Rachmaninoff, Sergei

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    Review: Under Manfred Honeck, the Philharmonic Becomes One

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    In a program of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, a guest conductor coaxes a sumptuous sincerity from the orchestra’s musicians.In a thrilling concert of Russian staples on Friday night, the conductor Manfred Honeck unified the players of the New York Philharmonic using something we don’t often hear from the stage of David Geffen Hall: a distinct point of view.Guest conductors arrive each week through a revolving door to present concerts with the Philharmonic after just a few rehearsals with the players. Ideally, an ensemble’s music director — in this case, Jaap van Zweden — provides continuity, but with repertoire that ranges across centuries in any given season, or indeed in any given program, the Philharmonic can sometimes appear faceless. Add the challenges of calibrating its sound to the acoustics of its new auditorium and you end up with some listless performances.Enter Honeck, the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In a program that paired Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony with Rachmaninoff’s beloved Second Piano Concerto, Honeck effortlessly coaxed sweep and sweetness, breadth and refinement, from the players. The concert had startling cohesion in its musical values.A conductor known for his intense warmth in general and his rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth in particular, Honeck brought the comfort of certitude to works composed in the shadow of doubt. In his sketches, Tchaikovsky noted that his symphony contains “reproaches against xxx,” which some read as struggles with rumors and anxiety about his sexuality. The Second Piano Concerto was the first piece Rachmaninoff wrote after the fiasco of his First Symphony; he dedicated it to the doctor who treated his creative block with hypnotherapy.For an orchestra that sometimes only goes through the motions, this program was animated by an expressive meticulousness. The Philharmonic’s strings shaded melodies to make them truly sing by using a variety of dynamics within a single phrase. The woodwinds handed off phrases with snappy coordination. The brasses, which Honeck put to ominous use in the Tchaikovsky, snarled and shone, and the horns traced rainbow arcs over the stage in the Rachmaninoff.Perhaps Honeck’s neatest trick was his ability to conjure lightness and amplitude at the same time. The strings’ opening melody in the Rachmaninoff had Romantic grandeur and beguiling translucence, blanketing but not muffling the piano’s arpeggios with gauzy tone. The waltz in the third movement of the Tchaikovsky was practically airborne, its elegantly asymmetrical melody generating an unlikely aerodynamic quality despite its sumptuousness.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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      Can a Piano Capture the Grandeur of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Music?

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      Inon Barnatan has created a solo transcription of “Symphonic Dances” in which he tries “not to imitate an orchestra, but to embody it.”Sergei Rachmaninoff composed two versions of “Symphonic Dances,” his last major work. One was the grand, orchestral score most often performed today; the other, a piano duet.But could it also work on one piano?Solo transcriptions have popped up in the decades since the 1941 premiere of “Symphonic Dances” — a colorful, harmonically adventurous journey through nostalgic melodies and grotesque waltzes, culminating in a cosmic showdown between life and death. And there exists a poor but precious recording of Rachmaninoff playing through the piece at the piano, vocalizing with his music as he ran through it for the conductor Eugene Ormandy in 1940.Now, the pianist Inon Barnatan has made a fresh case for the score’s viability as a solo transcription, through a new version of his own that he recorded for the Pentatone label — and that he will perform at the 92nd Street Y, New York on Friday.Barnatan, who has long loved the “Symphonic Dances,” has played the four-hands version in concert. But after hearing the Rachmaninoff recording, he wanted to try something similar, and the early, homebound days of the pandemic presented an opportunity.“I thought, this is my chance to see if this thing can work,” Barnatan, 44, said over coffee in his SoHo apartment. He gestured nearby and added: “I basically sat at that window with it from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. I didn’t look up, I was so engrossed.”In the interview, Barnatan explained why the piece lends itself to piano, and how it has changed his relationship with Rachmaninoff and his own playing. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Review: A New York Philharmonic Staple Outshines a Flashy Premiere

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      Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances was the highlight of a program that also included the New York debut of Bryce Dessner’s evocative Concerto for Two Pianos.On Thursday, the New York Philharmonic gave the New York premiere of a double piano concerto by a pop artist with classical and indie rock credentials. With the composer in attendance, the piece, lovingly crafted to show off the evening’s soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a strong claim as the evening’s centerpiece.Instead, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, a repertory staple that the Philharmonic recently performed in 2022, walked off with the night.The fault hardly lies with the piece written by Bryce Dessner, a founding member of the rock band the National, who has a master’s from the Yale School of Music and is a Grammy winner in rock and classical categories. The Labèque sisters’ recording of his Concerto for Two Pianos reveals an evocative, neatly conceived work that uses contrast to build momentum across three movements.Dessner, who closely studied the Labèques’ repertoire, throws all manner of writing at the pianists, who play cascading figures in canon, stuttering syncopations, gently articulated polyrhythms, jabbing chords and twinkling starbursts of notes. The orchestra, mesmerized, follows their lead. The winds copy the arching shape of the piano’s dreamy chord progressions, and the low strings and brasses double the piano’s bass stabs. What the concerto lacks in mystery it makes up for in showmanship and communal impact.On Thursday, the Labèque sisters played with typical precision, carving out figures from the orchestral fabric with a scalpel. They found flair in clarity; long-breathed lines flowed evenly, and the interplay between the piano parts — whether layered atop or responding to one another — had athletic grace. In the second movement, Katia played notes on high like a smooth, confiding whisper, and Marielle lashed out percussively. They make collaboration sound like an instinctive mind meld.The evening’s conductor, Semyon Bychkov, opted for a reduced version of the orchestration that sounded skeletal in live performance. A sequence of whole notes across the orchestral parts in the third movement desperately needed heft. The hairpin dynamics for the brasses, which are meant to flash by like a car’s headlights on a pitch-black night, were barely indicated. Without shape, vignettes blurred together: Prettily fragile passages sounded awfully similar to dissonant ones.The concerto, which never really reached out to grab its audience, deserved a fairer outing, especially as it was sandwiched between two works, Strauss’s “Don Juan” and the Symphonic Dances, that received the high Romantic treatment.The orchestra came out swinging in the Strauss, overshooting the brashness and bravado of the opening phrase and stiffly dispatching moments of mischief. But there was genuine sweep in the romantic climaxes as the orchestra summoned the intoxicating magic of Strauss’s dense score. The Don’s demise at the end was unsentimental and, in its own way, honorable.After intermission the orchestra, sounding reborn, struck a perfect balance between its overheated excitement in the Strauss and its detachment in the Dessner. From the first notes of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, the players, attuned to matters of balance and color, showed a striking confidence and natural expansiveness. The first movement’s extended woodwind chorale, anchored by the rose-gold color of Lino Gomez’s alto saxophone, was luxurious to behold. The strings, piano and harp answered with melancholic optimism.The second movement dispelled any lingering question about the Philharmonic’s dexterity with contrasts. It opened with the wheezing of stopped horns and muted trumpets, which quickly gave way to the liquefaction of legato winds and the oom-pah-pah of plush strings. A waltz of peculiar color, it seemed to waft off the stage and into the hall. It didn’t overwhelm the audience members or recede from them; instead, it invited them into the dance.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Illuminating Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, a Pinnacle of Russian Sacred Rep

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      Steven Fox and the Clarion Choir are tending to a less well-known part of the composer’s canon for his 150th birthday: His choral works.In a classical music world obsessed with anniversaries, be they grand or modest, the 150th birthday of the Russian émigré composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has inevitably drawn notice. Just as inevitably, commemorations have tended to focus on his war horses: the symphonies, piano concertos and solo piano works.It seems to have fallen to Steven Fox and his excellent choirs to tend to Rachmaninoff’s motley but treasurable body of choral works. The sacred ones, particularly — with their flowing yet restrained lyricism and none of the bombast or sentimentality often associated with the composer — represent the very best of Rachmaninoff.On Wednesday, Fox, the artistic director of the New York-based Clarion Music Society, will return to his alma mater — Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H. — to lead the Clarion Choir in Rachmaninoff’s exquisite All-Night Vigil, a pinnacle of the rich Russian Orthodox repertory. They will repeat the performance on Friday at Carnegie Hall.Fox, 44, first conducted the work — commonly called the Vespers, after a liturgical service included in it — as part of a senior project at Dartmouth in 2000. He also handled the logistics — simple enough, you might think, because Russian Orthodox practice bans musical instruments, using only voices.But those voices must be special, combining virtuosity with smooth blend. The basses, in particular, have to travel comfortably and sonorously below the clef, and typically, professional ringers are needed to fill out an amateur performance. (Clarion will feature Glenn Miller, the current go-to American basso profundo, in its two performances.)And to boot, the text is not quite in Russian but in antiquated Old Slavonic.“I can’t say I knew exactly what I was doing at that time,” Fox said in an interview. “There was a point about a week before the concert when I felt overwhelmed. I remember calling my adviser in tears and saying: ‘It’s too much. I can’t keep track of all the details.’ But leading up to the performance, even during it, I just felt calm. That really was the moment I discovered that I wanted to pursue conducting as a profession.”Fox has since made specialties of Russian Orthodox music in general and Rachmaninoff in particular. He and Clarion have presented the Vespers often at New Year in New York and recorded it beautifully for Pentatone.Fox, who first tackled the Vespers as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, has since made specialties of Russian Orthodox music in general and Rachmaninoff in particular.Olivia Galli for The New York TimesThe performances this week are just one part of Fox’s yearlong celebration of the Rachmaninoff anniversary. At New Year, he led Clarion performances of the composer’s other great sacred work, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. And in March, he conducted the Cathedral Choral Society, of which he is music director, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in a stirring rendition of “The Bells,” Rachmaninoff’s tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, at the National Cathedral in Washington.Still to come, in November, are the cantata “Spring” and “Three Russian Songs,” with Clarion at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, where Fox lives.Might Fox worry about the appropriateness of celebrating a son of Russia so deeply rooted in its culture as Russia wages war on Ukraine?“I did have misgivings,” he said. “My main concern was singing liturgical music, given the church’s role in what is happening now. But as I thought more about Rachmaninoff’s story, I thought in a way it relates to what many Ukrainians are experiencing. He kind of kept politics at arm’s length for a long time, but at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, he said: ‘I have no choice. I have to leave.’”In the end, Clarion added a program note for the New Year performances of the Liturgy: “There is a terrible war taking place in the part of the world from which this beautiful music comes. As we sing tonight, we pray for peace in the New Year.”And Leonid Roschko, an Orthodox priest and a basso who sang the Deacon in those performances, added a prayer to the Liturgy: “That Thou mightest enlighten with the light of Thy divine wisdom the minds of those darkened with hardness of heart, and protect the people of Ukraine from any harm.”On study and work travels to Russia before the invasion, Fox honed another specialty, Baroque music. He founded Musica Antiqua St. Petersburg, which called itself the nation’s first period-instrument orchestra. He also unearthed what he calls “the earliest known Russian symphony,” from about 1771, by the Ukraine-born Maksym Berezovsky.Back in New York, Fox took the lead in reviving the Clarion Music Society, which had fallen idle shortly after the death of its founder, Newell Jenkins, in 1996. Fox took it over in 2006 and, while expanding its range and pushing it to new heights of virtuosity, he furthered his own ventures into early music, notably including that of Bach.So when the New York Philharmonic asked him to cover for Jaap van Zweden during a run of Bach’s towering “St. Matthew Passion” in March, he was eager to do it. No matter that rehearsals were to begin the day after the “Bells” performance in Washington.“I know the piece, and it would have been hard to say no,” Fox said. “Jaap and I got on very well. I admired his intensity. I thought he knew the score really well, and yet every time I went back to his office, he was studying it more, preparing.”Van Zweden reciprocated the sentiment: “Steven Fox comes from the same school of interpreting Bach that I do,” he said in an email. “His excellent ears and good ideas were a real asset. I have asked him back next year when we do the Mozart Requiem at the New York Philharmonic.”And Fox continues to till Russian soil. Spurred by the renowned music publisher Vladimir Morosan, Fox has been exploring music by Alexander Kastalsky. For Naxos, he recorded “Memory Eternal to the Fallen Heroes” with Clarion, and prepared Clarion and the Cathedral Choral Society to take part in Leonard Slatkin’s recording of an expansion of that work, “Requiem for Fallen Brothers,” with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.Morosan has described Kastalsky as “a seminal figure upon the landscape” of the early 20th century. Yet he remains so obscure in the West that he didn’t even register in the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. What other rarities might Fox and Morosan unearth? More

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      Review: Yuja Wang Sweeps Through a Rachmaninoff Marathon

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      It was a momentous occasion as Wang played all five of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra at Carnegie Hall for one show only.Yes, Yuja Wang did an encore.After playing, with electric mastery, all four of Rachmaninoff’s dizzyingly difficult piano concertos and his “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” on Saturday — the kind of feat for which the phrase “once in a lifetime” was invented — she would have been forgiven for accepting a sold-out Carnegie Hall’s standing ovation, letting those two and a half hours of music speak for themselves, and heading home for a bubble bath.But this is a superstar artist as famous for what comes after her written programs as during them. At Carnegie in 2018, she responded to waves of applause with seven encores. Appearing with the New York Philharmonic a few weeks ago, she returned to the keyboard no fewer than three times.So on Saturday, the audience hushed as Wang, after all she’d already done with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, sat back down at the piano and played the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.” It had the same freshness and tender lucidity that, in her hands, had lay beneath even Rachmaninoff’s densest, most ferocious fireworks.She didn’t seem to have broken a sweat — neither on her face nor in her music-making, which had been calmly dazzling all the way through the final flourish of the Third Concerto at the program’s end.To these scores’ vast demands she brought both clarity and poetry. She played with heft but not bombast, sentiment but not schmaltz. Her touch can certainly be firm, but not a single note was harsh or overly heavy; her prevailing style is sprightly, which is why the concert didn’t feel like eating five slices of chocolate cake in a row. In the 18th variation of the “Rhapsody,” the work’s aching climax, she began demurely and dreamily before adding muscle. But when the orchestra joined in, a point at which many pianists begin to pound, she refused to hammer.She didn’t give the sense that she was pacing herself, either, over this very long stretch. With five breaks — two pauses, two full intermissions and one long, impromptu stop spurred by a medical emergency in the audience that interrupted the Second Concerto, the opener, just after the final movement had begun — the concert lasted about four and a half hours.Wang took on her marathon with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Chris LeeThe program was flanked by the Second and Third concertos, touchstones of the repertory for the past century, and also included the youthful First; the changeable, big-band-inflected Fourth; and the playfully kaleidoscopic “Rhapsody.” The composition and revision of these five pieces extended almost from the beginning to the end of Rachmaninoff’s career, from the early 1890s to the early 1940s. (He was born 150 years ago this April.) But all of them share his unmistakable stamp: the sumptuous soulfulness, the soaring expansions, the restless rhythmic shifts and, of course, the alternation of fierce energy and intimate reflection in the piano.Wang is nimble at that alternation, with power and accuracy in fast fingerwork and fortissimo chords — and, just as important, patience and elegance in cooler moments. Her pillowy chords at the close of the Second Concerto’s middle movement floated quietly into place, and she was shadowy but luminous before that piece’s ending romp.Before the final plunge near the end of the Third Concerto, the piano takes one last, brief inward look. Wang shaped this passage with exquisite detail: the first two chords gentle, the next suddenly louder and surprisingly tough — tougher than she’d sounded in solo moments like this during the whole concert — before the rest of the phrase ebbed into mist. This handful of measures painted a whole situation and personality: vulnerable, strong, searching but not lost. It was as memorable as the blazing runs and octaves that followed.The program’s first block, the Second and First concertos, might have involved shaking out some jitters over the momentousness of the occasion. Whatever the reason, there was a sense of audibly finding the right gear among Nézet-Séguin and this orchestra — which has a historical claim to Rachmaninoff, having premiered the Fourth Concerto and the “Rhapsody” before eventually recording all five of these pieces with him as the soloist.The Second Concerto’s opening movement was unsettled on Saturday, and the balances seemed off: The strings, less rich than turgid, swamped the winds and often Wang. Rubato stretched the line, but everyone wasn’t always stretching in the same direction. Wind solos felt excessively manicured, to the point of preciousness.But things gradually settled in. Apocalyptic storm clouds moodily gathered underneath the piano line in the first movement of the Fourth Concerto. And by the “Rhapsody,” which followed the Fourth, the ensemble had taken on the ideal Rachmaninoff sound: glittering and grand.The Philadelphians were practically feline in the iridescent orchestration of the grim Dies Irae’s appearance in the “Rhapsody.” A shivering hush in the first movement of the Third Concerto was like a snow in which Wang made soft footsteps with the palest chords. In the second movement, the winds at the start sounded as flexible and natural as they had all day, and the orchestra now seemed to sweep Wang’s lines upward rather than smothering her in the race to the final measures.That culminating dash had the easy sparkle of Wang’s best work. The concert also showed off, perhaps better than ever before, another defining feature of her performances: flamboyant clothes.A lot of them. She wore, along with her typical very high heels, a different dress for each of the five pieces, with skintight fits and shimmering fabric in red, ivory, green and silver — and, most immortal, a magenta minidress for the “Rhapsody” paired with sparkling periwinkle leg warmers. (Alas, there was no costume change for the encore. Next time!)With the controversy that greeted Wang’s attire choices 10 or 15 years ago now thankfully muted, we can concentrate on the joyfulness of those choices, which on Saturday were apt partners for these fundamentally joyful works. Virtuosity on this level, in material this ravishing, is elevating to witness — which is why, even after so many hours, I was left at the end feeling an exhilarated lightness. Like many others I saw, I drifted up the aisle and onto the street unable to stop smiling.Yuja Wang and the Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Yuja Wang, Daredevil Pianist, Takes on a Musical Everest

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      Known for dazzling virtuosity, Wang faces a new challenge in a three-and-a-half-hour Rachmaninoff marathon at Carnegie Hall.PHILADELPHIA — The star pianist Yuja Wang, fresh out of rehearsal on Tuesday with the Philadelphia Orchestra, threw her arms into the air and let out a nervous laugh.“We survived,” she said inside a dressing room stocked with dark chocolate, granola bars, a bear-shaped bottle of honey and a bag of lemons.Wang, 35, was a few days from one of the most herculean concerts of her career: a three-and-a-half-hour marathon of Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, a virtually unheard-of undertaking. She was excited but also a bit anxious as she imagined what was coming — the rushed rehearsals, the mammoth program and playing before an audience that will include some of her closest friends and mentors.“I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” she said. “I’m also having the same feeling as everyone else: Let’s see where this kamikaze run is going to go. I can’t even control it, so I’m just going to go with the flow.”Wang has made a career out of dazzling displays of virtuosity, including in the works she will perform this weekend. But taking on these Rachmaninoff pieces together — more than 400 pages of music, including some of the most vexing piano passages in the repertory — poses a new test.To prepare, Wang has reined in aspects of her famously flamboyant lifestyle, cutting back on drinking and partying so she can get eight hours of sleep a night. She has largely avoided intense solo practice in recent days, spending an hour or two a day on lighter fare like Johann Strauss waltzes. And she has tried to inhabit Rachmaninoff’s world, setting aside time to reflect on the love, loneliness and hope in his art.“All of it is imbued in his language,” she said. “You just play his music, and it just comes out.”Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s music director, who is leading the Carnegie concert, likened the effort to climbing Mount Everest. (Olympic-style medals, emblazoned with grand pianos, will be handed out to Wang, Nézet-Séguin and the players at the conclusion of Saturday’s marathon.)“It’s insane for everyone,” he said. “It’s possible only when people know each other so well. And that’s the case between Yuja and me and this orchestra.”“I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” Wang said of her Rachmaninoff marathon. “I’m also having the same feeling as everyone else: Let’s see where this kamikaze run is going to go.”Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesNézet-Séguin recalled thinking, “OK, that’s exactly the person made for that music” when Wang performed Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with the orchestra in 2013, one of their early collaborations. He described her as the “ideal Rachmaninoff pianist,” saying she had honed a powerful yet airy style.“With her there is never, never, ever a hint of a harsh or hard sound,” he said. “It’s always beautiful, it’s always phrased, it’s always very free.” (Nézet-Séguin will also conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in a series of Rachmaninoff performances with Wang at the ensemble’s home to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday.)Wang, who was born in China, has long felt a connection to Rachmaninoff’s music. As a child, she was drawn to the lyricism of his preludes for piano, even as she followed a strict conservatory regimen of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.It was not until she enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, at 15, that she began intensely studying Rachmaninoff’s works, including his piano concertos and the “Rhapsody.” She was drawn to the “noble and pure” sound of the composer’s own recordings, she said, and to the vulnerability of his music.“It’s like reading Russian literature,” she said. “It’s really enjoyable, even though it’s long, because it’s very loquacious.”The pianist and educator Gary Graffman, who taught Wang at Curtis, said it was quickly apparent that she intuitively understood the composer’s style. Her technical mastery of the pieces, which demand breakneck finger work and stunts like keyboard-sweeping glissandos, was exceptional, he said. But it was the sensitivity of her interpretations that awed him.“She ate it up,” he said. “She’s undaunted by everything.”After her graduation from Curtis, in 2008, she quickly became one of classical music’s most in-demand stars. She earned praise from critics for her fiery interpretations of works by Russians like Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. And she was celebrated by audiences for her virtuoso takes on well-known pieces, including the Rondo alla Turca from Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11.She also attracted attention for her vivid sartorial choices, performing war horses in skintight dresses and Jimmy Choo heels. And her love of encores captivated the public; at a recital in London last year, she performed 10. (A video of one favorite, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” has garnered more than 8.3 million views on YouTube.)During the early days of the pandemic, Wang took a break from piano, spending time watching Netflix, taking walks in Central Park and learning to master household tasks that she, as a prodigy, had long neglected, like cooking and laundry.But she returned to the stage in May 2021 with Rachmaninoff, performing his Piano Concerto No. 2 in London with the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, a longtime friend and mentor.“Imagine,” she said of the experience, “that was like, ‘Oh, OK, I see the power of music!’”As cultural life sprang back, Wang began thinking about new challenges. She was eager to create an experience that would test the attention span of audiences in the TikTok era. She recalled listening to Wagner’s “Ring” as a student at Curtis for hours on end and walking away with new admiration for “a past human being’s work and their effort and what they’re trying to express.”Saturday’s concert, she said, is “going to be a stamina test for the audience as well.”The Rachmaninoff marathon also had a virtuosic appeal for Wang, an inveterate thrill-seeker who has learned to Jet Ski and dabbled in cryotherapy. She said that performing the works in one go gave her “lots of ego”: “It’s like, Yes, I can play them!” She added that she would like to perform the program again, perhaps in Los Angeles or China. (She recently spread out the concertos over multiple programs with the Orlando Philharmonic, and will do the same, adding the “Rhapsody,” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in February.)Thomas said that Wang sometimes asked composer friends to revise piano works written for her — including ones by him — so that they were more demanding. He likened her to a racehorse.“She wants to run; she wants to show everything she can do,” he said. “And at the same time, she’s a very, very respectful and curious musical intelligence.”No artist has ever played all five of these Rachmaninoff works in a single concert at Carnegie, which is marketing the performance as a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience. Rachmaninoff, who long admired the Philadelphia Orchestra, performed the first three of his piano concertos with the ensemble under Eugene Ormandy there in 1939. Vladimir Ashkenazy played all four concertos on four consecutive nights with the London Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Daniel Barenboim at the hall in 1968.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said few artists had the stamina, focus, intensity and emotional engagement to pull off such a feat.“There have been occasions when artists do marathons and you feel it’s about showing off,” he said. “This 100 percent is not. That is not who Yuja is.”During rehearsals this week in Philadelphia, Wang seemed confident even as she fretted about the difficulty of sounding fresh in pieces that are well known. She said that at the height of her mastery of a piece, the music emerges so naturally that she feels as if she had composed it.And she reminisced about the energy she had in her 20s, when she said she could stay out late drinking and still perform at 11 the next morning. But now, she added, she feels a more profound connection with the music, especially since last year, when she began dating the conductor Klaus Mäkelä. (She recently took him to meet Graffman, her teacher, who offered his approval.)“When the love part is going well,” she said, “this music has a deeper meaning than just a release of emotions.”As Nézet-Séguin worked to lighten the sound of the orchestra in the “Rhapsody” to match Wang’s tone, she flipped through the score on an iPad and ran her fingers silently over the keys, practicing thorny passages.At the end of the rehearsal, he stopped to speak with her.“You’re my hero,” Nézet-Séguin said, embracing her. Wang smiled and laughed, and then turned back to the score. More

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      Review: A Chinese Concerto and a Romantic Classic Gaze Back

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      The New York Philharmonic, under Long Yu, played works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Qigang Chen and Rachmaninoff at the Rose Theater.The New York Philharmonic played Russian music on Thursday, for the third week in a row. It was yet another argument against President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims that his country’s culture is being canceled in the West.That wasn’t the only political resonance of the orchestra’s concert on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It is still all too uncommon for Chinese composers and artists — especially conductors — to be featured by American orchestras outside of Lunar New Year celebrations. But this program was led by Long Yu, experienced with the Philharmonic over the past decade, and included a substantial work by Qigang Chen.They are two of China’s most eminent classical artists. Yu leads no fewer than three major ensembles there: the China Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Shanghai and Guangzhou symphonies. And Chen served as music director for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.But though the New York Philharmonic has played three of his pieces in the past, they have all been on Lunar New Year programs; this was his subscription series debut. And his pristine cello concerto “Reflet d’un Temps Disparu” (“Reflection on Time Past”), written in the mid-1990s, was the highlight on Thursday.The aim of the half-hour, single-movement work is by now a familiar one: to bring together traditional Chinese sounds with the forces of a Western orchestra. But Chen, who studied in France with Olivier Messiaen in the 1980s, makes the interaction both surprising and natural.The melodic germ is “Meihua san nong,” an ancient tune whose title is often translated as “Three Variations on the Plum Blossom.” The cello soloist — here the eloquent, calmly commanding Gautier Capuçon — begins alone, notes subtly bending to evoke the twang of a qin. (It’s in a version for that Chinese zither that “Meihua san nong” is best known.)A woozy veil of winds casts a cloud of Messiaen-style European modernism, quickly settling into more openhearted warmth. But darkness keeps threatening, from groans in the low winds and brasses, and the cello’s line shifts from quietly clicking taps to pizzicato plucks of gonglike resonance — echoed in a large battery of percussion, including temple blocks.Trills and brushy arpeggiated motifs conjure the Bach suites at the center of the cello’s repertory, as the solo line goes back and forth from anxiously repetitive riffs to serene, expansive lyricism. The cello doesn’t quite lead the orchestra, but its music keeps being echoed within the ensemble; the soloist is something like a diamond in a ring, supported by and glinting onto its setting.Before the piece ends in wisps, it climaxes in a huge, lushly Romantic, quite saccharine explosion, like something out of John Williams.Or out of Rimsky-Korsakov, whose “Tsar’s Bride” Overture opened the concert. Or Rachmaninoff, whose “Symphonic Dances” followed intermission. These dances, like Chen’s concerto, are Proustian music, evocations of the Russian past presented in a modern, occasionally even jazzy, light. (The work’s alto saxophone solo is one of its most distinctive elements.)With its ingenious recastings of Russian Orthodox chants and the Catholic “Dies Irae,” this can be a grand, mesmerizingly intense score, a danse macabre written as World War II was underway. But while Thursday’s performance under Yu had robustness and dash, it was ever so slightly square — loud and quick, when warranted, but overall mellow in its impact.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More