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      Jaap van Zweden to Lead French Orchestra After New York Philharmonic

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      The conductor, whose tenure in New York ends this summer, will begin a five-year term at the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in 2026.The conductor Jaap van Zweden does not leave his position as the New York Philharmonic’s music director until later this summer.But his post-New York plans are already taking shape. In January, van Zweden officially began a five-year term as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director. And on Tuesday, he announced another new job: He will become music director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, a French radio orchestra in Paris, for a five-year term starting in 2026.Van Zweden, 63, succeeds Mikko Franck, who will step down next year after a decade on the podium. Van Zweden will take over as music director designate next year, the orchestra said in a news release, leading several weeks of concerts and a European tour.Van Zweden, who got his start as concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1979, when he was 19, said he was eager to once again be part of a European ensemble.“I could not be happier about inaugurating this relationship with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France,” he said in a statement. “In Paris, I can experience anew the musical colors familiar to me from Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw, another great European orchestra.”Van Zweden made his debut with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France last year, conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and a violin concerto by John Adams. The orchestra’s players said they felt an immediate connection.“It was clear from the first rehearsal that we had found our new music director,” Jean-Pierre Odasso, president of the musicians’ council, said in a statement, calling van Zweden’s appointment “a real joy for the musicians.”The orchestra said that van Zweden planned to promote new works during his tenure, with a special focus on contemporary pieces by French composers. He will lead his first European tour with the ensemble in October 2025.Van Zweden, who is from Amsterdam, came to New York in 2018, only to have his tenure interrupted by the pandemic.In 2021, he made the surprise announcement that he would depart New York, saying the pandemic had made him rethink his life and priorities. His six-year tenure will be the shortest of any Philharmonic music director since Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor who led the orchestra for six seasons in the 1970s. More

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      Review: A Case for Understated Majesty at the Philharmonic

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      A new piano concerto written for Emanuel Ax, and an old symphony by Rachmaninoff, reward close listening in a program conducted by Eun Sun Kim.I always wince when people say they like classical music, “but not the new stuff.”Comments like that are not only shortsighted — the old stuff was, in its time, of course new and often radical — but they also don’t take into account how varied contemporary music is, and how much of it is actually quite easy to love.Take Anders Hillborg’s second piano concerto, “The MAX Concerto,” which had its local premiere with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday. Programmed somewhat arbitrarily between works by Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, it was more entertaining than either of them, and just as well crafted.First performed in October in San Francisco, the concerto acknowledges the lineage of its genre with playfulness and reverence, and showcases Emanuel Ax, the soloist for whom it was written, by matching and pushing his brand of modest, underrated virtuosity. Likable without being eager to please, thrilling without shameless dazzle, it is, like Ax, enjoyable simply because it’s excellent.And, crucially, Hillborg’s concerto works regardless of how familiar a listener is with his music, or any classical music for that matter. You could be aware of the piece’s form — its nine evocatively titled sections, performed as a single, 21-minute movement — or smile at “MAX,” a contraction of “Manny Ax.” You could pick up on the opening passage’s nod to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, or a later suggestion of Bach. Or you could just sit back and sense, intuitively, the genial majesty and pleasure coursing through it all.One of the great nice guys in music, Ax is a pianist who, over his five-decade career, seems to have made no enemies while sitting quietly, comfortably near the top of his field, whether as chamber partner to Yo-Yo Ma or as a champion of contemporary works premiering a new concerto by John Adams — “Century Rolls,” whose section “Manny’s Gym” is one of the single most beautiful movements written in our time.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside the Lunar New Year Galas Hosted by the New York Philharmonic and 88rising

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      88rising’s Moonrise GalaOn Saturday evening in Los Angeles, the Lunar New Year celebrations continued as Hollywood’s Milk Studios was transformed for the inaugural Moonrise Gala by 88rising, the pan-Asian music collective and record label.Like 88rising, which helps Asian artists find mainstream success in the West, the event was focused on highlighting pioneering Asian performers, past and present.The night’s honorees spanned contemporary artists like the musicians Anderson .Paak, Jackson Wang and NIKI; the “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” director Destin Daniel Cretton; and influential figures like the ’90s dance-pop singer Jocelyn Enriquez and the Bay Area turntablist group Invisibl Skratch Piklz.“We’re just going to celebrate people that have really unique stories to tell,” Sean Miyashiro, 88rising’s founder, said. The collective also has plans to release music and videos with the night’s honorees, including Ms. Enriquez and Invisibl Skratch Piklz.Attendees entered through the venue’s arched red tunnel, dripping with fringe, into a space outfitted with dangling LED pendant lights.Before the ceremony, guests were offered small plates of Wagyu beef dishes including sliders, curry and kebabs. After brief remarks and performances from some of the honorees, they were each presented with a bespoke medal housed in an illuminated velvet-lined jewelry box designed by the New York jeweler Anna Kikue.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

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      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Young Artists Make Back-to-Back Debuts at the Philharmonic

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      The conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s two-week Philharmonic residency included the arrivals of the violinist Esther Yoo and the pianist Bruce Liu.For the past two weeks, the New York Philharmonic’s podium has been occupied by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a Finnish conductor who with a little spontaneity and a lot of sprezzatura offers a jolt to whatever orchestra he encounters.But that’s not what has made these two weeks interesting.Rouvali, after all, led multiple programs last season, making a long-awaited return after his debut in late 2019. Having proven himself as a guest worth keeping around, he has become comfortably part of the orchestra. His latest residency, though, has been more notable for the appearances of other artists: the violinist Esther Yoo and the much-hyped pianist Bruce Liu, both in their debuts, who with any luck will be just as present as Rouvali in the years to come.Liu’s Philharmonic debut at David Geffen Hall on Thursday followed a stop last season at Carnegie Hall, where he performed works by Chopin in a nod to his winning the top prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2021. As if to signal that he wasn’t at all nervous about the sudden spotlight, at Carnegie he blazed past the concert’s two-hour running time, returning to the stage for no fewer than seven encores.There was some showmanship, too, in his appearance with the Philharmonic, as the soloist in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” In the opening, his large hands, redolent of the composer’s, sprang high above the keyboard, more than was necessary; but as he settled into the performance, mannerisms like that cooled, and Liu revealed the depth behind his theatricality.He played with feline agility and lightness of touch. But, as a cat can be lethally powerful when necessary, he can also take on a muscularity that turns sensitive phrasing into tintinnabular resonance. That nimble versatility also made for fluid shifts between limpid precision and alluring rubato, between concerto virtuosity and the recital-like intimacy with which he opened the famous 18th Variation. (Liu demonstrated something similar in the pairing he made with his encores: crowd-pleasing dazzle in Liszt’s “La Campanella” and meditative warmth in Alexander Siloti’s B-minor transcription of Bach’s Prelude in E minor.)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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Concerts Reveal a Dramatic Shift Between Mahler Symphonies

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      Over consecutive evenings, the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra performed Mahler’s works on programs with star sopranos.Gustav Mahler had a near-death experience between the composition of his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. They were separated by a gulf that listeners could plunge into this week in consecutive concerts by the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.The Fourth was the third in a trilogy of symphonies that featured vocal settings of poetry from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” a folk collection that inspired Mahler, and it ends with a vision of heaven articulated by a soprano with childlike purity. The Fifth — which followed a hemorrhage that left Mahler bleeding out and on the verge of death — is a huge, bifurcated work, magnificently twisted in the Funeral March that opens it and cosmically buoyant in the finale.At David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, Gianandrea Noseda led the Philharmonic in a performance of the Fourth that sidestepped its intriguing, hectoring mystery and embraced the more conventional aspects of its Romanticism. The cellos were broad and sinuous, and the violins sighed and shone in big, roomy gestures. The abrasive sound of a scordatura violin colors the second movement, but the concertmaster, Frank Huang, slyly played it straight, letting the instrument’s fiendish, squirrelly sound speak for itself.The work’s emotional catharsis comes in the second half, and here Noseda jarred his audience awake with the Mahlerian climaxes that have a way of shaking listeners out of a daze — a shock, but an affirming one. Golda Schultz’s sparkly soprano was beautifully suited to the vocal solo in the final movement. Her absolute optimism was seemingly untouched by earthly matters. Noseda didn’t exactly reconcile the solo and the jangly orchestral interludes that separate its verses, but the Fourth can be impenetrable in that way.Golda Schultz, left, as the soprano soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda.Chris LeeDespite its elaborate structure of five movements in three sections and its prodigious length of 70 minutes, the Fifth is in some ways the more accessible piece, with its subjects of mortality and the good pain that comes with making oneself vulnerable to love. With the Fifth, Mahler moved away from programmatic or narrative conceptions of his work, but it’s incredibly tempting to map his autobiography to the piece: a macabre dream of his own death in the funeral march, and a love letter to his future wife, Alma, in the aching loveliness of the slow movement, the famous Adagietto.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jaap van Zweden, New York Phil Maestro, Takes Podium in Seoul

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      The conductor officially began his tenure as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra’s new music director, months before he is to step down in New York.In New York, Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, is preparing to say goodbye: Farewell concerts under the banner “Celebrate Jaap!” are planned over the next few months before his brief, pandemic-interrupted tenure ends this summer.But in Seoul, where van Zweden officially began a five-year term as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director this month, a new chapter is taking shape. Last week he led sold-out performances of Beethoven and Mahler with the ensemble, his first concerts as music director.“We had this feeling of trying to go to the next level,” van Zweden said in an interview from Seoul.Van Zweden was greeted as a celebrity, his face plastered on advertisements that declared the start of a new era. Fans snapped photos in front of his portrait in the lobby of the Seoul Arts Center. His inaugural concerts drew high-profile figures in culture and politics, including the mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, who appointed van Zweden, and the former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak.Critics praised van Zweden’s intensity and focus. The Korea Economic Daily, one of the country’s large business newspapers, said his music was as “impactful and engaging as an IMAX movie.” Another writer said he was “elegant and skilled, as if dancing.”Taking a snap at the Seoul Arts Center with an image of van Zweden and the South Korean phenom Yunchan Lim.Chang W. LeeWe 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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      Hilary Hahn Announced as Avery Fisher Prize Winner at Philharmonic Concert

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      The star violinist’s appearance as artist in residence included an announcement that she had received the $100,000 Avery Fisher Prize.After the concerto, after the encore, there was still more business to take care of when Hilary Hahn appeared with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday.She returned to the stage of David Geffen Hall, joined by Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s former leader, and Gary Ginstling, its current one. They had an announcement to make: Hahn — at 44 a star violinist for four decades — had been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, a $100,000 honor that rewards the good citizens of classical music who have complemented artistic excellence with lasting contributions to the field.Those contributions are varied but often affirm the vitality of the art form. The violinist Midori, who won in 2001, tours like a roving artist in residence, working with young musicians in small towns far from music capitals like Boston and New York; the flutist Claire Chase, the 2017 winner, is a passionate educator at work on a decades-long project to modernize her instrument’s repertoire; and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma (1978) — well, what isn’t he doing?Even as a teenager, Hahn was much more than a prodigy. She has always made herself accessible to fans, whether entertaining the longest of autograph lines or letting the public in on her practice sessions on social media. (If you come across #100daysofpractice on Instagram or TikTok, she started that.) She has been a prolific commissioner who insists on recording the works she premieres. And her community engagement, like her “Bring Your Own Baby” concerts for parents and their infants, is as endearing as it is genuinely valuable.If only there were more than just a taste of all this at the Philharmonic, where Hahn is the artist in residence this season. Thursday’s performance was the first in a series that will include one more subscription program, an evening of Bach solo works and a Nightcap show with the New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck.Hahn has done much more in the same post at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where she has been in residence since the 2021-22 season. There, she has collaborated with local youth initiatives, and revived her “Bring Your Own Baby” concerts. Her encore from Thursday, Steven Banks’s “Through My Mother’s Eyes,” was written for her time in Chicago.At the Philharmonic, we just get Hahn the performer. Which, to be fair, is quite something. Her account of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto exemplified the golden-age richness and astonishing technique that have long made her a standout in a crowded field. She handles her instrument like a great soprano handles her voice, with muscular lyricism and a luminously penetrating sound capable of reaching the farthest seats at a whisper.There was a sense of that deceptive softness in a whistling trill near the end of the piece, and as she generously partnered with members of the orchestra: her strumming paired with the wandering melody of Anthony McGill’s clarinet; her muted twinkle adding new color to the opening theme as it flowed from Robert Langevin’s flute.Elsewhere in the concerto, the orchestra plays a largely supportive role. And it was sensitively balanced yet sufficiently distinct under the baton of Jakub Hrusa, a guest conductor who tends to tame and enliven the Philharmonic’s forceful sound, with a feeling for dramatic shape that befits his recent appointment to the podium of the Royal Opera House in London.The ensemble was both larger and more showcased in the evening’s opening work, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade,” from 1898, which had its Philharmonic debut on Thursday. Some in the audience might have been unfamiliar with this chronically underprogrammed composer, but his alluringly chromatic score had much to please them: the lush orchestration of Brahms and Romantic gestures of Tchaikovsky, tightly packaged with the breathlessness of a Dvorak concert overture.Naturally more of a showcase for the players, though, was Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, a beloved reimagining of the Baroque concerto grosso for the 20th century. In a work obsessively precise in its construction — a love letter to sonata and arch forms that unfurls as a roll call of virtuosity — the Philharmonic and Hrusa were freely organic and sounded revelrous, with smiles accompanying the parodic passages of the fourth-movement Intermezzo interrotto.It was touching for the Bartok to follow the announcement of Hahn’s award. Because while workaday musicians might not have the glamour of a star soloist, they are no less essential to the ecosystem. Not for nothing does McGill, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinet, have an Avery Fisher Prize, too.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More