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      Review: The Philharmonic’s Maestro Revels in the Classics

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      Jaap van Zweden returned to the orchestra for the first time since October with a conservative lineup of works by Wagner, Beethoven and Brahms.With the new year, it’s the homestretch for Jaap van Zweden’s six-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, which ends this spring.But even on their way out, chief conductors don’t lead their orchestras that much. Before this week, van Zweden hadn’t been on the Philharmonic’s podium since early October, and after Sunday he won’t return until mid-March.So Thursday’s concert at David Geffen Hall was an island in a sea of guest batons. And it was about as van Zweden-esque as a program could be, consisting of nothing but standards: the kind of music that this maestro most relishes, and what he was brought to New York to enforce discipline in.These days, if a major orchestra is going to play classic repertoire like Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, as the Philharmonic did on Thursday, it tends to precede it with a short contemporary piece in the opening slot. Window dressing, maybe, but it’s become the norm.So it was almost radical to instead give that position to the Act I Prelude from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” probably the most-played chestnut of the evening. (For what it’s worth, audiences don’t seem to mind: The weekend’s run of four performances — rather than the usual three — is all but sold out.)The Wagner turned out to be the weakest point in an otherwise very fine concert. This was a flowing, not stodgy, take on the “Meistersinger” prelude, bringing the winds and brasses to the fore, their lines audible even in passages that usually spotlight the rich strings. While the sound wasn’t heavy, especially at loud dynamics it still emphasized the unpleasant way that, in densely massed music, the stark lucidity of Geffen Hall’s acoustics can tip into brittle blare rather than warm blend.This was less of a problem for the pared-down ensemble in the Beethoven concerto, though both here and in the Brahms, there was sleekness in the high strings without meaty heft; I kept wanting more depth to the violin sound. But there was considerable spirit and some evocative hushed playing. Again and again in the concerto, van Zweden cast a dreamlike glow without losing rhythmic tightness or momentum.And the performance boasted an immaculate soloist in Rudolf Buchbinder, nearing 80 and playing with patrician reserve and clarity, neither indulgent nor detached. At the start of the second movement, his tone was poignantly wounded in the face of orchestral aggression; in the finale, he was the ensemble’s graceful partner.The Brahms symphony was also clean and straightforward: precisely done, its tempos reasonable. The second movement developed eloquently from muted and funereal to noble and grand before a hearty third, and a fourth that was more sober and reflective than raging. This wasn’t a thrilling performance, but it was a considered and satisfying one.And it was part of a trend. When van Zweden last led the Philharmonic, in October, on the program was Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. In those pieces and on Thursday, I didn’t feel the rigidly tense, mannered, punchy quality that has marred some of his performances. This Beethoven and Brahms were strong without being overbearing, shaped but with room to breathe.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      What to Know About ‘Maestro’: A Guide to Bradley Cooper’s Bernstein Biopic

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      Now on Netflix, the movie tracks the life of the American conductor and composer and his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan.Pop quiz: Who wrote the score for Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”?Trick question: Bernstein. But you might not realize it, or learn of some of his more lasting accomplishments (“West Side Story” erasure!), even after watching the entire film, which focuses on the personal life of the prodigiously talented musician.Which is to say, the film — which Cooper directed and starred in, and which is now streaming on Netflix — does not hand-hold. It assumes some basic familiarity with one of America’s most storied conductors and composers. Here’s a guide to help you get up to speed.His careerWhat is Bernstein best known for?One of the rare virtuosos to compose for musical theater, write classical music and conduct august bodies like the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein is probably best remembered as the composer of the 1957 musical “West Side Story.”The Manhattan-set tale of urban gang warfare in New York City, based on “Romeo & Juliet,” includes standards like “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty” and the aching, wistful “Maria.” The classic show, a collaboration with Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, and Stephen Sondheim, who penned the lyrics, won two Tony Awards in its original incarnation.In his day, Bernstein was known first and foremost as an animated, passionate conductor. After his spectacular fill-in debut at the Philharmonic at age 25 in 1943 — on just a few hours’ notice, because the scheduled guest conductor fell ill — Bernstein would be affiliated with the orchestra for four decades and conduct symphonies around the world.He also wrote classical music, including three symphonies, “Jeremiah,” “The Age of Anxiety” and “Kaddish,” and made the classical realm accessible to ordinary Americans through his Young People’s Concerts. Those televised lectures, which ran on CBS for 14 years, covered a broad range of subjects including humor in music, and the composers Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.What is Tanglewood?Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its training academy in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, is where Bernstein studied with Serge Koussevitzky, then the director of the ensemble. The two met in 1940, when Koussevitzky selected a 22-year-old Bernstein as one of three inaugural conducting fellows for the Berkshire Music Center, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center.Bernstein went on to teach and perform there nearly every summer for 50 years, becoming the head of orchestral conducting at Tanglewood after Koussevitzky died in 1951. In 1990, Bernstein led the final performance of his life there — a gripping account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.How much of the film’s score is Bernstein’s music?That cue you hear when Bernstein finds out he’ll be making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic? That’s from “On the Waterfront,” the 1954 Marlon Brando drama for which Bernstein wrote the music. That spiky, horn-filled composition that signals tension when Bernstein and a male lover arrive at the family’s Connecticut home? That’s the prologue from “West Side Story.”In fact, most of the music you hear was written by Bernstein. (Also see if you can spot classical excerpts from his ballets “Facsimile” and “Fancy Free,” his opera “A Quiet Place,” and parts of his second and third symphonies.)His personal lifeWas Bernstein gay or bisexual?Though he was married to his wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), for 26 years, he had numerous relationships — with both men and women — before and during their marriage, and after her death in 1978.The film focuses on two of them — his dalliance with the clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer), whose bottom Bernstein slaps at the beginning of the film, and the musician Tom Cothran (Gideon Glick), whom he steals kisses with at a party and brings to his Connecticut home.What was society’s attitude toward gay people at the time?Anti-gay prejudice was rampant in America in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Lavender Scare — a fear that homosexual people had infiltrated the federal government and were a threat to national security — led to the dismissal of gay and lesbian employees, and those assumed to be, en masse. Gay, lesbian and transgender people — particularly public figures — faced intense pressure to conceal their identities, and Bernstein worried that the public revelation of his sexual orientation would hurt his conducting prospects.Did Montealegre know Bernstein was gay or bisexual when she married him?Yes, according to a letter she wrote to him the year after they were married, which the couple’s children discovered after her death. “You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote, adding later, “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr.” She went on to tell him, “Let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession.”Was Bernstein open about his affairs with men?At first, he was discreet, heeding Montealegre’s request to not embarrass her publicly. But, as “Maestro” shows, he became “sloppy” later or, rather, decided that he no longer wanted to hide what he viewed as a fundamental part of himself amid society’s changing attitudes.In 1976, he briefly left Montealegre to live openly with his boyfriend, Cothran, though he returned to her a year later when she learned she had lung cancer and cared for her until she died at age 56.What did Bernstein say about his sexuality?Nothing, at least, publicly. But privately, he suffered through years of therapy, apparently in the hope that he could be “cured” of his attraction to men. That desire lasted a lifetime: “I have been engaged in an imaginary life with Felicia,” he wrote in a letter to his sister, Shirley, from Israel in 1950, “having her by my side on the beach as a shockingly beautiful Yemenite boy passes.”Did Bernstein love his wife?Bernstein was “a gay man who got married,” his “West Side Story” collaborator Arthur Laurents once said in response to the assumption that Bernstein, who had three children with Montealegre, was bisexual. “He wasn’t conflicted about his sexual orientation at all. He was just gay.”But what is clear, from their children’s memories and from Bernstein’s own letters, is that he and Montealegre had an abiding affection for one another, and that their relationship was built on tenderness and mutual respect.“Bernstein absolutely loved her — there was no question about that,” Paul R. Laird, the author of “Leonard Bernstein,” a 2018 biography, recently told Time magazine. “It was as sincere a marriage as you’re going to get between a male homosexual and a woman at a time when a lot of male homosexuals married women.”Bernstein’s oldest daughter, Jamie, has spoken about her parents’ friendship. “They were really great friends, and probably that counts for the most in the long run, that they could still make each other laugh,” she said in a 1997 PBS interview.How did Bernstein die?He had received an emphysema diagnosis in his mid-20s — he would struggle with addiction to cigarettes and alcohol for most of his life — and died on Oct. 14, 1990, at 72, of a heart attack caused by lung failure.He was often depressed in his later years, intimidated that he would be best remembered as a conductor, resigned to the fact that he could never live up to the success of “West Side Story,” and guilty about his wife’s death from cancer, which he held himself responsible for. More

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      Anthony Parnther Conducts ‘Black Panther’ in New York

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      Anthony Parnther has a flourishing career as a classical conductor who also works in the fast-paced world of commercial entertainment.Anthony Parnther has a job that routinely takes him to fantastic places. Parnther, 42, makes his New York Philharmonic conducting debut this week. His destination? Wakanda: With a wave of his hand, he’ll evoke lush jungles and shimmering citadels as the film “Black Panther” screens overhead.Back home in Los Angeles in January, Parnther will pass through idealistic college classrooms and anxious laboratories, headed to a date with destiny in Los Alamos, when he conducts the sweeping score to “Oppenheimer.”But in a recent video interview, Parnther was finding his way to someplace quite different: Whoville.“I’ll be very honest with you,” he said in a video interview. “I’m sitting here trying to rapidly memorize the words to ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.’”He was cramming for a Christmas concert with the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra, where he has served as music director since 2019.“I could tell you that I’m sitting here studying the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto, which we’re doing on this concert,” he said. “But I’m actually more worried about the Grinch, because I’m the soloist.”Posts at San Bernardino and the Southeast Symphony Orchestra — a Los Angeles ensemble that is one of the nation’s oldest primarily Black orchestras — allow Parnther to explore and expand the repertoire. An enthusiastic communicator, he talks his audiences through his programs regularly, so singing isn’t that big of a stretch.Parnther conducting the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra in its 2022 Carnegie Hall Debut.J. Adam Fenster/University of RochesterBut his “Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer” engagements shed light on a less visible aspect of his growing career, which has included appearances with major ensembles, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Even if you don’t know Parnther by name, you’ve likely heard his conducting — on film soundtracks like “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Turning Red”; television series like “Fargo” and “Only Murders in the Building”; or video games, including “League of Legends” and “Guild Wars.” If you’ve streamed “Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl,” a concert performance of the animated Disney film featuring the original voice cast, you’ve seen him in action.Ludwig Göransson, who composed the scores for “Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer,” views Parnther as an invaluable collaborator. In a video interview from Los Angeles, he said: “If something doesn’t sound right, I’ll hit him up on the podium and we’ll talk about things — how to adjust a couple of notes or change a voicing — and he can immediately relate that information to the musicians.”One reason he works so effectively with studio musicians, Göransson says, is because he emerged from their ranks. For Parnther, working with Göransson on the “Star Wars” TV spinoffs “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett” was especially meaningful. As an eighth grader in Norfolk, Virginia, he learned his middle-school band would play music from “Star Wars” on a coveted trip to the theme park Kings Dominion. Thumbing through a musical reference book, he flipped past “A” and the accordion — it brought up unfortunate associations with “The Lawrence Welk Show” — before landing on “B” and the bassoon. He took up the instrument as his way to tag along.Parnther, the son of Jamaican and Samoan academics, was exposed to gospel in the Baptist church, but it was soundtracks by John Williams that sparked his interest in music. The timing wasn’t ideal: In high school, when he decided to pursue music professionally, his family was living in public housing after losing their home in a fire; his mother was fighting cancer.She bought her son the best bassoon she could afford, a Schreiber S91 Prestige: not state of the art, but a durable instrument.“She had to literally make the choice between paying the electric bill and making the payments on my instrument,” Parnther said. “She decided to make the payments on my instrument, so there was a fire lit in me: I wanted to repay my mother for the sacrifices that she made.”Parnther went on to earn music degrees from Northwestern and Yale. He then took a position at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn., gaining confidence as a conductor while earning a music education degree.His tenacity and ambition paid off. The kid who had been inspired by “Star Wars” to pick up the bassoon would go on to play his hardy Schreiber for Williams in the soundtracks for the last three feature films in the series. He also played bassoon on sessions with high-profile pop artists, including Beyoncé, Rihanna and Snoop Dogg. (When his instrument was stolen from his car in 2020, its theft and recovery made headlines.)“The conductor of the future, in order for the orchestra to remain relevant,” Parnther says, “will have to find a way to center the orchestra and not the genre.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesHis work as a versatile, open-minded conductor brought him attention beyond the studios. In addition to his San Bernardino and Southeast Symphony posts, in 2020 Parnther was named conductor of the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra, an elite annual aggregation of classical musicians of African descent, whose Chicago debut he will lead in April.Conducting also brought unanticipated collaborations — with the singer John Legend, the hip-hop producer Metro Boomin and the metal band Avenged Sevenfold, among others. Parnther hasn’t lured those artists into his concert-music realm yet, but it’s not out of the question.“The conductor of the future, in order for the orchestra to remain relevant, will have to find a way to center the orchestra and not the genre,” he said. “Sometimes that means you mix genres on the same concert, if there’s a story line or a relevant through line.”And the skills he’s picked up in the fast-paced world of commercial entertainment have proved transferable. Engaged last year to record “The Central Park Five,” Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, with the Long Beach Opera in just two days, Parnther took the company into a Glendale film studio. He used a metronomic click track and other tools of the trade to maximize efficiency.“The click track lends a certain precision,” Davis said in a video interview, “but there are times when I want a little more flexibility to let the music breathe” — crucial in sections involving improvisation. “It was a great experience, having the tightness of the music, yet also allowing space for the creative expression of individual musicians.”Parnther has used his platforms and rising profile to champion Black composers like Davis and Adolphus Hailstork, while nurturing artists who straddle worlds as he does, including Kris Bowers, Chanda Dancy and Tamar-kali. But his Hollywood affiliations have their own perks.“I’m not a famous conductor,” Parnther said, “but I have been picked out in so many public spaces as the conductor from ‘Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl.’” He’s seen a video of his symphonic concert with Metro Boomin rack up over six million views on YouTube. “And a comment that I ran across is like, Oh my God, this is awesome — but wait a minute, is that the same conductor from ‘Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl’?” More

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      Trinity Church’s ‘Messiah’ Is Still the Gold Standard

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      The church’s urgent and eloquent version of Handel’s classic oratorio remains an inspired communal rite.The holidays are a time for traditions — and for doubting them. Is Grandma’s ham drier than you thought when you were young? Is the movie the whole family watches every year maybe a little offensive?For me, the question on Wednesday was whether Trinity Wall Street’s version of Handel’s “Messiah” would be as good — as bracing, as riveting, as disturbing and consoling — as I remembered.Seeing Trinity’s “Messiah” for the first time, in 2011, showed me the galvanic possibilities of this classic work more than any recording or live outing I’d ever heard. This wasn’t the usual, quaintly sleepy Christmas routine, but a seething, electrically direct and dramatic enactment of an oratorio that both describes and calls for transformation: “And we shall be changed,” its crucial line promises.It had been a good few years since I’d heard the church’s Handel. But when people would ask me for a “Messiah” recommendation among the many options that pop up in New York each December, I always replied with a single word: Trinity.This “Messiah” long achieved its exhilarating quality because of an exceptional in-house choir and period-instrument orchestra — and because of Julian Wachner, Trinity’s director of music and the arts, who led the church’s medieval-to-modern music program with energy and ambition.Early last year, Wachner was fired by Trinity before the church completed an investigation into an allegation of sexual misconduct against him, but after it found he had “otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position.” (He has denied the allegations.)His departure left one of the jewels of the city’s artistic and spiritual scenes leaderless until early this month, when the church announced that Melissa Attebury would be its next director of music. For almost two years, Trinity has depended on staff and guest conductors, including, for this year’s Handel, Ryan James Brandau.And what a relief to find that Trinity’s “Messiah” is still burning and gladdening, vivid in both darkness and light. If Brandau’s account lacked some of Wachner’s charged, even savage intensity, that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The performance on Wednesday added some elegance to the urgent, heartfelt directness, the emphasis on communication, that has been Trinity’s standard in this piece.The soaringly resonant acoustics of Trinity Church smoothed some of the choir’s bite into airy creaminess, but the passion was still palpable. And while the orchestral sound was sleeker than I recalled, it had the same stirring commitment and bristling responsiveness to the vocalists, as well as a glistening, pastoral dawn quality to the shepherds.These forces are truly an ensemble, aided by my favorite aspect of the church’s version. Most “Messiah” presentations bring in a quartet of opera singers for the solos. Trinity’s soloists — almost 20 of them — come forward from the choir, giving the oratorio the feeling of an intimate, alternately sober and joyous communal rite, modest yet monumental.This practice also allows the ensemble to show off the strengths of its roster — no soprano is ideally suited to all the work’s soprano arias — and to experiment. In 2017, Wachner switched the traditional genders of all the solos, a change thrillingly recalled this year by having Jonathan Woody, a bass-baritone, blaze through “He was despised,” instead of the standard female alto.There was more sense than there usually is of the range of emotion within numbers, not just between them. The tenor Stephen Sands was calm, then pressing in the beginning of the work, and the soprano Madeline Apple Healey was sprightly, then tender in “Rejoice greatly.”Brandau guided the score so that “Hallelujah” seemed to emerge from the preceding numbers, which gradually rose in fieriness. And he, choir and orchestra built patiently to the work’s true climax — “The trumpet shall sound,” sung with annunciatory power by the bass-baritone Edmund Milly and accompanied with eloquence, on a difficult-to-control, valveless natural trumpet, by Caleb Hudson — before the shining waves of the final “Amen.”Though pleasant enough, a pared-down New York Philharmonic’s “Messiah,” heard on Tuesday, paled in comparison. Conducted by Fabio Biondi, the founder of the distinguished period-instrument group Europa Galante, in his debut with the orchestra, this Handel was a little stolid in the first part, though with more crispness and color in the second and third.Fabio Biondi made his debut with the New York Philharmonic conducting Handel’s “Messiah.”Chris LeeThe quartet of young vocal soloists made little impact in tone or interpretive zest; the star here was the venerable Handel and Haydn Society Chorus, from Boston. A few dozen strong, it sounded rich yet lucid, with metronomic clarity in the burbling 16th notes of “And He shall purify” and with evocative gauziness in “His yoke is easy.” Biondi led a lithe, brisk “Hallelujah,” seemingly designed to make this omnipresent number a bit more unassuming than the norm.Beyond the start of “Messiah” season, this was a banner week for early music in New York. On Saturday, the Miller Theater hosted the Tallis Scholars at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Manhattan, part of the ensemble’s 50th-anniversary tour. And yet more Handel: On Sunday, Harry Bicket and the English Concert continued their annual series of concert performances of his operas and oratorios at Carnegie Hall with “Rodelinda.”“Messiah” is Christmas music, but not entirely, since Jesus’ birth occupies only a few minutes of this long meditation on his life and example. The Tallis Scholars, though, offered a real Christmas program of largely Renaissance works focused on the shepherds who receive the news of the Nativity.Under their founder and director, Peter Phillips, these 10 singers displayed the floating silkiness, light without seeming insubstantial, that has been Tallis’s trademark over its remarkable career.With the parts of Clemens’s “Missa Pastores quidnam vidistis” interwoven with other pieces, the concert was notable for its exploration of different composers’ treatments of the same texts. Pedro de Cristo’s straightforwardly lyrical, almost folk-inflected “Quaeramus cum pastoribus” preceded Giovanni Croce’s grander version. And Jacob Obrecht’s plainchant-and-elaboration “Salve regina” came before Peter Philip’s later, more declamatory one.At Carnegie, the English Concert brought its characteristic spirited polish — moderate yet exciting — to “Rodelinda,” a work that Bicket has helped make a sterling recent addition to the Metropolitan Opera’s standard repertory. The cast of six was individually impressive and, even better, well matched. The soprano Lucy Crowe’s voice warmed in the title role as the afternoon went on, and her portrayal was gripping from the start. The countertenor Iestyn Davies, as her believed-to-be-dead husband, Bertarido, had, as usual, special time-stopping persuasiveness in slow music.It was refined work. But the performance over the past week that has lingered with me most is clear. If someone asks for a recommendation — for the holidays, or for music in New York in general — my answer is the same as it’s been for years: Trinity’s “Messiah.” More

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      Review: Philharmonic Debuts Back Flashiness With Substance

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      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

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      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

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      “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’

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      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