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    Review: Philharmonic Debuts Back Flashiness With Substance

    In an evening built to entertain, there was also depth in Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s conducting and the cellist Edgar Moreau’s playing.There’s often a bias against the idea of flashiness, especially in classical music circles, as if it must always be preceded by the word “empty.”But not on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, where the conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the cellist Edgar Moreau were making their New York Philharmonic debuts. If anything, the word that accompanied their kind of flashiness was “fun.”By offering plenty of buoyancy — and largely skirting grave weight — the programming communicated this conductor’s zealous pursuit of entertainment. It ran from a rousing take on Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy to a graceful (and yes, occasionally flashy) Haydn Cello Concerto No. 1, then, after intermission, a truly aggressive reading of Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” Suite and a boisterous finale in Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1.That’s an evening built to dazzle and entertain. But there was substance as well. From the outset of Tchaikovsky’s crowd-pleaser, Orozco-Estrada had the Philharmonic players in fine balance: Plucked strings had presence; entrances of flute or harp came across clearly; a roll of percussion heightened tension without calling too much early attention to itself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Review: A New York Philharmonic Staple Outshines a Flashy Premiere

    Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances was the highlight of a program that also included the New York debut of Bryce Dessner’s evocative Concerto for Two Pianos.On Thursday, the New York Philharmonic gave the New York premiere of a double piano concerto by a pop artist with classical and indie rock credentials. With the composer in attendance, the piece, lovingly crafted to show off the evening’s soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a strong claim as the evening’s centerpiece.Instead, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, a repertory staple that the Philharmonic recently performed in 2022, walked off with the night.The fault hardly lies with the piece written by Bryce Dessner, a founding member of the rock band the National, who has a master’s from the Yale School of Music and is a Grammy winner in rock and classical categories. The Labèque sisters’ recording of his Concerto for Two Pianos reveals an evocative, neatly conceived work that uses contrast to build momentum across three movements.Dessner, who closely studied the Labèques’ repertoire, throws all manner of writing at the pianists, who play cascading figures in canon, stuttering syncopations, gently articulated polyrhythms, jabbing chords and twinkling starbursts of notes. The orchestra, mesmerized, follows their lead. The winds copy the arching shape of the piano’s dreamy chord progressions, and the low strings and brasses double the piano’s bass stabs. What the concerto lacks in mystery it makes up for in showmanship and communal impact.On Thursday, the Labèque sisters played with typical precision, carving out figures from the orchestral fabric with a scalpel. They found flair in clarity; long-breathed lines flowed evenly, and the interplay between the piano parts — whether layered atop or responding to one another — had athletic grace. In the second movement, Katia played notes on high like a smooth, confiding whisper, and Marielle lashed out percussively. They make collaboration sound like an instinctive mind meld.The evening’s conductor, Semyon Bychkov, opted for a reduced version of the orchestration that sounded skeletal in live performance. A sequence of whole notes across the orchestral parts in the third movement desperately needed heft. The hairpin dynamics for the brasses, which are meant to flash by like a car’s headlights on a pitch-black night, were barely indicated. Without shape, vignettes blurred together: Prettily fragile passages sounded awfully similar to dissonant ones.The concerto, which never really reached out to grab its audience, deserved a fairer outing, especially as it was sandwiched between two works, Strauss’s “Don Juan” and the Symphonic Dances, that received the high Romantic treatment.The orchestra came out swinging in the Strauss, overshooting the brashness and bravado of the opening phrase and stiffly dispatching moments of mischief. But there was genuine sweep in the romantic climaxes as the orchestra summoned the intoxicating magic of Strauss’s dense score. The Don’s demise at the end was unsentimental and, in its own way, honorable.After intermission the orchestra, sounding reborn, struck a perfect balance between its overheated excitement in the Strauss and its detachment in the Dessner. From the first notes of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, the players, attuned to matters of balance and color, showed a striking confidence and natural expansiveness. The first movement’s extended woodwind chorale, anchored by the rose-gold color of Lino Gomez’s alto saxophone, was luxurious to behold. The strings, piano and harp answered with melancholic optimism.The second movement dispelled any lingering question about the Philharmonic’s dexterity with contrasts. It opened with the wheezing of stopped horns and muted trumpets, which quickly gave way to the liquefaction of legato winds and the oom-pah-pah of plush strings. A waltz of peculiar color, it seemed to waft off the stage and into the hall. It didn’t overwhelm the audience members or recede from them; instead, it invited them into the dance.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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    An Oratorio About Shanghai’s Jews Opens in China at a Difficult Time

    “Émigré,” about Jews who fled Nazi Germany, debuts amid U.S.-China tensions and cultural rifts over the Israel-Hamas war. It comes to New York in February.“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.Musicians of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra warming up before a dress rehearsal of “Émigré.” The oratorio will be performed by the New York Philharmonic in February.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe piece, composed by Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell and Brock Walsh, has been in the works for several years, a commission of the Philharmonic, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Long Yu. But it is opening at a delicate time, with tensions high between China and the United States and with the Israel-Hamas war spurring heated debates in the cultural sphere.The war in the Middle East is a sensitive subject in China, which has sought to pitch itself as a neutral broker in the conflict, though state-controlled media has emphasized the harm suffered by civilians in Gaza while giving scant coverage to Hamas’s initial attack. Israel has expressed “deep disappointment” at China’s muted response to the Hamas attack. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, on Tuesday called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and for “the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine.”In recent weeks, promotional materials in China for “Émigré” have rarely mentioned its plot, and listed its Chinese title, “Shanghai! Shanghai!” The major state-owned Chinese news outlets did not cover the premiere this month, although an English-language television channel for foreign audiences did.The creators of “Émigré,” which takes place during the Second Sino-Japanese War, said they hoped the piece would help underscore a shared sense of humanity in a time of renewed strife. “I don’t think music and politics really belong in the same sentence,” Zigman said. “I just want people to be human and kind, and there are certain parts of this piece that help that vision.”Brock Walsh, who wrote the lyrics to “Emigré,” with Mark Campbell.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe composer Aaron Zigman said, “Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy.”Qilai Shen for The New York TimesIn 2019, Yu, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten, came up with the idea for the piece. He approached the New York Philharmonic, which has had a partnership with the Shanghai Symphony since 2014, about commissioning the work together.Yu said he never expected the oratorio to premiere in wartime but hoped that its message would still resonate.“We always make the same mistakes in our lives, and we have to learn from history,” he said. “We can be inspired by the kindness and support that Shanghai showed in this moment.”To shape the music and the plot, Yu turned to Zigman, a classically trained film and television composer who has returned to classical music in recent years, including with “Tango Manos” (2019), a piano concerto he wrote for the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Yu has long known Zigman, who has composed more than 60 Hollywood scores, including “The Notebook,” and he and Thibaudet suggested the idea for a tango concerto.For “Émigré,” Zigman said he was eager to create a “multicultural love story” that drew attention to the violent struggles unfolding in Asia and Europe at the time. Those include the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, an eastern Chinese city, in which tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by occupying Japanese forces; and Kristallnacht, the wave of antisemitic violence carried out by Nazis in 1938.“Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy,” Zigman said.Rehearsing in Shanghai. Yu, the orchestra’s music director, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten.Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” tells the story of Otto, a rabbinical student, and Josef, a doctor, who leave Berlin for the port city of Trieste, Italy, and board a boat headed for Shanghai.The brothers are anguished about leaving their parents and homeland but try to settle into life in China. Josef is interested in traditional Chinese medicine and visits an herbal medicine shop, where he meets Lina, the daughter of the owner, who is grappling with the death of her mother in Nanjing. They fall in love, but their cross-cultural union draws scorn from their families.Shanghai’s role as a haven for Jews was a historical fluke. Britain, France and the United States insisted that Beijing let them set up settlements there in the 1840s. By the 1930s, the settlements had grown into a sprawling city. But the Chinese government controlled who was issued visas to enter mainland China, including for arrival at Shanghai’s docks.When Japan seized east-central China in 1937, including the area around Shanghai, the Nationalist Chinese government could no longer inspect visas at the city’s riverfront docks. But the Japanese military did not start controlling visa access to the area until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.The result? Nobody was controlling who entered China at Shanghai. It became an open port for those four years: Foreign travelers were welcomed and could stay in the Western settlements.Mark Campbell, who wrote the libretto with Brock Walsh.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesCampbell, who has written librettos for more than 40 operas, said he hoped that the stories of refugees in “Émigré” could be a modern-day lesson.“It’s very important for the audience to go away and remember there was a time in this world when one country embraced the refugees of another country,” he said.In Shanghai, the stories of Jewish residents are preserved at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The core block of China’s legally designated Jewish ghetto, where the Japanese required Jews in Shanghai to live during the last three years of the war, has been preserved. Its Central European-style townhouses and house-size synagogue still stand.But much of the surrounding area has been bulldozed amid rapid growth in recent decades, causing concern among preservationists. Two gargantuan office buildings, each 50 stories tall, cast huge shadows toward the little synagogue at midday.At least 14,000 Jews lived in the ghetto during the war, and possibly several thousand more. Another 1,000 to 10,000 secretly lived elsewhere in the city. (Almost all of Shanghai’s Jews left after the war, many resettling in the United States.)A building in what was the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. The core block has been preserved amid encroaching urban growth.Jackson Lowen for The New York TimesShanghai was a deeply troubled place in the years that “Émigré” takes place: packed with Chinese refugees as well as Jewish ones, frequently short on food and potable water, and racked by epidemics of disease. Opium was smoked openly and prostitutes gathered on street corners.Among the ghetto’s residents was Michael Blumenthal, who fled from Nazi Germany in 1939 at 13 and who much later became treasury secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal said in an interview with The New York Times in 2017 that when he was a teenager, a Japanese police station was just down the block from the synagogue. He and others had to apply at the station for permission to leave the ghetto during the war, and by the final year, it was almost impossible to obtain permission.Trucks patrolled Shanghai, not just in the ghetto, to collect those who succumbed to illness. “I used to see them driving around the city, picking up dead bodies,” Blumenthal said. “The city was vastly overcrowded, it was dangerous, there was constant fighting among factions, and shootings.”“Émigré” received wide attention in China when it was announced in the summer. With a Chinese and American cast, the work was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Yu joined Zigman, Campbell, Walsh and Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, for a news conference at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum celebrating the commission.When the joint Shanghai-New York project was announced, “Émigré” was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” will have its American premiere in February with the same cast, and Ginstling said in a recent interview that he did not expect the Israel-Hamas war would lead to alterations in the work, which Deutsche Grammophon recorded in Shanghai for release next year.“Things change quickly in the world,” he said. “We are committed to our role as cultural ambassadors.”The Philharmonic’s version, directed by Mary Birnbaum, will be semi-staged and incorporate some visual elements, including images of devastation from World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.Several New York Philharmonic musicians took part in the premiere in Shanghai, and a group of Chinese musicians will play at the premiere in New York.At a recent rehearsal for “Émigré” at Jaguar Shanghai Symphony Hall, choir members sang Jewish, Christian and Buddhist prayers, which open the work. “Grant peace in high places,” they sang in Hebrew.“Sacred presence blossoming,” they sang in Chinese.The cast includes the tenor Arnold Livingston Geis as Josef; the tenor Matthew White as Otto; the soprano Zhang Meigui as Lina; the mezzo-soprano Zhu Huiling as her sister, Li; and the bass-baritone Shenyang as their father, Wei Song.Between rehearsals, Zhang said that she was trying to stay focused on the music, and that she hoped “Émigré” could provide some relief from the war.“We’re going through a very difficult time in this world,” she said, “but I think music has to be separate from this.”Zhang added that she had found some comfort in a song at the end of the first act called “In a Perfect World.” In that piece, Josef sings:If I ruled the world,Mine to redesign,I’d stop every gunshot, every war.Now, forevermore.Li You More

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    Review: The Philharmonic Feasts on ‘The Planets’

    Under Dima Slobodeniouk, the orchestra played works by Holst and Ligeti and, for the first time, Julia Perry’s somber “Stabat Mater.”Holst’s “The Planets” is one of the Thanksgiving feasts of classical music. It seduces with variety of color and texture — just as tangy cranberry compote refreshes after buttery mashed potatoes — but tends to leave you overstuffed.I’ve never heard it when it wasn’t at least a little too much. But, played with vigor by the New York Philharmonic under Dima Slobodeniouk on Wednesday evening at David Geffen Hall, it didn’t have me moaning with overindulgence, as some “Planets” performances do. It felt like an ideal way to ring in a holiday that’s all about bounty.There was punchiness in “Mars” and genuine playfulness in “Mercury,” and Slobodeniouk was agile in guiding the orchestra through the hairpin transitions of “Jupiter.” That section’s noble hymn theme was less strings-heavy than usual, flowing with ease.That Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” is, like “The Planets,” indelibly associated with the extraterrestrial is due less to its title than to its inclusion (without its composer’s permission) in the soundtrack of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Written in 1961, not quite half a century after Holst’s tone poem, the sumptuously eerie “Atmosphères” on Wednesday felt a bit like the son or grandson of “The Planets.” Ligeti’s queasily unsettled sound world seemed a direct descendant of the stunned stillness at the start of “Saturn,” the uneasy simmering after the march drops out in “Uranus” and the gaseous, hovering mystery of “Neptune.” Neither of these works was played with super-polish at Geffen, but under Slobodeniouk both had vibrant drama.Those tried and true “Planets” aside, this wasn’t a concert of chestnuts. The orchestra revived “Atmosphères” to cap its commemorations this fall of Ligeti’s centennial; it hasn’t presented the piece (except as it’s excerpted in the “2001” score) since 1978. And it is performing Julia Perry’s 1951 “Stabat Mater” this week for the first time ever.Perry’s brief “Study for Orchestra” was, in 1965, the first music by a Black woman to be played on a Philharmonic subscription program. It was brought back last year, but the “Stabat Mater,” scored for strings and a vocalist, is a far more powerful work. Heated yet subtle and restrained, the piece’s 10 sections on a Latin text, lasting about 20 minutes in all, chart an intimate drama whose moments of grandeur are all the more effective given the overall modesty.In the short prelude, light yet pungent pizzicato plucks — amid brooding low strings and an elegiac solo violin — movingly evoke Jesus’s mother’s tears without feeling too obvious. Throughout, Perry gives both voice and orchestra an appealing combination of Neo-Baroque angularity and post-Romantic warmth. The quivering, high-pitched flames of “the fire of love” near the end are reminders that this piece and “Atmosphères” date from the same era.The mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges sang with oracular authority in the somber vocal lines, rising to flashes of intensity. There were passages in which a more encompassing, contralto-style richness in the low register would have filled out this music. But Bridges’s focused tone was just right for Perry’s poignant austerity.The violinist Sheryl Staples, in the concertmaster chair, played with sweetness and eloquence in both the “Stabat Mater” and Holst’s “Venus.” That section of “The Planets” also featured a beautifully mellow flute solo by Alison Fierst, leading into rhapsodic lines from the orchestra’s longtime principal cello, Carter Brey.Oh, and for at least one night, the “fireflies” — the lights over the Geffen stage that do a flickering up-and-down dance before concerts, in corny imitation of the chandeliers that rise before curtain at the Metropolitan Opera next door — were stilled.Might they stay that way forevermore? That would be something to be thankful for.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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    At the Philharmonic, Violin Concertos as Alike as They Are Different

    In back-to-back programs, the orchestra presented concertos by Beethoven and Benjamin Britten.The violin concertos by Beethoven and Benjamin Britten are as alike as they are different, and over the past week, the New York Philharmonic presented them in back-to-back programs that gestured at their beauties without digging into them.Both concertos begin with a rumbling in the timpani, barely the outline of a rhythm, but enough of a motif to inspire developments in the orchestral and violin parts that build to strenuous emotional heights. Both tax the soloist’s endurance with a series of technical hurdles, and challenge the orchestra to step up its musical partnership.The Philharmonic nestled each concerto into the middle of programs that began with a brief curtain-raiser and ended with expansive, idiosyncratic symphonies. Last week, Stéphane Denève conducted the Beethoven in between Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers” and Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony. Then, on Thursday, Paavo Järvi led a more strongly conceived program that framed the Britten with Veljo Tormis’s Overture No. 2 and Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony.If the concerts had similar setups, they had similar problems too. The Philharmonic, perhaps a bit on autopilot, began the concertos tentatively, smoothed out the drama of the symphonies and locked into isolated moments of dynamism. The openers, particularly the Tormis, emerged as effectively crafted short stories: internally coherent, absorbing, satisfying.The unabashed emotionality of Britten’s concerto, which the pacifist composer completed after the outbreak of World War II, shows up in the solo writing in two ways: urgent, long-lined melodies of sweet despair; and raw plucking and feverishly cascading stops. Alena Baeva, making her Philharmonic debut, played the piece with assertive beauty and vibrato so quick, at times, that it seemed to disappear. With her understated legato and handsomely voiced harmonies, she made things sound easy. In guttural passages, she indicated Britten’s intentions without compromising her ability to return to lyricism.Baeva, so facile in surmounting technical obstacles, had trouble turning up the temperature. The exquisite, full-throated lament at the center of the second movement gets volleyed between soloist and orchestra, and Järvi didn’t build a compelling progression out of the straightforward yet potent musical scenario. Baeva’s final re-entry was anticlimactic. In the cadenza, she dispatched technical challenges — the duetting of held notes and plucked ones was finely handled — without tapping into the writing’s existential anguish. She sounded more aligned with the tranquillity of the third movement.Stéphane Denève, left, leading the Philharmonic and the violinist Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto last week.Chris LeeIn 1801, a few years before completing his Violin Concerto, Beethoven wrote in a letter of his encroaching deafness, “From a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.” And yet he ended up producing a sprawling concerto that keeps the violin in the tippy top of its range as it leaps continually through intervals.The violinist Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider’s solo playing, decisive in bold passages and tender in soft ones, sometimes turned brittle. Quiet moments emerged like beautiful whispers that evaporated as they tapered off, and he sounded more at ease in stepwise passages than leaping ones.Saint-Saëns’s Third, nicknamed the “Organ Symphony” for its prominent use of that instrument, is full of theatrical string writing that Denève shortchanged. The work came alive in its final stretch when he made the Maestoso section, which derives its power from majestically broad time signatures, sound like a king’s procession marching down the aisles of David Geffen Hall. The four-hand piano playing was simple yet magical, and the organist Kent Tritle seemed to be having a ball with his forte passages after teasing out the subtler beauties of earlier sections and their woozy prism of colors.Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, like Britten’s Violin Concerto, can be considered a response to the horrors of World War II; at times you can almost hear the sound of an individual’s spirit writhing out of the grasp of a conflict that would snuff it out. And, as with the Saint-Saëns, the Philharmonic snapped into focus in the work’s final minutes.Up until that finale, when he drove the Vivace at a thrilling clip into a climax of overwhelming impact, Järvi walked the middle of the road. The conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky, chosen by Prokofiev for the symphony’s world premiere, left behind a gripping recording full of specific choices: a stiff, percussive celesta; ear-clearing winds screeching on high, blowzy brasses with something sinister to say. By contrast, Järvi’s adherence to conventional beauties sounded strange.But he found Prokofiev’s individuality in the Vivace, where the violins sounded clean yet somehow breathless, and the clarinet, warm yet sharply etched. A threat bubbled up from the percussion section. The final moments of cataclysm arrived suddenly and all at once. It was almost worth the wait. More

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    Orin O’Brien Broke Barriers in Music but Doesn’t Want Center Stage

    A new documentary tells the story of Orin O’Brien, a double bassist who became the only woman in the New York Philharmonic when she joined in 1966 and helped open doors for others.For decades, the New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, was an all-male bastion. Then, in 1966, came Orin O’Brien, who played the double bass.Often described as the first woman to become a permanent member of the Philharmonic, O’Brien was part of a pioneering group of female artists who opened doors for other women. Last year, for the first time in its 180-year history, women outnumbered men in the ensemble.O’Brien, who retired from the Philharmonic in 2021 after a 55-year career, has resisted speaking publicly about her life in music, preferring to stay in the background.But a new documentary short, “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” directed by her niece, the filmmaker Molly O’Brien, looks at her struggles and achievements. (The film premiered last week at DOC NYC, a festival that celebrates documentary film.)The Philharmonic, which was founded in 1842, was long closed off to women. It was not until 1922 that it hired its first female member: Stephanie Goldner, a harpist. But she departed after a decade, and the orchestra became a male bastion once again until the arrival of O’Brien.In a recent interview at her Manhattan home, O’Brien, 88, reflected on her early days in the Philharmonic, the strides made by women in classical music and growing up in California with movie-star parents. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.A scene from “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” the documentary film made by O’Brien’s niece, Molly O’Brien.The Only Girl in the Orchestra ProductionYou made history at the Philharmonic but you’ve avoided talking about your time there. Why did you agree to take part in this film?I hate the idea of being photographed. I hate the idea of talking about myself. It’s just awful. In music, you’re part of a group and you enjoy the camaraderie with the other musicians. My niece begged me for years. She told me, “Maybe it will help the cause of classical music.” If she wasn’t my relation, I would just say no. It’s all her fault.Your appointment to the Philharmonic was the subject of many news reports that focused on your gender. How did you feel about the attention?I didn’t like it because, first of all, the difficulty was not being female. The difficulty was studying for years and practicing and also being encouraged by your teachers and being encouraged by your colleagues.I felt there was undue attention on me, especially because the orchestra was so great and Leonard Bernstein, the music director, was so great. Bernstein would yell out once in awhile, “Bravo, Orin!” because I could count. And I felt so embarrassed. I felt my face turning red. He was trying to be nice and friendly and welcoming. But I felt that the other musicians would resent it because I was new. I mean, who was I? I was just a member of a section. I wasn’t anybody that important. But I was made important by the P.R. at the time, and I shrank from it.Much of the coverage at the time was sexist. A Time magazine article said that you were “as curvy as the double bass she plays.” A New York Times article called you “as comely a colleen as any orchestra could wish to have in its ranks.”It seems a little frivolous, doesn’t it? It doesn’t say anything about my background or experience or the fact that my teacher, Fred Zimmermann, was in the orchestra for 36 years before me, and that I had a tremendous working knowledge of the orchestra because I had heard every concert they played for two whole years when I worked as an usher at Carnegie Hall. I absorbed their style that way.In the 1960s and 1970s, the maestro Zubin Mehta opined that he did not think women should be in orchestras because they “become men.” He also said that female musicians were “just not as good at 60 as a man is at 60.” He was named the Philharmonic’s music director in 1976. How did you feel about his remarks?They were so unfounded and ridiculous and prejudiced. I thought it was laughable because there were so many talented women. One of the best musicians in the Philharmonic, although her name was very often not listed, was the pianist Harriet Wingreen, who could sight-read any score. And the concertmaster at New York City Ballet was Marilyn Wright. I remember the violinist Nathan Milstein came and sat in the front row to listen to her play the big violin solo in Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker.” And she didn’t flinch and played perfectly.“I felt I was welcomed in as a musician, as a member of the group. The feeling was ‘You’re a musician like us,’ except they were my heroes.”James Estrin/The New York TimesWhen you joined the Philharmonic, there were no dressing rooms for women. At the beginning of the 1970s, there were only five women in the orchestra. How did you feel you were treated in those early years?I felt I was welcomed in as a musician, as a member of the group. The feeling was “You’re a musician like us,” except they were my heroes. They were special people. I knew them by name. And now they were talking to me? I was very thrilled to be there.Some women in the Philharmonic have said that they struggled to be paid as much as their male counterparts and were offended when male colleagues referred to them as “the skirts.” Did you encounter those issues?I never heard that. They were too polite to say that to me, I think. Everybody has a different experience.How do you feel about the fact that women now make up roughly half of the New York Philharmonic?It’s an uncomfortable subject. It was when I joined, and it still is for me. I don’t think that it has anything to do with music. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t think that female composers are any better than men or any worse. I have friends in the orchestra of both genders.One of your fans was Bernstein, who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 and once described you as a “source of radiance in the orchestra.”I remember when Bernstein said he was going to take some time off to compose something special. I had just bought a book about Masada, the ancient fortress in Israel. I wrote him a letter saying, “I think I found a theme for you for an opera or maybe a cello concerto. And if you want, I can loan you my book.” And the next week at rehearsal he stops and he says: “Orin, thank you for your letter. It’s a very good idea.” And all the guys turned and looked at me and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m never going to write him another letter. Never.” And I never did. I was so embarrassed and humiliated.You say in the film that you chose the double bass because you liked being in the background. Was that a reaction to the fame of your parents, George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, who were both movie stars in the 1930s?That was definitely part of it. My brother and I would go out to dinner with my father and fans would come up and ask for his autograph. We were bitterly resentful of that because that took him away from us because he loved the attention. “I’d love to sign an autograph.” And we were then deprived of his attention for awhile and we were hurt by that. But you could see that he just reveled in it. He enjoyed the perks of fame and fortune. And my mother probably did, too — she was an actress onstage here in New York before she went to Hollywood. If you’re a bass player, you don’t expect that much attention. And that’s maybe one reason I gravitated to it.How do you feel about the future of classical music, as cultural institutions work to recover from the pandemic?I’m a little bit in despair because I see audiences not coming as well-informed as they used to be, and the programming is being watered down. I’m sorry to say, but not every composition is a great composition and the great compositions are still basically the lifeblood of an orchestra: Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Haydn, and so on. Sometimes I feel that the real great repertoire is neglected in favor of other things. Musicians need to play the classics.After you retired from the orchestra, you continued to teach and perform. How do you see the totality of your career?I just feel so lucky that I was able to do something that I loved all my life, and I was so lucky that I landed in my favorite orchestra. When my father would pick me and my brother up, he would ask, “Are you coming into church?” I would say, “No, I’m going to stay in the car and listen to the New York Philharmonic.” And that’s when I decided music was my religion.If I can convince my students to love music the way I’ve been lucky to love it — through their whole lives — and if it gives them the same joy it’s given me, that’s all I really would like. More

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    Review: Ligeti’s Fascinating Polyrhythm at the New York Phil

    The conductor Susanna Mälkki led a program centered on Ligeti’s Piano Concerto, propelled by the soloist Pierre-Laurent Aimard.On Thursday, the conductor Susanna Mälkki led the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall in an unusually cohesive program built around the bizarro sound world of Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. It was part of the orchestra’s centennial celebrations of the composer.Written in the 1980s, the piece draws its lifeblood from Ligeti’s remarkable rhythmic sense. The piano soloist works out asymmetrical accents from interlocking metrical units while also maintaining composure in scales and running 16th notes. On the surface, there’s a high degree of independence among the wailing strings, fluorescent woodwinds and intricate percussion, but as Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the Philharmonic’s soloist, recently told The New York Times: “It’s a work that renews polyphony through fascinating polyrhythm.” The chaos has a way of coming together if a listener stops resisting it.The concerto seems frozen between states, its harmonic center melting away without ever evaporating, but in Mälkki’s expert hands, it could sound almost traditional in structure. In the first movement, she lined up emphatic pizzicati with the accents that Aimard plucked out of the solo part. In the second, a siren crescendoed into a blaring signal whistle to herald the piano’s violent re-entry — a satisfying climax built from unusual means. The music seemed to levitate with the centrifugal force of rampaging bongos. The strange postludes that close out the second movement (scored for Chromonica) and the fifth (a duet for xylophone and piano) were gripping afterthoughts.The crisp acoustic of the recently renovated hall enhanced Ligeti’s rhythmic vivacity. The orchestra sounded warm and precise, with a tone that was full but not fatty. In the Lento e deserto, the work’s only slow movement, the lonely yowlings of piccolo, bassoon and slide whistle formed a tender yet humorous trio.Mälkki folded the piano into the texture like a firing engine, enabling Aimard, a longtime friend and champion of the composer, to propel the piece. Aimard, something of an elegant mathematician, handled polyrhythms with a through line and sense of ease. Pianistic effects, like scales, crunchy chord clusters and running 16th notes with multiple voicings, had unfussy finesse. The “leggiero, non legato” (“light, but not connected”) passage in the Presto luminoso had a discrete, glockenspiel-like tone that didn’t turn percussive. Aimard and Mälkki were unable to reach the finish line in the Presto in three minutes or less, as Ligeti requests in the score, but it was nonetheless a bravura performance.The Ligeti crowned the first half of the program, which was themed around Hungarian composers. The Budapest-born musician Jeno Lisztes opened the concert with a dazzling solo arrangement of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 for cimbalom, a traditional Hungarian instrument in the dulcimer family that utilizes a pedal mechanism and mallets that resemble cotton-padded bar spoons. His performance had melancholy grace and a rollicking climax that left me wondering where this symphony of notes was coming from. In Bartók’s brief Romanian Folk Dances, the orchestra sounded sturdy and grounded.After intermission, Mälkki and the orchestra leaned heavily into the grotesquerie that characterizes half of the images that Mussorgsky depicts in “Pictures at an Exhibition.” “Gnomus” had a dangerous agility, both aggressive and surprising, and “Bydlo” was moody and theatrical. The brasses, summoning deep, forbidding power, made a meal of “Catacombae.” The penultimate movement, “The Hut on Hen’s Legs” — and not Mälkki’s muscular take on the magnificent “The Great Gate of Kiev” — provided the piece’s true finale. The hut, which houses a witch of Russian folklore, lurched in gleeful, monstrous ways as its inhabitant sniffed out young children to devour.Mälkki and the players dug into the fantastical elements of “Pictures” as if possessed, almost as though they couldn’t shake off the Ligeti — and after such a tremendous performance, neither could I.New York Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna MälkkiThrough Saturday at David Geffen Hall; nyphil.org More

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    Celebrating the Music of Ligeti: ‘The Incarnation of a Free Spirit’

    The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a friend and collaborator of Ligeti, is helping the New York Philharmonic observe the centennial of his birth.If you are going to salute the composer Gyorgy Ligeti, you might as well ask one of his most dedicated and perceptive collaborators to lend a hand.Ligeti, who died in 2006, and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard were more than artistic partners, more than a composer and a sympathetic interpreter; they were friends. So the New York Philharmonic can surely have found no more suitable a soloist than Aimard to help observe the centennial of Ligeti’s birth.“Ligeti was certainly one of the most seminal composers of the latter half of the 20th century,” said Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic. “It’s important, and an honor, for the Philharmonic to celebrate his contributions in collaboration with one of his greatest champions, Pierre-Laurent Aimard.”And the Philharmonic, which began its Ligeti tribute a couple of weeks ago with a program featuring the “Concert Romanesc” and “Mifiso la Sodo” under the conductor David Robertson, is going to keep Aimard busy.On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Aimard, 66, will join Susanna Mälkki at David Geffen Hall for performances of Ligeti’s Piano Concerto. He has recorded that work three times, if you count a fascinating documentary he made with Pierre Boulez and Ensemble Intercontemporain.But if anything, Aimard’s relationship with Ligeti’s formidable, witty Études is closer still; many of them were written with him in mind. For a Saturday Nightcap concert, Aimard and a fellow pianist, Joachim Kühn, will draw links from selected Études to jazz. And on Tuesday, back at Geffen, Aimard will connect the Études and other works to Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy. The Philharmonic, in addition, is mounting an archival exhibition that includes manuscripts lent to it for the occasion.Aimard talked in a recent interview about his relationship with Ligeti, who lost most of his family during the Holocaust and fled Hungary during the uprising of 1956, and offered some reflections on the composer’s place in music today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Take me back to when you and Ligeti met, in the 1980s. What struck you about him?I met him at a rehearsal of “Aventures” and “Nouvelles Aventures,” one of his most eccentric compositions, and I was struck by both his freedom and imagination, and his wish to realize every sound product in the most achieved way. This mix of inner freedom and care in craftsmanship was extraordinary. He was always inspiring in the way he spoke about his musical visions, with astonishing metaphors, ideas, suggestions, and at the same time he was very demanding, always fighting for quality.Gyorgy Ligeti, left, with Aimard. The two met in the 1980s and remained close until the composer’s death in 2006.Louise DuchesneauLigeti came to maturity at a particularly turbulent time in Hungarian history. Did his music have a particular message, to you?Which music doesn’t carry a message? First of all, all the discoveries, an extraordinary era of discoveries in science, all possible fields of knowledge. Then, it was also a period of great discovery for artists. He was in contact with everything that was new in any artistic territory and would absorb that as well. But also, he was a part of the history of his century, and was part of it quite dramatically, quite tragically. This part, this dark dimension, was always in him.Some of his music has that sense of tragedy to it, but also a sense of humor.Definitely. It was music that never fell into pathos, because he was too attracted by life. So, all the antidotes against pathos were there, including humor, and sometimes dark humor.It’s hard to speak generally about influence, but in what ways does Ligeti’s music have an influence on composers today?He belonged to a generation of avant-gardists who opened hundreds of doors, and consequently, yes, he influenced generations of very different creators. His music is not avant-garde anymore; pages have been turned in between. Even if our era is not an avant-garde era artistically at all, on the contrary, he is an extraordinary, living part of the past. But the past can still face us with very appropriate questions, I think.What kinds of questions does Ligeti ask?Well, all the destabilizing ones that he does in his creations.During your time with the New York Philharmonic, you are putting Ligeti in the context of folk music, jazz and the classical tradition. Where did that extraordinary range in his music come from?He was an open-minded man who loved and shared independence, paid for that at a very high price in his life, but lived like that on a daily basis. For me, he was the incarnation of a free spirit, really. One could never manipulate him. He would never follow models; he would create all the time.All the Études are so different in their own way, yet so characteristically him.Well, they are different because he had a lot of fantasy, and was interested in many layers of our past and our present, and consequently incorporated a lot in his music. I don’t think there is a dramaturgy that doesn’t work among them. If so, he would have left it in the wastepaper basket.Do you have a favorite among the Études? Is there one that you think is particularly characteristic of your work with him, or just of him?Of course, these possible favorites change; the more I work on them the more I discover the richness, the way how he could balance and compose, extremely carefully, each identity: identity of textures, identity of movements, of polyrhythms. I’m not a preacher of this music, I’m an interpreter, so I try to have the closest and best possible contact with each of the pieces I try to make present onstage.How would you describe the Piano Concerto for somebody who does not know it?I would avoid describing it too briefly, the work is so rich. It’s a work that renews polyphony through fascinating polyrhythm, and a piece in which his own fantasy reinvents the relationship between the soloist and the group of players in five different ways. There are five movements in the piece.Do you think of it as a kind of chamber concerto?It’s a chamber concerto with highly virtuosic soloists, a bunch of them, because the part for each instrumentalist is challenging. So, this is, let’s say, for a group of kamikaze.It hasn’t been played by the New York Philharmonic for seven years, and only twice in the history of the orchestra. Do you think that is because of that difficulty?It is true that it is challenging, and I’m not the only one who has played this piece who thinks that, in terms of challenging concertos, this one is really at the top. I don’t think that the difficulty is a problem; the difficulty is a challenge. The question mark is more, I think, understanding the language. When a new language appears, it takes time to be absorbed. For instance, a great majority of my young colleagues play some, if not several, of the Ligeti Études. So, it has taken a bit of time — but not so much. More