Schumann, Robert

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    Review: Gustavo Dudamel Wraps Up a Philharmonic Audition

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    The superstar conductor, a possible successor to the New York Philharmonic’s podium, led a cycle of Robert Schumann’s symphonies and two premieres.If concerts had the “previously on” introductions of television, on Thursday the New York Philharmonic would have recapped last week’s installment of its Robert Schumann symphony cycle: lithe yet energetic, hardly Romantic yet fully alive.This week we are in the same series but what feels like a new story arc. The First and Second symphonies, on the earlier program, have been followed by readings of the Third and Fourth that, on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, were for better and worse grander and more emotive, with swerving contrasts — and a premiere to match by Andreia Pinto Correia.The symphonies are being presented as a festival called “The Schumann Connection,” led by Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a contender for the podium here in New York when Jaap van Zweden departs in 2024. That series is also an oblique exploration — through two new works by women — of Robert’s relationship with Clara Schumann, his wife, a notable pianist and composer who largely stopped writing after they married.Clara haunts this festival, and not just in the title of last week’s premiere, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Clara.” Although the series has relegated her music to appearances on chamber programs far from the main stage, she looms over her husband’s major works.Robert’s Piano Concerto in A minor, played by the Philharmonic in October, bears the mark of her earlier one in the same key. And elements of her concerto subtly inform his Fourth Symphony — in its through-composition and fantasia form, in its Romanze second movement and in a first one characterized by its abandonment of the traditional recapitulation. A more satisfying “Schumann Connection” might have paired these two pieces.To the Philharmonic’s credit, though, the concerts have featured those premieres, even if the fact that both are based on Clara and Robert sets off a Bechdel test alarm. Pinto Correia’s “Os Pássaros da Noite” (“The Birds of Night”) is inspired by the sadness shared by the couple in their correspondence, and by a letter to a friend in which Robert wrote that “the melancholy birds of night still flit round me from time to time.”The 15-minute work is the account of one harrowing night, in which strings, droning or in a haze of harmonics, underlie the sorrowful cries of a trumpet. A wearying set of nocturnal episodes, it would be a fitting horror soundtrack, its mood transparent in gestures like upward runs in the winds — a sinister curlicue of moonlit fog — accompanied by matching upward glissandos in the violins. As in any night of sleepless anxiety, the darkness lingers, seemingly interminable, until it doesn’t.“Os Pássaros da Noite” was a sharp contrast to the preceding symphony: the Third, nicknamed the “Rhenish” for its tonal tributes to the Rhine River — where in 1854, just a few years after it was written, Schumann would attempt suicide. But that gloom is absent from the score’s buoyant, dancing mood, and from Dudamel’s conducting. The heroic opening heralded a propulsive interpretation, guided by hemiola rhythms but emphasized in mighty sforzando accents and thrillingly veering dynamics.The Philharmonic’s playing was warmest in the ländler-like Scherzo. But its tendency toward excessive expression made for a Feierlich (“solemn”) movement strangely heavy on vibrato. Schumann’s music here is a portrait of the awe-inspiring Cologne Cathedral, with a chorale and orchestration that, if articulated correctly, closely resembles the sound of an organ. A little of that came through, but for the most part this was a scene with more emotion than solemnity.The Fourth Symphony, in D minor, was composed nearly a decade earlier, in a wave of productivity that included Schumann’s First; but he withdrew it, later revisiting it and premiering the revision in 1853. This version had more darkness and heft, but retained the elegance of the earlier one, which the scholar John Daverio captures in his claim that “Beethoven may have been primarily a ‘dramatist’ and Schubert a ‘lyricist’; Schumann straddles both categories by treating his fundamentally lyric themes with a dramatic urgency.”Dudamel sensitively wove that belief throughout, with strands of melody emerging from the opening chord that were by turns fiery and gentle — especially in the second movement’s flowing violin solo from the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, Frank Huang. In its extremity, its grand finale, this was Schumann at his most Romantic of the cycle.When “The Schumann Connection” concludes on Sunday, so will a long stretch of programs led by guest conductors, many of whom are being watched as potential successors to van Zweden. Of them, there is immense promise in Dudamel — charismatic, eager to lead new works and, crucially, followed by the Philharmonic players with apparent ease.In terms of programming, he fared better than two other contenders, Susanna Mälkki and Santtu-Matias Rouvali, who have triumphed with the Philharmonic in the past but in recent months had mixed outings in repertory of mixed quality. It’s difficult to avoid imagining what impression they would have made with a platform like Dudamel’s festival.Any of the three, though, would be a welcome change at the Philharmonic. And they are just a selection of the talent that has passed through this season. It’s still far too early to guess who the orchestra’s next music director will be. But regardless, its future seems one worth looking forward to.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Sunday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Could Be the New York Philharmonic’s Future

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      As the orchestra searches for a new leader, this superstar conductor led the first of two programs pairing Schumann symphonies with new works.On Wednesday, when the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center hosted a news conference announcing that the $550 million renovation of David Geffen Hall had been fully funded and that it would reopen this fall, Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was not in town.This didn’t feel like a coincidence: As the project, decades in the making, finally materialized over the past few years, van Zweden has seemed like an afterthought, along for the ride.Who was in New York to lead the Philharmonic, hours after Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams feted the Geffen renovation as a cultural and civic milestone? Gustavo Dudamel, the 41-year-old superstar conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starting a two-week cycle of Schumann’s four symphonies.The symbolism was unavoidable. Van Zweden — who said in September that he would be leaving in 2024, opening up one of the world’s most prestigious podiums — is already the past. Dudamel is the Philharmonic’s future.At least he could be. He made a solid case for the prospect on Wednesday at Alice Tully Hall, with spirited, unpretentious performances of Schumann’s First and Second symphonies, alongside a premiere by Gabriela Ortiz written to accompany them.The First Symphony (“Spring”) sounded particularly fresh — emphatic without being stiff or mannered, a balance that often eludes van Zweden. The slow second movement built intensity without seeming pressed, and a certain lack of depth in the orchestra’s sound felt here like welcome lightness, with viola and cello lines subtly emphasized to give spine to passages that luxuriated in lyricism.The Philharmonic is calling Dudamel’s festival “The Schumann Connection,” suggesting Robert Schumann’s ties to his wife, Clara — whose underappreciated music is being played in chamber concerts alongside the two orchestral programs. And to contemporary composers: Two have been commissioned to respond to the Schumanns.Ortiz’s “Clara,” 15 minutes long, in five sections played without pause, had its first performance on Wednesday. (Andreia Pinto Correia’s “Os Pássaros da Noite” (“The Birds of Night”) comes next week, between Robert Schumann’s Third and Fourth.)Robert Schumann’s first two symphonies were joined by the premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s “Clara.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOpening with a series of lingering chords, a kind of tolling ensemble bell, “Clara” is most memorable in long stretches of suspended eeriness, an apt evocation of floating between eras and continents, with the oboe making a melancholy keen.Recalling Holst and mid-20th-century film scores in its lush colors and noirish dissonances, the piece has at its center a raucous movement recalling Ortiz’s Mexican heritage and her modern sound world: “the unique vitality born out of the entrails of the land I come from,” she says in the program. That driving vibrancy then recedes, in quiet music gently perforated with a pricking constellation of high-pitched percussion. In the final moments, wind instruments are tonelessly blown through, conjuring the sigh of history itself.Dudamel’s interpretation of Schumann’s Second was punchier than his First, while feeling appealingly improvisatory in a first movement that keeps unexpectedly sidling into new material. Avoiding emotional indulgence in the third movement, this conductor made the music seem a bit impersonal, a play of sound — the winds lovingly passing around solos — rather than a poignant narrative. But the energy throughout felt honestly built, never overemphasized.The Philharmonic doesn’t play these days with old-school brilliance or majesty, or with the feverish edge that Leonard Bernstein brought to Schumann’s symphonies with this orchestra in his classic recordings.But with Dudamel — his tempos moderate, neither rushed at one extreme nor sentimentally milked at the other — the ensemble was genial and eager. And its sound was sometimes arresting, as when the strings floated downward in hazy scales at the end of the First Symphony’s Scherzo, or when the winds massed near the end of the Second to uncannily organ-like effect.Dudamel’s appointment to the Philharmonic’s podium is, of course, far from a sure thing. But it was Deborah Borda, the orchestra’s chief executive, who nearly 20 years ago, in her previous position, grabbed him for Los Angeles when he was just emerging on the international scene. The New York Philharmonic, still nostalgic for the glamorous days of Bernstein, may well jump at the chance to hire one of the few present-day maestros to have achieved that kind of mainstream celebrity.One thing is clear: Displaying his lively approach to the standard repertory, coupled with an interest in living composers — particularly female ones of color — these programs are meant to show off Dudamel as the model of a 21st-century maestro.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; “The Schumann Connection” continues through March 20; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Schumann at the Philharmonic. Robert, Too.

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      With a debuting pianist and conductor, a solo by Clara Schumann preceded works by her husband and Brahms.Hasn’t the New York Philharmonic been through enough? Closed for a year and a half by the pandemic, and exiled from its home for renovations during its return season, the orchestra is now at the mercy of visa delays.Caused by backlogs and staff shortages at embassies and consulates around the world, these delays are plaguing a classical field that depends on the easy travel of musicians from abroad. They kept the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes from coming here this week to play; and if one cancellation wasn’t enough, the planned conductor, Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, also withdrew, because of a family medical emergency.But when the dust settled, this left an enjoyable double debut with the orchestra at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Thursday: the pianist Alessio Bax and the conductor Giancarlo Guerrero.There was a quiet milestone in the program, which was retained with the new performers. While Robert Schumann’s works are fixtures of the repertory, those of his wife, Clara, an accomplished composer and one of the great piano virtuosos of the 19th century, are decidedly not. So when Bax entered and began Clara Schumann’s brief but eloquently wistful Romance in A minor, it was the first time her music was being played for a Philharmonic subscription audience.Its subdued ending led, without pause, to the dramatic burst that begins another work in A minor: Robert Schumann’s war horse piano concerto. Bax, well known to New York audiences in chamber music over the past decade, started with a tone of pristine Classicism that swiftly dissolved into washes of dreamier mistiness, without ever losing clarity.With the strings often evocatively gauzy, wind solos slicing piquantly through the textures, he and Guerrero conveyed the work’s mercurial swerves of mood without affectation or exaggeration. The lyrical effusions of the second movement were answered with crisp changeability; the finale had a surreally martial undercurrent. The performance was suavely manic, as it should be.It was a progressive move, yes, to bring the Schumanns together. Next it would be wonderful to hear Clara’s piano concerto — also, as it happens, in A minor — from the Philharmonic; Isata Kanneh-Mason, among others, has recorded it to impressive effect.Critics often valorize concert programs that sprawl across time. But the Philharmonic did well to pair the Schumanns with their great friend Johannes Brahms for a tightly focused evening of works written in the 1840s and ’50s. And not one of his frequently played symphonies — the First comes to the Philharmonic next month — but the second of his earlier, rarer pair of serenades.Brahms wrote these works as he was still experimenting with composing for orchestra; revised in the mid-1870s, the score of the 30-minute Serenade No. 2 lacks violins, for a melancholy tinge to the general geniality. Guerrero — the music director of the Nashville Symphony and a grinning presence with expressive fingers and a shiny suit — led a subtly energetic performance, bringing out both the delicacy and the darkness in the third movement and the Schubertian wistfulness in the fourth.Vivid yet unexaggerated, just like in the Schumann concerto, the playing had the intimate warmth that the orchestra also brought to Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony in the same space a few weeks ago. It speaks to how successfully the Philharmonic is scaling down to the 1,200-seat Rose Theater, and to two auspicious debuts.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      10 Hours Gives Us (Almost) All of Schumann’s Songs

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      Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, peerless in lieder, have released an 11-disc set of Robert Schumann’s songs, many overlooked.Back in 1988, it was hearing the lieder of Robert Schumann that convinced Christian Gerhaher, then a philosophy student in Munich, to ask a pianist he knew from school, Gerold Huber, whether they might start playing some songs together.Three decades later, Gerhaher and Huber have long since become the greatest partnership in singing, and they come full circle this month with the release of an 11-disc box set of Schumann on Sony. As its cover announces, it contains “All the Songs.”“Gerold and I have worked on singing Schumann for 33 years,” Gerhaher, 52, said in an interview. “He composed nearly 300 songs, but what is astonishing is that every song is amazing, a revelation of possibilities, of thoughts, of beauty. There is maybe only one song I don’t like so much.” (It’s “Der Handschuh.”)Schumann has had an uncertain presence in the art song repertoire. While cycles like “Dichterliebe” are touchstones, much of his output remains overlooked. Gerhaher can cite only two prior attempts at anything comparable to a complete set, neither of them as cohesive as his new release.The baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among the leading lieder advocates of the 20th century, taped about half the songs in the 1970s. Graham Johnson, an accompanist with encyclopedic tastes, compiled a very full set on Hyperion from 1996 to 2009. But he split the songs among different vocalists.That makes Gerhaher the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups). Huber is at the piano throughout, and the goal is finally to give Schumann his due as a connoisseur of lyrics — according to Gerhaher, “one of the best-read composers that there has ever been.”Gerhaher believes that Schumann took a far more literary approach to songs than, say, Schubert — an approach that was intended “to make these poems even more complicated than they are.” He did this not just in introducing tensions between text and music (and vocalist and pianist), but also by writing almost exclusively in cycles, combining disparate poems into coherent sets.That has always been obvious with cycles like the Eichendorff “Liederkreis” (Op. 39), or the “Kerner Lieder” (Op. 35). But it is true, too, Gerhaher said, of less monumental groupings with innocuous titles like “Three Songs” (Op. 83) or “Six Songs” (Op. 107) — their texts (sometimes by the same poet, sometimes drawn from different ones) freighted with deeper, often darker meaning when set together.Gerhaher is the first singer to finish a complete survey of his own (albeit with the help of colleagues in works written for the female voice or for groups).Daniel Etter for The New York Times“He doesn’t want to finish thinking about a poem,” Gerhaher said. “By putting them into music and then combining them into cycles, he stretches the semantic nature of a poem, in order to create something very different and new. This is what I love.”Schumann composed his songs in two spells. The first period, from 1840, has been seen as the epitome of Romanticism. The second has been heard skeptically, if at all, but Gerhaher has increasingly found it the richer. Schumann wrote these songs from 1849 to 1852, not long before he jumped into the Rhine in 1854 and died in a psychiatric asylum two years later. Like most of his later works, the late songs have been lesser to some ears, as antiquated prejudices about mental health have led to misunderstandings of their experimental tone.Gerhaher dissents, citing the Violin Concerto and the “Ghost Variations” as further evidence that this view is wrong. “Saying that the late Schumann was a sick Schumann, mentally and spiritually weak, is an assumption which is dangerous,” he said. “The assumption that we understand something as being weak is always combined with the assumption that we understand something else very well. Both are wrong, I think.”With that in mind, Gerhaher chose five late songs to introduce his new recording. Here are edited excerpts from his comments.‘Schneeglöckchen’ (Op. 96, No. 2)In Op. 96, you have five songs. Two and four are very disturbing, about human sorrow. The third, in the middle, is an August von Platen poem that explains that words can’t convey what they try to convey. These three describe humanity’s horrible situation: being thrown into the world and not even being able to talk to each other properly.There is another “Schneeglöckchen” (“Snowdrops”) in the “Liederalbum für die Jügend” (Op. 79), where it means something nice, because it’s a sign of the end of winter. But the anonymous poem Schumann sets here in Op. 96 is harder to understand. A voice comes to a snowdrop and says, you have to leave, a storm is coming. But why? It’s the end of winter; the flower has nothing to fear. The voice answers that the snowdrop’s “Liverei” — its uniform — is white, with a green trim.Why does it talk about a uniform? I looked through some uniform books, and found a similar one for a cavalry called the Scheither Corps, part of the Hanover regiment in the Seven Years’ War. There was a battle at Moys, near Görlitz, where the corps was defeated by Austria. There was one snowdrop rider left hurt, who couldn’t get home. And in the poem the voice says you have to go home. This is so disturbing, even if I can’t prove the connection.‘Himmel und Erde’ (Op. 96, No. 5)This last song, “Heaven and Earth,” is a resolution for the Op. 96 cycle. The first song is Goethe’s “Nachtlied”; it starts with the two nouns “Gipfel” (“hills”) and “Wipfel” (“treetops”). This last one, by Wilfried von der Neun, starts with the reverse, with “Wipfel” then “Gipfel.” You are confronted with these opposites, then you are confronted with heaven, and you see that these oppositions are not important anymore; they come together. It reminds me of the medieval German philosopher Nicholas von Kues, who wrote about the “coincidentia oppositorum” — the falling together of opposites.‘An den Mond’ (Op. 95, No. 2)At first you can’t understand this cycle at all. You see number one, “Die Tochter Jephtas” (“Jephthah’s Daughter”), and number three, “Dem Helden” (“To the Hero”). All three are Byron texts. What does it mean?In 1847, Fanny Mendelssohn died, and Felix Mendelssohn shortly after, and Schumann wrote some Byron into his book of poems. The first song is a memorial to Fanny. Jephthah’s daughter was this warrior without a name; she fought for her father, the king, but she didn’t get a name. This was Fanny’s fate: She was a composer, but she didn’t make a name as one. “To the Hero” is about Felix’s role in these years, especially to Schumann: the splendid hero of music.In the middle is “To the Moon.” It says, look, moon, you are kind of a star, but you are a cold star, because you reflect warm light from the sun — you are only a memory, sad, cold, hard memory. This is how Schumann combined the deaths of his two friends.‘Die Blume der Ergebung’ (Op. 83, No. 2)This cycle so abstract. You have three songs, and they represent three ways to set a poem. The first song, “Resignation,” is the most advanced and through-composed; the second is a varied strophic song; the third, “Der Einsiedler” (“The Hermit”), is a perfect strophic song. In “The Flower of Resignation,” you have five strophes, and in the middle of the third strophe, you see this word “Liebesschalen” (literally “love bowls”). This is the center of the middle strophe of these three songs, the creation of a third person by a couple. It can’t be an ongoing error that Schumann had this maniacal tendency to conceive of combinations.“Requiem” (Op. 90, No. 7)Op. 90 is maybe my favorite cycle overall. There is a downward spiral. It’s very dark, about accepting the vanity of the world and the sadness of being alone. We start with a framing song again, the song of a blacksmith who is helping Faust on his travels, naïvely unaware that Faust is seducing his wife. In the middle you have two song couples, which are examples of losing faith in life. The fourth is a wonderful song about love vanishing and death taking over.Then Schumann added this “Requiem” as a requiem for the poet, Nikolaus Lenau, whom he thought was dead but in fact only died around the day of the first performance of these songs. You have these illusions of eternity, of never-ending life. It’s so full of feeling, a coming-together of spirituality and sensuality. More