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      Two Gems of June: Premieres at Carnegie Hall and Harlem School of the Arts

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      The festival circuit may be getting underway but the city offers fine fare with programs of work by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Adegoke Steve Colson.This month, you might feel the momentum in classical music swinging to the domestic festival circuit, with splashy premieres and revivals coming courtesy of Spoleto, Ojai and the Opera Theater of St. Louis. But New York isn’t finished yet, either.Two premieres here over the weekend — one loudly trumpeted and one that enjoyed comparatively little fanfare — were newsworthy and enjoyable on their own terms, while also serving as reminders not to neglect the city’s June calendar.Along with the New York Philharmonic’s presentations Friday of Barber’s Violin Concerto — featuring the star violinist Hilary Hahn — and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the audience at Carnegie Hall heard the premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s 14-minute “Forward Into Light.”The composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, center, with the conductor Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on Friday, for the premiere of her work “Forward Into Light.”Chris LeeCommissioned by the orchestra as part of its “Project 19” focus on female composers, “Forward Into Light” was inspired by the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. With music that was by turns fragile and ferocious — and that also boasted touches of mordant wit — “Light” ably communicated its story about new ideas struggling for space (and for longevity). Spare, ascending motives in the harp anchored some early sections. When the orchestra responded and added in new, consonant melody in turn, there was a sense of material developing through collaboration. Elsewhere, a brief song for clarinet spurred material for other winds. Subsequent interplay, with Minimalist pulses in the violins offset by glissandi in the cellos and basses, recalled the swooning call-and-response arrangements of past Snider works, like “Circe and the Hanged Man,” from her 2010 song cycle “Penelope.”The typically hard-charging Philharmonic music director Jaap van Zweden allowed these moments to breathe. Yet he also relished hairpin turns during which the music throttled into tutti writing. Late in the piece, he managed Snider’s quick dynamic shifts with a Hollywood sound-mixer’s feel for drama.Overall, “Forward” was packed but not overstuffed with historical references, both abstract and concrete. Sometimes Snider’s Sturm und Drang suggested early feminist boldness, or corresponding public sphere controversy. However, a prerecorded sample of Dame Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women,” late in the piece, didn’t register as strongly as the rest of the music. But even in the densest moments, you could discern Snider’s feel for wry commentary. A few walloping brass passages seemed to offer knowing nods and the subtlest of eye-rolls — as though the characters who inspired this music were aware that the unshakable strengths of the suffrage movement could outlast early, noisy objections.The violinist Hilary Hahn performing Barber’s Violin Concerto on Friday, with van Zweden conducting.Chris LeeAnd so, just as in her ecologically oriented “Mass for the Endangered,” the composer’s intellectual concerns dovetailed smoothly with the lush, inviting score. (The Death of Classical concert series presents Snider’s Mass, Monday through Thursday this week at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.)It was the beginning of a fine night for the Philharmonic. In partnership with Hahn, the orchestra gave Barber’s violin concerto some thrillingly rough-hewed edges, cutting against its public reputation as lighter fare. And though van Zweden’s over-articulated grimness in the middle sections of Mahler’s symphony came at the expense of the composer’s more colorful twists, the conductor’s handling of the outer movements delivered undeniable galvanic thrills.While the Carnegie crowd received Hahn’s appearance with an ovation befitting her global-star status — and responded to the culmination of the Mahler with fever-pitch satisfaction — they also greeted the new piece with enthusiasm. It all made for a richly satisfying close to the orchestra’s challenging year outside its own auditorium.The next time we hear them indoors, it will be at the newly refurbished, redesigned Geffen Hall, inside Lincoln Center. What they’ll play there, over the next few years, is beginning to come into focus. And as the Philharmonic’s administrators continue to deepen their engagement with music by Black composers, they might have looked uptown on Saturday for a few more ideas.Adegoke Steve Colson’s “Suite Harlem,” a six-movement work, was dedicated to the Harlem School of the Arts and its founder, the soprano Dorothy Maynor.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesKendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, performed a dance accompaniment in the third movement of Adegoke Steve Colson’s work.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe bassist Luke Stewart was part of the octet performing “Suite Harlem.” Each soloist had a chance to shine throughout the piece.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn the closing night of the second annual A Train Festival at the Harlem School of the Arts, the pianist and composer Adegoke Steve Colson — a veteran of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or A.A.C.M.) — presented a 75-minute premiere of a six-movement work. Titled “Suite Harlem,” it was dedicated to the school, and presented in its 120-seat black box theater. Like Snider’s “Forward,” this work was also dedicated to a female pathbreaker: the soprano Dorothy Maynor, who founded this school in the 1960s.Scored for an octet of piano, vocalist, trumpet, bass clarinet, violin, vibraphone, bass and drums, Colson’s music occasionally felt like a thrilling update of the soul jazz tradition — particularly when the composer’s piano took a subtly swinging yet harmonically unpredictable background role. At other points the work had all the high-energy markers of the 1970s avant-garde. And thanks to some stirring playing from the violinist Marlene Rice, the music also proposed a lineage with some of Ellington’s chamber-adjacent music with Ray Nance on violin (as in “Dance No. 3” from the Liberian Suite).During “Searching Harlem,” the first movement of this premiere, the composer’s wife and longtime collaborator and vocalist Iqua Colson gave affecting voice to Maynor’s intentions in founding this institution. She brought crisp intonation to some mournful melodic lines that described the historical dearth of spaces for the neighborhood’s children “to sing or dance or act a part.” And later in the suite, during the explosive, uptempo penultimate movement, “Resilience,” she channeled the fiery sense of artistic expression made possible by the school, with an inventive solo of scat singing. It wasn’t supper-club-style scat, either — but an ingeniously shaped solo, concluding with some darting phrases that earned one of the night’s biggest rounds of applause. It brought to mind the couple’s long and fruitful collaboration, going back to 1980s releases like “Triumph!” and “No Reservation.”The interdisciplinary nature of the school — and of the A.A.C.M. itself — was brought into enjoyable focus thanks to contributions by students, during the third movement (“Our Beautiful Children”). Two dancers, Kendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, provided fluid accompaniment to funk-inflected rhythms of the percussionist Pheeroan akLaff and the bassist Luke Stewart.Adegoke Steve Colson shined especially bright in the suite’s final half.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesEvery soloist had a chance to shine, throughout the piece. But Adegoke Steve Colson’s piano playing in the suite’s final half was a cut above this generally high standard: densely avant-garde and joyously singing in equal measure. This solo aspect of his art has been only rarely heard on recordings — like “Tones for” (2015) — so it was a treat to hear him in this manner, in the suite.The music of the Montclair, N.J.-based Colson, who is now 72, is not as well known as that of his A.A.C.M. contemporaries like Henry Threadgill. But there’s still time to give him more airings in New York. “Suite Harlem” was the climactic result of his time as an artist in residence at the school in Harlem. Given his pedagogical bent, perhaps Carnegie could commission a chamber work from him, for its young professional group Ensemble Connect. And a revival of his large-scale opus dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “ … as in a Cultural Reminiscence …” might also fit in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall space.For now, this weekend’s performances were reminder enough of the veteran’s long contribution to music, and of Snider’s emergent career. The back-to-back relationship of their premieres on the calendar was a reminder, too, of the city’s aggregate cultural riches. Even if relatively few concert halls are flexible enough to combine these complementary artistic communities under a single roof, sagacious concertgoers can still plot their own course through New York’s venues, in any season. More

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      Review: Beatrice Rana Plays Tchaikovsky at Human Scale

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      The pianist made her New York Philharmonic debut with the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 1, on a program with Shostakovich.The New York Philharmonic’s season isn’t quite over. There are a couple of chamber concerts coming up, and, next Friday, a one-off at Carnegie Hall, as well as the traditional parks programs in mid-June.But this weekend does mark a farewell. After its last events at Alice Tully Hall three weeks ago, the Philharmonic is now saying goodbye to the Rose Theater, its other main host during this wandering season while David Geffen Hall has been closed for renovations.Tully, built for chamber music, was a sonic adjustment for the orchestra. Though it’s not much bigger in capacity, the Rose, part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s home on Columbus Circle, has been a better fit. On Thursday, its acoustics admirably bore the grand onslaught of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — with Beatrice Rana making her Philharmonic debut as soloist — and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, conducted by the ensemble’s music director, Jaap van Zweden.Not that Rana’s Tchaikovsky ever felt like an onslaught. Her take on this war horse is more of an embrace. Even when she’s muscular, she’s lyrical.From early on, the stylish use of rubato gave a sense of dreaminess to her performance. The sprawling first movement never felt lost, but it wandered: assertive; then suddenly reflective, translucent; then once again roiling. In the finale, her playing danced with appealing, almost sticky heaviness, but then the next line would take off with sparkling freshness.All this changeability never evoked anxiety, as it has in the hands of other artists. Rana projects an underlying calm command, a grounded quality, with the concerto’s different moods on human scale. Small corners were intimate communication: the notes touched, with perfect clarity, by her right pinkie as punctuation to her mellow left hand; her trills, lucid yet silky, a little melty.The orchestra played with panache in the third movement — and van Zweden supported artful details, like the double basses seeming to take up the resonance of the piano near the end. But it was hard to focus on anything but the central player. Even during a big flute solo in the first movement, you couldn’t take your ears off Rana. It was a truly memorable debut.Shostakovich is van Zweden country, the kind of repertory in which his characteristic clenched grip on the music helps rather than hinders it. This was a punchy, tightly played Fifth, an angrily grinning take on a work whose politics will always be ambiguous. (Its composer was desperately attempting to get in Stalin’s good graces, but as far as the score’s meaning, who knows?)The Philharmonic played well, with an almost choked grotesquerie in the march in the first movement, an eerie danse macabre of the second and bristling unsentimentality in the third. Van Zweden began the finale very fast, and the orchestra responded with clean ferocity. The progression to the climactic major-key explosion was grim, and its achievement, as Shostakovich may well have intended, was the very definition of an empty victory.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: Igor Levit Arrives at the New York Philharmonic

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      Levit, one of the world’s eminent pianists, appeared with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall eight years after making his New York debut.Eight years ago, a young pianist made his New York debut with a brazen program of Beethoven’s final sonatas.Baby-faced and wearing a bow tie, Igor Levit, then 27, took the stage at the Park Avenue Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room and proved that age is no impediment in interpreting some of the wisest and most challenging music in the keyboard repertory. “A major new pianist has arrived,” the critic Anthony Tommasini wrote of that night.Since then, each return engagement has had the air of an important event: Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations with the artist Marina Abramovic at the Armory’s drill hall, recitals with premieres at Carnegie Hall that started in its chamber-size Zankel space before moving to its main auditorium.Levit, who lives in Berlin, hasn’t brought his most madcap programming to the city — his essential, standard-setting take on Ronald Stevenson’s “Passacaglia on DSCH” or his turn in Ferruccio Busoni’s extravagant Piano Concerto — but he has graduated from newcomer to New York fixture.One important debut remained, and it came on Friday: his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic.Now 35, more scruffy than smooth and trading his bow tie for a casual black shirt, he joined the orchestra at Carnegie in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. It was one of those evenings — agonizingly, just one performance — that left you wondering whether the Philharmonic had found an artist to keep on speed dial for future seasons.Holding his own against the orchestra’s characteristic muscularity, Levit offered counterpoint in an expressive touch, an instinctual sense of shape and a gift for navigating the nuances of a piece that keeps one foot in the Classical era and the other in the Romanticism of its time.Like Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, also in D minor, the Brahms begins with a long orchestral introduction before the soloist’s softly singing entrance — passion turning into a plea. The Philharmonic, led by Jaap van Zweden, its music director, sounded more aggressive than ardent, and crisp where another ensemble might have been grand.Van Zweden’s reading didn’t necessarily register as problematic until it was brought into relief by Levit’s arrival, which achieved more tension with less force. His solos were similar to sonatas in their intimacy and breadth of expression (a sensibility that reached its height with his encore, a sonorous yet serene “Nun Komm’ der Heiden Heiland,” transcribed by Busoni from Bach). At the keyboard he was capable of conjuring not only thunder, particularly in the climax of the first movement, but also the troubling calm that can precede it and, as in the Adagio, something like the gentle parting of clouds that follows.Where soloist and orchestra most aligned was in the Rondo finale; Levit stated the first theme briskly, precisely, and the Philharmonic responded in kind. More here than elsewhere, van Zweden allowed the score to speak for itself, to build naturally toward its joyous D major coda. The piano part wraps up several measures before the end, but Levit’s skill and stage presence had been well established by then — and the audience reacted, the moment he moved to bow, with a swift standing ovation.The Philharmonic would have its moment, too, after intermission, in Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. And if this work activates instruments like lights on a switchboard, then there was not a dull bulb on Friday. With brasses clear and heroic; winds eloquent and full of personality; and strings speaking as a single unit, this was an ensemble in excellent form. In the fourth movement “Intermezzo interrotto,” especially, the players found a sensitivity absent in the Brahms: lush in its folk-like melody, animated in the nightmarishly parodic interruption and, in the return of the folk tune, movingly soft, with Dvorakian wistfulness.As he did in Brahms’s Rondo, van Zweden led the Bartok Finale with a restraint that, after simply getting through the virtuosity of the breakneck pace and fugal writing, made way for an organic accumulation toward a lingeringly resonant final chord. It was a glimpse of an approach he doesn’t take often — but that would be welcome, like any appearance by Levit, with the Philharmonic going forward.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Nico Muhly’s Moody Concerto for Two Pianos

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      In its American debut with the New York Philharmonic, “In Certain Circles,” featuring Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a freedom born from confidence.Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, designed an atmospheric program around the American premiere of Nico Muhly’s “In Certain Circles” at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday night.A concerto for two pianos and orchestra, “In Certain Circles” was written for the sisters Katia and Marielle Labèque, who performed the world premiere in Paris last year and returned to the work on Wednesday, in a program that also featured erotically charged works by Debussy and Wagner. “In Certain Circles” is an exciting new piece — focused, phantomlike, unafraid of sentiment — from a composer who has been in the public eye, and the cross hairs of critics, since shortly after earning his master’s degree from the Juilliard School in 2004.Muhly became classical music’s darling. He worked with Philip Glass and Björk. There were profiles in the media and plenty of commissions, including the film score for “The Reader,” and a full-scale opera, all by the time he was 30 years old.That opera, “Two Boys,” had its premiere at the English National Opera in 2011, and when it arrived at the Metropolitan Opera two years later, it sounded unripe. It was moody for sure — a detective story whose unease came from efficient musical motifs and natural, if plain spoken, recitative. Still, it felt like the soundtrack to a film that wasn’t there. “Marnie,” which came to the Met in 2018, was something less — a strained sophomore effort in search of maturity.“In Certain Circles” is something more. It’s moody too, but there’s a freedom born from confidence that makes it satisfying. Here, Muhly develops musical ideas without being constrained by elements like plotting and vocal setting, as in the operas. It’s not that he’s suddenly employing the rigorous architecture of, say, a Beethoven symphony. Instead, like Debussy, he seems motivated by the sounds of the instruments themselves. They tell him where to go.The tone of “In Certain Circles” is consistent — wispy and vaguely ominous — but Muhly is able to tell a three-part story with it. The orchestration is weblike yet spare, and somehow the two pianos are muffled within it. It’s a neat sleight of hand: Muhly scores the instruments in roughly the same range and gives the orchestra strong, independent lines, creating the sense of an encroaching threat.In the first movement, “L’Enharmonique” — the name comes from Rameau — the orchestra takes an antagonistic stance toward the pianos. The brasses bray at them. The piccolos hector them like circling crows. All the while, the two pianists run and run, playing long, highly patterned stretches of 16th notes, unable to catch their breath. Then they repeat a series of rising chords that end on unstable tone clusters — a stairway to nowhere.At the end of the movement, as the orchestra finally falls away, a musical fragment from Rameau emerges from the mist in a sweetly sad, delicate moment.The Labèque sisters favor rhythmic precision and quick, sharp action — a solid way to achieve clarity in the double piano repertory — and they use dynamics rather than color to define phrases. On Wednesday, Katia Labèque, playing the Piano I part, finished phrases with a flourish of the hand and hopped up from her stool to use the force of her shoulders. Marielle, more collected, connected her notes fluidly.In the second movement, “Sarabande & Gigue,” the orchestra suddenly sympathizes with the soloists by supporting the piano parts. The flutes echo the melodic line, like an act of kindness, and the strings provide harmonic reinforcement.Named for two Baroque dances, the title is a bit of a feint: Muhly has both embraced and refused the forms. Yes, he wrote a saraband in its traditional three-quarter time, but it’s suspended, its feet hovering above the ground with a patient, forlorn, undanceable tune, played by Katia with sensitivity. The gigue, in compound time, whirls chaotically.In the last movement, “Details Emerge,” the pianos assert themselves with rumblings in the bass and contrasting flights in the keyboard’s upper reaches. The orchestra reacts: The piccolos go wild, and the percussionists clash their cymbals and clap their whips. The Rameau fragment returns in the piano, but as an imperfect recollection. The orchestra, emboldened, winds up for the kill, but the piece ends abruptly, as if the lights went out before any victor in the concerto’s battle could be determined.The evening’s other pieces — Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune” and “La Mer,” and Wagner’s “Prelude and “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde” — beautifully contextualized Muhly’s concerto, even if their sensuality eluded van Zweden at the podium.Both preludes were delivered by the Philharmonic players with generically sweeping strings and overly strict tempos. These pieces are about as explicit as classical music gets without a graphic-content warning. But at Carnegie Hall, they didn’t give off much steam.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: The Philharmonic’s Conductor Returns to His Perch

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      Jaap van Zweden led the orchestra after seven weeks away in works by Julia Perry, Shostakovich and Beethoven.He’s back: After six weeks of guest conductors — including some prominent contenders to succeed him as music director when he leaves in two years — Jaap van Zweden returned to the New York Philharmonic on Thursday.And he’s back, too: A month after swooping into Carnegie Hall as a last-minute replacement for an artist with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the pianist Seong-Jin Cho was once again in Manhattan.They joined at Alice Tully Hall for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” its opening orchestral chord full and rounded; the balances between the strings and the winds, which had heavily favored the violins at Tully earlier this season, equitable; the tempos judicious.Cho, who played a tour date with the Philharmonic in 2019 but on Thursday made his subscription series debut, was most memorable when most delicate: his silvery playing under the horn just after his cadenza in the first movement; his gentleness in the questioning chords wandering from the second movement to the third; his shimmering trills at the end of the piece.His forcefulness in his right hand sometimes tipped into rawness — which, in passages of worried repetition, added an intriguing note of obsessiveness but otherwise felt too steely for such an intimate space. In the Rondo finale, though, he and the orchestra shared a graceful mixture of lightness and weight.In 1965, the Philharmonic premiered the final version of Julia Perry’s “Study for Orchestra,” but hadn’t reprised it until a one-off last year. Also known by an earlier title, “A Short Piece for Orchestra,” it is certainly that: Barely seven minutes long, it opens punchily, with heated strings and sardonic brasses, then enters a slower section of poetic winds and quietly suspended harmonies. The music turns blocky and dramatic again, with the vehemence of a Bernard Herrmann film score, before a softening ensemble, with touches of celesta and piano, is surprised by a brief, fierce coda.Perry’s “Study” felt connected — across the Beethoven concerto and the intermission that followed — to Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, another work whose swaths of high spirits are tinged with a bit too much aggression, a clenched grin. And both pieces relax into melancholy passages of seeming sincerity, haunted by eerie mists.Shostakovich wrote it as World War II came to an end, and originally planned something huge and triumphant, akin to Beethoven’s full-chorus Ninth. When he delivered a slighter, merrier piece, less than half an hour long, some were charmed, while others — including, dangerously, officials in Stalin’s government — felt he had failed to meet the historic moment.The degree to which the music is ironic — its bubbly passages even politically subversive — is unclear, a familiar ambiguity from a composer adept at playing all the angles. Its sprightliness in a sober time recalls Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony, written three decades earlier, which the Philharmonic played under van Zweden in February.Sharp, precise performances of this kind of repertory are the main reason van Zweden — known in past positions as a martinet of polish — was hired, and the orchestra played on Thursday with pep and something close to unity. The slower sections were particularly impressive, with icy waves of violin, brasses ominously smoldering, Anthony McGill’s clarinet aching and Judith LeClair’s bassoon offering eloquent humanity, without schmaltz.What are the piece’s politics? The jury is, and always will be, out.But playing the work makes its own political statement as Putin went on television on Friday to decry what he called instances of the West canceling Russian composers like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff to protest his invasion of Ukraine. This is, of course, largely his fantasy, a message of division meant to rally his people against phantoms he imagines to be demeaning and destroying Russia’s cultural heritage.For the Philharmonic to play this Ninth Symphony — and, next week, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev — is a gesture, however small, against that message.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      The Philharmonic Plans Its Return to Geffen Hall, With Fanfare

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      The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its renovated home.For the past two years, the only sound coming out of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, has been the clamor of construction. That will change in October, when it reopens after a $550 million renovation.And the Philharmonic will announce its return there with fanfare: Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” which is the first work of the orchestra’s 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts and events unveiled on Monday.Among the season’s highlights are a monthlong festival to inaugurate the hall; a series of premieres by composers, including Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw; concerts exploring issues like racism and climate change; and appearances by conductors who could replace the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, after he steps down in 2024.After losing more than $27 million in anticipated ticket revenue during the pandemic lockdown, and spending much of the past year without a permanent home during the Geffen Hall renovation, the Philharmonic hopes the coming season will restore a sense of normalcy and rebuild its audience.The renovated Geffen Hall will feature wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.Diamond Schmitt Architects“It’s a moment for us not only to reunite with people who have come before, but as we look to the future, to develop and nurture new audiences,” Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We can’t just expect people to come. We have to invite them.”The Philharmonic recently announced that the renovation is fully funded and on track to finish in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule, after construction was accelerated during the pandemic. The new space will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and vineyard-style seats that wrap around the stage.There will also be additions meant to draw people in, including a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public, and a studio looking out onto Broadway. The goal, Borda said, is for the hall to be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”The season begins Oct. 7 with a program called “Thank You Concert,” led by van Zweden, for an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas, and an open house weekend, will follow later that month.Opening festivities include the world premiere, performed at two free concerts, of “San Juan Hill,” a work by the trumpeter Etienne Charles, who is known for blending jazz with the music of his native Trinidad. Several other contemporary works will be featured, including the American premiere of a piece by Shaw; and the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by the Brazilian composer Marcos Balter.Some of the new works were written specifically for the renovated hall. “The early weeks are designed to be an exploration,” Borda said.Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive, said that the renovated hall should be a “home for music and a home for New Yorkers.”Tod Williams Billie Tsien ArchitectsAs the Philharmonic continues its search for a new music director, guest conductors will get more attention than usual.Several familiar names will take the podium, including Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will lead Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. In March, another prominent contender, Susanna Mälkki, the outgoing chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, will conduct the New York premiere of a double concerto by Felipe Lara, featuring the flutist Claire Chase and the bassist Esperanza Spalding, in their Philharmonic debuts.Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the Philharmonia Orchestra’s young principal conductor, is the only guest who will get two weeks of concerts, leading the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3, featuring Yuja Wang, in January. The following week, he will shepherd the American premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis,” in a program that also includes Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”Given the dearth of female conductors among the largest American orchestras, some have argued that the Philharmonic should choose a woman as its next music director. Several rising conductors, many of them women, will make their debuts with the ensemble next season, including Karina Canellakis, the chief conductor of Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruth Reinhardt, a former assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony; and Nathalie Stutzmann, who takes the podium of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra next season.Borda declined to comment on the music director search, except to say that the upcoming season was “obviously an opportunity to see some returning talent and some wonderful new talent as well.”Soloists appearing for the first time with the orchestra include the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, who will play Ravel’s piano concerto in November, and Cynthia Millar, playing the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Sinfonie,” alongside the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, in March.The season includes concert series designed to address modern issues, including “Liberation,” about social injustice; “Spirit,” about “humanity’s place in the cosmos”; and “Earth,” about the climate crisis.As part of “Liberation” in March, the Philharmonic will premiere a work by Courtney Bryan and Tazewell Thompson. “Spirit,” that same month, will include Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” which the Philharmonic has not performed since 2008.“Earth” will close out the season in June, with the world premiere of Wolfe’s “unEarth,” a multimedia oratorio that explores forced migration, loss of nature and adaptation. John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Become Ocean,” will get its New York premiere.Borda said that throughout the new season, the Philharmonic wants people to feel that “their lives have been touched and changed.”“If we accomplish that,” she added, “we could all be very proud.” More

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      Review: Philip Glass and the Bangles, Mashed at the Symphony

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      Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond brought their gleeful opera-cabaret show “Only an Octave Apart” to the New York Philharmonic.It’s not like the New York Philharmonic hasn’t been queer before. I can’t have been the only boy for whom Jessye Norman’s hair, when she sang Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene with the orchestra on national television in 1995, was a turning point. The ensemble backed Mariah Carey in Central Park, and Elaine Stritch for Sondheim’s 80th. It once paired Lou Harrison and Bruckner.But it’s safe to say it hasn’t presented anything quite like Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond’s Philharmonic debut as a duo on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Performing a rich helping of their recent show “Only an Octave Apart,” they cracked jokes about G spots and traveling for sex, mashed up Purcell’s Dido with Dido’s “White Flag,” layered Philip Glass over the Bangles, and generally camped up the joint.When “Only an Octave Apart” played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last fall, it was a riff on Beverly Sills and Carol Burnett’s high-low 1976 special of the same name, bringing together Costanzo, an operatic countertenor, and Bond, the gleefully savage cabaret diva. I went in with a little trepidation — a fan of both performers, but not quite sure whether the experiment would go off. Would it be too stiff? Too silly? Too talky? Too self-indulgent?It was sublime.By turns hilarious and tender — those dual Didos are very much not played for laughs — the show was a small miracle of careful craft and improvisatory looseness, of arch personae and moving sincerity. Costanzo was a superb, well, straight man to Bond’s battiness, and their voices — one slender and pure, the other husky and vibrato-heavy — improbably blended. The return to live performance after a year and a half of lockdowns only increased the poignancy and delight of their obvious mutual love and respect. It was a confection that nourished.It still is. Alongside the release of an album version, the show is an apt opener for the festival “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within,” organized by Costanzo as part of his Philharmonic residency. Focused on marginalized identities and (forgive the self-helpism) being yourself, the festival’s programs include a pair of premieres sung by Costanzo, as well as a rare countertenor take on Berlioz’s song cycle “Les Nuits d’Été.”On Thursday I missed Zack Winokur’s daffy yet elegant full staging of “Only an Octave Apart,” especially Jonathan Anderson’s delirious gowns. But the 90-minute show compressed nicely into a 50-minute concert half, the union between classical and cabaret smoothed by Nico Muhly’s lush yet subtle orchestrations.Costanzo also joined the orchestra and its music director, Jaap van Zweden, in the premiere of Joel Thompson and Tracy K. Smith’s “The Places We Leave.”Chris LeeSome moody Nelson Riddle-style string arrangements — like the scoring of a Douglas Sirk melodrama — nodded to what came before intermission: the premiere of Joel Thompson’s “The Places We Leave.” Setting a new text by the poet Tracy K. Smith, Thompson also reveled in sumptuous, worried strings, and gave Costanzo mellow, narrative vocal lines that surge into piercing climaxes. There was even a patch of exhausting Handelian coloratura, a wink at the text’s account of a lover who “left me breathless,” and at a Costanzo specialty. (He appears in “Rodelinda” at the Metropolitan Opera in March.)The concert opened with Joan Tower’s stout “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” No. 1, and also included Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, “Classical.” What was this chestnut doing here? Particularly as conducted by Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director — who was otherwise a sensitive leader — with his all-too-characteristic clenched, unwitty approach to the standard repertory.But an aspect of the choice resonated. Like “Only an Octave Apart,” Prokofiev’s First was created in a time of crisis, the violence of the February Revolution in Russia, but has little hint of that darkness in a work of sparkling energy and grace.Is making joyful music in grim times escapist, even reactionary? Sometimes the opposite: The “Classical” looked, as does “Only an Octave Apart,” to the past with a fresh spirit, a kind of progressive nostalgia. And like Costanzo and Bond in their show, Prokofiev used the work not to rest on his laurels but to spur himself to develop; the symphony was the first big piece he wrote without leaning on his beloved piano as a composition tool. It made his future possible.As unlikely yet satisfying a pairing as Costanzo and Bond, then, these two works — bridging an intermission and a century — are a reminder that what emerges and survives from our distressing era may not be what we expect. All we can do is give artists the space to create, and keep our ears open.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: An Ambitious Project Returns at the Philharmonic

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      Project 19, the orchestra’s series commissioning female composers, came back with a new work by Joan Tower.After a long delay, Joan Tower’s “1920/2019” was premiered on Friday by the New York Philharmonic at Alice Tully Hall. It was worth the wait to hear this 14-minute work by one of America’s most eminent composers — who, at 83, is as inventive as ever.The piece is part of Project 19, the orchestra’s initiative to commission 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which extended the vote to women. It began auspiciously in February 2020 with Nina C. Young’s “Tread softly” and, later that month, Tania León’s “Stride,” which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize this year.Ellen Reid also got her work in under the wire before the pandemic shut down the performing arts. But with the premiere of Tower’s hurtling, dark new piece, Project 19 has finally resumed. Her title juxtaposes 1920, when the amendment was ratified, with 2019 — “another significant year for women,” as Tower writes in a program note, “the height of the #MeToo movement, which raised the status of women to yet another level.”In her description Tower leaves the larger thematic resonances to listeners’ perceptions and focuses on the materials — steady repeated notes, chords, runs in scales and such — that drive the music. The piece begins with weighty blocks of orchestral chords heaving over kinetic rhythmic riffs. Rising runs and, soon, a persistent yet varying five-note motif keep spiraling forward. Imaginative writing for percussion and bustling rhythmic activity — long traits of Tower’s music — course through this restless, episodic score. On the surface the mood is ominous, even threatening. But the sheer intricacy lends a stirring fortitude to the music.During a long later section, the piece becomes like a little concerto for orchestra, featuring star turns for instruments in solo, duo, trio and small ensemble groups. Some observers have found Tower’s lucid music accessible almost to a fault. A better word to describe this engrossing, effective piece — and her style overall — is audible: All the multilayered, meter-fracturing workings of the score are laid out clearly. The Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden drew a glittering, moody performance from the orchestra.Though the program didn’t make thematic or musical connections between Tower’s piece and the longer works that followed — Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 and Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony — it was a pleasure to hear both those classic scores in such winning performances. Emanuel Ax was the animated and elegant soloist in the Mozart.The variety of his articulations and shadings was especially fine: sometimes crisp and sparkling, other times milky and subdued, as when the piano part shifts into wistful, minor-mode excursions during the sunny first movement. In the restrained, lyrical slow movement, Ax proved sensitive to Mozart’s evocations of his operatic aria style. The finale, a buoyant theme and variations, was splendidly stylish.Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony is suffused with the breadth, lyricism and wayward approach to harmony of his hero, Brahms. Yet Dvorak’s distinctive, rustic voice pervades the score. The Philharmonic’s performance captured the engaging yet elusive quality of the episodic first movement, and the dancing, bucolic third movement was especially vibrant. Van Zweden summoned fervor and opulent sound in the teeming finale without slipping into overdrive, as he sometimes does. And the players finally seem to be adapting to Tully, one of their temporary homes as David Geffen Hall is renovated.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More