box of Dimitri Mitropoulos’s recordings are an opportunity to reassess a conductor who remains out of reach.When Dimitri Mitropoulos was putting together the programs that he would conduct in 1947 as a guest of the New York Philharmonic — the ensemble he later led in a fraught tenure from 1949 to 1958 — he likely could not have predicted which item on his typically eclectic lists would be the most controversial.One week, this “strangest and most curiously gifted” of conductors, as Olin Downes of The New York Times called him, preceded Gershwin’s Piano Concerto with the American premiere of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, at a time when Mahler’s works were regarded with incredulity. The week before, Mitropoulos, the Greek American music director of the Minneapolis Symphony, had offered firsts of Bartok and Barber. Before that, he had given a Thanksgiving premiere of Krenek’s Symphony No. 4, a serial work with “about as much savor to it as a pasteboard turkey,” the critic Virgil Thomson quipped.Yet none of that caused the caustic ire reserved for Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony.” “A composer would be a little embarrassed to confess to the authorship of a score like this today,” Downes railed after the Philharmonic concert on Nov. 20, joking that only an atomic bomb had been left out of its “sensational and expensive sounds.” If the parting of Strauss’s thunderstorm was “mellifluous,” he admitted, it was still “sentimental in the most bourgeois vein,” music “from which one would have expected Mr. Mitropoulos long since to have graduated.”Even so, the “Alpine Symphony” was the kind of gospel that Mitropoulos, a missionary for new and underappreciated music whose hair-shirt devotion and tall, bald figure evoked the monks he had thought of joining as a boy, could preach aflame in inspiration. Listen to a Philharmonic broadcast from Nov. 23, and you hear a Strauss not of banality but spirituality; what Downes dismissed as mawkish, Mitropoulos conducts as rapture.Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony”New York Philharmonic, 1947 (Music & Arts)Conducting was a calling for Mitropoulos, an alpinist who felt closest to God in the mountains but expressed his faith enduring trials of music. His aim, he wrote to his muse, Katy Katsoyanis, in 1947, was “to surpass the material, to annihilate it, reduce it to nothing, so that the spiritual achievement becomes an absolute morality.” It was also carnal, an act of metaphysical love between conductor and orchestra that this largely celibate gay man, as his exemplary biographer William R. Trotter portrays him, saw as “another expression my unlived sexual life.”Painstakingly committing the tiniest details of scores to memory, Mitropoulos seemed not to direct music but to emanate and embody it, fists flailing and feet flying. He was, on principal, a collaborator, one who worshiped the charitable example of St. Francis of Assisi and refused to wield a baton, which he saw as a symbol of subjugation. But his ability to unify gesture and tone paradoxically appeared imperious to some, even authoritarian, a denial of spontaneity and specificity of style.Either way, if Mitropoulos’s detractors granted that his erratic interpretations, driven tempos and taut, sinewy sound served some music spectacularly well, ministering to the downtrodden of the world’s (male) composers was not what his times demanded.Mitropoulos, an alpinist who felt closest to God in the mountains, in 1949.NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives“Mr. Mitropoulos conducts the wrong pieces magnificently,” Thomson surmised after his Philharmonic debut, in 1940; a reputation for coarseness in the canon of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms would undo him when New York critics sought blood over a decade later.The stature of “the most masterful of all modern conductors,” as the critic Neville Cardus anointed him, has since wilted in the egotistical heat cast by his erstwhile protégé, constant betrayer and eventual successor: Leonard Bernstein.A new, 69-disc Sony Classical box of Mitropoulos’s recordings might grant an opportunity to reassess the conductor, but if there is far too little of what Thomson thought of as the “right” music to be heard in it, there’s hardly enough of the “wrong” music to challenge the conventional wisdom either. The real Mitropoulos remains frustratingly out of reach.Sony is not at fault here. Releasing many of Mitropoulos’s recordings for the first time in the digital era, it has filled the last gaping hole in the discography of the Philharmonic’s post-Toscanini decades. The blame lies with the label that recorded Mitropoulos for much of his career, Columbia, whose executives chose Eugene Ormandy over interpretive insight and stuck Mitropoulos with the leftovers, deploying him as a concerto accompanist and offering him scant chance to fulfill his mission. The decision was commercial; the pity is lasting.Mitropoulos was born in Athens in 1896. He was young when he began to study piano; soon enough, if he wasn’t joining his uncles to pray in the monasteries of Mount Athos, he was spending his Saturdays leading scratch ensembles at home. At the Athens Conservatory, he trained as a keyboard virtuoso of firebrand talents and as a composer of Romantic tastes. Aside from some transcriptions, he rarely performed his own works later on, but he made his podium debut in 1915 with his tone poem “Tafi” (“Burial”).After a brief spell in Brussels, Mitropoulos went to Berlin to study composition with Ferruccio Busoni, then worked as an assistant conductor at the State Opera there. But the modernist impulses he came to feel in Weimar-era Berlin, influencing both his inclinations in the repertory and his formidable last compositions, were of little use back in Greece, where duty bade him return in 1924 to lead the Conservatory Orchestra in Athens, a poor ensemble he turned into a listenable one.His breakthrough came in 1930, when one of his patrons hired the Berlin Philharmonic for him to conduct a concert: After Egon Petri withdrew from Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, Mitropoulos took up the solo part as well. Repeating that shocking display of musical ability elsewhere drew the attention of Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s director, who invited him to be a guest conductor. Upon that debut, in 1936, the Boston Herald said that “his body, even more than the notes of the score, seems the source of the music.” Critics gossiped of finding Toscanini’s heir.Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3: Allegro ma non troppoRobin Hood Dell Orchestra of Philadelphia, 1946 (Sony Classical)When Mitropoulos returned to Boston in January 1937, he added a date with the Minneapolis Symphony, now the Minnesota Orchestra, which Ormandy had jilted for Philadelphia the year before. “Mitropoulos appeared to be a fanatic who had sold his soul to music” wrote a local critic, who described conducting “so full of blood, muscle, and nerves as to seem alive and sentient.” Mitropoulos was announced as the music director within a couple of weeks, and would stay for 12 years.Mitropoulos’s stint in the Twin Cities was radical in more than just repertoire, challenging the godlike halo of other conductors with his asceticism. He lived in dorm rooms at the University of Minnesota. Spending on little but his habit of catching a double feature, he gave his salary away, much of it to the players whose privations he shared on endless tours. His sexuality remained private, the closet one act of discipline among many; the summer of 1943 was spent doing exhausting manual labor for the Red Cross.Mitropoulos’s marked copy of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung.”NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThere were tribulations in the music to which Mitropoulos exposed his listeners in the five-thousand-seat Northrop Auditorium, too. Alongside recent music from Rachmaninoff and Vaughan Williams came the dissonances of Schoenberg, Krenek and Artur Schnabel, the pianist whose First Symphony even Milton Babbitt described as “murderously complex” after hearing Mitropoulos’s unhappy performance of it in 1946.The Minneapolis recordings in Sony’s box give no more hint of such ambition than a pioneering Mahler Symphony No. 1. Mitropoulos chafed at the early recording process, but his style is audible through dismal sound. Dynamics are extreme, and accents are firm. If his Schumann Second suffers from his wrestling, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” — the only one of that composer’s symphonies that he recorded — sounds aptly brawny today. And his burly rhythmic insistence makes unexpected triumphs of Franck’s Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead.”Mahler’s Symphony No. 1: Stürmisch bewegtMinneapolis Symphony, 1940 (Sony Classical)The question was never whether Mitropoulos would leave Minneapolis, but for which ensemble and when. He took charge of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s summer concerts from 1945 to 1948, but Ormandy proved immovable. Boston looked likely until Koussevitzky’s homophobia — abetted by the ambitious Bernstein’s evident outing of Mitropoulos, his youthful crush, to his new mentor — ended that path. The last orchestra standing was the New York Philharmonic, an overworked, underpaid orchestra with a fearsome reputation.“I have to go,” Mitropoulos told his Minneapolis concertmaster, Louis Krasner, “even though I know I am probably going to my doom.”Doom awaited, although there was success before the fall. The repertoire was again catholic, ambitious, brilliantly risky. His “Elektra” and “Wozzeck” were historic. Plenty of Schoenberg’s scores received hearings; difficulties rehearsing the monodrama “Erwartung” led Mitropoulos to ask Katsoyanis whether his compulsion for “distorted and screwy beauty” was just an “egotistical occupation” with “the pleasure of self-destruction.” It almost was after Milhaud’s colossally challenging “Christophe Colomb” humiliated him in November 1952. He had a heart attack within weeks.Mitropoulos never drew the loyalty from the Philharmonic that he had secured in Minneapolis; the players took advantage of his financial generosity or publicly threw their parts of a Webern work at his feet. Snide remarks about his private sexuality were common, and Bernstein gossiped conspiratorially that it was wrong for a bachelor to hold such a post. Mitropoulos was reduced to tears before the orchestra’s hostility. Trotter writes that this saintly figure once grew so exasperated that he threatened the players with the tyranny of George Szell.Mitropoulos, center, with the conductor Herbert von Karajan to his left and his erstwhile protégé Leonard Bernstein to his right.Don Hunstein, via NY Phil Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital ArchivesThe standard account is that standards plummeted, that Mitropoulos’s fervent intensity inevitably generated rough playing; The Times remarked in 1955 that it was “a sin to let the Philharmonic play like this.” That decline is not wholly apparent in Sony’s box, though in Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet,” among other works, there are moments of horrifying playing.Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10: AllegroNew York Philharmonic, 1954 (Sony Classical)Dig through the criminal number of concertos — few of them as valuable as Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with David Oistrakh — and there are worthwhile records to be heard: consuming Mendelssohn; fierce accounts of Shostakovich’s Fifth and Tenth; an astonishingly brutal Vaughan Williams Fourth, Mitropoulos’s most exhilarating recording. Of Strauss, there is only a tired excerpt from “Salome.” For Mahler, you must turn to his stunning broadcasts, above all a Sixth from 1955.Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 4: Finale con epilogo fugatoNew York Philharmonic, 1956 (Sony Classical)Even as critics lauded Mitropoulos’s appearances with the Metropolitan Opera — his recording of Barber’s “Vanessa” from 1958 is gorgeous — they made him a scapegoat as they demanded the end of a dreary era in the Philharmonic’s history, dating back to Toscanini’s departure in 1936.“The Philharmonic—What’s Wrong With It and Why” ran a Times headline on April 29, 1956, as the critic Howard Taubman savaged its deterioration. Bernstein was announced as co-conductor for the 1957-58 season that October; it would be Mitropoulos’s last, though he returned for a Mahler Festival in 1960, while Bernstein began to profit from the repertory path he had blazed.By then, Mitropoulos was working himself into the grave after another massive heart attack. His last concert was in Cologne, Germany, a Mahler Third whose finale has an irradiant glow. He died as he sought to, falling from on high — not from a mountain, but from the podium in Milan, on Nov. 2, 1960. He was 64. More

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      Review: Nico Muhly’s Moody Concerto for Two Pianos

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      In its American debut with the New York Philharmonic, “In Certain Circles,” featuring Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a freedom born from confidence.Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, designed an atmospheric program around the American premiere of Nico Muhly’s “In Certain Circles” at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night.A concerto for two pianos and orchestra, “In Certain Circles” was written for the sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque, who performed the world premiere in Paris last year and returned to the work on Wednesday, in a program that also featured erotically charged works by Debussy and Wagner. “In Certain Circles” is an exciting new piece — focused, phantomlike, unafraid of sentiment — from a composer who has been in the public eye, and the cross hairs of critics, since shortly after earning his master’s degree from the Juilliard School in 2004.Muhly became classical music’s darling. He worked with Philip Glass and Björk. There were profiles in the media and plenty of commissions, including the film score for “The Reader,” and a full-scale opera, all by the time he was 30 years old.That opera, “Two Boys,” had its premiere at the English National Opera in 2011, and when it arrived at the Metropolitan Opera two years later, it sounded unripe. It was moody for sure — a detective story whose unease came from efficient musical motifs and natural, if plain spoken, recitative. Still, it felt like the soundtrack to a film that wasn’t there. “Marnie,” which came to the Met in 2018, was something less — a strained sophomore effort in search of maturity.“In Certain Circles” is something more. It’s moody too, but there’s a freedom born from confidence that makes it satisfying. Here, Muhly develops musical ideas without being constrained by elements like plotting and vocal setting, as in the operas. It’s not that he’s suddenly employing the rigorous architecture of, say, a Beethoven symphony. Instead, like Debussy, he seems motivated by the sounds of the instruments themselves. They tell him where to go.The tone of “In Certain Circles” is consistent — wispy and vaguely ominous — but Muhly is able to tell a three-part story with it. The orchestration is weblike yet spare, and somehow the two pianos are muffled within it. It’s a neat sleight of hand: Muhly scores the instruments in roughly the same range and gives the orchestra strong, independent lines, creating the sense of an encroaching threat.In the first movement, “L’Enharmonique” — the name comes from Rameau — the orchestra takes an antagonistic stance toward the pianos. The brasses bray at them. The piccolos hector them like circling crows. All the while, the two pianists run and run, playing long, highly patterned stretches of 16th notes, unable to catch their breath. Then they repeat a series of rising chords that end on unstable tone clusters — a stairway to nowhere.At the end of the movement, as the orchestra finally falls away, a musical fragment from Rameau emerges from the mist in a sweetly sad, delicate moment.The Labèque sisters favor rhythmic precision and quick, sharp action — a solid way to achieve clarity in the double piano repertory — and they use dynamics rather than color to define phrases. On Wednesday, Katia Labèque, playing the Piano I part, finished phrases with a flourish of the hand and hopped up from her stool to use the force of her shoulders. Marielle, more collected, connected her notes fluidly.In the second movement, “Sarabande & Gigue,” the orchestra suddenly sympathizes with the soloists by supporting the piano parts. The flutes echo the melodic line, like an act of kindness, and the strings provide harmonic reinforcement.Named for two Baroque dances, the title is a bit of a feint: Muhly has both embraced and refused the forms. Yes, he wrote a saraband in its traditional three-quarter time, but it’s suspended, its feet hovering above the ground with a patient, forlorn, undanceable tune, played by Katia with sensitivity. The gigue, in compound time, whirls chaotically.In the last movement, “Details Emerge,” the pianos assert themselves with rumblings in the bass and contrasting flights in the keyboard’s upper reaches. The orchestra reacts: The piccolos go wild, and the percussionists clash their cymbals and clap their whips. The Rameau fragment returns in the piano, but as an imperfect recollection. The orchestra, emboldened, winds up for the kill, but the piece ends abruptly, as if the lights went out before any victor in the concerto’s battle could be determined.The evening’s other pieces — Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” and “La Mer,” and Wagner’s “Prelude and “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde” — beautifully contextualized Muhly’s concerto, even if their sensuality eluded van Zweden at the podium.Both preludes were delivered by the Philharmonic players with generically sweeping strings and overly strict tempos. These pieces are about as explicit as classical music gets without a graphic-content warning. But at Carnegie Hall, they didn’t give off much steam.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: A Chinese Concerto and a Romantic Classic Gaze Back

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      The New York Philharmonic, under Long Yu, played works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Qigang Chen and Rachmaninoff at the Rose Theater.The New York Philharmonic played Russian music on Thursday, for the third week in a row. It was yet another argument against President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims that his country’s culture is being canceled in the West.That wasn’t the only political resonance of the orchestra’s concert on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It is still all too uncommon for Chinese composers and artists — especially conductors — to be featured by American orchestras outside of Lunar New Year celebrations. But this program was led by Long Yu, experienced with the Philharmonic over the past decade, and included a substantial work by Qigang Chen.They are two of China’s most eminent classical artists. Yu leads no fewer than three major ensembles there: the China Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Shanghai and Guangzhou symphonies. And Chen served as music director for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.But though the New York Philharmonic has played three of his pieces in the past, they have all been on Lunar New Year programs; this was his subscription series debut. And his pristine cello concerto “Reflet d’un Temps Disparu” (“Reflection on Time Past”), written in the mid-1990s, was the highlight on Thursday.The aim of the half-hour, single-movement work is by now a familiar one: to bring together traditional Chinese sounds with the forces of a Western orchestra. But Chen, who studied in France with Olivier Messiaen in the 1980s, makes the interaction both surprising and natural.The melodic germ is “Meihua san nong,” an ancient tune whose title is often translated as “Three Variations on the Plum Blossom.” The cello soloist — here the eloquent, calmly commanding Gautier Capuçon — begins alone, notes subtly bending to evoke the twang of a qin. (It’s in a version for that Chinese zither that “Meihua san nong” is best known.)A woozy veil of winds casts a cloud of Messiaen-style European modernism, quickly settling into more openhearted warmth. But darkness keeps threatening, from groans in the low winds and brasses, and the cello’s line shifts from quietly clicking taps to pizzicato plucks of gonglike resonance — echoed in a large battery of percussion, including temple blocks.Trills and brushy arpeggiated motifs conjure the Bach suites at the center of the cello’s repertory, as the solo line goes back and forth from anxiously repetitive riffs to serene, expansive lyricism. The cello doesn’t quite lead the orchestra, but its music keeps being echoed within the ensemble; the soloist is something like a diamond in a ring, supported by and glinting onto its setting.Before the piece ends in wisps, it climaxes in a huge, lushly Romantic, quite saccharine explosion, like something out of John Williams.Or out of Rimsky-Korsakov, whose “Tsar’s Bride” Overture opened the concert. Or Rachmaninoff, whose “Symphonic Dances” followed intermission. These dances, like Chen’s concerto, are Proustian music, evocations of the Russian past presented in a modern, occasionally even jazzy, light. (The work’s alto saxophone solo is one of its most distinctive elements.)With its ingenious recastings of Russian Orthodox chants and the Catholic “Dies Irae,” this can be a grand, mesmerizingly intense score, a danse macabre written as World War II was underway. But while Thursday’s performance under Yu had robustness and dash, it was ever so slightly square — loud and quick, when warranted, but overall mellow in its impact.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Two Artists Arrive at the Philharmonic, Loudly

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      The conductor Anna Rakitina made her New York Philharmonic debut, while the pianist Haochen Zhang had his first subscription series appearance.When the New York Philharmonic performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 on Thursday, barely a month had passed since that piece was heard nearby at Carnegie Hall.The earlier concert, on Feb. 25, happened in the raw, confused early hours of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yannick Nézet-Séguin had jumped in at the last minute to lead the Vienna Philharmonic, joined by the pianist Seong-Jin Cho. The reason for the switch? The originally scheduled artists, the conductor Valery Gergiev and the pianist Denis Matsuev, had been dropped over their ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.As the war continued, the Russian conductor Tugan Sokhiev resigned from his posts at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Orchestre National du Capitole in Toulouse, France, because of pressure to denounce the invasion. Then, in a mutual decision with the Philharmonic, he withdrew from this week’s program, featuring the Rachmaninoff concerto. (He will be back next spring to lead Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony.)For his replacement, the Philharmonic followed a similar course as the Metropolitan Opera. That company replaced the Russian diva Anna Netrebko — once its reigning prima donna, now persona non grata despite a recent about-face in her affiliation with Putin — with the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska for a revival of Puccini’s “Turandot.” And the Philharmonic turned on Thursday to Anna Rakitina, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s assistant conductor, who was born in Moscow to Russian and Ukrainian parents.With more lead time than last month at Carnegie, Thursday’s performance of the Rachmaninoff — at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center — at least had the luxury of proper rehearsal. And the focus was less on the war than what the evening meant for its artists: Rakitina’s Philharmonic debut and the pianist Haochen Zhang’s first subscription series concert, after his brief appearance at a Lunar New Year gala in early 2020.Their arrivals were announced loudly, even a bit indelicately: The concerto had clarity and crowd-pleasing excitement, but also lapses in sensitivity and shape.That mix of strengths and weaknesses was not only in the Rachmaninoff, but also in the work that preceded it, Lili Boulanger’s 1918 “D’un Matin de Printemps,” an agile, five-minute survey of Technicolor images that, with a martial touch here, felt less connected to Debussy than to the Russian works to come on the program.Boulanger’s piece could hardly register alongside a towering piano concerto and a yet more towering symphony, Prokofiev’s Fifth. While Rakitina’s presence at the podium was a reminder of the strides the Philharmonic has made in gender representation among its guest conductors this season, its track record with female composers remains mixed at best.Rakitina and, at the piano, Haochen Zhang, who made his first Philharmonic subscription series appearance.Chris LeeOrchestrated with the forces of maximal Romantic grandeur, the Rachmaninoff concerto tends to overpower soloists — who, denied a traditional cadenza in the first movement, must often settle for hand-cramping virtuosity that hardly anyone can hear. Not so on Thursday: After the start, with Zhang alone building tension through a slow succession of chords in crescendo, he was a constant presence.That seemed to come easily to him, as he played with unshowy coolness while revealing the full architecture of his part, all its thick pillars of chords and buttressing runs. In doing so, he occasionally lost his sense of elegance and melodic line; he may have been heard above the strings, but he couldn’t match their sweeping lyricism. Nor did he aim for that sentimentality in his encore, the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 12 in A flat: a heroic funeral march, here more dignified than mournful.There is a funeral march, too, in Prokofiev’s World War II-era Fifth Symphony, albeit a passing one. This work has other preoccupations. Depending on when he was asked, its composer said it was about “the triumph of the human spirit,” “the greatness of the human spirit” and “the spirit of man, his soul or something like that.” (Simon Morrison, in his book “The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years,” suggests that the comments are not so much glib as, perhaps, signs of a creative outlook changing from “divine inspiration” to “human potential.”)Rakitina’s interpretation was one of ambivalent optimism, matched by her contrasting gestures at the podium: an emotively outstretched hand in one moment, a hammering beat in another. As throughout the evening, she favored fast tempos and booming dynamics, keeping the audience from truly being seduced by the arioso passages of the first movement. The Scherzo, a visit from the sound world of Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” ballet, seemed to be on the panicked end of a chase — but a stylized one, with Anthony McGill’s clarinet solos swerving playfully, like a dancer through the streets of “West Side Story.”Prokofiev again borrowed from previous material in the third movement, which begins with a waltz written for an unrealized film adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades.” Coming after the breathless Scherzo, on Thursday it struggled to find its footing, but eventually did, building toward a keening climax of shrieks and downward runs. That haunted the finale, in which Rakitina brought out the orchestra’s lowest voices to darken the festive conclusion. Here, at last, was a glimpse of this conductor’s potential for undergirding surface-level thrills with deeper meaning.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic’s Conductor Returns to His Perch

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      Jaap van Zweden led the orchestra after seven weeks away in works by Julia Perry, Shostakovich and Beethoven.He’s back: After six weeks of guest conductors — including some prominent contenders to succeed him as music director when he leaves in two years — Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic on Thursday.And he’s back, too: A month after swooping into Carnegie Hall as a last-minute replacement for an artist with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the pianist Seong-Jin Cho was once again in Manhattan.They joined at Alice Tully Hall for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” its opening orchestral chord full and rounded; the balances between the strings and the winds, which had heavily favored the violins at Tully earlier this season, equitable; the tempos judicious.Cho, who played a tour date with the Philharmonic in 2019 but on Thursday made his subscription series debut, was most memorable when most delicate: his silvery playing under the horn just after his cadenza in the first movement; his gentleness in the questioning chords wandering from the second movement to the third; his shimmering trills at the end of the piece.His forcefulness in his right hand sometimes tipped into rawness — which, in passages of worried repetition, added an intriguing note of obsessiveness but otherwise felt too steely for such an intimate space. In the Rondo finale, though, he and the orchestra shared a graceful mixture of lightness and weight.In 1965, the Philharmonic premiered the final version of Julia Perry’s “Study for Orchestra,” but hadn’t reprised it until a one-off last year. Also known by an earlier title, “A Short Piece for Orchestra,” it is certainly that: Barely seven minutes long, it opens punchily, with heated strings and sardonic brasses, then enters a slower section of poetic winds and quietly suspended harmonies. The music turns blocky and dramatic again, with the vehemence of a Bernard Herrmann film score, before a softening ensemble, with touches of celesta and piano, is surprised by a brief, fierce coda.Perry’s “Study” felt connected — across the Beethoven concerto and the intermission that followed — to Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, another work whose swaths of high spirits are tinged with a bit too much aggression, a clenched grin. And both pieces relax into melancholy passages of seeming sincerity, haunted by eerie mists.Shostakovich wrote it as World War II came to an end, and originally planned something huge and triumphant, akin to Beethoven’s full-chorus Ninth. When he delivered a slighter, merrier piece, less than half an hour long, some were charmed, while others — including, dangerously, officials in Stalin’s government — felt he had failed to meet the historic moment.The degree to which the music is ironic — its bubbly passages even politically subversive — is unclear, a familiar ambiguity from a composer adept at playing all the angles. Its sprightliness in a sober time recalls Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, written three decades earlier, which the Philharmonic played under van Zweden in February.Sharp, precise performances of this kind of repertory are the main reason van Zweden — known in past positions as a martinet of polish — was hired, and the orchestra played on Thursday with pep and something close to unity. The slower sections were particularly impressive, with icy waves of violin, brasses ominously smoldering, Anthony McGill’s clarinet aching and Judith LeClair’s bassoon offering eloquent humanity, without schmaltz.What are the piece’s politics? The jury is, and always will be, out.But playing the work makes its own political statement as Putin went on television on Friday to decry what he called instances of the West canceling Russian composers like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff to protest his invasion of Ukraine. This is, of course, largely his fantasy, a message of division meant to rally his people against phantoms he imagines to be demeaning and destroying Russia’s cultural heritage.For the Philharmonic to play this Ninth Symphony — and, next week, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev — is a gesture, however small, against that message.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The Philharmonic Plans Its Return to Geffen Hall, With Fanfare

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      The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its renovated home.For the past two years, the only sound coming out of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been the clamor of construction. That will change in October, when it reopens after a $550 million renovation.And the Philharmonic will announce its return there with fanfare: Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which is the first work of the orchestra’s 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts and events unveiled on Monday.Among the season’s highlights are a monthlong festival to inaugurate the hall; a series of premieres by composers, including Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw; concerts exploring issues like racism and climate change; and appearances by conductors who could replace the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, after he steps down in 2024.After losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue during the pandemic lockdown, and spending much of the past year without a permanent home during the Geffen Hall renovation, the Philharmonic hopes the coming season will restore a sense of normalcy and rebuild its audience.The renovated Geffen Hall will feature wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.Diamond Schmitt Architects“It’s a moment for us not only to reunite with people who have come before, but as we look to the future, to develop and nurture new audiences,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We can’t just expect people to come. We have to invite them.”The Philharmonic recently announced that the renovation is fully funded and on track to finish in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic. The new space will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.There will also be additions meant to draw people in, including a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public, and a studio looking out onto Broadway. The goal, Borda said, is for the hall to be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”The season begins Oct. 7 with a program called “Thank You Concert,” led by van Zweden, for an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas, and an open house weekend, will follow later that month.Opening festivities include the world premiere, performed at two free concerts, of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the trumpeter Etienne Charles, who is known for blending jazz with the music of his native Trinidad. Several other contemporary works will be featured, including the American premiere of a piece by Shaw; and the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter.Some of the new works were written specifically for the renovated hall. “The early weeks are designed to be an exploration,” Borda said.Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the renovated hall should be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”Tod Williams Billie Tsien ArchitectsAs the Philharmonic continues its search for a new music director, guest conductors will get more attention than usual.Several familiar names will take the podium, including Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. In March, another prominent contender, Susanna Mälkki, the outgoing chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, will conduct the New York premiere of a double concerto by Felipe Lara, featuring the flutist Claire Chase and the bassist Esperanza Spalding, in their Philharmonic debuts.Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s young principal conductor, is the only guest who will get two weeks of concerts, leading the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Yuja Wang, in January. The following week, he will shepherd the American premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” in a program that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”Given the dearth of female conductors among the largest American orchestras, some have argued that the Philharmonic should choose a woman as its next music director. Several rising conductors, many of them women, will make their debuts with the ensemble next season, including Karina Canellakis, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruth Reinhardt, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony; and Nathalie Stutzmann, who takes the podium of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season.Borda declined to comment on the music director search, except to say that the upcoming season was “obviously an opportunity to see some returning talent and some wonderful new talent as well.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who will play Ravel’s piano concerto in November, and Cynthia Millar, playing the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Sinfonie,” alongside the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in March.The season includes concert series designed to address modern issues, including “Liberation,” about social injustice; “Spirit,” about “humanity’s place in the cosmos”; and “Earth,” about the climate crisis.As part of “Liberation” in March, the Philharmonic will premiere a work by Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson. “Spirit,” that same month, will include Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” which the Philharmonic has not performed since 2008.“Earth” will close out the season in June, with the world premiere of Wolfe’s “unEarth,” a multimedia oratorio that explores forced migration, loss of nature and adaptation. John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” will get its New York premiere.Borda said that throughout the new season, the Philharmonic wants people to feel that “their lives have been touched and changed.”“If we accomplish that,” she added, “we could all be very proud.” More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Wraps Up a Philharmonic Audition

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      The superstar conductor, a possible successor to the New York Philharmonic’s podium, led a cycle of Robert Schumann’s symphonies and two premieres.If concerts had the “previously on” introductions of television, on Thursday the New York Philharmonic would have recapped last week’s installment of its Robert Schumann symphony cycle: lithe yet energetic, hardly Romantic yet fully alive.This week we are in the same series but what feels like a new story arc. The First and Second symphonies, on the earlier program, have been followed by readings of the Third and Fourth that, on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, were for better and worse grander and more emotive, with swerving contrasts — and a premiere to match by Andreia Pinto Correia.The symphonies are being presented as a festival called “The Schumann Connection,” led by Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a contender for the podium here in New York when Jaap van Zweden departs in 2024. That series is also an oblique exploration — through two new works by women — of Robert’s relationship with Clara Schumann, his wife, a notable pianist and composer who largely stopped writing after they married.Clara haunts this festival, and not just in the title of last week’s premiere, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Clara.” Although the series has relegated her music to appearances on chamber programs far from the main stage, she looms over her husband’s major works.Robert’s Piano Concerto in A minor, played by the Philharmonic in October, bears the mark of her earlier one in the same key. And elements of her concerto subtly inform his Fourth Symphony — in its through-composition and fantasia form, in its Romanze second movement and in a first one characterized by its abandonment of the traditional recapitulation. A more satisfying “Schumann Connection” might have paired these two pieces.To the Philharmonic’s credit, though, the concerts have featured those premieres, even if the fact that both are based on Clara and Robert sets off a Bechdel test alarm. Pinto Correia’s “Os Pássaros da Noite” (“The Birds of Night”) is inspired by the sadness shared by the couple in their correspondence, and by a letter to a friend in which Robert wrote that “the melancholy birds of night still flit round me from time to time.”The 15-minute work is the account of one harrowing night, in which strings, droning or in a haze of harmonics, underlie the sorrowful cries of a trumpet. A wearying set of nocturnal episodes, it would be a fitting horror soundtrack, its mood transparent in gestures like upward runs in the winds — a sinister curlicue of moonlit fog — accompanied by matching upward glissandos in the violins. As in any night of sleepless anxiety, the darkness lingers, seemingly interminable, until it doesn’t.“Os Pássaros da Noite” was a sharp contrast to the preceding symphony: the Third, nicknamed the “Rhenish” for its tonal tributes to the Rhine River — where in 1854, just a few years after it was written, Schumann would attempt suicide. But that gloom is absent from the score’s buoyant, dancing mood, and from Dudamel’s conducting. The heroic opening heralded a propulsive interpretation, guided by hemiola rhythms but emphasized in mighty sforzando accents and thrillingly veering dynamics.The Philharmonic’s playing was warmest in the ländler-like Scherzo. But its tendency toward excessive expression made for a Feierlich (“solemn”) movement strangely heavy on vibrato. Schumann’s music here is a portrait of the awe-inspiring Cologne Cathedral, with a chorale and orchestration that, if articulated correctly, closely resembles the sound of an organ. A little of that came through, but for the most part this was a scene with more emotion than solemnity.The Fourth Symphony, in D minor, was composed nearly a decade earlier, in a wave of productivity that included Schumann’s First; but he withdrew it, later revisiting it and premiering the revision in 1853. This version had more darkness and heft, but retained the elegance of the earlier one, which the scholar John Daverio captures in his claim that “Beethoven may have been primarily a ‘dramatist’ and Schubert a ‘lyricist’; Schumann straddles both categories by treating his fundamentally lyric themes with a dramatic urgency.”Dudamel sensitively wove that belief throughout, with strands of melody emerging from the opening chord that were by turns fiery and gentle — especially in the second movement’s flowing violin solo from the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, Frank Huang. In its extremity, its grand finale, this was Schumann at his most Romantic of the cycle.When “The Schumann Connection” concludes on Sunday, so will a long stretch of programs led by guest conductors, many of whom are being watched as potential successors to van Zweden. Of them, there is immense promise in Dudamel — charismatic, eager to lead new works and, crucially, followed by the Philharmonic players with apparent ease.In terms of programming, he fared better than two other contenders, Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, who have triumphed with the Philharmonic in the past but in recent months had mixed outings in repertory of mixed quality. It’s difficult to avoid imagining what impression they would have made with a platform like Dudamel’s festival.Any of the three, though, would be a welcome change at the Philharmonic. And they are just a selection of the talent that has passed through this season. It’s still far too early to guess who the orchestra’s next music director will be. But regardless, its future seems one worth looking forward to.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Sunday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More