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    Review: Dalia Stasevska Returns to the New York Philharmonic

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    Dalia Stasevska returned to the orchestra’s podium with a world premiere and subtly linked works by Tchaikovsky and Sibelius.The opening of the New York Philharmonic’s concert on Friday took a step toward solving one problem while exposing another.Wang Lu’s “Surge,” given its world premiere at the top of the show, is the product of an initiative by the League of American Orchestras to commission new works from six composers — all women — that will be guaranteed performances from ensembles across the country.So far, so good. Too often, premieres have short rehearsal periods; then, unless future performances are lined up, or unless soloists champion concertos written for them, the music can easily disappear. The League’s project at least gives contemporary work a fighting chance at longevity.I hope, however, that the other premieres to come out of this initiative don’t have the running time of “Surge.” At a mere six minutes, it was shorter than all but one movement in the classics that followed at David Geffen Hall on Friday: Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Sibelius’s Second Symphony.Larger commissions are certainly possible. A week ago, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis” took up the first 20 minutes of the Philharmonic’s program; last season in Los Angeles, an entire evening was given over to Thomas Adès’s 100-minute “Dante.” Imagine the League’s group of orchestras nurturing music on the scale of symphony. Then they might tackle what is perhaps the problem of world premieres: that, as brief curtain-raisers unrelated to the rest of a concert, they tend to just read as perfunctory exercises in box-ticking.That said, Wang’s piece has the elements of an enormous score skillfully accordioned into the shape of a much smaller one. From the flourish of its first measure, “Surge” is a restless succession of swinging gestures, martial flashes and exercises in disparate, assertive voices coming in and out of focus, then occasionally finding common ground in a tutti mass. It all had the feel of a TikTok binge: an endless and entrancing stream of much of the same in short, slightly different bursts. The music ended before it became exhausting — but, like TikTok, left you wanting more.At the podium was Dalia Stasevska, in her second appearance with the Philharmonic. Her debut last season proved her bona fides in contemporary music, with a whirlwind trio of works by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams. Friday’s premiere was equally impressive; Stasevska led the Wang with verve, commitment and, above all, clarity (despite distractingly wide-armed conducting mannerisms that could qualify as a cardio workout).The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, a longtime outspoken critic of Russia, performed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in a gown design to resemble the Ukrainian flag.Chris LeeThe rest of the program was another kind of test: standard repertory. For the Tchaikovsky, she was joined by the Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, in characteristically elegant and modestly electrifying form, with a focused, penetrating sound. In this piece, the orchestra mostly plays a supporting role to the singingly Romantic solo part. But ensemble moments were nevertheless distinct; the introduction alone seemed to inhale and exhale its phrases, and the cellos’ freely beating fifths in the finale set the tone for the rubato and joyously dancing liveliness that Batiashvili has previously brought to folk-inflected music by the likes of Szymanowski.It was the kind of performance that, without trying to, had audience members roaring with applause after the first movement, then, at the end, immediately rising for a standing ovation — one of the most passionate I’ve heard at Geffen Hall this season. They had a similar response to the Sibelius, which here was anxiously brisk and occasionally furious.The symphony can come off as an exercise in motivic obsession on the level of Beethoven’s Fifth, and even has that work’s style of a soaringly ecstatic finale. But Stasevska’s heavily opinionated interpretation was unusual from the start; the slurred tenuto phrases of the strings, rather than gentle waves approaching a shore, were a ride along a bumpy road. With a liberal treatment of tempo markings, passages were pushed and pulled, some relished and others simply rushed. The last movement was an uncertain triumph, with a suggestion of continuing struggle, until Stasevska savored the radiance of the closing measures’ chords.Throughout, it was difficult to avoid seeing this idiosyncratic account as a personal one. Stasevska lives in Finland but was born in Ukraine, which she has been fervently supporting — through fund-raising, through driving trucks packed with supplies across its border — since Russia’s invasion nearly a year ago. Batiashvili, too, has long been outspoken against Russia and the classical musicians who have benefited from its leadership, especially the conductor Valery Gergiev. On Friday, she performed wearing a gown in the stark blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag.Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was written in the glory days of Imperial Russia — an empire that included Finland as a grand duchy subjected, by the time Sibelius’s Second Symphony premiered in 1902, to severe policies of Russification. Sibelius denied as much, but listeners heard in this work an outcry for national pride and independence. To them, the music could never be met with a neutral response. And it’s just as impossible to have one to Stasevska, neither to her life nor to her passionately argued performance.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      New Effort Aims to Bring More Contemporary Music to Orchestras

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      An initiative by the League of American Orchestras will enlist 30 ensembles to perform works by six living composers, all of them women.Many orchestras, eager to demonstrate a commitment to contemporary music, have taken pride in programming works by living composers in recent years. But when the glamour of the premiere fades, many of those works all but disappear from the standard repertoire, rarely to be performed again.Now a group of nonprofit leaders is working to make new music a more permanent part of the artistic landscape. The League of American Orchestras on Thursday announced an initiative that will enlist 30 ensembles over the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women.“There’s too much great music that gets lost and is never heard after its premiere,” Simon Woods, the league’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We thought, ‘We need to solve that.’”While many orchestras are eager for the prestige of commissioning new works, Woods said they are not as focused on playing pieces that have premiered elsewhere.“Orchestras should be patrons of new work,” he said. “But still, the second performance and the third performance are really important. Because it’s only when one hears a work a few times that it sort of snowballs and it has a chance of getting a toehold in the repertoire. Building that momentum is really important.”The League, in partnership with the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and American Composers Orchestra, has been working since 2014 to bring more diversity to orchestral programming, including awarding commissions to female and nonbinary composers.The initiative announced on Thursday will build on those efforts, pairing each of the six composers with five ensembles. The program, which will cost at least $360,000, will be financed by the Toulmin foundation.The six composers are the British-born Anna Clyne, who works in the United States; Sarah Gibson, who is also a pianist; the Hong Kong-born Angel Lam; Gity Razaz, an Iranian American; Arlene Sierra, an American based in London; and Wang Lu, a China-born composer and pianist, who lives in Providence, R.I.Wang said in an interview that it was often difficult for contemporary composers to find orchestras interested in playing new works after they have premiered.“As a composer, I can’t just like knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, this is my music, why don’t you play it?’” she said.Wang, who is working on a new piece that the New York Philharmonic is to premiere in January, said the league’s initiative would give artists more opportunities to develop. “You can only get better by working with orchestras,” she said in an interview. “Only by listening can you improve.”The initial group of orchestras taking part are the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Kansas City Symphony and the Sarasota Orchestra. Those ensembles will begin to premiere and perform the works by the composers next season.In the coming months, the league will choose the remaining 24 ensembles that will take part in the program. More

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      Review: ‘Density’ Keeps Expanding the Flute’s Universe

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      Now in its eighth year, Claire Chase’s multidecade project to create a modern repertory for her instrument shows no signs of slowing.It was a familiar, comforting sight: the flutist Claire Chase, standing atop a scaffold and softly lit, a warmly glowing star in the expansive darkness of the Kitchen’s performance space.Since 2013, a scene like this has greeted every audience to witness an installment of “Density 2036,” Chase’s multidecade initiative to commission a new program of flute music each year, leading up to the centennial of Edgard Varèse’s brief but influential 1936 solo “Density 21.5,” a work that, she once wrote, “unfurled genre-dissolving possibilities for the instrument.”These programs — theatrical as well as musical, vocal as well as instrumental — have taken on the reliability of holiday gatherings. And, like many such gatherings, Chase’s was jeopardized by the pandemic: The seventh installment, Liza Lim’s “Sex Magic,” premiered online last December.What a relief it was, then, to be back at the Kitchen on Friday for Part VIII of “Density” — one of the great musical undertakings of our time, a singular project by a singular artist on the messily ambitious scale of Wagner’s “Ring” and Stockhausen’s “Licht.” The climax will be a 24-hour marathon concert, but until then, “Density” is unfolding incrementally, with Chase as the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe.This latest performance — dedicated to the composer Alvin Lucier, whose “Almost New York” was featured in Part I, and who died recently at 90 — opened with Lim’s “Sex Magic,” in the form of the excerpt “Throat Song,” for ocarina and voice, blending and blurring the two in gentle polyphony.Lim’s piece was a reminder that, while “Density” is, on paper, a mission to develop a modern solo flute repertory, it has in practice been much broader. Chase and her cohort of composers have made an encyclopedic embrace of the flute family — especially in Marcos Balter’s “Pan,” which constituted Part V — and remained open to the ways in which the human body can produce sound, such as in Pauline Oliveros’s monodrama-like “Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase,” from Part III. Some works haven’t even been solos. (And some, it should be said, have been easier to respect than love.)The concerts are anything but straightforward. Friday’s came with a host of additional credits, including for Levy Lorenzo’s sound, Nicholas Houfek’s lighting and production design, Monica Duncan’s projections and Kelly Levy’s stage management. The reason was clear the moment Chase began to play Wang Lu’s “Aftertouch,” which complements three types of flute with street noise, a club-worthy beat and videos, by Polly Apfelbaum, of spinning singing bowls. It seems like a lot, but the elements wove together naturally: the city’s restlessness; the dizzying video; Chase’s arpeggios, amplified and, through electronics, feeding one another in waves of sound that transformed into clashing ripples.If “Aftertouch” courted dance, the low frequency of its beat rattling the rafters, then Ann Cleare’s “anfa,” which followed, invited something like the opposite. Its title, according to the program notes, comes from the Irish word for “a disturbance in the elements,” and its baseline is deceptive stasis. Chase stood with her towering contrabass flute against the backdrop of a projected film landscape, by Ailbhe Ni Bhriain, of an Irish bog — a site, Cleare says, of rich industrial and geological history.The video has the look of a still image, but Cleare’s score reveals that there is always more to a landscape than meets the eye. Accompanied by electronics, Chase sounded both of the earth and beyond it, shifting textures with tectonic patience and warping time. Quietly, but alarmingly, the image changes to another in which inky plumes erupt with increasing frequency; by the end, their slowly spreading tendrils begin to overtake the bog.Matana Roberts’s “Auricular Hearsay” countered Cleare’s muted intensity with piercingly loud extroversion. Written for flute, video and the option of collaborators, it uses a mixed-media framework that Roberts calls “Endless Score,” and is, the composer writes, “a visual and sonic exploration of the brains of the neurodiverse,” inspired by how they “operate in starts, stops, spurts.” Improvising from a set of instructions, Chase played no fewer than a half-dozen instruments, including slide whistles, percussion and panpipe, alongside Senem Pirler’s scene-stealing live electronics and against blazing projections.It’s a marvel that, after this rush of premieres, Varèse’s original “Density 21.5” had the freshness of a new discovery. But its inclusion also put a lot of pressure on the pieces that preceded it: Will they still have such an eager audience in 2136?And what about artists able to take them up? So much of “Density 2036” has been written specifically for Chase, tailored to her nimble technique, vocal prowess and charismatic presence. Although each addition has been a gift, it will be even more impressive if these works break the trend — all too common in new music — of coming and going like the burst of breath that makes a flute sing.Density 2036, Part VIIIPerformed Thursday through Saturday at the Kitchen, Manhattan. More