Wang, Yuja (1987- )

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    In Kentucky, a Maestro of the People

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    Teddy Abrams, the 36-year-old music director of the Louisville Orchestra, has embedded himself in his community, breaking the mold of modern conductors.On a muggy July night at an amphitheater in suburban Kentucky, the conductor and composer Teddy Abrams — sporting black jeans, camouflage sneakers and a bouncy mop of golden curls — took the podium and began to evangelize.It was the final stop on the Louisville Orchestra’s summer tour across Kentucky, and Abrams, the ensemble’s 36-year-old music director, paused to speak to the crowd of roughly 900 in Bardstown, 40 miles or so south of Louisville, about his mission.He told the audience — teenagers in tie-dye, retirees snacking on nachos and workers from nearby Bourbon distilleries among them — that he wanted to use music to “bring people together across all backgrounds.” Invoking his idol, the eminent conductor Leonard Bernstein, he said music was a universal language: “We have to do something with it.” He spoke of the need for Kentucky to promote its rich cultural traditions.“This is your Louisville Orchestra, everyone,” he said. “Kentuckians know good music. We’ve made a lot of the music that the world loves, invented entire genres right here in our state. That’s what this is all about — sharing the incredible music-making that takes places in Kentucky.”During his nine years at the helm of the Louisville Orchestra, Abrams has helped the 86-year-old ensemble emerge from a period of turmoil to reclaim its reputation as one of the most innovative in the United States.And he stands out for another reason. While many modern maestros lead jet-set lives, spending only as much as time in one place as contractually required, Abrams, a California native, has broken the mold, putting down roots in Kentucky and embarking on an ambitious project to make the orchestra part of daily life for Kentuckians.“Teddy, it’s so easy!” Students in the rap program invited Abrams to take part in a dance video, at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesHe lives in a house near downtown Louisville, where he regularly hosts musicians, activists, city officials and entrepreneurs, and rides a bicycle around town. (He finally got a driver’s license in October.) He writes music honoring local figures, including a “rap opera” about Muhammad Ali (a musical, “Ali,” by Abrams and the actor and director Clint Dyer, is set to premiere in Louisville next year and is aimed for Broadway in 2025). He has expanded the orchestra’s public efforts, starting a rap program for young people; founding a creator corps that invites artists from around the country to embed themselves in Kentucky; and leading a two-year statewide tour, which began in May, including the stop in Bardstown.His approach stands in stark contrast to that of many music directors, who often take on full-time commitments to several orchestras at once and can live thousands of miles from their ensembles.Abrams says that conductors too often operate at a distance from their communities, missing an opportunity to build connections.“We expect mayors and university presidents and police chiefs to be in the city,” he said. “I think that the conductor of the orchestra should be in that same category of civic leader. Because if they’re not, what does it say to the people of that town?”Abrams’s vision has drawn attention at a time when many arts organizations are looking to forge closer ties with residents and communities. His approach recalls that of Bernstein, who as music director of the New York Philharmonic popularized a series of concerts for young people and was credited with helping make classical music accessible to the public.“This is your Louisville Orchestra, everyone”: The orchestra performing in Bardstown. Jon Cherry for The New York TimesFiling into the stands at Bardstown.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesAbrams also draws inspiration from his mentor, Michael Tilson Thomas, the former music director of the San Francisco Symphony, who studied with Bernstein and has also initiated music education efforts, including the popular “Keeping Score” television series.Thomas, who has known Abrams since he was a child, said his protégé had created “a very natural space for people to feel comfortable inside of the music.”“He is extraordinarily devoted to helping people better understand what the music is all about, and what they’re all about,” Thomas said. “I’ve never really seen anything quite like it, and it fills me with an enormous sense of hope.”Abrams’s success in Louisville has fueled speculation that he might be tapped for a more prominent post, perhaps in Los Angeles or elsewhere. He doesn’t rule out such a move, he said, but at the same time he doesn’t feel pressure to climb the ladder.“I never thought I’m just going to stay here until a larger orchestra comes along, until I can get a ‘better’ gig,” he said. “That’s not the calling. I was brought here to do something for this place.”Born in Berkeley, Calif., the son of lawyers, Abrams played piano and clarinet as a child. He was drawn to conducting after seeing Thomas lead an all-Gershwin program with the San Francisco Symphony when he was 9. He wrote a letter to the famed maestro soliciting advice — and lessons.“I never thought I’m just going to stay here until a larger orchestra comes along, until I can get a ‘better’ gig,” Abrams said. “That’s not the calling. I was brought here to do something for this place.”Jon Cherry for The New York TimesThe singer Lisa Bielawa performed in the premiere of Tyler Taylor’s “In Memory’s Safe” in Bardstown. Both Taylor and Bielawa are composers in residence with the orchestra.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesJ. Bryan Heath, a trombonist in the orchestra, sang and played guitar in an arrangement of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”Jon Cherry for The New York TimesThomas urged him to seek out 20th-century composers, including Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Bartok, in addition to Beethoven and Mozart, and told him to “keep your ears open.” (Thomas’s reply, framed, now hangs in Abrams’s Louisville bedroom.)Soon Abrams was studying with Thomas, who offered guidance on life as well as music. When he saw Abrams, then a teenager, with a pencil behind each ear, he counseled him that “one pencil is endearing; two are eccentric.”Thomas said that Abrams was eager from the start: “He always had this tremendous and thorough enthusiasm for music in all of its different forms.”At 11, he enrolled at community college because his family thought it would be a better fit than traditional schools (“I was a diminutive kid who related to adults,” he said). At 18, he graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and went onto the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, becoming one of the youngest conducting students to enroll there.Abrams seemed destined for a traditional career, earning plum posts as a fellow at the New World Symphony in Miami, co-founded by Thomas, and as an assistant conductor at the Detroit Symphony under its then-music director, Leonard Slatkin.Then the Louisville Orchestra, which had been searching for years for a replacement for Jorge Mester, its veteran conductor, invited him for an audition. Abrams said he felt an immediate connection with the orchestra, and in 2014, when he was 27, he became the youngest music director in Louisville’s history.He took up full-time residence in the city, buying a sprawling two-story home in the trendy NuLu neighborhood, and furnishing it with two pianos, a Hammond organ, a keyboard and other instruments. Abrams, who is also fluent in genres like jazz, swing and blues, sometimes took his keyboard to the street to entertain passers-by.When he arrived, the orchestra was still feeling the pain of having declared bankruptcy in 2010 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. At the time, the orchestra made cuts to musicians’ pay and reduced the size of the ensemble to 55 from 71.Abrams with donors and board members at Toogie’s Table in Bardstown.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesAbrams watching the dance video he made with the students.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesAbrams signs a concertgoer’s program in Bardstown.Jon Cherry for The New York Times“We were left with ashes,” said Kathleen Karr, the principal flutist. “His ability to make us feel so worthy of all his ideas gave us new hope.”Abrams set out to improve morale and to rethink the orchestra’s place in the community.“The orchestra was in such a place of questioning and an identity crisis that it meant when I came here it was an open book,” he said. “We could write the story in a new way.”The Louisville ensemble had a reputation for experimentation going back to the 1940s, when the city’s mayor, Charles Farnsley, a fan of composers like Stravinsky and Villa-Lobos, came up with a plan to save the orchestra by commissioning works by living composers. In the decades that followed, as the orchestra premiered and recorded hundreds of new pieces, few ensembles could match Louisville’s ambition.Abrams has sought to resurrect that legacy, inviting composers and artists to Louisville for residencies and commissioning more than 70 works, including pieces by rappers and R&B stars. He has also presented many of his own works, including a piece about Mammoth Cave, in central Kentucky, which premiered this spring inside the cave with the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.The star pianist Yuja Wang, a classmate at Curtis who often enlisted Abrams to accompany her while rehearsing concertos, went to Louisville last year for the premiere of a piano concerto that Abrams wrote for her, which combines jazz, funk, big band and television and movie music. “He has this way of expanding on every thought and making it even more imaginative,” she said. “He always has a clear vision of what he wants.”As he enters his 10th season in Louisville, Abrams is keeping the focus on community, amicably playing the role of musical ambassador (a photo of him conducting greets visitors at the Louisville airport).One day this summer, he spent time with a group of students in the hip-hop program, a joint project of the orchestra and the education group Hip-Hop N2 Learning. When the teenagers invited him to take part in a dance video they would post on TikTok, he agreed with some hesitation, watching intently as they taught him the routine.“I’ve never done this before,” he said. “I’m worried this will be the white guy cannot dance situation.”“Teddy, it’s so easy!” the students exclaimed, and he began to sway his hips and cross his arms.When they finished, Abrams turned to the students. “Let me know when we get to a million views,” he said.Craig Greenberg, the mayor of Louisville, said Abrams often showed up in unexpected places to promote the orchestra. Several years ago, he said, Abrams brought a small band of orchestra players to perform at a wrestling match.“He’s always looking to break down the barriers,” Greenberg said, “so that more people have access to art and have an entry point to begin to enjoy the arts even more.”The pandemic, which forced the cancellation of in-person concerts, brought new challenges. But Abrams and the orchestra’s chief executive, Graham Parker, have kept the organization’s finances relatively stable. The annual budget has more than doubled to about $12 million over the past decade, and donations and grants have risen sharply.Still, there is work to be done: The orchestra’s audiences remain predominantly white, as do its players, despite the fact that about 24 percent of Louisville’s residents are Black and about 7 percent are Hispanic.A year after Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker in Louisville, was shot and killed by police officers, Abrams and the orchestra joined forces with Jecorey Arthur, a rapper and City Council member, for a virtual program that included a Ravel piano concerto, as well as Black spirituals and a hip-hop track.Jecorey Arthur, a rapper and City Council member, said of Abrams: “He’s always very intentional, not just musically, but also socially and politically, and knows that he is a part of something that is bigger than him as an individual.”Jon Cherry for The New York Times“He’s always very intentional,” Arthur said, “not just musically, but also socially and politically, and knows that he is a part of something that is bigger than him as an individual.”Abrams, who has signed with Louisville through at least the 2024-25 season, acknowledges that he has lofty ideals and that he may at some point be tempted to try his community-driven approach elsewhere.But for now, he says, he is content where he is.“If Louisville becomes a destination city for composers, and they all start leaving Williamsburg and L.A. and Nashville and wherever they are, then the question is reversed,” he said. “Why would I leave? Why would you leave something if you actually helped make it?” 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 Philharmonic Contender Returns to the Podium

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      With a change of the guard imminent at the New York Philharmonic, Santtu-Matias Rouvali is the only guest conductor leading two programs this season.A changing of the guard on the world’s great orchestral podiums was in the air on Friday. Daniel Barenboim, 80, the longtime music director of the Berlin State Opera, had just announced he would step down at the end of the month because of his declining health.A potential generational shift was looming at the New York Philharmonic, too. The evening before, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, 37, had conducted that ensemble with crisply elfin spirit as one of the leading candidates to take over when Jaap van Zweden, 62, leaves at the end of next season.Rouvali faces steep competition — not least from Gustavo Dudamel, 41, who is widely considered the favorite for the position and who arrives in New York this spring for Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, a classic music director showcase.But it is no accident that Rouvali is the only Philharmonic guest conductor this season to get two weeks of concerts. After the current program of works by Rossini, Magnus Lindberg and Beethoven, he leads music by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Prokofiev and — like the Mahler, a prime assignment — Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” starting next Thursday.It is an added sign of trust in and respect for Rouvali, the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, that each of those programs includes a new work co-commissioned by the Philharmonic: Thorvaldsdottir’s “Catamorphosis” and Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 — bless him for being one of the few contemporary composers who favor plain, simple concerto titles — with the calmly formidable Yuja Wang as soloist.Yuja Wang, front, was the soloist in Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3.Chris LeeOn Thursday at David Geffen Hall, Rouvali, too, was a calm and lucid guide through the piece — which came off, however, as billowy and somewhat baggy. The score’s meter markings are precisely gauged for shifts of pulse that don’t come across audibly as slow-fast contrasts of tempo; this may be why Lindberg has cheekily described the work as a concerto in three concertos, rather than three movements.But while that is an impressive technical achievement, the whole thing ends up registering for the listener as a bit homogeneous, a roughly half-hour foray into richly chromatic nostalgia, swaths of it reminiscent of golden-age film music à la Korngold. (A modernist sheen over a late-Romantic spirit has become a trademark Lindberg move.) Like the Groundhog Day spectacle of votes for a House speaker this week, the performance gave the sense of hearing the same concerto again and again.If this repetitiveness yielded little urgency, the piece wasn’t exactly sluggish, either. Moment by moment, passage by passage, the music doesn’t feel heavy. Lindberg keeps the orchestra airy, often adding complexity by dividing the strings into ever-ampler harmonies rather than using denser instrumentation or greater volume. And the daunting solo part emerges — particularly in Wang’s cool hands — as quicksilver and subtle, integrated into the general textures and restrained even in the fevered portions of the cadenza near the end of the first movement.Lindberg is never less than artful, as in how that cadenza seems to silkily melt out of softly plush strings, which just as quietly and cleverly rejoin the pianist a minute or so later. The shadows at the start of the second movement organically grow into an expansive, grave grandeur reminiscent of Debussy’s “La Mer,” with passages of candied glockenspiel woven beautifully into the golden wire of a tiny group of violins. The third movement has bits of sumptuous playfulness, punctuated by yelps of brass.But overall the work’s impact is muted and breezy, which is striking given the broad, Rachmaninoff-esque sweep of Lindberg’s musical gestures.Rouvali, one of a full lineup of conductors accompanying Wang in the coming months as she tours with the work, which premiered in San Francisco in October, matches her clean, objective style. There is a conscientiousness to Rouvali that can tip into squareness, as I felt when he led the Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony a year ago. And Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture on Thursday lacked the steadily accumulating propulsion, even through lyrical passages, that is the piece’s reason for being; the soufflé never really rose.But in Beethoven’s Second Symphony — a classic that is still somehow underrated — he was superb, with his deliberate, even careful conducting yielding a graceful, stylish interpretation. I have rarely been more clearly yet delicately aware of Beethoven’s most visionary passages here: the orchestra mistily reconstituting itself near the end of the first movement, the amorphous clouds of harmonies in the finale.Under Rouvali, the second movement was intimate and sober, but it gradually relaxed, even to a charming daintiness; the third, never rushing the eager rhythms, reached elegance. This conductor doesn’t do breathlessness, and he could probably do with a little more liveliness. But when he avoids plainness, his judiciousness can seem very like maturity.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Tuesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      A Lifelong Friendship’s Latest Chapter: A Concerto Premiere

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      At the San Francisco Symphony, Magnus Lindberg’s music is being conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, his fellow Finn and former classmate.Look at the biographies of Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and you’ll notice that the similarities stack up pretty quickly.These two Finnish artists — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, attended the same music school and, on Thursday, will jointly present the premiere of Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the San Francisco Symphony.Well, they’re not exactly the same age. “Magnus is four days older than me,” Salonen said in a joint video interview with Lindberg, “which I’ve never let him forget.”Lindberg laughed. They are friends, of course, and this week’s premiere is the latest chapter in a lifelong relationship defined by mutual support and even the occasional collaboration, as when Salonen recorded Lindberg’s first piano concerto, a 1994 work loosely inspired by Ravel but in a thoroughly modernist vein.The second piano concerto, which the New York Philharmonic debuted in 2012, is a product of Lindberg’s residency there, and was conducted by Alan Gilbert. It is a grand, deceptively conventional piece, running nearly half an hour over three movements. During a reunion with Gilbert three years ago in Hamburg, Germany, Lindberg saw Yuja Wang perform Shostakovich’s two piano concertos with the NDR Elbphilharmonie.“I found that interesting, and we had dinner, and we started to discuss this and that,” Lindberg said, recalling his first meeting with Wang. “I said I would like to do another piano concerto one day, and it became a project.”In the interview, Lindberg and Salonen discussed their history and that project — in which Wang will be the soloist, and which will travel to the New York Philharmonic in January under the baton of their fellow Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Salonen and Lindberg — both composers, both performers and, in Salonen’s case, one of the world’s great conductors — are the same age, 64, and attended the same music school.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesHow did you meet?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN We met at 15 in a music theory group in the precollege department of the Sibelius Academy.MAGNUS LINDBERG We were thrown out of music theory after two weeks because we were trying to know everything better than everyone else. And that teacher put us in the hands of another teacher, who became our theory teacher for eight years. We spent basically all Saturday mornings together during those years.SALONEN We had this iron principle that no matter what happened Friday evening — whether a party or whatever — we were always there Saturday morning.LINDBERG It was typically the three of us playing on two pianos, six hands. We would go through Scriabin’s First Symphony, and then we would analyze it and check the harmonies and play it. Also, we ended up having Esa-Pekka conduct if we played four hands. For me, at least, it was sort of a lifesaver because music theory was always around music with this teacher. It was always making noise, never theoretical.SALONEN During those years, we went through not only the Western music canon but all kinds of things that did not belong to the canon. We developed a party trick that became really unpopular, which is that we played music by Josef Matthias Hauer, the weird Austrian composer who invented a 12-tone system before Schoenberg. We played “Apokalyptische Phantasie” on four hands, and it was not super popular, but we did it anyway because we thought the best thing we can give to friends is to widen their horizons.Yuja Wang, left, will be the soloist on Lindberg’s new piano concerto, which she helped influence.Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesAnd to the public. You were founders of the group Korvat Auki.SALONEN We had a group of composing students and also instrumental students who were interested in contemporary music, who felt that we needed something new in Finnish music life and to open the windows to the newest things in Europe. So together with other friends and fellow students we started Korvat Auki. That’s how we met Kaija Saariaho, in the first meeting of the society. The first meeting, in fact, took place in Kaija’s then-boyfriend’s apartment. He was a painter, so he brought in his visual arts friends, and there was cross-pollination.The idea was to bring new music to people. So we did concerts in schools and hospitals and so on — outside gas stations in the middle of nowhere, in snow banks. I organized one concert in my old school, which was totally faultlessly executed except that I had forgotten to announce it. Nobody knew that this concert had happened. I started studying conducting as well, mainly because no one seemed interested, so we had to bring someone from our own ranks.LINDBERG We founded a group called Toimii, and that definitely came out of an enormous respect for what Stockhausen was doing. Aside from playing written music, we also did a lot of improvisation. We thought that should be a natural way of expressing musical thoughts.SALONEN That was the group that once performed music at Ojai in bunny suits. That was a children’s concert; the kids seemed to like it.Children have the most open ears.SALONEN Exactly. They are the best audience, no question.How have those years influenced your careers?SALONEN In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive. We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing. Now I’m getting ready to rehearse his piano concerto tomorrow morning, and it’s a style that I know very well. But the delight here is for me to see, “Oh that’s new; that chord you haven’t used before.”I tell my young conducting colleagues and students: Form relationships with composers. Because in the best-case scenario, you might find a working partner for the rest of your professional life. Of course, growing up in Helsinki in the 1970s was a great place for this to develop because it was a statistically unusual situation where like-minded composers were studying together and hanging out, and despite the different stylistic approaches, we were completely loyal to one another.LINDBERG And we’ve been keeping on with the tradition that every time one of us has written a new piece, we gather and listen, and we give feedback. Being a composer in this strange world is astonishingly alone. Having someone you can trust telling you what he is thinking is crucial.SALONEN The funny thing is that composing gets lonelier as you get older and become more famous. Because fewer people dare to say anything. So at the end of the day, you have your old friends and colleagues.“In terms of Magnus and me, the cross-influence has been massive,” Salonen said. “We have spent countless hours talking about orchestration, notation, form, this and that. It’s been a lifelong school, in a way, and it’s still ongoing.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWhat new directions, Magnus, did you take with this new piano concerto?LINDBERG I am sort of free. I don’t have to invent the concerto as a sort of individual-collective setup. This piece, despite being in three movements, would almost rather be like three concertos — a concerto in three concertos. I spent a lot of time working on it, and last winter, when it wasn’t fully ready, Yuja and I went through, and I allowed her to influence the writing. The specialties of her technique and her approach to the piano are quite stunning.What should audiences listen for?SALONEN The first time I went through this score, I spotted a few old friends: a moment, very fleeting, where there is a strong allusion to an existing piano piece. There’s one where the orchestra quiets down and the piano starts playing the first bar of “Ondine.” It’s like this hallucination almost, and it goes by very quickly. This is a technique that Magnus has been using since the very beginning. It’s like bumping into somebody in the crowd on the subway. It’s a familiar face — “I must know that person” — and then it’s over.LINDBERG You think you invent something, then you realize, Oh, my God, that was so close to something that exists. Instead of abandoning it, for a brief moment you can give it a tribute, and go away from it.SALONEN These moments, the accidental ones, happen to every composer — at least all the composers who respect the history of music and are aware of it. There’s something nice about the fact that you sometimes go back to your ancestors. It’s a sign of love and respect. More

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      Review: An Audition Season Begins at the Philharmonic

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      Jakub Hrusa is the first of several guest conductors appearing with the orchestra in the coming weeks as it searches for its next music director.It’s audition season at the New York Philharmonic.Well, not officially. But ever since the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, announced that he would step down in 2024, every guest conductor’s appearance has carried the weight of speculation. When an outsider takes the podium these days, it’s hard to get through the concert without thinking: Could this be our future?And, for the next six weeks, the Philharmonic’s calendar is filled with nothing but guests.It began Thursday with Jakub Hrusa, a conductor with an ear for rarities and the skill to make persuasive cases for them. Next up are Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a charismatic and promising young talent; Manfred Honeck, a master of the standard repertory; Herbert Blomstedt, an elder statesman who, now in his mid-90s, is unlikely to be a music director again; and Gustavo Dudamel, who is being given substantial real estate with a Schumann festival in March. (That’s an awful lot of Y chromosomes, though other notable appearances in recent months have included Dalia Stasevska, Simone Young and Susanna Mälkki.)Hrusa last led the Philharmonic in 2019 — as it happens, at the end of another stretch of guest programs. Beyond bringing out a dynamic sound often absent from van Zweden’s indelicate style, Hrusa had a subtle gift then of giving the audience something it would enjoy but not necessarily ask for: Dvorak, say, but the underrated Sixth Symphony.That happened again with this week’s concerts at Alice Tully Hall. (I attended the one on Friday.) The evening had the surface-level same-old of dead European dudes — Central Europeans, to be exact — but was rich with novelty and spirited throughout, enough to inspire applause in the middle of a symphony. Two of the three works had never been played by the Philharmonic, and the centerpiece concerto, featuring the pianist Yuja Wang, hadn’t been on a subscription program since the 1980s.Even among those rarities were names you should but don’t see here often: Zoltan Kodaly and Bohuslav Martinu.Kodaly was represented by his Concerto for Orchestra, which premiered in 1941 — ahead of the more famous work of the same name by his Hungarian compatriot Bela Bartok. The piece harkens back to Bach, in its “Brandenburgs”-like treatment of the ensemble and contrapuntal writing, but with a folk flavor.Under Hrusa’s baton it had the feel of a festive opener, and the Philharmonic players responded accordingly: a big sound delivered at a breakneck pace, yet crisply articulated (which helps at Tully, whose acoustics tend to punish grandeur with muddle). The score is not without its swerves, though, and Hrusa navigated them by dropping to a whisper in an instant for lyrical, chamber-size passages and making space for intriguing sonorities that arose from, for example, the doubling of cello pizzicato in the bassoon.Martinu’s Symphony No. 1, from 1942, was comparatively quiet — at least at first, because Hrusa took a long, almost theatrical view of the piece, building toward a climax and threading the four discrete movements. With a soft approach, his opening, of upward chromatic scales passed around the orchestra, was a garden of strangely beautiful flowers in bloom.Those scales recur later, but Hrusa didn’t overemphasize them. Rather, they arose gracefully amid the work’s shifting character: the unsteady and rapidly escalating second movement, with strings given fleeting fragments of a phrase that could just as easily soar, the shards of a Dvorak melody; the thick textures of the darker third movement; and the dancing finale, in which even dolce passages sprint as if sprung.Yuja Wang performed Liszt’s First Piano Concerto wearing chunky white sunglasses — doctor’s orders, but readily accepted by an audience familiar with her blend of glamour and thoughtful artistry.Chris LeeIt was heartening to see that nearly all of the audience had stayed after intermission for the Martinu, given that the evening’s clearer selling point had come earlier: Wang playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat.Wang has Liszt’s storied star power as a performer: easily able to command a stage and entertainingly showy, yet sensitive and never excessively emotive. Her glamour is so established, she came out wearing chunky sunglasses — doctor’s orders as she recovers from a recent procedure — and the audience simply greeted it, with cheers, as a fashion statement.She played the opening with muscularity and precision, matched by the orchestra’s vigorous reading of the first movement’s theme. But later, in a nocturne-like solo, Wang exquisitely flipped the piece’s scale to that of an intimate recital. She made the concerto sound better than it actually is.In the spirit of Liszt, she returned with an encore of crowd-pleasing, breathless athleticism: the Toccatina from Kapustin’s Opus 40 Concert Etudes. But then she came back — still virtuosic, yet expressive and absolutely lovely — for Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” (Op. 67, No. 2). As she played, Hrusa listened from the conductor’s podium, his eyes closed and his head nodding in bliss, a stand-in for all of us there.New York PhilharmonicPerformed Friday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Carnegie Hall Reopens With a Blaze From Philadelphia

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      After a 572-day closure, the hall was lit by a vibrant concert from the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.After being closed for 572 days because of the pandemic, Carnegie Hall, the country’s pre-eminent concert space, opened its season on Wednesday. It took only a simple greeting from the stage — “welcome back,” spoken by Clive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director — for the audience to burst into sustained cheers.On paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s program — including favorites like Bernstein’s joyous overture to “Candide” and staples like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — seemed tilted toward an opening night’s traditional purpose as a crowd-pleasing fund-raising gala. Yet both the choice of works and the vibrant music-making went deeper into questions of classical music’s relevance and renewal than I had expected.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra’s music director, began by leading a performance of Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” a work that the Philadelphians premiered online in May. This five-minute score has become the orchestra’s unofficial anthem for this difficult period. Inspired by Boccaccio and the 7 p.m. cheers for frontline workers during the pandemic, the piece offers a hard-won vision of a more beautiful place.Nézet-Séguin, also the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, led vibrant, impetuous performances of works both classic and new.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesIt opens with cautious trumpet fanfares that activate tremulous strings. The music goes through passages of jittery riffs, burnished string chords, elegiac quietude and eruptive restlessness — complete with actual shouts and claps from the players. The piece at times has a Copland-esque glow, but Coleman adds tart harmonic tweaks and assertive syncopations that continually surprise.The brilliant pianist Yuja Wang was the soloist for Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a work from 1957 considered one of this composer’s lighter, wittier scores. But from the start, this performance — especially Wang’s commanding, colorful playing — seemed determined to look below the bustling surface for hints of the bitterly satirical Shostakovich.As the orchestra played the chortling opening theme, alive with woodwinds, Wang almost sneaked into the fray with a subtly lyrical rendering of the piano’s quizzical lines. Then, taking charge, she dispatched bursts of brittle chords, tossed off creepy-crawly runs and kept bringing out both the sweetly melodic and industriously steely elements of the three-movement work.Yuja Wang joined for a commanding, colorful performance of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThen Nézet-Séguin, who in his other role as music director of the Metropolitan Opera is currently leading performances of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” turned to the “Candide” overture — and may have tried too hard to tease out jagged edges and multilayered complexities in Bernstein’s sparkling, impish music.He then spoke to the audience about how the disruptions of the pandemic shook our collective sense of “where we are, where we are going,” and explained the pairing of the final two works on the program: Iman Habibi’s short “Jeder Baum spricht” (“Every Tree Speaks”) and Beethoven’s Fifth. The Habibi score, written in dialogue with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, was premiered in Philadelphia on March 12, 2020, to an empty hall, just after pandemic closures began.Habibi imagines how Beethoven, a nature lover, might respond to today’s climate crisis. On Wednesday, the compelling piece came across like a series of frustrated attempts at cohesion and peace, with fitful starts, hazy chords and driving yet irregular rhythmic figures. Finally, there is a sense, however uneasy, of affirmation and brassy richness.Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphians will play seven concerts in all at Carnegie this season, including a complete survey of Beethoven’s symphonies.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWithout a pause, Nézet-Séguin dove into the Beethoven. And if you think this classic work has to sound heroic and monumental, this performance was not for you. Here was an impetuous, in-the-moment account. Tempos shifted constantly. Some passages raced forward breathlessly, only to segue to episodes in which Nézet-Séguin drew out lyrical inner voices you seldom hear so prominently. It was exciting and unpredictable. Beethoven felt like he was responding to Habibi, as much as vice versa.The Philadelphians had planned to present a complete survey of the symphonies at Carnegie last season, as part of the celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th birthday. That cycle will now take place in five programs over the coming months, with most of these totemic works preceded by shorter new pieces. (Coming to Carnegie no fewer than seven times in all, the orchestra also plays more Coleman in February, alongside Barber and Florence Price, and Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” in April.)If the opening-night pairing and performances were indicative, this series will be a stimulating conversation between classical music’s storied past and the tumultuous present.Philadelphia OrchestraOther Beethoven symphony programs on Oct. 20, Nov. 9, Dec. 7 and Jan. 11 at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org. More