Noseda, Gianandrea

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    Two Concerts Reveal a Dramatic Shift Between Mahler Symphonies

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

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      Review: When the Philharmonic Applauds the Soloist

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      Without interplay from the musicians, Leonidas Kavakos found tension in his own playing in Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto.After the musicians of the New York Philharmonic finished Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto on Thursday night, they did something they don’t usually do: They applauded the soloist.With a violinist on the order of Leonidas Kavakos, that reaction felt justified. He is a wonder. The music flowed out of him like a river — big, glistening and unobstructed, but also tasteful in its frictionless subtleties.Shostakovich, under the watch of Soviet authorities and brought to heel at Stalin’s pleasure, completed the concerto in 1948 but, presumably fearing retribution for failing to glorify the nation and its people, shelved it until after Stalin’s death in 1953. The work is constructed as a suite of movements. It opens with a character piece, a murkily colored Nocturne that lives in the Upside Down of Chopin’s genre-defining works for piano, and reaches a climax in a Baroque-derived Passacaglia, at once august and austere, that leads into a fiendish five-minute cadenza for the soloist.Playing from memory, Kavakos cleared one hazard after another in Shostakovich’s stupendously original score. He didn’t just spin legato lines in the searching, conversational Nocturne; he expounded entire legato paragraphs in an eloquent, unbroken stream of consciousness. Shredding his way through the Scherzo, his tone was poised, even lavish. Where some violinists convey a sense of anguish in demanding passages — playing two melodies in duet or an endless seesaw of double stops — he sounded effortless. Even his harmonics had a juicy ping.The orchestra, led by Gianandrea Noseda, faded into the background. The players failed to envelop Kavakos in the Nocturne’s glimmering, unsettling darkness. The Scherzo had no abandon, and the Burlesque’s funhouse-mirror distortions of the concerto’s once-noble themes had no derision. Noseda fitfully ratcheted up the intensity of the Passacaglia with its implacable 17-bar pattern. As energy slacked, shy deference reigned.Without interplay from the orchestra, Kavakos found tension in his own playing. In the cadenza, he could have been a caged animal reacquainting itself with its own majesty. His encore, taken from Bach’s Partita No. 1, was spellbinding.It was hard to imagine how anything could follow Kavakos’s performance, and perhaps someone at the Philharmonic felt the same way. After he left the stage, an announcement was made that the next piece, George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 1, would be pushed to after intermission.During the break, I wondered if the clean, bright acoustics of the Philharmonic’s new hall were partly to blame for the orchestra’s showing in the Shostakovich. Each instrumental section sounded crisp, soloistic and unblended.The Walker, an imaginative exercise in disparate timbres, dispelled those suspicions. The orchestra, from the pointed brasses to the curling woodwinds, found its way to unanimity of utterance.The final piece, Respighi’s “Roman Festivals,” gave the Philharmonic an opportunity to demonstrate how far it has come in calibrating its sound to the enhanced acoustics of its new auditorium. A composer of sunny bombast, Respighi provided the stirring finale for the ensemble’s first subscription program of the season in October with “Pines of Rome,” the second piece in his Roman trilogy. At the time, colors practically bounced off the walls in the lively acoustic; climaxes, perhaps overshot, took on a fuzzy quality.On Thursday, the orchestra showed off the clarity of fortissimo passages, layering percussion, brass and strings in handsome tiers. Corrosive brasses and heated strings enlivened the Respighi’s first movement, and gray-toned woodwinds, transparent violins, and luxuriant cellos and basses colored the second.In something of a redo of Shostakovich’s Burlesque, “Roman Festivals” closes with a portrait of the antic, circuslike crowds of Piazza Navona in Rome. The Philharmonic’s players came alive in the coordinated chaos. It was the sound of revelers falling into a shared rhythm — and of an orchestra relearning how to play with itself.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: The National Symphony Spotlights Forward Thinkers

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      Gianandrea Noseda led his Washington ensemble at Carnegie Hall in a trio of works by George Walker, Prokofiev and Stravinsky.The National Symphony Orchestra, in the days leading to its Carnegie Hall appearance on Tuesday, launched a charm offensive in the press.This ensemble from Washington revealed that its music director, Gianandrea Noseda, had been anonymously lending seven Italian-made violins and one viola, reportedly collectively valued at some $5 million, to players in the orchestra. Until very recently, the musicians did not know who their benefactor was until — ta-da! — Noseda stepped forward.While heartwarming, this revelation says nothing of the orchestra’s actual sound. That still depends on the performance it delivers — and on Tuesday, it came through. In a program of works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky and the underperformed American George Walker, the National Symphony and Noseda highlighted three inventive, forward-looking composers with Romantic roots.In 1996, Walker became the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music; he died in 2018 at age 96. He had tried to begin his career as a concert pianist, but, stymied by the lack of opportunities for Black classical instrumentalists, turned his ambitions to a career split between academia and composing.The National Symphony has been recording a cycle of Walker’s five brief Sinfonias, with the last scheduled to be released this fall. At Carnegie, the group performed his fourth, “Strands,” written in 2012, which subtly weaves in two spirituals, “There Is a Balm in Gilead” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” Walker employs astringent, rigorous modernism in an orchestral palette that brings to mind the grand sweep of Bruckner. This is music that deserves wider hearing.Daniil Trifonov, the Russian-born pianist who has made his home in New York, joined for Prokofiev’s devilishly virtuosic Second Piano Concerto with brilliant panache. He often hunched over his instrument in ruminative concentration, his long curtain of hair nearly brushing the keys. But when it was time to unleash his full power — in the driving propulsion of the second movement Scherzo, for example — Trifonov made it clear that he was the one leading the orchestra, drawing out all of Prokofiev’s prickly tonalities and percussive rhythms. While the orchestra couldn’t quite match Trifonov’s hairpin turns of attack, they were shoulder to shoulder with him in their mood and color.As an encore, Trifonov played more Prokofiev: the Gavotte from his “Three Pieces From ‘Cinderella,’” based on his 1940s ballet. Here again, Trifonov underscored all of Prokofiev’s dazzling, capricious energy.Many conductors choose a pungent flavor for Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” written for the 1910 season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Noseda instead led his Washington players into a gauzy, gossamer-spun dreamland of a Russian folk tale. While there were moments of piquancy and verve in the winds and brasses, the strings tamped out little flashes of fire and spark in favor of a plusher, more rounded sound. Eventually, though, Noseda dissipated that shroud of glistening sweetness, inviting the low brass and percussion to emerge in full force.The orchestra may see those Noseda-owned instruments as a kind of secret sauce, but on Tuesday it was the total flavor — a mix of honey and heat — that was truly satisfying.National Symphony OrchestraPerformed on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      An Orchestra Brings Harmony to a Region of Discord

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      The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra unites players from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine with a message of peace and dialogue.In February, Grigory Ambartsumyan, a 22-year-old Ukrainian violinist of Armenian descent, awoke in Kyiv to the sound of bombs. It was the beginning of Russia’s assault on his country, and the coming days and weeks were a blur of restless nights in bomb shelters.Now, six months later and with war still raging, Ambartsumyan and dozens of his fellow musicians with the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra have reunited in Tsinandali, a bucolic village in Georgia for the fourth annual Tsinandali Festival of classical music. It’s been a difficult three years since the orchestra debuted in September 2019, given the coronavirus pandemic (which stopped it from performing at the festival for two years), as well as continuing tensions between Georgia’s neighbors Azerbaijan and Armenia, and, of course, the lingering war in nearby Ukraine.This year, there is an urgent sense of camaraderie and hope among these young musicians and the festival organizers in this historically volatile region. Some 80 performers from seven countries from the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and a few neighboring nations — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine — will play three of the 19 concerts at the festival, which runs Sept. 2-11.Members of the orchestra celebrate after their Mahler performance in 2019.Tsinandali Festival“If we don’t establish a new relationship across borders with music, we are going to lose the opportunity to plant some seeds in the hearts of these young musicians,” said the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the Tsinandali Festival. “You have to start with the young people to solve problems through connections rather than divisions.”The orchestra opens this year’s festival on Friday with “Adagio” by the Ukrainian modern composer Bohdana Frolyak (along with pieces by Brahms and Beethoven). The concert will be conducted by Oksana Lyniv, also Ukrainian, who in 2021 became the first woman to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival.The Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra is the brainchild of Martin Engstroem, the director of the well-heeled Verbier Festival in Switzerland. In 2018 he was hired, along with Avi Shoshani, the secretary general of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, by the private-equity investor George Ramishvili, a Georgian, to start a music festival in his home country. The festival began in September 2019 on an estate northeast of the capital of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.But Engstroem and Shoshani didn’t just want to put on another summer festival for the elite. “I felt one needed to create a festival in this part of the world with a message,” Engstroem said, something “humanitarian and geopolitical.”The Tsinandali Festival is held on the grounds of an estate northeast of Tbilisi once owned by the 19th-century Romantic poet Prince Alexander Chavchavadze.Tsinandali FestivalLike many classical music festivals, the festival celebrates the works of major European composers — but it also includes music from the Caucasus, as well as Turkey and other countries that border the region, where tensions stretch back hundreds of years, including between Turkey and Armenia and, more recently, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as Russia and Georgia.The State of the WarA New Counteroffensive: Ukraine has long vowed a major push in the southern region of Kherson to retake territory seized by Russia. It may have begun.Nuclear Plant Standoff: After renewed shelling intensified fears about a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, United Nations inspectors arrived in Ukraine for a high-stakes visit to the Russian-controlled station.Russia’s Military Expansion: President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a sign that he expects a prolonged war — an outcome Ukraine has incentive to avoid.Unusual Approaches: Ukrainian troops, facing strained supply lines, are turning to jury-rigged weapons and equipment bartering among units.“Georgia and this region of Tsinandali are right in the center of where countries have been fighting forever,” Engstroem said.“Now, more than, ever, a dialogue is so important. We have seen that classical music is a universal language,” he added. “It’s relatively easy for kids from different backgrounds to create a common language through music.”For Ambartsumyan, the violinist, this year’s festival seems like a miracle. After enduring the bombardment of Kyiv earlier in the year, he remained in the city to study at the Ukrainian National Tchaikovsky Academy of Music this summer before traveling to Tsinandali for rehearsals. Speaking through a translator in a video interview, Ambartsumyan fought back tears as he talked about his journey in the last six months and recalled several friends killed in the war.“Starting in February, the explosions woke me up at night, and people were running and hiding everywhere,” he said. “It was such a tough time. And these past two years have been hard because I’m both Armenian and Ukrainian.”He was referring to the simmering clash between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It’s a conflict that much of the world seems to not know much — or care much — about, he said.“In 2019 I met an Azerbaijan girl in the youth orchestra, and I remember her saying that we can communicate together, all of us, despite the tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” he said. “It’s important for me and other musicians to realize that peace is the most important thing in life.”War has also touched other members of the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.“We were a little bit scared when the festival started in 2019 because there is always something going on or that could explode at any time,” said Diana Sargsyan, 23, an Armenian violinist. “And then Armenia and Azerbaijan fought for 44 days in 2020. I had brothers in the war, and I was always thinking about them.”The Tsinandali Festival continued in 2020 and 2021 but on a smaller scale and without the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra.Tsinandali FestivalAlthough the orchestra didn’t reunite in 2020 and 2021 (the Tsinandali Festival continued, but on a much smaller scale), many of the young musicians stayed in touch and hoped they would play this year.“People might wonder how we can sit next to each other, but it’s OK for us,” Sargsyan added. “The language we speak is music. It doesn’t matter which country you come from. We are all the same.”It’s a sentiment echoed by Ekaterine Tsenteradze, 25, a Georgian oboist who remembers the brief war between her country and Russia as a child.“I was 12 in 2008, and I remember seeing Russian soldiers in the streets,” Tsenteradze said, referring to the occupation of Georgia by Russian forces in August 2008 before a cease-fire was brokered after 12 days. “I have this fear again now. It feels like another country could be next. We’re in peace now and playing music, but it could all change.”Ambartsumyan said he found a certain pleasure that the orchestra would play works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, two composers who were repressed by the Soviet regime, for the festival’s closing performance on Sept. 11.The conductor Derrick Inouye, the ensemble’s assistant conductor, working with the orchestra this month in rehearsal.Tsinandali Festival“It will be emotional for me because in their music there is a small grain of tragedy, but also underlying a lot of their music is a satire of the government,” he said. Ambartsumyan said it was an ironic bit of programming in 2022, given that music written to criticize the Russian government is being played decades later in a region where Russian aggression is once again in the headlines.“When I saw Prokofiev and Shostakovich on the program, I thought to myself, ‘perfect!’” he said. “I know a little something about what these two composers went through.” More