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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

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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