Nezet-Seguin, Yannick

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      Review: Two Years Later, a Beethoven Cycle Reaches Its Finale

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      Delayed by the pandemic in 2020, then again in January, the Philadelphia Orchestra brought a long-awaited Ninth Symphony to Carnegie Hall.The Philadelphia Orchestra’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies was supposed to come to Carnegie Hall in spring 2020. It should go without saying: It didn’t.But that series of concerts belongs to the lucky class of canceled performances that have found their way back to the stage. The journey, however, has been a mirror of our continued pandemic uncertainty. Although the cycle started last fall when the Fifth Symphony opened Carnegie’s season, it was delayed once again in January when the Omicron variant pushed off Beethoven’s Ninth — and its full-choir “Ode to Joy.”So only on Monday did the cycle reach its conclusion, with the Philadelphians’ music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, at the podium for the First Symphony and the mighty Ninth, alongside a world premiere inspired by it, Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Pachamama Meets an Ode.”In New York, Nézet-Séguin has taken on something like the role of resident conductor, even to the point of exhaustion; the performance on Monday came exactly a week before he leads a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is also the music director.And because the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Beethoven concerts were an addition to its others planned at Carnegie this season, it has become the hall’s de facto house band. The ensemble was just there two weeks ago, with departures from the standard repertory (and Beethoven) that Zachary Woolfe applauded in The New York Times, while wagering that “nothing the Philadelphians do at Carnegie this season will be more impressive.”At the very least, there won’t be much competition from Monday’s appearance. Beethoven’s extremes — the consummate Classicism of the First, and the controlled excess of the Ninth — were absorbing but imperfect in this reading. But it was nevertheless a moving program, in large part because of Frank’s premiere.At their best, Beethoven cycles that fold in new commissions offer a conversation between past and present. Frank’s is quite literally a dialogue, however imagined, with the composer she calls “Great Man.” And who better to contend with Beethoven? As a composer with hearing loss, Frank has written about perceiving him as a kindred spirit. The world-spanning background that inspires her practice — as the American daughter of a father with Lithuanian-Jewish heritage and a Peruvian mother of Chinese and Indigenous descent — provides a nuanced perspective, and check, on the brother-embracing aspirations of the “Ode to Joy.”Her new work is a fantastical encounter between Beethoven and a contemporaneous Cusco School painter, tracing the climate crisis of today to the exploitation of natural resources and the global expansion of European powers in Beethoven’s time. In the piece’s 10 minutes, the text, written by Frank, invokes colonialism, animal extinction and images like a river “on oily fire.”Nézet-Séguin, right, conducted a program that included a pairing of Beethoven’s Ninth and a Gabriela Lena Frank premiere inspired by it.Chris LeeUsing the same orchestration as Beethoven’s Ninth, minus its four vocal soloists, “Pachamama” is big, and deploys the emotive force of the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem. Distinct textures do break the waves of sound: chromatic chattering in the strings, and dissonant humming in the choir — a nod, Frank notes, to Indigenous South American vocal music. The words are set straightforwardly, transformed only in the end to elongate the questions “What of odes?” and “What of joy?” Then a horn lingers indefinitely, a looming punctuation mark and a subtle bridge to the first bar of the Beethoven.The two symphonies here demonstrated the Great Man’s enormous transformation in the 24 years between their premieres, but also how much of his late style was gestating in his youth.His First is transparently indebted to Mozart and Haydn, until it isn’t. That moment, the Menuetto, is where Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation found its footing. Before, the strings — too many of them — were still mired in the introduction’s flowing phrases. But their articulation came sharply into focus with the Menuetto, a kind of artistic coming-of-age, with flashes of the Beethoven to come.Nézet-Séguin is a gifted Mozart conductor, and his treatment of the finale — witty and nimble — could have been the overture to one of that composer’s operas. It was dampened only by the inflated orchestra; Beethoven can benefit from fewer instruments, for balance, clarity and, above all, energy.Outsize scale was more problematic in the Ninth. Nézet-Séguin took a long view of the work, beginning in mysterious quiet, as if descending into the symphony from a great height, and building toward relentless grandeur in the “Ode to Joy” finale. But 25 minutes is a long time to sustain a climax, and the effect wore off long before the ending came.The orchestra was at its best in the second movement, in which the strings maintained a fleet lightness that allowed for pronounced contrasts and, crucially, made room for the winds and brasses, drowned out elsewhere. Later, the players were sensitive accompanists to the vocal soloists, though the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green needed no help commanding the stage with his booming entrance.Green pulled back to mix, beautifully, with his fellow soloists. His voice was a surprising complement to the more slender brightness of the tenor Matthew Polenzani, and together, they wove rich textures with the soprano Angel Blue and the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb. The Philadelphia Symphonic Choir was more difficult to follow. If you listened closely, you could make out an “alle Menschen” here and there, but the group’s sound was for the most part cloudy, as if coming from backstage, blending into the orchestra when it should have been heard above it.Even the best performance of this symphony, though, would have been haunted by the Frank, which rendered Beethoven’s ecstatic finale a tad delusional, and his naïve optimism difficult to stomach — a reminder of how this work’s universal message has been dangerously put to universal use, and of its Enlightenment hopes yet to be realized, nearly 200 years later. In the fermata rest of the Ninth’s final bar, Frank’s horn still resonated in the mind, still asking: What of odes? What of joy?Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Monday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, and returning there on April 8 and 21; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Review: Without a Note of Beethoven, an Orchestra Shines

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      At Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave pride of place to a once-forgotten Florence Price symphony, alongside new works and a classic.The vast majority of the music the Philadelphia Orchestra is playing in its eight concerts at Carnegie Hall this season is by Beethoven.Under its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, this ensemble plays the master with warmth and verve. And alongside the nine classic symphonies, it is presenting contemporary works written in response, a tried-and-true technique to scooch in the new with the old, spoonful-of-sugar style. They’ve been worthy performances.But even though three of the concerts are yet to come — Beethoven’s First and Ninth on Feb. 21, then his “Missa Solemnis” and a John Williams gala in April — I reckon that nothing the Philadelphians do at Carnegie this season will be more impressive than Tuesday’s performance.There was not a note of Beethoven. Nor, for that matter, any piece that could be considered a standard audience draw. The closest thing to a chestnut, Samuel Barber’s 1947 soprano monologue “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” bloomed in the fresh company of two new works and Florence Price’s once-forgotten Symphony No. 1.When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the Price in 1933, it was the first work by a Black woman to be played by a major orchestra. While women and composers of color are now better represented on programs, it is still all too rare for them (or for anything but a canonical piece) to have the anchor position at a concert’s end.So it was a progressive, even inspiring statement for Philadelphia — which released a recording of Price’s First and Third symphonies last year — to close with the First. And the players gave it the same vitality and subtlety they’ve brought to Beethoven.The opening bassoon line was here less a solo showpiece than a mellow song nestled modestly within the textures of the strings. In that bassoon call — along with the blending of folk-style melodies and classical sweep, and a dancing finale — Price’s symphony bears the unmistakable influence of Dvorak’s “New World.” But it is very much its own piece, with an arresting vacillation between raging force and abrupt lyrical oases in the first movement and a wind whistle echoing through the vibrant Juba dance in the third.Price clearly knew she had a good tune in the slow second movement, a hymnlike refrain for brass chorale that she milks for all it’s worth. But the many repetitions, with delicate African drumming underneath, take on the shining dignity of prayer. And the ending, with rapid calligraphy in the winds winding around the theme, rises to ecstasy, punctuated by bells.Sounding lush yet focused and committed, Nézet-Séguin’s orchestra even highlights a quality I hadn’t particularly associated with Price: humor, in her dances and in the way a clarinet suddenly squiggles out of that slow hymn, like a giggle in church.The concert opened with a new suite by Matthew Aucoin adapted from his opera “Eurydice,” which played at the Metropolitan Opera last fall. At the Met, Aucoin’s score swamped a winsome story, but in an 18-minute instrumental digest, it was easier to appreciate his music’s dense, raucous extravagance, the way he whips an orchestra from mists into oceans, then makes pummeling percussion chase it into a gallop. Ricardo Morales, the Philadelphians’ principal clarinet, played his doleful solo with airily glowing tone, a letter from another world.There was grandeur, too, in Valerie Coleman’s “This Is Not a Small Voice,” her new setting of a poetic paean to Black pride by Sonia Sanchez that weaves from rumination to bold declaration. The soprano Angel Blue was keen, her tone as rich yet light as whipped cream, in a difficult solo part, which demands crisp speak-singing articulation and delves into velvety depths before soaring upward to glistening high notes. Blue was also superb — sweet and gentle, but always lively — in the nostalgic Barber.In its inspired alignment of old and new, the concert recalled last week’s program at the New York Philharmonic, which also closed with a rediscovered symphony by a Black composer. When it comes to broadening the sounds that echo through our opera houses and concert halls, change can be frustratingly slow. But to hear, within a few days, two of the country’s most venerable orchestras play symphonies by Julius Eastman and Florence Price did give the sense of watching the tectonic plates of the repertory shift in real time.Philadelphia OrchestraAppears next at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, on Feb. 21. More

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      Review: ‘Tosca’ Catches Fire at the Met Opera

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      Sondra Radvanovsky and Brian Jagde sing thrillingly, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts a superb performance of Puccini’s classic.Sometimes, for reasons no one can fully explain, an opera performance just catches fire. That’s what happened at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, when Puccini’s “Tosca” returned.In a fall at the Met that’s been full of momentous new works, intriguing repertory firsts and six-hour epics, this seemed on paper just an ordinary revival of David McVicar’s production. The soprano Sondra Radvanovsky was returning in the title role; the tenor Brian Jagde was appearing at the Met for the second time, singing Cavaradossi; the veteran baritone George Gagnidze (a late replacement for Evgeny Nikitin) was Scarpia; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, was in the pit.Yet starting with the opening measures, chilling orchestral chords that represent the villainous Scarpia, this performance abounded in crackling energy, sure-paced suspense, romantic reverie and thrilling singing from Radvanovsky and Jagde.It was Nézet-Séguin who seemed to be inspiring these formidable singers and the orchestra. On Monday, the Met announced that he was withdrawing from a January run of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” and taking a nearly four-week sabbatical from his conducting duties, including his directorship of the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin has been maintaining a busy schedule this fall, including Met runs of two demanding contemporary works, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “Eurydice”; in the announcement he said he needed some time to “re-energize.” Though it was a concerning decision, and it’s disappointing to lose him for “Figaro,” if taking a short break will allow him to keep summoning the kind of energy he had for “Tosca,” then so be it.He didn’t bring an unusual interpretive approach to Puccini’s familiar score. He simply led a splendid performance: rhythmically crisp, transparent, textured and colorful. While giving singers expressive leeway, he maintained shape and direction and favored slightly brisker than usual pacing. When, in Act I, Cavaradossi, trying to calm his jealous lover’s suspicions, turns to Tosca with a lyrical outpouring that begins their duet, Jagde and Radvanovsky sang with plenty of melting lyricism. Still, what a pleasure it was to hear the music — thanks to Nézet-Séguin’s subtle control — performed with a clear pulse, in a tempo that did not allow for any indulgences.Radvanovsky’s account of the great aria “Vissi d’arte” was at once intensely anguished and surpassingly beautiful, our critic writes.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaRadvanovsky was extraordinary. Like Maria Callas, perhaps the 20th century’s defining Tosca, she uses the slightly grainy quality of her sound to exciting dramatic purpose. Her account of the great aria “Vissi d’arte” was at once intensely anguished and surpassingly beautiful. The ovation went on so long it seemed Radvanovsky might be forced to break character and acknowledge it. But not this Tosca. One of the best actresses in opera, she made the character her own with affecting touches — flirtatious and playful one moment, fearful and anguished the next.In Jagde she had a tenor who could match her soaring power. It’s hard to believe that he spent almost 10 years early in his career as a baritone. On Thursday his enormous, vibrant voice was capped by exciting top notes. Now and then I wanted a little more subtlety and elegance. But it’s hard to complain when you have a singer with such a big, beefy instrument.Gagnidze held his own as Scarpia, conveying the character’s malevolence but also his aristocratic disdain. Patrick Carfizzi as the Sacristan, Kevin Short as Angelotti and Tony Stevenson as Spoletta were all excellent.There are just four more performances this month with Radvanovsky, Jagde and Nézet-Séguin. When word gets out, tickets may be scarce.ToscaThrough Dec. 18 with this cast (and in January and March with different artists) at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Met Opera’s Conductor Drops Out of ‘Figaro’

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin said a nearly four-week break from the podium would allow “time for me to re-energize” after a busy autumn.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, will not conduct, as planned, a revival of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” in January, the company announced on Monday evening.Nézet-Séguin will be “taking a brief, almost four-week sabbatical from all conducting duties commencing Dec. 19,” the Met said, and quoted him as adding, “This short break will allow time for me to re-energize as we return in the new year with more inspiring art.”The Philadelphia Orchestra, of which Nézet-Séguin is also music director, announced that Xian Zhang would take over his scheduled concerts on Dec. 31 and Jan. 2, but said that his time off would not affect his appearance with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 11, nor two subsequent weeks of subscription concerts in Philadelphia in January.Nézet-Séguin — who earlier in his career was known for keeping a particularly hectic schedule, and sometimes canceling — is currently in the midst of leading the Met’s run of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice.” It is the second company premiere he has conducted this fall, after opening the season with Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”He also led the Met’s forces in outdoor performances of Mahler’s Second Symphony and a nationally telecast version of Verdi’s Requiem for the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as concerts in Philadelphia, at Carnegie and in Montreal, where he is the music director of the Orchestre Métropolitain.He conducts Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Met from Thursday through Dec. 18, as well as a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” that opens on Feb. 28.For the “Figaro” run, which opens on Jan. 8, Nézet-Séguin will be replaced by Daniele Rustioni — who is at the Met to conduct a new production of “Rigoletto” starting New Year’s Eve — and (for the final performance, on Jan. 28) Gareth Morrell. Five more “Figaro” performances scheduled for April will be conducted by James Gaffigan. More

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      Review: The Met Opera’s ‘Eurydice’ Tries to Raise the Dead

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      The composer Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s teeming, wearying adaptation of her play is a contemporary vision of the Orpheus myth.What does it sound like when you’re dead?“There are strange high-pitched noises,” a character in Sarah Ruhl’s play “Eurydice” writes to his daughter, who is still in the land of the living, “like a teakettle always boiling over.”Slippery, curdling tones, as if you were hearing sour milk being poured, score our first visit to the underworld in Ruhl and the composer Matthew Aucoin’s teeming, wearying adaptation of the 2003 play, which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere on Tuesday.Ruhl and Aucoin’s ambition, to offer a contemporary vision of the story of Orpheus and his attempt to rescue his wife from oblivion, resonates to the very origins of this art form. Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice,” from 1600, is the earliest surviving opera, and Claudio Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” written a few years later, is the earliest still regularly performed. Orpheus operas clutter the next four centuries; Luigi Rossi’s gorgeous 1647 version had a rare production at the Juilliard School earlier this month.In Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s opera, the recently dead are overseen by three stones (from left, Chad Shelton, Ronnita Miller and Stacey Tappan).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s not surprising that a tale about the greatest musician in history, a man who could make the very stones weep when he performed, keeps appealing to his descendants. The scenario offers composers a wedding party, a tragic death, an evocation of what lies beyond, an attempt at resurrection, a plangent lament — opportunities to shine, and to place themselves in a grand tradition.Aucoin, 31, doesn’t shy from taking on this lineage. His score is massive and assertive, but agile; it keeps moving, endlessly eclectic, but unified by a muscular grip on the pace, and played with tireless vitality by the Met Orchestra under the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.The sheer scale of Aucoin’s music is luxurious, but it never luxuriates for long, always rushing on to the next, different thing — as if, for all its splendor, it was afraid of losing our attention. A pummeling restlessness that evokes John Adams shares the manuscript with softly glistening bells; a riff on elevator-music bossa nova, with batteries of raucous percussion.The dancing at Orpheus and Eurydice’s wedding, a hint of pop music glimpsed through ominous shadows, is a little jewel. Hades, the god of the underworld who tempts her to her destruction, is a screechingly high tenor (here Barry Banks, relishing the extremity).Morley, with Hopkins, is the focus far more than in most operas about the Orpheus myth.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOrpheus (the baritone Joshua Hopkins) has a double (the countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski, in his Met debut). Down in hell, the recently dead are overseen by a trio of those weeping stones (Ronnita Miller, Chad Shelton and Stacey Tappan, all vivid). Unlike in most Orpheus operas, the main aria here goes to Eurydice (the soprano Erin Morley), gently bemoaning the pain of loving an artist: “Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.” Near the end, an effusion of Puccinian warmth yields to yet more punchy percussion, then a fanfaring pastiche of the Handelian Baroque before the work’s grimly quiet conclusion. A chorus chants offstage.It’s all a lot; it can feel like too much. Plain-spoken yet poetic, Ruhl’s play is the kind in which a scene is devoted simply to Eurydice’s father creating a room for her out of string — about the most heartbreakingly delicate act you can imagine. But Aucoin gives the sequence an orchestral accompaniment of Wagnerian grandeur, rising to a pitched climax, as if the father had just built Valhalla.And not long before that passage comes a similarly jarring instrumental interlude with the bruising intensity of something out of Berg’s “Wozzeck.” Later, as Orpheus emerges from the underworld — instructed, sigh, not to look back at his wife, who’s following him — a cacophony of drumming and brass makes the moment feel less appropriately dramatic than simply bullied.Opera feeds on too-muchness, of course, and the Orpheus myth is life-or-death stuff, not undeserving of big, fervent music. But given Ruhl’s winsome treatment, the resulting sensation is of Aucoin’s music swamping the story, rather than guiding and being guided by it. You take in the plot, but feel too overwhelmed to feel.A surfeit of scoring was also a problem in Aucoin’s last opera, the turgid “Crossing” (2015), about Walt Whitman during the Civil War. He wrote that libretto; thanks to Ruhl’s lucidity, “Eurydice,” first heard in February 2020 at Los Angeles Opera, is a clearer, stronger work. Her play, written a few years after her father’s death, added a twist, grafting onto the traditional myth a story about a parent and child grieving their distance.Hades (Barry Banks, relishing the part’s screechingly high tenor range) tempts Eurydice to her doom.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis structure puts much more focus than usual on Eurydice, the conjunction of these romantic and familial strands. But at the Met there is a misty blank at the center of the work: Morley, in a role that dominates the music and action, has a voice that is poised and precise — and so slender as to be almost inaudible for much of the opera. (Aucoin’s dense scoring doesn’t help, but she has problems being heard even in transparent moments.) There are artists with small instruments that nevertheless penetrate the vast Met; Morley’s does only in its highest notes.As a result, we never feel sufficiently compelled by her; it’s a reminder that the emotional impact of operatic characters emerges from singers’ vocal presences. It is easy to like this Eurydice, her presence sweet yet unsentimental, but it is hard to care about her as much as we must. Her love for Orpheus, her recognition of her father (the sober bass-baritone Nathan Berg), her fear and her maturation — we know these things are happening, but none of them really come to life.Aucoin and Ruhl have interpolated some unnecessary cuteness into a play already tipping toward twee. At the gates of hell, the stones instruct Orpheus not to sing there “unless you sing in a dead language” — so Hopkins and Orlinski duly start intoning Latin, in a parody of medieval plainchant.The countertenor double feels like the kind of idea that gets embraced at a brainstorming session. It’s true, the sound of Orlinski’s luminous voice making a halo around Hopkins’s robust lower lines can be quite pretty.But it’s a muddle figuring out what the double is doing onstage, particularly in Mary Zimmerman’s production, which gives him tiny angel wings but also has him often appear shirtless and brooding. Is he Orpheus’s trainer? His id? His creative side? A clever musical effect ends up clogging the drama. (Coincidentally, Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s season, also included a baritone’s high-pitched double, but with clearer dramaturgy: a boy soprano representing the main character’s younger self.)Zimmerman’s blandly fantastical “Eurydice” staging efficiently depicts the action — the elevator down to hell; the shower that makes the dead forget their lives; the looming, pocked walls of the underworld — but lacks magic and sparkle. (The stones, monumentally caked gray beings, are charming; Ana Kuzmanic is the costume designer.) One relief: The text is projected as it’s sung onto Daniel Ostling’s set, letting the audience focus fully on the action.“Eurydice” is most moving as a symbol of a shift in the Met’s artistic priorities. If you had said just a few years ago that the company’s music director would be conducting two recent American operas — this and “Fire” — in two months, no one would have believed you. Pandemic reshuffling made that happen, but Nézet-Séguin said in a recent interview that the past year and a half has left him newly committed to maintaining that pace and personally leading a pair of contemporary works each season.Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s eerie 2017 adaptation of “Hamlet” arrives in the spring. Premieres by Kevin Puts, Missy Mazzoli, Mason Bates, Jeanine Tesori and others are on the horizon, as are overlooked works of the past few decades, like Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.”What a time to be on this side of the underworld.EurydiceThrough Dec. 16 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin Is Now New York’s Conductor

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      After facing anger during a prolonged labor dispute, the Met Opera’s music director has returned to the podium, emphasizing new work.The set for “Porgy and Bess” had been pushed to the back of the Metropolitan Opera’s stage on a recent Wednesday morning, and in front, lines of chairs and music stands had been set up. The company’s orchestra and chorus were coming together for the first time with the cast of “Eurydice” — a recent adaptation of Sarah Ruhl’s wistful play, with music by Matthew Aucoin — to run through the score in what’s known as a sitzprobe.Inside the vast and almost empty Met auditorium, Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, typed on his laptop near the back of the theater. Ruhl was in the house; Mary Zimmerman, the director of the production, which opens on Tuesday, watched, too. Aucoin dashed around, listening for balances.At breaks, he rushed down the aisle to the pit to confer with the leader of any sitzprobe: the conductor. Here that was Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, who offered the ensemble bits of counsel, sometimes asking for delicacy and transparency (“more French in approach”), sometimes for lyricism (“violas and cellos, you could sing a bit more”).The orchestra flew through one breathless passage in the second act, making a gallop to the final burst. “Ecstatic and chaotic,” said Nézet-Séguin, 46, smiling from the podium. “Is this something we can do?”With the New York Philharmonic’s director a newly declared lame duck, Nézet-Séguin is entering an era as the city’s presiding conductor, the one whose artistic achievements blur into civic stature.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesChaos has lately dominated: The pandemic shut the Met for a year and a half. During much of that period, its unionized employees — including orchestra musicians and choristers — were furloughed without pay as a stalemate over compensation cuts dragged on.But the response to the company’s return has been ecstatic. And at the center of it all — short and muscular, with close-cropped, bleached-blond hair and a taste for rehearsal athleisure — is Nézet-Séguin. Omnipresent and energetic, he has been one of the central figures in New York’s cultural re-emergence, and certainly the city’s most significant and visible classical musician at a transformative moment.Over Labor Day weekend, shortly after the Met reached a deal with its unions, he conducted Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony — the first notes the company had played together since March 2020 — in front of thousands outside the opera house. Audiences soon returned inside the theater to hear him lead a nationally telecast performance of Verdi’s Requiem, for the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11.Later that month, he began the Met’s season in earnest at the podium for Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” from 2019, the company’s first work by a Black composer. Nine days after that, he reopened Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra, of which he is also the music director, in the first of an astonishing nine dates for him at Carnegie this season. With the New York Philharmonic’s director, Jaap van Zweden, a newly declared lame duck, Nézet-Séguin is entering an era as the city’s presiding conductor, the one whose artistic achievements blur into civic stature.At the Met, he works from the ground-floor office once occupied by James Levine, who ruled the company for decades before being brought down by illness and allegations of sexual misconduct. Those troubles led Nézet-Séguin to ascend to the music directorship in 2018, two years ahead of schedule. Levine — who rarely led contemporary operas, let alone two in two months — died in March.When the Met’s unionized workforce was furloughed during the pandemic, some employees were angry that Nézet-Séguin was not earlier and louder in support.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesThere has been a major change to the office. At the start of a recent interview there, Nézet-Séguin mimed tearing down a set of bookshelves that had blocked the view of Damrosch Park.“It feels symbolic,” he said. “It is to me. It’s about windows open and the fresh air of our repertoire and approach.”Despite the bright new light and the celebratory spirit of the past month and a half, the pandemic has been a dark period for Nézet-Séguin. During labor struggles, a music director’s position — closely connected to the players, but at the same time part of the administration — is intensely uncomfortable. There were musicians angry that Nézet-Séguin, who did not comment publicly on the negotiations until March, just after the orchestra agreed to begin accepting partial pay, was not earlier and louder in support.“It is a position that is unenviable,” Gelb said in an interview. “And one I hated to see him in. I’m used to catching fire during these disputes, and I hated to see him get it, too. I tried to keep him out of it; it was unfair for him to be in the middle of it. But I was not very good at protecting him.”The experience was unsettling for an artist whose rise to the top of his profession has been swift and sunny, and who is unused to hostility from musicians. (They tend to venerate him: “He’s the greatest conductor I’ve ever worked with,” said Harold Robinson, who is retiring as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal bass after 26 years.)“I didn’t know what to expect coming in,” Nézet-Séguin said of the orchestra’s first rehearsal after the furlough ended. “I said very little at the beginning. I said: ‘We lost many people. We lost members of our company. We lost people in our families, our friends.’ And the first notes were Verdi, actually. We just played it through. Let’s put all our emotions in this. And it helped.”Nézet-Séguin leading a rehearsal for the Met premiere of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice.”Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan OperaDavid Krauss, the Met’s principal trumpet, said in an interview: “There was some tension in the first half of the first rehearsal back. And by the second half, it was back to business as usual.”Not exactly business as usual. The pandemic, and the calls for racial justice that flared last year, fast-tracked the Met premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” giving it pride of place on one of the highest-profile opening nights in the company’s history. The piece’s success — reviews were positive, four of the eight performances sold out, and the crowds were markedly more diverse than usual — has convinced Nézet-Séguin that works representing the experience of groups often marginalized in the classical canon, including Latinos and L.G.B.T. people, should be fixtures going forward.“This is showing us what we need to do,” he said, “and confirming what I’ve been wanting from Day 1.”But one question is whether, without the burst of publicity that accompanied the Met’s belated presentation of a Black composer’s work, new operas can hold their own at the box office. (To be fair, even classics have struggled to sell in recent years.) Test cases will come: While Nézet-Séguin has his eye on little-done corners of the repertory — he mentioned Gluck, Weber’s “Der Freischütz,” Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” and Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” — he has decided that if the choice is between a rarity’s revival and a contemporary piece, the latter will get priority.“It should be at the expense, maybe, of some stuff I had wanted to bring back,” he said.“I had a lot of new pieces planned in the future,” Nézet-Séguin said. “But I was maybe thinking I would do one a year, or skipping some years. And now, no.”Jingyu Lin for The New York Times“We are reassessing all the operas I am going to be conducting,” he added, “because I don’t want this to be the exception, to do ‘Eurydice’ and ‘Fire.’ For me, this should be the norm. I had a lot of new pieces planned in the future. But I was maybe thinking I would do one a year, or skipping some years. And now, no.”Aucoin, the composer of “Eurydice,” said that Nézet-Séguin is a collaborator “to a degree that’s unusual for conductors.”“In the chaotic dance scene in Act I,” he added, “there’s this techno-esque line in the background, and my idea was that it should be only in the very bottom octave, the piano’s left hand and contrabassoons. I wanted it to be a pop song heard from another room. But it wasn’t registering. And he suggested we throw some bass trombone in there, and he was right.”On an early November afternoon in Philadelphia, Nézet-Séguin and his orchestra there presented an installment in the cycle of Beethoven symphonies they are also playing at Carnegie this season.Beethoven’s Second and Eighth framed “Sermon,” a suite of arias and spoken texts about race and struggle organized and performed by the young bass-baritone Davóne Tines. At its center is the calm, luminous sorrow of “Vigil,” written by Igee Dieudonné and Tines in memory of Breonna Taylor.New music can often feel randomly scattered onto an orchestral concert, added merely to give a progressive sheen to fundamentally conservative programming. But the mournful “Sermon” felt at home among the symphonies, both complementing and in tension with them, particularly as they were played by the Philadelphians with such graceful, sweet-not-saccharine polish and élan. Old and new, life and death, coexisted and enhanced one another.“That was the idea,” Nézet-Séguin said of Tines’s piece. “Giving him the space to tell us his story. I’m not a private, private person. I like to speak with you about my art; I like to go on television and share who I am as a person. But it’s not about me becoming more famous so that people give me attention. I’m not shying away from attention, but I want it to be helping the collective. I want to be the person who can help shed light on others.”“I’m not shying away from attention, but I want it to be helping the collective. I want to be the person who can help shed light on others.”Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesAt the end of February, Nézet-Séguin will achieve another repertory milestone at the Met, bringing Verdi’s “Don Carlos” there for the first time in its original French — rather than in the more common Italian, as “Don Carlo.” A few weeks later, as part of what is intended to be an ongoing collaboration between his two American institutions — he also leads the Orchestre Métropolitain of Montreal — he and the Philadelphia Orchestra will give the world premiere of Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s opera adaptation of “The Hours” in concert, before it is staged at the Met in a future season.The rebuilding of the Met is far from over. Eleven of its orchestra’s 96 regular full-time members retired or left their jobs during the pandemic. Should all be replaced? In what order? That is for Nézet-Séguin, in large part, to decide. And the company’s financial model, which keeps forcing the need for cuts and brinkmanship with the unions, is no closer to being permanently solved.“I can’t say we’re completely behind what happened last year,” Nézet-Séguin said. “We’re not. But at least these moments — this Verdi, this ‘Fire’ and now this ‘Eurydice’ — are helping everyone focus on what matters to us and how we can function together. And making a difference. It sounds cliché, but trying to make a difference in the world.” More

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      Review: Carnegie Hall Reopens With a Blaze From Philadelphia

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      After a 572-day closure, the hall was lit by a vibrant concert from the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.After being closed for 572 days because of the pandemic, Carnegie Hall, the country’s pre-eminent concert space, opened its season on Wednesday. It took only a simple greeting from the stage — “welcome back,” spoken by Clive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director — for the audience to burst into sustained cheers.On paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s program — including favorites like Bernstein’s joyous overture to “Candide” and staples like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — seemed tilted toward an opening night’s traditional purpose as a crowd-pleasing fund-raising gala. Yet both the choice of works and the vibrant music-making went deeper into questions of classical music’s relevance and renewal than I had expected.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra’s music director, began by leading a performance of Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” a work that the Philadelphians premiered online in May. This five-minute score has become the orchestra’s unofficial anthem for this difficult period. Inspired by Boccaccio and the 7 p.m. cheers for frontline workers during the pandemic, the piece offers a hard-won vision of a more beautiful place.Nézet-Séguin, also the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, led vibrant, impetuous performances of works both classic and new.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesIt opens with cautious trumpet fanfares that activate tremulous strings. The music goes through passages of jittery riffs, burnished string chords, elegiac quietude and eruptive restlessness — complete with actual shouts and claps from the players. The piece at times has a Copland-esque glow, but Coleman adds tart harmonic tweaks and assertive syncopations that continually surprise.The brilliant pianist Yuja Wang was the soloist for Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a work from 1957 considered one of this composer’s lighter, wittier scores. But from the start, this performance — especially Wang’s commanding, colorful playing — seemed determined to look below the bustling surface for hints of the bitterly satirical Shostakovich.As the orchestra played the chortling opening theme, alive with woodwinds, Wang almost sneaked into the fray with a subtly lyrical rendering of the piano’s quizzical lines. Then, taking charge, she dispatched bursts of brittle chords, tossed off creepy-crawly runs and kept bringing out both the sweetly melodic and industriously steely elements of the three-movement work.Yuja Wang joined for a commanding, colorful performance of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThen Nézet-Séguin, who in his other role as music director of the Metropolitan Opera is currently leading performances of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” turned to the “Candide” overture — and may have tried too hard to tease out jagged edges and multilayered complexities in Bernstein’s sparkling, impish music.He then spoke to the audience about how the disruptions of the pandemic shook our collective sense of “where we are, where we are going,” and explained the pairing of the final two works on the program: Iman Habibi’s short “Jeder Baum spricht” (“Every Tree Speaks”) and Beethoven’s Fifth. The Habibi score, written in dialogue with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, was premiered in Philadelphia on March 12, 2020, to an empty hall, just after pandemic closures began.Habibi imagines how Beethoven, a nature lover, might respond to today’s climate crisis. On Wednesday, the compelling piece came across like a series of frustrated attempts at cohesion and peace, with fitful starts, hazy chords and driving yet irregular rhythmic figures. Finally, there is a sense, however uneasy, of affirmation and brassy richness.Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphians will play seven concerts in all at Carnegie this season, including a complete survey of Beethoven’s symphonies.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWithout a pause, Nézet-Séguin dove into the Beethoven. And if you think this classic work has to sound heroic and monumental, this performance was not for you. Here was an impetuous, in-the-moment account. Tempos shifted constantly. Some passages raced forward breathlessly, only to segue to episodes in which Nézet-Séguin drew out lyrical inner voices you seldom hear so prominently. It was exciting and unpredictable. Beethoven felt like he was responding to Habibi, as much as vice versa.The Philadelphians had planned to present a complete survey of the symphonies at Carnegie last season, as part of the celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th birthday. That cycle will now take place in five programs over the coming months, with most of these totemic works preceded by shorter new pieces. (Coming to Carnegie no fewer than seven times in all, the orchestra also plays more Coleman in February, alongside Barber and Florence Price, and Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” in April.)If the opening-night pairing and performances were indicative, this series will be a stimulating conversation between classical music’s storied past and the tumultuous present.Philadelphia OrchestraOther Beethoven symphony programs on Oct. 20, Nov. 9, Dec. 7 and Jan. 11 at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Carnegie Hall Counts Down to Its Reopening

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      “The biggest variables — box office sales and venue rentals — are moving in a good direction,” says the director of the hall, which opens its season Oct. 6.The pianos have been tuned. The crimson carpets have been cleaned. The crystal chandeliers have been dusted.After nearly 19 months without concerts, Carnegie Hall, the nation’s pre-eminent concert space, plans to reopen its doors to the public on Oct. 6.With the coronavirus still omnipresent, the reopening is a logistical feat, involving questions about air-ventilation systems, crowd control and hand-sanitizing stations.It’s also an emotional moment for Carnegie, which lost millions of dollars in ticket sales during the pandemic and at one point was forced to reduce its staff by nearly half. The hall is grappling with an anticipated budget deficit of up to $10 million and is planning a lighter-than-usual season of about 100 concerts (versus the usual 150) as it tries to gauge demand.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, inside hall’s archives.Michael George for The New York TimesClive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director since 2005, says Carnegie is ready for the challenge. The hall has added entrances, upgraded ventilation systems and increased the frequency of bathroom cleaning.“We have to keep adapting to whatever the situation is, not only to look after people as best we can, but also for people to feel as safe as they can,” Gillinson said. “It’s reality as well as perception. Both are equally important.”In an interview, Gillinson discussed the new season, which begins with the Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the virtuoso Yuja Wang alongside works by Valerie Coleman, Iman Habibi, Bernstein and Beethoven.Gillinson also spoke about the lack of racial diversity in classical music and the return of the arts amid the pandemic. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Carnegie has been closed for the longest stretch in its history. Are you confident audiences will come back, especially given the continuing spread of the virus and the need for added safety protocols?Without doubt some people will be concerned. All I can say is the reaction we’ve had has been the opposite. It’s been that everybody is so thrilled that things are coming back to life again. When we opened the box office, beginning to start on the road back, we had people in tears because they were so excited about actually being able to buy tickets again. But at the same time, we feel we’ve got to look after the people who have still got concerns.During the height of the pandemic Carnegie was forced to make substantial cuts, including reducing its staff to 190, from 350. How are you planning the new season amid all the uncertainty?The biggest variables — box office sales and venue rentals — are moving in a good direction at the moment. But that doesn’t mean we count anything as done until we’ve completed the season. You have to be working incredibly hard all the time. You have to be responding to everything that’s happening every day because life just does change every day during Covid.What are you seeing so far in terms of ticket sales?The opening concerts look really strong and very positive. The others will continue to sell as we go along.We deliberately didn’t over-pack the fall. It’s much busier from the new year onward because we just wanted to make sure audiences had time to build up their confidence, and time to really get re-engaged with going out again. So it’s a very deliberate strategy.Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra will reopen the hall in the first of their seven Carnegie concerts this season.Chris LeeSince announcing the season earlier this year you’ve added a few concerts to the schedule, including a complete cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies with Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra that was supposed to happen last year. How did you decide what to revive?When we had to cancel because of Covid, I spoke to Yannick and said, “Look, I promise that we will bring this back in the future.” It was something that meant a huge amount to him. The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned some contemporary works to go alongside the cycle that would actually have some sort of reflection on the world we live in today and look at Beethoven through that light.The minute we were able to open and the governor gave everybody permission to open with full seating, the first thing I did was phone Yannick to say: “This is it, if there’s any way you can do it. I promised you we would bring this back. How about now?” They jumped at it.At the same time there are many artists whose concerts were canceled who you haven’t been able to reschedule. How are you dealing with that?We do feel an obligation to try and bring people back who we haven’t been able to bring back so far. So that’s going to take some time, because if you lose a year and a half of concerts, there’s a lot of concerts. Sometimes the world can move on as well and they’ll be doing other things and there’ll be other repertoire. But we are looking to do the best we can in terms of looking after the people we had to cancel.The Sphinx Virtuosi perform at Carnegie on Oct. 15.Stephanie BergerDo you worry the pandemic has hurt the careers of rising artists whose engagements at Carnegie or elsewhere were canceled?One of the things I’ve always felt about what we do is that the great artists will always come through and they’ll always succeed. They’ve got something to say that is really important to people. Something like this clearly will have changed plans and will have delayed very early-days careers. But the reality is, I think talent and great artistry are never lost. That never, ever goes away.What about smaller venues and less established artists, who suffered a great deal during the pandemic. Do you think they will make a comeback? Has the pandemic fundamentally changed which kinds of artists and groups can survive?Some of the most innovative, interesting, imaginative work that’s ever happened is going on in New York. It’s the most dynamic scene we’ve ever seen.They’re very entrepreneurial people. They’re very creative people. And they’ll find a way to survive. It’s not like all us large organizations where we have massive overhead, much of which we can’t change.The pandemic has made it very difficult for many ensembles to go on extensive global tours, with stops at Carnegie and other venues. How do you think the pandemic will change touring?You’ve got all the issues like climate change and so on. I think there are going to be a lot more question marks about orchestras at least asking themselves how much touring they should be doing. And I think what they do, they will want it to have greater significance than it had before.It’s not just a question of touring and saying, “I’ve appeared in this city and that city.” It’s: “What have I left behind? Is there is there a legacy or is this something important that came out of my having been there?”This season Carnegie will prominently feature Valery Gergiev, the Russian conductor and friend of Vladimir Putin, who will perform a series of concerts with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra. How do you respond to those who think he shouldn’t be given such an opportunity, given his silence on abuses in Russia?Why should artists be the only people in the world who are not allowed to have political opinions? My view is you only judge people on their artistry. If somebody was a racist or somebody said things that were clearly abusive of other races or other people in certain ways, that is completely different and that is unacceptable. But in terms of them being entitled to an opinion which happens to be a political opinion, they have every right as every other single member of society has.What do you make of the current debate around the idea that classical music, which has long been dominated by white, male composers, is racist, and that it has not adequately grappled with questions about representation and diversity?If you think of Western culture, literature, painting, music, the bulk of it was done by people who were white in one form or another. And it’s not invalidated. I always worry when people try and apply today’s values to the world of 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, because the fact is, what people were trying to do at that time was completely different and it was relevant for its time. We’ve got to be relevant for our time. Diversity is unbelievably important. That is central to the sort of society we must live in now. And that doesn’t invalidate the fact that there was great art created, and OK, a lot of it was created by white people, and some of it was created by people who were racists.Carnegie was one of the first institutions to impose a vaccine mandate for audiences. Did you meet any resistance?I’ve had a very, very small number of emails from people saying: “This is ridiculous. You’re being paranoid. It’s completely unnecessary.” But we know the world we live in has very, very different views on this. We can only have one view, which is, how do we look after people?How do you see the future of the arts in light of the pandemic?How people are likely to feel, nobody can judge that. We can’t tell. But I do think the arts will come roaring back.Why do people live in New York City? Why do the big companies want to be here? Why do the headquarters want to be here? Why is there all this tourism? Culture is the magnet that actually makes New York New York. More