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      Russian Conductor Will Not Appear With New York Philharmonic

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      Tugan Sokhiev, who resigned from two posts after facing pressure to condemn the invasion of Ukraine, will not perform with the orchestra because of the war.The Russian conductor Tugan Sokhiev, who recently resigned from two high-profile posts after facing pressure to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, will no longer lead a series of concerts with the New York Philharmonic because of the war, the orchestra announced on Friday.Sokhiev, who until this month was the music director of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Orchestre National du Capitole in Toulouse, France, had been scheduled to appear with the Philharmonic starting on March 31 for three concerts featuring the music of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. Instead, the concerts will be led by Anna Rakitina, a rising conductor who was born in Moscow to a Russian mother and Ukrainian father, in her Philharmonic debut.The Philharmonic described the change as a mutual decision, saying in a statement that it was made “out of regard for the current global situation.” The orchestra said Sokhiev would appear next season.In a statement, Sylvie Bouchard, Sokhiev’s manager, said, “The decision with the New York Philharmonic was made mutually and Tugan Sokhiev is looking forward to his future engagements with the orchestra.”The cancellation of Sokhiev’s appearance in New York comes as the Russian invasion continues to rattle the performing arts. In recent weeks some cultural institutions have put pressure on artists to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his attack on Ukraine.Sokhiev had faced demands from French officials earlier this month that he clarify his position on the war before appearing again with his Toulouse orchestra. In response to the demands, he resigned, and announced at the same time that he was also stepping down from the Bolshoi Theater, saying he felt he was being forced to pick between the two ensembles.“I am being asked to choose one cultural tradition over” another, Sokhiev said at the time. “I am being asked to choose one artist over the other.”Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview that the orchestra had a “wonderful relationship” with Sokhiev, who led a week of performances in New York in 2018.“We pray for peace,” she said. “We pray for peace for him.”Borda added that the Philharmonic was committed to presenting Russian musicians and works by Russian composers. But she said that the orchestra would not present artists if they had direct ties to Putin or his government.“These are very nuanced decisions,” she said. “One cannot make blanket decisions about this. It’s not black or white.”Rakitina is an assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a former Dudamel Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She will make her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra next week.The program that Sokhiev was set to lead, which features the Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto alongside Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, will remain unchanged. More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Could Be the New York Philharmonic’s Future

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      As the orchestra searches for a new leader, this superstar conductor led the first of two programs pairing Schumann symphonies with new works.On Wednesday, when the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center hosted a news conference announcing that the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall had been fully funded and that it would reopen this fall, Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was not in town.This didn’t feel like a coincidence: As the project, decades in the making, finally materialized over the past few years, van Zweden has seemed like an afterthought, along for the ride.Who was in New York to lead the Philharmonic, hours after Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams feted the Geffen renovation as a cultural and civic milestone? Gustavo Dudamel, the 41-year-old superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starting a two-week cycle of Schumann’s four symphonies.The symbolism was unavoidable. Van Zweden — who said in September that he would be leaving in 2024, opening up one of the world’s most prestigious podiums — is already the past. Dudamel is the Philharmonic’s future.At least he could be. He made a solid case for the prospect on Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall, with spirited, unpretentious performances of Schumann’s First and Second symphonies, alongside a premiere by Gabriela Ortiz written to accompany them.The First Symphony (“Spring”) sounded particularly fresh — emphatic without being stiff or mannered, a balance that often eludes van Zweden. The slow second movement built intensity without seeming pressed, and a certain lack of depth in the orchestra’s sound felt here like welcome lightness, with viola and cello lines subtly emphasized to give spine to passages that luxuriated in lyricism.The Philharmonic is calling Dudamel’s festival “The Schumann Connection,” suggesting Robert Schumann’s ties to his wife, Clara — whose underappreciated music is being played in chamber concerts alongside the two orchestral programs. And to contemporary composers: Two have been commissioned to respond to the Schumanns.Ortiz’s “Clara,” 15 minutes long, in five sections played without pause, had its first performance on Wednesday. (Andreia Pinto Correia’s “Os Pássaros da Noite” (“The Birds of Night”) comes next week, between Robert Schumann’s Third and Fourth.)Robert Schumann’s first two symphonies were joined by the premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s “Clara.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOpening with a series of lingering chords, a kind of tolling ensemble bell, “Clara” is most memorable in long stretches of suspended eeriness, an apt evocation of floating between eras and continents, with the oboe making a melancholy keen.Recalling Holst and mid-20th-century film scores in its lush colors and noirish dissonances, the piece has at its center a raucous movement recalling Ortiz’s Mexican heritage and her modern sound world: “the unique vitality born out of the entrails of the land I come from,” she says in the program. That driving vibrancy then recedes, in quiet music gently perforated with a pricking constellation of high-pitched percussion. In the final moments, wind instruments are tonelessly blown through, conjuring the sigh of history itself.Dudamel’s interpretation of Schumann’s Second was punchier than his First, while feeling appealingly improvisatory in a first movement that keeps unexpectedly sidling into new material. Avoiding emotional indulgence in the third movement, this conductor made the music seem a bit impersonal, a play of sound — the winds lovingly passing around solos — rather than a poignant narrative. But the energy throughout felt honestly built, never overemphasized.The Philharmonic doesn’t play these days with old-school brilliance or majesty, or with the feverish edge that Leonard Bernstein brought to Schumann’s symphonies with this orchestra in his classic recordings.But with Dudamel — his tempos moderate, neither rushed at one extreme nor sentimentally milked at the other — the ensemble was genial and eager. And its sound was sometimes arresting, as when the strings floated downward in hazy scales at the end of the First Symphony’s Scherzo, or when the winds massed near the end of the Second to uncannily organ-like effect.Dudamel’s appointment to the Philharmonic’s podium is, of course, far from a sure thing. But it was Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, who nearly 20 years ago, in her previous position, grabbed him for Los Angeles when he was just emerging on the international scene. The New York Philharmonic, still nostalgic for the glamorous days of Bernstein, may well jump at the chance to hire one of the few present-day maestros to have achieved that kind of mainstream celebrity.One thing is clear: Displaying his lively approach to the standard repertory, coupled with an interest in living composers — particularly female ones of color — these programs are meant to show off Dudamel as the model of a 21st-century maestro.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; “The Schumann Connection” continues through March 20; nyphil.org. More

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      Geffen Hall’s $550 Million Makeover Is Fully Funded

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      The New York Philharmonic’s home will reopen in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic.Gone are the mustard-colored seats and shoe box interior of David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s home at Lincoln Center. When the hall reopens this fall, wavy beech wood will wrap around the stage — and so will the audience, in seats upholstered in richly colored patterns evoking flower petals in motion.When the coronavirus pandemic hit, paralyzing the performing arts, the orchestra and center seized on the long shutdown to accelerate a planned makeover of Geffen Hall, gutting its main theater and reimagining its public spaces.Now the long-delayed overhaul is almost complete. The project’s leaders announced on Wednesday that they had raised their goal of $550 million to cover the cost of the renovation, and that the hall will reopen to the public in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule.In a rendering of the new hall, wavy beech wood wraps around the stage of the new hall — as does the audience.Diamond Schmitt“It’s not just a simple renovation where we repainted the walls and put down new carpet and chairs,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “The whole space is transformed. It’s an entirely new hall and an entirely new feeling.”With 2,200 seats (down from 2,738 in the old hall), Geffen will have a more intimate feel — and, if all goes as planned, improved acoustics. The project’s leaders hope the renovated hall will help galvanize New York’s performing arts scene during a difficult time, as cultural institutions work to recover from the coronavirus and win back audiences.The pandemic cost the Philharmonic more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue; in the early days of the crisis, it was forced to reduce its staff of 135 by 40 percent, though many have since been rehired. The orchestra is currently in the midst of a roving season during the construction, shuttling mostly between Alice Tully Hall and the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center; it is also on the hunt for a replacement for its music director, Jaap van Zweden, who announced in September that he would step down in 2024.The coronavirus pushed the Philharmonic and the center to think more urgently about attracting new audiences, a challenge that orchestras have been grappling with for decades. The hall will include a variety of spaces meant to draw people in. In the lobby, there will be a 50-foot digital screen broadcasting concerts live. A new studio facing Broadway, with floor-to-ceiling windows, will offer passers-by a glimpse of performances, rehearsals and other events.The seats in the new hall will be upholstered in richly colored patterns evoking flower petals in motion.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“We’re opening ourselves up to New York so it doesn’t feel like a fortress,” Borda said. “It feels welcoming, inviting and vibrant.”The renovation of the hall — which opened in 1962 as Philharmonic Hall and was called Avery Fisher Hall starting in 1976 — has been in the works for decades, repeatedly stalled by management woes and concerns about losing subscribers if the orchestra was exiled from its home for a prolonged period.A $100 million gift from the entertainment mogul David Geffen revived the project in 2015. Since then, the orchestra and center have raised an additional $450 million, though other naming gifts have not yet been announced.The pandemic, which forced the hall to close in March 2020, offered a silver lining, giving the orchestra and the center a chance to accelerate the construction. They worked at breakneck speed, gutting the interior of the main theater, removing the box office and relocating the escalators.Turmoil in the global supply chain made it harder to obtain some building materials. Surges in coronavirus cases also presented safety challenges at the construction site. But the project pushed forward, even as live performances in the city came to a standstill.“It has become a real celebration of the resilience and creativity and diversity of our great city,” Henry Timms, the president of Lincoln Center, said in an interview.The renovation project pushed forward, even as live performances in the city came to a standstill.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTimms added that there was still work ahead, including bringing the seats into the hall and painting the interior. The orchestra will begin playing in the space in August as part of an acoustic tuning process that is expected to last several weeks.“No one is declaring this a triumph yet,” Timms said. “We’re not done yet.”The acoustics of the hall, long derided by musicians and critics, have been a priority. The renovated space features beech wood walls molded into grooves to help improve resonance. Seats will wrap around the stage, which has been moved forward 25 feet, providing a greater sense of intimacy.The hall’s notoriously congested lobbies and other public spaces have been reimagined by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, which in 2019 joined a team that already included Diamond Schmitt Architects, which is working on the auditorium’s interior; Akustiks, an acoustical design firm; and Fisher Dachs Associates, a theater design firm.The lobby has nearly doubled in size and will include a lounge, a bar and a restaurant.The project’s leaders said the renovation has provided substantial benefits to the city’s economy, which has lagged behind the rest of the United States in its recovery. More than 6,000 jobs have been created, according to the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center; many have gone to businesses run by women or members of racial or ethnic minorities.“We built through the pandemic because we knew New Yorkers needed jobs as much as they needed culture,” Katherine Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center’s board, said in a statement.The leaders of the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center announced the funding of the hall at a news conference on Wednesday, joined by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams. Adams said the project was a symbol of New York’s comeback amid the pandemic, drawing comparisons to the construction of the Empire State Building during the Great Depression.“We’re going to come back bigger and better than ever,” he said.Borda — who was hired as the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive in 2017, after leading it in the 1990s, in large part because of her success completing the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003 — said the renovation was long overdue. She added that the project had given the Philharmonic’s staff and players a sense of hope during the difficult moments of the pandemic, when dozens of concerts were canceled and pay cuts were imposed.“It’s emblematic of New York: real resilience and hanging in there,” she said. “It’s the reason I came back. I’ve always believed in this project.” More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Conductor Is the Star

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      In a program without soloist vehicles, the focus was on Herbert Blomstedt, a 94-year-old elder statesman of classical music.It’s probably safe to say that Herbert Blomstedt will not be the New York Philharmonic’s next music director.When Jaap van Zweden leaves the orchestra in spring 2024, Blomstedt will be nearly 96. Who would want to take on the burden of an orchestra at that age? Which is not to say that he couldn’t: Blomstedt maintains a dauntingly busy schedule, with a varied repertory of long, heavy lifts that includes Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony — named, fittingly, “The Inextinguishable.”On Thursday at Alice Tully Hall, he paired the Nielsen with another symphonic testament to what that composer would call “the spirit of life”: Beethoven’s Fifth. In a time when each guest conductor’s appearance at the Philharmonic — and the orchestra is in a six-week stretch of them — feels like an audition, there was a certain relief, even joy, in hearing a concert purely for its own sake.Beethoven demonstrated through his music, though, that alongside joy is a duty to face and engage with political reality. In recent days, cultural institutions around the world have been forced to confront their relationships with artists who have ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, following his invasion of Ukraine.With reckoning has come solidarity. The Metropolitan Opera opened Monday’s performance with the Ukrainian national anthem, and on Thursday, Blomstedt led the Philharmonic in a grand treatment of it. Gestures like this are rousing reminders that we can never truly separate art and politics, but are they enough? Imagine if, in addition to a program insert dedicating the concert “to the strength, courage and resilience of those resisting Russia’s invasion,” the Philharmonic had offered a vehicle for aid to Ukraine.Otherwise the statement comes and goes, as it did on Thursday. The audience and musicians, who had been standing for the anthem, took their seats, and, with little pause, Blomstedt gave the downbeat for the Nielsen — a choice made all the more jarring because the Fourth opens as if in media res. From that moment, in a program of just two symphonies and no star soloist, the focus was on Blomstedt.He might bristle at that. Famously modest, he wields authority at the podium with minimal means, leading symphonic accounts that are notable less for what they say than what they don’t. “The Inextinguishable,” written in the shadow of World War I and reflecting it in dueling timpani sets, can easily be milked for drama. But Blomstedt follows the score closely, faithfully, with the trust that it will speak for itself.This approach occasionally leaves me wanting more — accustomed as I am to the bloated grandeur of stereotypical 20th-century performance practice or the leaner, speedier sound of historically informed styles — but it is most often clarifying. Blomstedt’s reading of the Nielsen, controlled but unmannered, was one of sublime balance. The second movement’s wind choir interlude had the gentle movement and harmony of a morning walk among trees and bird song. Later, there was a shock in the starkness of strings bowed heavily in unison. The finale built slowly, and seemed to end as openly as the symphony had begun: the closing measure’s crescendo not a sweep so much as a shine with lingering radiance.In the Nielsen, the Philharmonic players were willing partners in their guest’s vision. Yet old habits emerged in the Beethoven. It’s a work, Blomstedt wryly noted in a recent interview, that he has been hearing for nearly a century. But this orchestra has been playing it much longer — since its first concert, in 1842 — and most recently has been trained to give it a hellfire treatment under van Zweden’s baton.For the most part, though, Blomstedt kept its force in check, in an interpretation free from excess. He never made too much of a fermata — especially in the famous four-note opening motif — and subtly rejected notions of fate knocking at the door, relishing instead the symphony’s exploration of motivic obsession. If this is a work often described as a journey from darkness to light, Blomstedt embraced life-affirming optimism from the start; passages suggesting adversity were met with insistent dignity.It would be easy to link this concert to current events. Indeed, that program insert encouraged the audience to do so, with a paragraph about the music’s “tribute to the fortitude of the human spirit in the face of the fiercest adversity.” But part of Beethoven’s enduring appeal is his triumph in making the personal universal, and that’s what Blomstedt’s conducting reflected: the ability of music, at its best, to speak to any time or place.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      A Conductor Brings Nearly a Century of Experience to Beethoven

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      Herbert Blomstedt, 94 and leading the New York Philharmonic this week, discusses the famous opening of the Fifth Symphony.Herbert Blomstedt just keeps on going. The Illinois-born, Swedish conductor is 94, and he maintains a schedule that musicians half his age might blanch at.At the start of February, Blomstedt was in San Francisco, where he was the music director from 1985 to 1995. A week later, Cleveland. Then Boston, conducting Mozart and a new edition of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony that is dedicated to Blomstedt himself. Next week, he repeats that program in Chicago.This week, Blomstedt leads the New York Philharmonic in two symphonies that testify to the strength of the human will: Nielsen’s Fourth and Beethoven’s Fifth.Blomstedt’s service to Scandinavian music has long been lauded, and his recordings of works by Berwald, Nielsen, Sibelius and Stenhammar still repay repeated listening. If his Beethoven has been a little less prominent, that is only because its virtues are not of the flashy or radical kind.Although slightly different in tempos and textures as a result of Blomstedt’s adoption of the new editions of Beethoven’s scores that came out in the 1990s, both symphony cycles he has recorded — with the Staatskapelle Dresden from 1975 to 1980 and the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Germany, from 2014 to 2017 — remain beacons of good taste, with a distinctive spiritual power shining through the music. In both sets, that’s particularly true of the Fifth, which may be less brutally violent than under other conductors but has a merciful empathy to its relative restraint.Asked to choose a page from the Fifth’s score, Blomstedt went for the first, which announces the four-note motif that dominates the symphony’s passage from darkness to light. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The opening page of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, whose first four notes make up one of the most famous motifs in all of music.Bärenreiter-Verlag, KasselThis is probably the most famous opening in all of music. But is it deceptively difficult to conduct?It’s very difficult. We are all haunted by this saying of Anton Schindler’s, that fate is knocking on the door. Of course, we cannot knock on the door so fast, so it becomes [singing slowly] “baaam-baaam-baaam baaaaaam.” That’s obviously not what Beethoven wanted. On the top of the page it says “Allegro con brio.” If the first bar is like that, it’s not con brio at all; it’s allegro comodo or allegro pesante or something like that.It’s also strange that there are no staccato dots there. Some of my colleagues are very conscientious; they play it [singing smoothly] “duhduhduh duhhh” because there are no dots. So that’s also another subject that can get heated.The new Bärenreiter score now has a metronome mark, in parentheses, because he wrote the marking some years later. The marking is quite shocking for those who were used to listening to Wilhelm Furtwängler or his followers, who are about twice as slow.Then, the second fermata is longer than the first one, tied over to an extra bar. The question is, why is that? So, there are many things to discuss.What are you aiming for yourself, then?The first point about the tempo is that in earlier editions of the symphonies, there were no metronome marks, so that authorized slow tempos. Of course, there were books; you could go to the musicological literature in the library and find out. Now, it is right at the top of the page, even if it is in parentheses. It’s part of the composition. And that makes a difference.When I was young — and it’s almost a hundred years ago now — the attitude toward the scores of Classical composers was much more casual than it is today. It cannot go so far that we are put in a straitjacket; that does not help the music very much. We know that Beethoven was himself very differentiated in tempos. He might start in one tempo, and after a few bars there was another tempo. Schindler reports on this; in that case, he’s quite a reliable source.Before I started conducting, I was a musicologist, so I’m trained to think like this. I’m sure Beethoven wanted the tempo as it stands. I heard so many crazy theories about what he meant with this. Some say that his metronome was going too slow, but I don’t believe that, because you can check the metronome by looking at your watch. Since the new editions have come, I’m convinced that he meant the metronome markings as they stand.Of course, I’m not alone in that. With a couple of exceptions, I think the markings are ideal. You just have to change yourself and not do what you find from tradition. You had heard Furtwängler or Bruno Walter do it, so that must be right. No, it is not right. The right thing is what he wrote.What we think Beethoven actually wanted has changed dramatically over the course of your career, with new research and shifting tastes. How do you reconcile that?That’s normal. I don’t have to apologize for that. My first ideals were what I heard Furtwängler do. I heard him many times, in rehearsal and in concerts. It shaped my musical world; it was magic. But, little by little, I discovered that there are other ways to interpret Beethoven’s music that are at least equally motivated in what he wrote.It’s not easy for a conductor, or any musician who has the task of interpreting this music, to get onto Beethoven’s wavelength, because you have so many memories, so many ideas about the music from what you have heard. You have to free yourself of that if you are looking forward. It requires that you change your mind, but I think that is what we must do. Once you are accustomed to that, you discover new expressions in the music that perhaps were not so evident a hundred years ago.What about the fermata over the last of the four notes in the motif?From a musicological standpoint, the fermata shows that the tempo does not exist anymore. What really says how long a fermata is, in this case, is how long the bow is. When the bow is at the end, you have to stop, unless you want to do two bows, which some people do. I think that misses the point, because to hold the fermata with a single down bow requires great control of muscles. If you do two, you don’t have to have that tension in your arm; it’s too easy.Why do you think Beethoven remains such an obsession for so many of us?One could write a whole book about that, but one thing to me is characteristic. We know that Beethoven was a sufferer, but he never expresses his suffering in his music, like Mahler does. You can hear it in every bar of Mahler — I’m suffering, I’m suffering, I’m suffering — and it’s wonderful, the way he does it.Beethoven was another type of person. He doesn’t put his emotions on display, and that makes it more objective. It can represent the suffering of everyone, not only his, but mine, the suffering of the whole society. The suffering of today, in Ukraine for instance. It could symbolize anything. That helps it to outlive the personal situation of the composer, or the personal situation of the interpreter. It’s something that we go through, as humans. More

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      Review: The New York Philharmonic Brings Back the Standards

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      Manfred Honeck led a program that teased at novelty, then settled into well-known works by Mendelssohn and Dvorak.It had to end at some point.For the past month, the New York Philharmonic has been an unexpected source of novelty: premieres, queer cabaret, the orchestra’s first performances of works by Eastman, Kodaly and Martinu. But last week, Strauss’s rare “Brentano-Lieder” was followed by the familiar creeping back in the form of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.And now comes a program (despite a brief opener from the underrated Erwin Schulhoff) of well-worn pieces by Mendelssohn and Dvorak that were most recently heard here in 2019 — which, with pandemic closures, might as well have been last year. Fortunately, there are few conductors as trustworthy in the standard repertory as Manfred Honeck, who led the Philharmonic on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center.The Czech-born Schulhoff crossed paths with the likes of Dvorak and Debussy before embarking on a promising career that was cut short: first by Nazi blacklisting, then by his death, at 48, in the Wülzberg concentration camp. His Five Pieces for String Quartet, from 1923, is a modern treatment of a Baroque suite, with each movement inspired by a specific dance style. The work’s chamber scale came to the Philharmonic transformed, in an arrangement for full orchestra by Honeck and Thomas Ille, who have also collaborated on symphonic assemblages from operas such as “Jenufa” and “Rusalka.”All arrangements are acts of translation, and here Schulhoff’s humor was lost along the way. With a massive sound from added brass and percussion at the start, this Five Pieces was less lightly playful and more Mahlerian — witty and ironic, but with martial heft. Once tinged with Debussian sonorities, the third-movement Czech dance was a dark memory of Dvorak. In the tango that followed, what was previously implied in rhythm became literal in exotic-Spain castanets, and the closing tarantella took itself too seriously.There is nothing inherently wrong with arrangements, an art form in themselves. But this take on Schulhoff felt like a missed opportunity. Among the lessons we have learned from the pandemic is that orchestral programming doesn’t need to be formulaic, that a string quartet can easily share the stage with a symphony. And Schulhoff — chronically underrepresented, especially on Philharmonic subscription concerts — would benefit from advocacy for music that is truly his.Ray Chen made his Philharmonic debut in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, which he took up with the spirit of a Romantic hero.Chris LeeMendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor is a common rite of passage for violinists, and on Thursday it was the vehicle for Ray Chen’s Philharmonic debut. Charismatic and expressive, he took up the work like a Romantic hero while Honeck maintained a modest, if indistinct, accompaniment in the orchestra. That would have left room for any soloist, but Chen rarely dipped below mezzo forte in volume, his force evident in the many bow hairs he broke during the performance.Chen’s full-bodied lyricism nevertheless made for beautifully contoured phrases in the violin’s highest, riskiest registers. The concerto calls for that often, but not always, and his interpretation, delivered as if with a sticky, heavy bow, rarely mined the contrasts of flowing melody and bouncing agility. Only in the sprinting theme of the finale did he at last find a lighter touch. More relaxed yet was the encore, his own fantasy-like arrangement of “Waltzing Matilda,” the unofficial national anthem of Australia, where he grew up.Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony clocked in longer here than in many other accounts. But Honeck’s reading was one that rewarded patience — the introduction making up in atmosphere what it lacked in drive. That was just the start of a thoroughly fresh performance, one in which loudness, for example, was never simply loud; it signified festivity or tumult, or both at once. His Adagio, begun with Brahmsian lushness, was unafraid of silence, revealing the holy in the pastoral. The finale had the feel of a dance suite, a subtle nod back to the Schulhoff, with Dvorak’s series of repeated phrases a journey from the lofty to the frisky and affectingly wistful.As guest conductors have passed through recently — with Herbert Blomstedt and Gustavo Dudamel on the way — the Philharmonic players have shown a promising malleability often missing from concerts with their music director, Jaap van Zweden, who leaves in 2024. And under the right baton, they can even be forgiven for putting on the classics. As they proved with Honeck, standard doesn’t have to mean stale.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: Another Week, Another Philharmonic Podium Candidate

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the latest potential music director to lead the orchestra, in a program of Zibuokle Martinaityte, Strauss and Tchaikovsky.Jakub Hrusa and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, two of the world’s most respected rising maestros, keep ending up in close proximity. In 2017 they were simultaneously named the principal guest conductors of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. (Rouvali was elevated to that ensemble’s top post two years later.)When Rouvali made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in fall 2019, it was a week before Hrusa appeared there. And now they have returned to the orchestra, once again in tandem: Hrusa, 40, last week, and Rouvali, 36, on Thursday.Their appearances — and those of other Philharmonic guest conductors this season — are being closely watched since the announcement in September that Jaap van Zweden would be stepping down as music director in 2024. These two young, talented artists are among the prominent candidates to succeed him.Hrusa’s recent concert was, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times, “rich with novelty and spirited throughout.” Rouvali’s was, too — if not in its main offering, Tchaikovsky’s all too often played Fifth Symphony. But the program on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center began with the American premiere of a recent work by Zibuokle Martinaityte, and continued with a rare account of the full set of Strauss’s six Op. 68 songs, the “Brentano-Lieder.”Martinaityte’s dense, moody “Saudade” (2019) begins with a ceaselessly rocking motif and a quality of awakening, which is swiftly obscured by strange oscillations in the cellos and oozy, sliding dissonances in the violins.A passage of grumbling darkness becomes almost palpable, as in the unsettlingly visceral music of Ash Fure, before gradually expanding into a wailing full-orchestra crescendo. That climax comes about halfway through the 17-minute piece, which loses some urgency after, with droning tidal motions continuing to rise and fall, even if the colors in Martinaityte’s orchestral writing remain intriguingly agitated.Making her Philharmonic debut in the Strauss songs, the soprano Golda Schultz was — as in “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Metropolitan Opera last month — serene and confident, her voice silky and immaculate. You got a sense of why these pieces are not often performed as a group; a voice light and agile enough for the middle four songs can struggle with the grander ones that frame them.And Schultz, whose slender instrument sweetly penetrates but doesn’t exactly bloom, was not in her element for the rapturous opening “An die Nacht.” But with Rouvali softening the orchestra into intimacy, she brought characterful wit and zestful German to “Ich wollt ein Sträusslein binden” and “Säus’le, liebe Myrte!” and Zerbinetta-esque dexterity to “Amor.”The closing “Lied der Frauen” wants tone a bit more majestic, but Schultz attacked it with gusto and brought gentle ambivalence to the end. And in “Als mir dein Lied erklang,” she was superb, singing with the combination of purity and humanity that characterizes the best Strauss ingénues.Throughout the evening, Rouvali stepped around the podium with a kind of cheery calm, like a genial general directing troop movements. He kept a precise beat, his left hand often clenched but for a pinpointing index finger.His Tchaikovsky was logical, restrained and orderly — and also relaxed and natural in its phrasing, as opposed to the mannered, manicured style that van Zweden often brings to the standard repertory. But the straightforwardness of this Fifth sometimes tipped into plainness, as when the strings in the first movement covered rebellious passages in the winds. It was a brisk account, neither particularly grand nor intense.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: An Audition Season Begins at the Philharmonic

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      Jakub Hrusa is the first of several guest conductors appearing with the orchestra in the coming weeks as it searches for its next music director.It’s audition season at the New York Philharmonic.Well, not officially. But ever since the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, announced that he would step down in 2024, every guest conductor’s appearance has carried the weight of speculation. When an outsider takes the podium these days, it’s hard to get through the concert without thinking: Could this be our future?And, for the next six weeks, the Philharmonic’s calendar is filled with nothing but guests.It began Thursday with Jakub Hrusa, a conductor with an ear for rarities and the skill to make persuasive cases for them. Next up are Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a charismatic and promising young talent; Manfred Honeck, a master of the standard repertory; Herbert Blomstedt, an elder statesman who, now in his mid-90s, is unlikely to be a music director again; and Gustavo Dudamel, who is being given substantial real estate with a Schumann festival in March. (That’s an awful lot of Y chromosomes, though other notable appearances in recent months have included Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young and Susanna Mälkki.)Hrusa last led the Philharmonic in 2019 — as it happens, at the end of another stretch of guest programs. Beyond bringing out a dynamic sound often absent from van Zweden’s indelicate style, Hrusa had a subtle gift then of giving the audience something it would enjoy but not necessarily ask for: Dvorak, say, but the underrated Sixth Symphony.That happened again with this week’s concerts at Alice Tully Hall. (I attended the one on Friday.) The evening had the surface-level same-old of dead European dudes — Central Europeans, to be exact — but was rich with novelty and spirited throughout, enough to inspire applause in the middle of a symphony. Two of the three works had never been played by the Philharmonic, and the centerpiece concerto, featuring the pianist Yuja Wang, hadn’t been on a subscription program since the 1980s.Even among those rarities were names you should but don’t see here often: Zoltan Kodaly and Bohuslav Martinu.Kodaly was represented by his Concerto for Orchestra, which premiered in 1941 — ahead of the more famous work of the same name by his Hungarian compatriot Bela Bartok. The piece harkens back to Bach, in its “Brandenburgs”-like treatment of the ensemble and contrapuntal writing, but with a folk flavor.Under Hrusa’s baton it had the feel of a festive opener, and the Philharmonic players responded accordingly: a big sound delivered at a breakneck pace, yet crisply articulated (which helps at Tully, whose acoustics tend to punish grandeur with muddle). The score is not without its swerves, though, and Hrusa navigated them by dropping to a whisper in an instant for lyrical, chamber-size passages and making space for intriguing sonorities that arose from, for example, the doubling of cello pizzicato in the bassoon.Martinu’s Symphony No. 1, from 1942, was comparatively quiet — at least at first, because Hrusa took a long, almost theatrical view of the piece, building toward a climax and threading the four discrete movements. With a soft approach, his opening, of upward chromatic scales passed around the orchestra, was a garden of strangely beautiful flowers in bloom.Those scales recur later, but Hrusa didn’t overemphasize them. Rather, they arose gracefully amid the work’s shifting character: the unsteady and rapidly escalating second movement, with strings given fleeting fragments of a phrase that could just as easily soar, the shards of a Dvorak melody; the thick textures of the darker third movement; and the dancing finale, in which even dolce passages sprint as if sprung.Yuja Wang performed Liszt’s First Piano Concerto wearing chunky white sunglasses — doctor’s orders, but readily accepted by an audience familiar with her blend of glamour and thoughtful artistry.Chris LeeIt was heartening to see that nearly all of the audience had stayed after intermission for the Martinu, given that the evening’s clearer selling point had come earlier: Wang playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat.Wang has Liszt’s storied star power as a performer: easily able to command a stage and entertainingly showy, yet sensitive and never excessively emotive. Her glamour is so established, she came out wearing chunky sunglasses — doctor’s orders as she recovers from a recent procedure — and the audience simply greeted it, with cheers, as a fashion statement.She played the opening with muscularity and precision, matched by the orchestra’s vigorous reading of the first movement’s theme. But later, in a nocturne-like solo, Wang exquisitely flipped the piece’s scale to that of an intimate recital. She made the concerto sound better than it actually is.In the spirit of Liszt, she returned with an encore of crowd-pleasing, breathless athleticism: the Toccatina from Kapustin’s Opus 40 Concert Etudes. But then she came back — still virtuosic, yet expressive and absolutely lovely — for Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” (Op. 67, No. 2). As she played, Hrusa listened from the conductor’s podium, his eyes closed and his head nodding in bliss, a stand-in for all of us there.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More