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      For Classical Music, Every Summer Is a Liberation

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      During a time of year in which anything can be a stage, the joy of music making has room to breathe outdoors.A Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.James Estrin/The New York TimesConsider classical music a late bloomer. In New York, as the city emerges from its winter hibernation — the snow on tree branches replaced by dreamily pastel cherry blossoms, the short, sleepy days extended by increasingly dramatic sunsets — performers tend to remain indoors. A concert in May doesn’t look so different from one in January.But then comes summer.Around early June, orchestras and opera companies close out their seasons, and music making begins to take on new, liberated forms. Instruments that seem so precious onstage make their way outdoors, suddenly looking as casual as the artists wielding them, who sometimes swap their formal concert attire for, well, whatever they want.Samantha Lake with Make Music New York, on Lexington Avenue.The Metropolitan Opera’s float at the New York City Pride March.The old-hat claims of classical music’s elitism and lack of approachability just don’t hold up in summer. Performances pop up as if out of thin air; the New York Philharmonic puts on a series of free outdoor shows that sprawl across the city’s boroughs; everyone, regardless of skill or expertise, is invited to take part in local celebrations for the global Fête de la Musique on the June 21 solstice.A Boston Symphony Orchestra concert at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.During this season, a singer from the Metropolitan Opera might appear on a makeshift stage or in a band shell, performing for passers-by and die-hard fans alike. Friends and families gather on picnic blankets to camp out, some for hours, and enjoy one another’s company, eat and play games before the day culminates in a Philharmonic concert played for thousands more people than could fit inside the orchestra’s home at Lincoln Center.The Met — an institution that throughout its history has been a haven for queer fans but only recently has represented people like them onstage — leaves its velveteen temple to let its hair down and celebrate Pride in the streets, complete with its own float, a mobile concert sung by the likes of the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe.A Death of Classical concert at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.Caramoor.Bard College.Anything, after all, can be a stage in the summer: a patch of grass, a barn, the catacombs of a cemetery. Music moves farther and farther away from concert halls, away from cities into the countryside and mountains. New Yorkers wind their way up the Hudson Valley to the bucolic grounds of Caramoor, or to the expansive lawns of Bard College and its sculptural, Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center.The Boston Symphony Orchestra, which in town has the air of a bastion of tradition, embraces the relaxed — and relaxing — grounds of its idyllic Tanglewood campus in the Berkshires. Students also stay there for the summer, exploring new music with monastic focus and learning from some of the finest artists in the field.The Met’s float at the Pride March.Pride in New York.Tanglewood.Joan Forsyth with Make Music New York.Things that would be unfathomable in a concert hall suddenly seem possible. The cannons of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” can be literal cannons. The joy of music making has room to breathe, inviting the sounds of nature to join in: a chorus of birds and insects, a roar of thunder, hopefully not the needy wail of a car alarm.A New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park.The Philharmonic’s concert.A Philadelphia Orchestra concert in Saratoga Springs.Soon, it won’t be so pleasant to lay out a picnic spread while waiting for the Philharmonic. As the trees shed their leaves and the sunsets come earlier, the concert hall will become a refuge. But come next summer, so will the outdoors. More

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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Review: New York Philharmonic Journeys From Ocean to Desert

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      The orchestra’s final program of the season featured the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert.”Ostensibly, the New York Philharmonic’s final two programs of the season were about the earth. But they served more to illustrate the challenge composers face in translating the climate crisis to music.Last week at David Geffen Hall, Julia Wolfe’s new multimedia oratorio, “unEarth,” took an explicitly activist stance, lashing out at ecological violence and offering a path to recovery. On Thursday, John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” in its New York premiere, addressed the natural world more humbly — mourning, perhaps, the desertification of environments, but also evoking, marveling at and bowing down to forces larger than ourselves.The approach you prefer can be a matter of taste; I find observation more persuasive. Take this week. As smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted to New York, you could read that the city’s air quality was the worst on record, and understand the severity, but a step outside would reveal even more: a burning in your eyes and throat, an unrecognizable view of streets and parks obscured by an orange haze.That is the difference between “unEarth” and “Become Desert,” between declaring an emergency and bringing it to your feet. Interestingly, Wolfe and Adams have worked in both modes; her earlier oratorios have tended toward the poetic, and his “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” which premiered in April, had the blunt rhetoric of a protest sign. These are two of the finest composers of our time, each with a Pulitzer Prize. But they are still figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis without making artistic missteps.And composers aren’t alone. The Philharmonic, too, had mixed success with its “Earth” concerts, which were both conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Wolfe’s work shared the billing with, for some reason, a seemingly unrehearsed account of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. Thursday’s program was an improvement, tracing a more considered path from the ocean to the desert.Representing the ocean was Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes From ‘Peter Grimes,’” brief movements that do double duty as poetic depictions of water, and as representations of the opera’s underlying drama. On Thursday, they were mainly illustrative of the renovated Geffen Hall’s acoustics, which in their bright dryness rewarded the lithe angularity of “Sunday Morning” but punished the violent muddle of “Storm.”Between the climactic ending of the “Interludes” and the monumentality of “Become Desert,” it was easy to overlook the small, Debussyan beauty of Toru Takemitsu’s “I Hear the Water Dreaming,” featuring the Philharmonic’s principal flute, Robert Langevin, as the soloist. He had a warm, lulling tone but played — like the concertmaster, Frank Huang, in the Sibelius last week — with the selfless stage presence of a section leader rather than an assertive star.“Become Desert” is the third installment of a trilogy that began with “Become River,” a 2010 chamber work of icy harmonic shards trickling into a flow that grows grander, and deeper, as if to lead directly into “Become Ocean” (2013), which won the Pulitzer. A masterpiece of scale and form, it immerses its listeners into a world that moves unpredictably in grand swells and ebbs. “Desert,” from 2018, continues in that enveloping vein, a musical equivalent of a camera placed on the ground to witness an expansive landscape as the day breaks and recedes, then returns — a glimpse into a repetitive yet ever-changing environment. The earth emerges, in all three, as awesome in every sense of the word.The Seattle Symphony, under Ludovic Morlot, has recorded the entire trilogy. In that account, you get a sense of Adams’s deference to his subject, rendered in stereoscopic clarity: textures that move like shadows; stretches of seeming stasis that evolve organically, demanding patience and distance to truly perceive; an unchanging pace of life marked in the score with a tempo of 45 beats per minute, described by Adams as “timeless.” At the opening, percussion instruments chime on every beat, but scattered, which with a haze of sustained harmonics dissolve any sense of a downbeat.But at Geffen Hall, van Zweden’s baton sliced through the air more quickly, shaving a few minutes from the score’s typical duration and dispelling its magic, and delicacy, along the way. Its 4/4 time signature all too apparent, the music was less immersive than propulsive.It was an unfortunate New York introduction to a work that ranks among Adams’s most ingeniously reverential. As written, the slowly evaporating final section recalls the poignant dissolving strings at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. On Thursday, though, it just felt like a march to a finish line painted intrusively on the earth.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The New York Philharmonic’s Season of Mixed Boons

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      The orchestra’s renovated hall and Gustavo Dudamel, its next leader, have kept ticket sales robust, but cool acoustics curb the music’s impact.David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s gut-renovated home at Lincoln Center, isn’t perfect.The decorating tends cheesy and clashing — even if seating that wraps around the stage has done wonders for intimacy. And the sound, for all its improvements on the old acoustics, leans coolly antiseptic.But for the orchestra, which ends its first season in what is essentially a new hall this weekend, Geffen has been a kind of talisman.Last fall, when performing arts groups around the country were blindsided by theaters half-full (and worse), the excitement of the hall’s reopening insulated the Philharmonic from a similar fate. Sales have been robust all season.In February, another talisman appeared: the star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who was named the orchestra’s next music director. Though Dudamel won’t raise his baton at Geffen next season — and though classical music’s bizarrely stretched planning cycles mean he won’t officially start until 2026 — there was already a clear sense of his power as an audience draw in his three sold-out concerts in May.Dudamel is probably the only figure capable of putting such an exclamation point on the unveiling of the hall, a $550 million project. And an exclamation point on the season, as he conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony — an extreme and emotional, expansive yet focused piece particularly treasured by this orchestra, which its composer conducted for a brief but memorable stint just before his death in 1911.Gustavo Dudamel, who will succeed van Zweden as music director, conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May.James Estrin/The New York TimesI attended all three performances, trying to get the fullest possible sense of what might come from the relationship of this maestro to this orchestra and this space. The message was mixed.The first performance, a Friday evening, sounded fine, the players poised. But poise is hardly the takeaway you want from Mahler’s harrowing Ninth; there was nothing intense or uncomfortable about this interpretation, nothing personal or inexorable.The first movement progressed with bland serenity. The middle movements danced pleasantly, without a hint of the manic. The Adagio finale, its own epic journey of agony and relief, was mild-mannered. The third performance, a Sunday matinee, was much the same.But the middle go, on Saturday night, offered a glimpse of a more vital alchemy. The quality of the playing remained high — and was now infused with some of Dudamel’s oft-mentioned but not always apparent vibrancy.Those inner movements had taken on menacing bite, whipping between contrasting sections; the Adagio was a deeper evocation of stillness and fragility. This was not profound or moving Mahler, but it had a spark.At these concerts, as throughout the season, there was a sense that Geffen Hall, rather than bringing together this mass of instruments in a blooming blend, was etching the sound, hard, in the air.While orchestras take a good, long time to fully adjust to new homes, after a full season it can be said: Geffen’s acoustics seem lucid and balanced, but also stiff and stark, the sonic equivalent of the blond-wood auditorium’s cold, harsh lighting, which makes you squint a bit as you enter and floods the stage during performances.These qualities make it better suited to certain repertoire — Romantic sumptuousness is particularly hard to come by — and the Philharmonic is going to have to work hard to build the richness of its sound if the hall isn’t going to help.Susanna Mälkki conducting Claire Chase (on flute) and Esperanza Spalding (singing, on bass) in Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto.Chris LeeWhat also isn’t going to help, unfortunately, is the Philharmonic’s current music director, Jaap van Zweden, who has seemed an overshadowed guest at his own party since Geffen’s reopening and Dudamel’s appointment. Van Zweden, who finishes his short tenure next season, has a tough, blunt style — a “Pines of Rome” of bludgeoning volume in October, a sludgy “Turangalîla-Symphonie” in March — that emphasizes the hall’s acoustic shortcomings rather than relieving them.The concerts at which those shortcomings were least noticeable were, by and large, led by guests. The conductor Hannu Lintu made his Philharmonic debut in November with a cogent, precise program of Stravinsky, Bartok (the rarely played Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion), Kaija Saariaho and Sibelius. At the end of that month, the hall’s acoustics were actually a boon, helping cut the fat in what could have been an overly indulgent program of French works, led by Stéphane Denève with a kaleidoscopic sleekness well suited to the space.Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted a raucous rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in February, a week before Thomas Adès’s superb 2008 piano concerto “In Seven Days” — which should be a repertory staple — returned to the Philharmonic for the first time in 12 years. Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto, an exuberant showcase for Claire Chase (on a battery of flutes) and Esperanza Spalding (singing and playing double bass), had a sensational New York premiere in March under Susanna Mälkki.Last month, a blistering program of Prokofiev’s Third Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, with the dazzling, preternaturally mature 19-year-old Yunchan Lim as soloist, was as much a showcase for the gifted conductor James Gaffigan as it was for Lim. When will Gaffigan get an American orchestra?The conductor James Gaffigan and the teenage pianist Yunchan Lim joined for Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto in May.Chris LeeBut there was no more poignant and musically stimulating spectacle this season than the return to the podium in February of Herbert Blomstedt, who, at 95, guided with utter control Ingvar Lidholm’s sternly elegant “Poesis,” a work whose premiere Blomstedt presided over in 1963.Back in those days, the Philharmonic’s then-new hall was already being criticized for its acoustics. For decades there didn’t seem to be the will to fix it, and the current leaders of the orchestra and Lincoln Center deserve great praise for finally bringing the project over the finish line.The public areas are roomier now, and capacity has been cut; you still wait for the bathroom at intermission, but not nearly as long as you used to. In quiet, glistening music, like some of John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives” in October, Geffen offers a transparent sonic window.But in concertos by composers as varied as Mozart, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, whether for violinist or pianist, the soloists recede a bit too thoroughly into the orchestral textures. At top volume and density, there’s blare where there should be grandeur. And when real warmth is needed, as in the symphonies of Mahler or Florence Price, there’s the small but important lack of bloom and build, of resonance.The audiences and excitement are there in the hall. But the full impact of the music isn’t. More

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      Review: Julia Wolfe’s ‘unEarth’ Is Crowded Out by Multimedia

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      Not for the first time this season at the New York Philharmonic, a premiere was muddled by obvious, sometimes intrusive video art.Since moving back into David Geffen Hall this season, the New York Philharmonic has tried to use its newly renovated, technologically adept space to give extra multimedia glamour to a few premieres.Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill” opened the season in October, and dealt directly with the midcentury displacement of economically vulnerable populations on the blocks that became Lincoln Center. “The March to Liberation,” a program in March featuring the music of Black composers, was accompanied by video art.On both occasions, I felt that the multimedia — however sensitively rendered — undercut my experience of the music. During “San Juan Hill,” Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, would be building a real rapport, and momentum, with Charles’s group Creole Soul; but then there would be a pause for a lengthy new interjection of video commentary. And a new work by Courtney Bryan during “The March to Liberation” was so transporting, I at times found myself closing my eyes to avoid having my experience filtered so strongly through the lens of another artist.I felt the need to close my eyes again on Thursday, when van Zweden led the Philharmonic in another buzzy premiere that showed off the multimedia capabilities of Geffen Hall. It happened during the imaginative second movement of Julia Wolfe’s “unEarth” — the latest in her recent series of oratorio-like protest efforts, which served as the opening of two weeks of ecologically minded programming.During that second movement, Wolfe — a Pulitzer Prize winner and a founder of the influential Bang on a Can collective — amasses a powerful mix of sonorities: chattering, antiphonal choral music (often heard uttering the word “tree” in different languages); percussion indebted to gamelan tradition; punchy orchestral writing; intense electric guitar lines that, as played by her regular collaborator Mark Stewart, were biting but not too imitative of rock styles.After the solemn choral writing in the first movement — which drew on the combined talents of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and male singers from the Crossing — this mix of sounds was a welcome transition. The writing for Stewart’s guitar was a reminder of the muscular verve heard in the “Breaker Boys” movement from Wolfe’s “Anthracite Fields” (2014), for which she won that Pulitzer. And in moving from dry orchestral ruffling to powerful tutti riffing, this section of “unEarth” also recalled the “Factory” movement of her “Fire in my mouth” (2019), which the Philharmonic premiered and memorably recorded.When the soprano Else Torp entered — with beaming, stratospheric straight-tone singing that quoted Emily Dickinson’s “Who robbed the woods” — this movement of Wolfe’s piece proved delightfully, consistently weird. But it was a weirdness in service of dramatically clear ends, since the whole thing worked as a sonic commentary on the wonders of biodiversity.The piece was designed for both amplified and acoustic sounds, which van Zweden kept in balance. The animated projections that accompanied “unEarth,” however, were far less imaginative than the score; the video played instead like a slideshow of each language’s word for “tree,” along with some local arboreal information at the margins. The music was an impassioned litany; the multimedia amounted to a listicle.When a stage director (Anne Kauffman), projection designer (Lucy Mackinnon), two animators and four video technicians are listed in the program — while soloists like Stewart and the electric bassist Gregg August are not — that’s another sign that the multimedia urge has transgressed a bit much on the Philharmonic’s presentation of, you know, music.This same literalism of the video art held sway, in sound and image, during the third and final movement of “unEarth,” in which Wolfe sets some texts contributed by the younger singers to droning yet anxious music. Here, the projections — portraits similar to screen tests, featuring members of the Young People’s Chorus — were of a piece with the music: serious, but a bit too obvious to be moving.The entire concert was something of a muddle, down to the random-seeming pairing of “unEarth” with Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, in which the solo part’s difficulty was often audible in the account by Frank Huang, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster.Next week’s program seems to be on firmer conceptual footing, though. The orchestra will present Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes From ‘Peter Grimes,’” Toru Takemitsu’s “I hear the water dreaming” and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s majestic “Become Desert.”Most important: On those nights, the focus will be entirely on the music.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The Composer Julia Wolfe Focuses on Climate in ‘unEarth’

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      Julia Wolfe’s latest in a series of increasingly political, oratorio-like works, “unEarth,” premieres this week at the New York Philharmonic.Julia Wolfe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of Bang on a Can, has a way with words.In “Anthracite Fields,” the coal-dark highlight of a series of folklike, oratorio-adjacent works in which Wolfe, 64, has been putting American injustices under her unsparing sonic microscope, she lists the men named John with single-syllable surnames who can be found on an index of Pennsylvania mining accidents — a litany hundreds of Johns long.Her memorial to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, “Fire in my mouth,” concludes with an ethereal incantation of the 146 workers who died, their names drifting in sound, as if into the smoke of history. “Her Story,” a reflection on women’s rights, quotes some of the choicest insults that were spat at suffragists a century ago, as if to ask whether they sound familiar today.Now comes “unEarth,” a confrontation with climate change that premieres on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic, with Jaap van Zweden leading the soprano Else Torp, the men of the Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, in a staging by the director Anne Kauffman. It starts, and ends, with words sung by the children who helped write them.Wolfe’s “Fire in my mouth” at David Geffen Hall in 2019.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times“Of course, it’s so important for everyone but particularly poignant for younger people,” Wolfe said of the climate crisis in a recent interview. “A lot of the leadership right now, a lot of the feisty leadership is coming from young people, particularly from young women.”The texts that Wolfe uses in “unEarth” have a sense of literary adventure familiar from her earlier oratorios. She read widely to research it, and noted the influence of such writers as Sami Grover, Peter Wohlleben and Elizabeth Kolbert, a friend. The libretto draws on Emily Dickinson and the book of Genesis; in the second movement of three, “Forest,” the word tree is translated into myriad languages, which she pounds into a celebration of all things arboreal, backed by conga drums.“She is always taking kernels of text that have a lot of resonance in the stories of the world we live in,” Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, said of Wolfe. “Honestly, at some point, you start to stop thinking about the words and you drift off into larger ideas.”Many of Wolfe’s compositions — another, an orchestral work called “Pretty,” will premiere at the Berlin Philharmonic next week, under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, a Wolfe admirer — have had political themes. But the larger ideas of “unEarth” are more directly delivered than those of any of her other socially conscious but primarily historical oratorios, dating back to “Steel Hammer” more than a decade ago.The impulse to speak plainly comes not just from the subject matter, but from Wolfe’s chosen collaborators. When she decided to involve the Young People’s Chorus in the work, as she had in “Fire,” she sought the input of its singers; she and Kauffman asked its conductors to lead the choristers in discussions about the climate crisis, and recorded them.“Something that I remember is everybody agreeing on this sense of urgency,” Ryoko Leyh, 16, said of the conversations she took part in. “Everybody was saying something like ‘I’m scared,’ or ‘I’m always thinking about it, it’s always on my mind and making me anxious.’ So I feel like we all had different ideas of what is actually going on and what we can do to stop climate change, but we all had that collective sense of dread.”The children of the chorus come from all kinds of educational backgrounds, said Francisco J. Núñez, its artistic director. For many of them, the discussions were a learning opportunity; some were as young as 8.“It really made me think on how impactful learning about climate change and global warming itself can be on the young population,” Irene Cunto, 12, said, “because at the end, we’ll be the ones that’s facing it.”Wolfe’s works in this vein have grown increasingly political. “I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” she said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”Amrita Stuetzle for The New York TimesThe process was instructive for Wolfe, too. She was amazed at the subtlety of the conversations, and decided to use parts of them in the piece. It begins with a quotation of one of the most junior participants, who saw global warming as “like a monster devouring the Earth.” The work ends with another quotation, this time of an older singer, as their phrase “hope requires action” is chanted like a mantra, before the chorus and the soprano demand that the audience “act,” with an insistent, if fearful and minor-key, final crescendo.“We just feel powerless because of this idea that we’ve inherited all these problems and now it’s our responsibility to fix everything,” Leyh said, pointing to the importance of the chorus singing words its members have written themselves. “It’s like we’re being given a platform that we don’t usually have, literally, to say what we want to say in a way that we know is going to be heard.”Making the Young People’s Chorus the voice of hope in “unEarth,” and ensuring that the audience would have to look at them “in the face,” as Wolfe put it, offered the composer something of a way through the dilemmas involved in creating explicitly political art, a challenge that climate-conscious composers are finding becomes more acute as catastrophes grow. Wolfe said that she was trying not to be too didactic, but that she was content with her solution in the final movement, “Fix It,” which lists a number of ways in which individuals can make a difference — Meatless Mondays, No Mow May — as well as broader policy concepts, like “reforestation” and “solarification.”“I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” Wolfe said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”The Philharmonic commissioned “unEarth” after the success of “Fire in my mouth” four years ago, and is presenting it on the first of two programs that make up “Earth,” a climate mini-festival. The second program, next week, includes the belated local premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” which debuted in Seattle five years ago.“In the end, music is about emotion,” said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, “and Julia is able to combine, in that way that we cannot quite explain, a combination of beauty and emotion. It carries an even stronger message as a result.”Each of Wolfe’s oratorios has offered a different answer to the question of where the balance of poetry and politics lies, though she sees a progression through them. “Anthracite Fields” was not exactly shy about its views — it sets a speech by John L. Lewis, the militant leader of the United Mine Workers — but, as one listener pointed out to her, it does not explicitly mention protest. “Fire,” partly as a consequence, has an entire, thumping movement called “Protest.” “Her Story” is more of an inquiry into change than an indictment of the past, but as Wolfe put it, “it’s a little sassier.”“UnEarth,” though, includes lines like “the house is on fire,” and “clean up your corporation.” It goes further, and with good reason.“The others were more reflective. ‘Who were we?’ ‘Who are we?’” Wolfe said. “And this is like: ‘Guess what. We have to do something.’” More

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      Gustavo Dudamel in New York: Selfies, Hugs and Mahler

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      Our photographer followed the maestro when he came to town to conduct Mahler’s Ninth — his first time leading the New York Philharmonic since being named its next music director.The violins were tuning, the woodwinds warming up and the trumpets blaring bits of Mahler. Then the musicians of the New York Philharmonic began to whistle and cheer.Gustavo Dudamel, one of the world’s biggest conducting stars, strode onto the stage this month for his first rehearsal with the Philharmonic since being named the ensemble’s next music director. On the program was Mahler’s epic Ninth Symphony.“I will have the opportunity in the next few days to hug everybody,” he told the musicians, smiling and pumping his fist. “I’m very honored to become part of the family.”As it happened, the orchestra’s new hall, the recently renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, was occupied that day, so Dudamel’s first rehearsal took place at its old home, Carnegie Hall. Dudamel said he felt a connection to Mahler, who conducted the Philharmonic at Carnegie when he was its music director from 1909 to 1911.At his first rehearsal, in Carnegie Hall, Dudamel offered a mantra for his tenure: “We will have a lot of fun.”James Estrin/The New York TimesWhile the orchestra rehearsed Mahler, Dudamel rushed to the center of David Geffen Hall to briefly assess the acoustics.Dudamel, one of the world’s biggest conducting stars, is known for his bouncy curls and fiery baton.The violinist Ellen dePasquale warmed up backstage before a rehearsal of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, one of the repertory’s most sweeping and profound works.“This was Mahler’s orchestra,” he said, noting Mahler’s ties to New York when he wrote it. “Even if they are not the same musicians, they have that heritage of Mahler.”While Dudamel does not take the podium in New York until 2026, his five days with the Philharmonic this month, for rehearsals and performances of the Mahler, were an unofficial start. They came at a moment of transition for him in more ways then one: a week later he would announce that he was resigning as music director of the Paris Opera. But New York felt like a new beginning, and as he got to know the orchestra and the city, he offered a mantra for his tenure: “We will have a lot of fun.”Dudamel took a pause backstage before going to meet with percussionists during a break in rehearsal.“I’m very honored to become part of the family,” Dudamel told the Philharmonic’s players.Dudamel grabbed a sip of coffee in his dressing room during a break in rehearsal.Dudamel examined a Mahler score that once belonged to Leonard Bernstein, a predecessor. He said he felt a connection to Mahler, who led the Philharmonic from 1909 to 1911. “Even if they are not the same musicians,” he said, “they have that heritage of Mahler.”Judith LeClair, the Philharmonic’s principal bassoon, embraced Dudamel after a rehearsal. He was greeted as a rock star by the orchestra, with musicians lining up for selfies and hugs.There were hours of intense rehearsals, during which Dudamel urged the players to embrace Mahler’s operatic impulses and his varied style.There were Champagne toasts and rites of passage. In his dressing room Dudamel examined a Mahler score that once belonged to Leonard Bernstein, a predecessor and noted Mahlerian. There were hours of intense rehearsals, during which Dudamel urged the players to embrace Mahler’s operatic impulses and his varied style.“It’s not bipolar, it’s tripolar,” he said of one passage. “This is Freud. A new character — a new spectrum of humanity.”When Dudamel and the orchestra got back to Geffen Hall for the final rehearsals and performances, there were some surprises.After a spectral whirring sound surfaced during an open rehearsal, he turned to the audience. “Maybe it’s Mahler,” he said.Dudamel spoke backstage with members of the Philharmonic’s artistic team about the timing of a rehearsal break. A few seconds before walking onstage for his first concert at the newly renovated Geffen Hall, Dudamel adjusted his tie.The Philharmonic was warmly received at its performances with Dudamel. On the first night, the ensemble got a seven-minute standing ovation.Dudamel’s appearances were highly anticipated by music fans eager to catch a glimpse of the Philharmonic’s next music director. All three concerts sold out.Dudamel abstained from solo bows, gesturing instead to highlight the contributions of the members of the orchestra.Dudamel in his dressing room. “To arrive here, to achieve this connection with you, is for me a prize of life,” he told musicians at a reception. “We will develop this love, this connection.”Throughout his visit, Dudamel was greeted as a rock star, with musicians lining up for selfies and hugs.“You’re part of my family,” Cynthia Phelps, the principal violist, told him at a reception. “Welcome.”Dudamel thanked the musicians, saying he never imagined he would one day lead one of the world’s top orchestras.“To arrive here, to achieve this connection with you, is for me a prize of life,” he said. “We will develop this love, this connection.”At the opening concert, Dudamel was nervous. As is his custom, he conducted the symphony, one of the repertory’s most sweeping and profound works, from memory. At the end of the piece, Dudamel abstained from solo bows, gesturing instead to highlight the contributions of the members of the orchestra.Backstage, an aide handed Dudamel a glass of scotch.“My God,” he said. “What a journey.”Dudamel with his longtime friend and mentor, Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, who lured him east from Los Angeles. More

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      Review: Thanks to Chick Corea, the Trombone Is a Philharmonic Star

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      The jazz composer wrote a new concerto for the New York Philharmonic’s principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, but died before its U.S. premiere.There are not exactly a wealth of great concertos written for the trombone, that largely unheralded stalwart of the brass section. (Insert sad trombone sound here.) If anyone is going to change this state of affairs, it’s Joseph Alessi, the principal trombone of the New York Philharmonic. He’s an idol of legions of brass players for his rich tone, exemplary phrasing and virtuosic precision.In 1992, Alessi premiered Christopher Rouse’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Trombone Concerto. Almost three decades later, Alessi asked the widely loved jazz keyboardist and composer Chick Corea, who was enmeshed with classical music throughout his life, to create a trombone concerto. That work received its U.S. premiere at the Philharmonic on Thursday evening, performed by Alessi under the baton of Marin Alsop, another artist who easily code switches between jazz and classical idioms.The premiere was originally scheduled for the orchestra’s 2020-21 season. But with the onset of the pandemic, those plans were abandoned. Corea died of cancer in February 2021, and the concerto stands as his last finished work. (A recording, with Alessi as soloist, is scheduled for release this November on the Parma record label.)The four-movement work features a huge battery of percussion instruments — including gongs, marimba, xylophone and African cowbells — that lend a new palette of shimmering colors to the orchestra. And it shows off the marvel of Alessi’s technique and musicianship: in the first movement’s bluesy slides, in the lyrical tenderness of a second-movement waltz, and in devilish 16th-note runs in “Hysteria,” the third movement, which Corea wrote as pandemic lockdowns were just beginning. A final tango draws together the soloist and orchestra, before allowing Alessi to finish triumphantly on a series of high F sharps, venturing into trumpet territory.Corea had intended to play the prominent piano part in early performances. Instead, John Dickson, who orchestrated the concerto, is performing it with the Philharmonic. As an encore, Alessi introduced Dickson and they played a brief homage to Corea written by Dickson. It was a heartfelt adieu to their mutual friend and collaborator.The program opened with Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1. Written when Barber was just 25, it’s a mature wonder of a work, woefully under-programmed. (The last time the Philharmonic played it was during the Clinton administration.) Among its pleasures are declarative brass, crisp percussion, richly colored string writing and an exquisitely lyrical third movement.The New York Philharmonic musicians have finally relaxed into trusting the acoustics in David Geffen Hall. Gone is their urge to push hard to be heard — a necessity before the renovation. Instead, they now luxuriate in the chance to sculpt sound in space.Alsop celebrated that ability in 12 selected movements from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” Suites Nos. 1, 2 and 3, beginning with the fiery opening blasts of “The Montagues and the Capulets” and ending with the tear-stained “Death of Juliet.” Alsop drew out all the sharp accents and quick turns in “The Death of Tybalt,” and made the most of the silvery charm of the “Aubade.”Her vivid sense of color and rhythmic clarity framed Prokofiev’s ballet music as an exciting complement to the Barber Symphony, written the same year as some of the Prokofiev selections. This kind of creative juxtaposition, in which one piece illuminates another, is the essence of good concert programming.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More