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Tag: Classical Music

  • Boston Pops’ Keith Lockhart Has the Ear of the Red Sox and Classical Fans


    But Lockhart remains a crucial, beloved figure for the Boston Symphony, most of whose players he conducts far more often than their music director. And he has the experience and skills of a proper musician: He led the Utah Symphony for 11 years and has been artistic director of the Brevard Music Center Summer Institute and Festival since 2007. “He comes in knowing what he’s going to do, and we just follow him,” said Suzanne Nelsen, a Pops bassoonist.

    His collaborators are similarly effusive. “Keith and the musicians, they know where the beat is,” said Branford Marsalis, the jazz saxophonist, “so it never feels like it falls into affectation or stereotype, which are the worst experiences ever.” Ben Folds, the singer-songwriter, applauded the Pops for keeping the dignified environment of a symphony orchestra intact. “When you’re playing with Keith,” he said, “he’s taking the inside of your music seriously.” Bernadette Peters, Broadway royalty, confided that on her phone, she keeps a secret recording of the Pops performing a lullaby she wrote about a dog. “He gets all these players to play as a whole, and make music with me,” she said of Lockhart. “It’s basically a miracle.”

    Lockhart is also one of the few conductors today who is deeply rooted in his community, so much so that even its baseball team speaks highly of him. Alex Cora, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, appeared at the Holiday Pops in 2018, and last year invited Lockhart to talk to his players at spring training.

    “It was good for our guys, especially seeing it from a different perspective,” Cora said. “Probably for them, it was like: ‘Oh, he’s a conductor, what is it, what’s the big thing? He’s just, you know, moving his hands and whatever.’ No, no, no, no, he’s doing a lot from that platform. It was good to have him around.”



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  • The Harp Needs More Modern Music. That’s Easier Said Than Done.

    The Harp Needs More Modern Music. That’s Easier Said Than Done.


    Figuring out “Anyway” required about seven weeks of intense studio time, spread over 18 months, along with months of practicing and fund-raising on my part. Such was the complexity of the work that a technician told me it posed one of the more intricate challenges that he had seen in his many years at IRCAM. For all its pyrotechnics, though, the work has arresting moments of stunning weightlessness as detuned strings at the top of the harp interact with overtones from lower metal strings to proffer slow undulations. The subtle accompanying electronics constitute a duet with the harp, playing with acoustics to make the room feel like it’s moving, even breathing, like a human lung.

    OF COURSE, all this takes a lot to put together: having conversations about fund-raising; missing friends’ weddings; lying when a caring partner asks, after a difficult performance, “Are you sure you’re not hurting yourself?”; being honest enough to admit that the loneliness of focusing singularly on promoting and supporting new works of art induces intense depressive episodes.

    Six days before the premiere of “Anyway,” I whacked my elbow against a wooden music stand hours before an evening-long dress rehearsal that had been years and tens of thousands of dollars in the making. I made it through that day and the concert, but I wondered whether I’d regain feeling in the ring finger and pinkie in my left hand. The next morning, it was no better, and a friend sternly looked at me over breakfast and told me firmly, but kindly, “It didn’t have to be this way.”

    I powered through the next few months, but on the night I was to perform another new work, the numbness in my left hand returned. Soon, I was back in Paris, where I met with an orthopedist who kept a life-size poster of Alain Delon on the wall. I was told I had a pinched ulnar nerve, which would require a two-month break from the harp.

    Although I recovered, it took a while for me to learn the lesson that while I can challenge the limitations surrounding the harp, I can only push so hard. And some things are beyond my control. I was planning to bring “Anyway” to my 92NY recital for its New York premiere, but the colleague from IRCAM who coded the electronics was not able to obtain a visa to travel to the United States. There was no other choice but to program something else.

    In instances like that, it can be difficult to maintain energy or garner excitement when so much can potentially go wrong. Fortunately, composers are as much of a lifeline as my family, and have helped me learn to ride the waves. After an idealistic stretch in Paris, they helped me get back to New York, somewhat with my tail between my legs. Now, I’m taking a bit of space, and starting a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, before the next round of commissions in 2026. There may be some new constraints on time, but if there’s anything a decade of working with composers has taught me, it’s that boundaries are what force us to be creative.



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  • Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Alisa Weilerstein Make Sparks Fly at N.Y. Phil

    Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Alisa Weilerstein Make Sparks Fly at N.Y. Phil


    To judge by its marketing materials, the New York Philharmonic is uncomfortable with its leaderless state, created by the gap between the departure last summer of the music director Jaap van Zweden and the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel, who takes over in 2026. Dudamel’s likeness is already splashed all over Lincoln Center, as if the mere promise of him were the orchestra’s best hope for selling tickets. But the parade of visiting conductors passing through Geffen Hall has had its own rewards, shaking the ensemble from its routine and injecting a vital note of unpredictability. Week by week, the orchestra sounds different. The energy in the hall fluctuates. And when a firebrand soloist joins a smoldering conductor, sparks fly.

    This was the case on Wednesday in an electrifying concert that drew tumultuous ovations. The Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa teamed up with the flamboyant violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who shredded the Stravinsky Violin Concerto — and more than a few bow hairs — on a program that opened with the world premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s sumptuous “Chemiluminescence” and ended with a glowing reading of the Symphony No. 1 by Brahms.

    The previous week had featured another ferociously expressive soloist in another world premiere when the cellist Alisa Weilerstein performed a Thomas Larcher concerto, “Returning Into Darkness,” on a program bookended by Mendelssohn and Schumann. There, it was Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider who conducted, drawing chiseled playing from the orchestra that brought out the wit in selections from Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the intricate flow of Schumann’s Second Symphony. Under Hrusa, the collective sound seethed and simmered.

    Larcher’s one-movement concerto grows out of a single gesture, a swooping glissando across multiple octaves on the solo cello. On a string instrument, glissando results from the player’s finger sliding up or down the fingerboard, drawing an elastic line through all available pitches. Because it blurs the distinction between individual notes, it evokes extra-musical sounds: sirens, moans, the lowing of a wounded animal.

    In “Returning Into Darkness,” the swooping lines that recur in the solo cello part, interspersed with bouts of frenetic activity, convey a state of emotional emergency and a certain neurotic rootlessness, unmoored but also unwilling to commit. A similar fluidity governs the ensemble sound, which swells and tapers like a swarm of insects that can build to menacing proportions. Moment by moment, Larcher’s command of color and Weilerstein’s forceful performance were compelling, though over the course of 25 minutes, the constant slaloms induced little more than emotional whiplash.

    High glissandos also made an appearance in Montgomery’s “Chemiluminescence” for string orchestra, where they function like sonic will-o’-the-wisps glinting through the oceanic churn. This nine-minute piece wears its neo-Romantic heart on its sleeve from the first strains, reminiscent of Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” that proceed in tender, halting motion. Ardent melodies in the violas, then cellos, are nearly submerged in the luscious ensemble. A choppy section whips up rhythmic excitement before leading into an ambiguous ending with gleaming violins undercut by a restive repeated figure in the lower strings.

    From Kopatchinskaja’s first double-stopped notes on Wednesday, it was clear that glossy tone and full-bodied violin-ness would be a low priority in her reading of Stravinsky’s neo-Classical Violin Concerto. And a good thing, too: The rough, scratchy sounds she drew from her instrument with punishing bow strokes suited the abrasive brilliance of the first movement, in which Stravinsky sets the soloist and individual wind players in gleeful competition against one another. In the inner two movements, Kopatchinskaja allowed brief glimpses of a more songful side, including a memorably tender duet with a solo bassoon.

    But her approach to the score is that of a character actor unconcerned with favorable optics. When the drama demands it, Kopatchinskaja is more than happy to dig for ugly sounds including squeals, rattles and the kind of fuzzy whistles called wolf tones that can result from competing sound oscillations inside a string instrument and which players usually work hard to avoid. The entire last movement, played with toneless fury at dizzying speed, might have been called “Dances With Wolves.”

    Dressed in a gown that paid homage to the folklore-inspired costumes worn in Ballets Russes’ “The Rite of Spring,” Kopatchinskaja crouched, bobbed and weaved in what sometimes looked like a sacrificial dance of her own. At the final, explosive note the audience sprang to its feet.

    Kopatchinskaja’s first encore lasted all of 90 seconds: a Dadaistic miniature, “Crin” by Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, in which she vocalized a virtuosic stream of nonsense while performing acrobatics up and down the fingerboard. She followed it with a cadenza that she wrote, distilling themes from Stravinsky’s concerto along with ghostly echoes of Bach; it ended in a vertiginous pas de deux with the orchestra’s concertmaster, Frank Huang. In duet, their wildly different sounds — his impeccably polished, hers raspy and urgent — came together in an unexpectedly moving demonstration of how much diversity can fit into classical music and how much of it seems to be thriving at this institution, even, and perhaps especially, in this season’s no-man’s-land between leaders.



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  • Singer Sues Met Opera Over Firing for Post-Pregnancy Vocal Problems

    Singer Sues Met Opera Over Firing for Post-Pregnancy Vocal Problems


    The Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili was once one of opera’s most sought-after stars, renowned for stirring, powerful performances in works like Bizet’s “Carmen” and Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.”

    But after she began experiencing vocal problems during pregnancy in 2021, her career suffered. When she returned to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, company officials later said, she did not sing up to her standard. The Met canceled her upcoming engagements, and she lost work at other opera companies.

    Now Rachvelishvili, 40, is suing both the Met and the union representing her, seeking more than $400,000 in compensation for lost work. In a complaint filed in late March, she accused the Met of breaching its contracts with her, and she said that her union, the American Guild of Musical Artists, had failed to properly represent her.

    Rachvelishvili’s lawsuit claimed that the Met had been aware that she had “suffered complications from her pregnancy and birth affecting her voice and vocal range.” The suit described her as being “disabled due to her pregnancy” and accused the opera company of discriminating against her.

    “I was shocked that I was not given a chance to recover and all of my contracts for the next two years were immediately canceled without pay,” she said in a statement.

    The Met said it could not comment on pending litigation.

    Her complaint argues that the Met should compensate her because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay contracted performers even if they later decide not to engage them.

    But under the collective bargaining agreement, the Met retains some ability to avoid paying singers who do not meet its artistic standards. According to the agreement, the Met does not have to compensate singers it deems are “vocally or physically unfit for performance.”

    Her lawsuit accuses her union, the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents opera singers, of failing “to file a grievance and proceed to arbitration relating to discrimination based upon plaintiff’s pregnancy or other applicable law.”

    The union declined to comment.

    The case is notable in part because Rachvelishvili’s lawyer, Leonard D. Egert, used to lead the union she is suing. Egert served as national executive director of the guild from 2016 to 2022. (More recently, he had served as general counsel and general manager of San Francisco Ballet and as a consultant to the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale in San Francisco, whose singers last year voted to unionize.)

    Egert said in an interview that his former union should have done more to push the Met to compensate Rachvelishvili for the canceled engagements.

    “It would be logical for them to do so,” he said in an interview. “But they did not.”

    Rachvelishvili, who made her debut at the Met in 2011, was renowned for the power of her voice. The Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, once hailed her as the “greatest dramatic mezzo-soprano singing,” and Riccardo Muti, the eminent conductor, had called her “without doubt the best Verdi mezzo-soprano today on the planet.”

    But her voice began to suffer during her pregnancy in 2021, becoming “scratchy and strange,” as she recalled in a 2023 interview with The New York Times in which she spoke frankly about her vocal troubles and her efforts to overcome them. She canceled a run of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Met in fall 2022, but arrived there to sing the part of Amneris in “Aida” that December.

    After the first performance, Gelb removed her from the production. (“It was obvious that she was not the same singer — at least temporarily not the same singer — who had conquered our stage so brilliantly up to that point,” he said later.) Gelb also canceled a solo recital by Rachvelishvili and her participation in a splashy new production of “Carmen” at the Met that would ring in 2024.

    Rachvelishvili’s complaint acknowledges that she was “temporarily limited in her very highest vocal range as a result of giving birth.” But it says that she was “at all times ready, willing and able to perform the roles for which she was contracted,” and that she has since made a full recovery.

    Her suit said that her union representatives met the representatives of the Met in February 2023 and that the union initially took the position that the Met was in violation of the “pay or play” provision of the contract. It said that the Met initially indicated that it would offer to “buy out” her contracts. But it said that the Met then withdrew the offer.

    The suit said that last year, the union informed Rachvelishvili’s representatives that it would “decline to grieve the contractual violations, file for arbitration or otherwise seek a settlement” with the Met.

    The union has not explained its decision.

    Rachvelishvili has continued to perform, though not as much as before. In November, she starred in a production of Dvorak’s “Rusalka” that opened the season at Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Italy.



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  • Patricia Kopatchinskaja Knocks the Cobwebs Off the Violin Repertory

    Patricia Kopatchinskaja Knocks the Cobwebs Off the Violin Repertory


    In classical music, we think we know how the great pieces go. We hear these standards so often — they have formed our ears so thoroughly — that it can be hard to imagine why some of them were resisted when they were new. Take Tchaikovsky’s beloved Violin Concerto, which endears us with its graceful lyricism and good spirits.

    Not when Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays it.

    Kopatchinskaja, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut on Wednesday, released a recording of the Tchaikovsky in 2016. The performance is bracing and even manic, pressing toward extremes of loud and soft, fast and slow. Kopatchinskaja’s violin often sounds raw and wiry; she plays as if she’s improvising on a fiddle at a sweaty barn dance.

    For once, you understand what the 19th-century critic Eduard Hanslick was talking about when he panned the piece as “stink one can hear.” “The violin is no longer played,” he wrote. “It is pulled about, torn, beaten black and blue.”

    Kopatchinskaja doesn’t always beat music black and blue. She can reduce her sound to a fragile whisper, or honey her tone into sweetness:

    But she always strips away the fat, giving canonical works a breathing — indeed, panting — vitality. She grounds decorous masterpieces in the earthiness of Central European folk traditions.

    She doesn’t do plush or placid. Pretty? Kopatchinskaja gives you biting wildness.

    Born in Moldova in 1977, she moved with her family to Vienna after the fall of the Soviet Union and developed into one of music’s quirkiest stars — and not just because she made a habit of performing barefoot. She has avoided the usual endless tours of Beethoven and Brahms. Instead, with similarly open-minded colleagues, she’s organized a slew of idiosyncratic, time-spanning, sometimes staged thematic programs.

    Their mood is often dark. “Dies Irae” evokes war and other catastrophes with works from Gregorian chant to George Crumb. Anchored by Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, “Les Adieux” is a funeral for a warming planet. Religiously infused solemnity emanates from her 2023 album “Maria Mater Meretrix,” a mesmerizing exploration of the figure of Mary in music through the ages.

    Kopatchinskaja favors small, agile ensembles like the Camerata Bern of Switzerland, her partner on “Maria Mater Meretrix” and other recent albums. When she works with major orchestras, she tends to play contemporary music or the more modern side of the standard repertory, like Stravinsky’s concerto, which she will perform with the Philharmonic this weekend; its elegant angularity is a perfect fit for her lean sound.

    Her appearance in New York should be treasured since she doesn’t play often in the United States. (Her stint as an artistic partner of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota ended in 2018.) But even if you can’t go see her, her recordings convey much of the intense commitment of her live performances.

    “Rapsodia” (2010) brought her together with her parents, who played in Moldova’s state folk ensemble: her mother as a violinist and violist and her father on the cimbalom, the twangy Hungarian hammered dulcimer. On the recording, wild folk tunes — almost bluegrassy — are juxtaposed with art music by Enescu and Kurtag and Ravel’s “Tzigane,” with the piano part transcribed for cimbalom.

    Personal, adventurous, surprising, charming, throaty, a raucous party that’s somehow rigorous and informal at once: The album is classic Kopatchinskaja.

    So is the Tchaikovsky concerto, which she recorded with the equally provocative conductor Teodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna. That take, for all its daring, is more persuasive than some of her early recordings of standards, like a Beethoven “Kreutzer” Sonata so harsh it can make you wince.

    The first movement of that “Kreutzer” feels more intent on puncturing listeners’ expectations of the core Classical-Romantic repertory than on offering a better alternative. Music that dances, though, finds Kopatchinskaja at her most irresistible, and she blazes through the sonata’s tarantella finale with rhythmic spiciness and snap.

    Her chronology-hopping programs with staged elements, while ambitious by the standards of classical music, can come off a little scrappy and sophomoric in person. When recorded, though, these combinations of old and new, well known and unusual, are far more successful.

    “Death and the Maiden” (2016), with the St. Paul orchestra, ingeniously threads Renaissance melodies and some morose Kurtag through a heated ensemble arrangement of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. By alternating Vivaldi concertos with contemporary Italian pieces, “What’s Next Vivaldi?” (2020), with the conductor Giovanni Antonini and his Il Giardino Armonico, offers a new context for Baroque virtuosity.

    Kopatchinskaja’s latest collaboration with the Camerata Bern, “Exile,” released in January, has a subtle political charge, featuring works by composers who were — like her — uprooted from their homelands.

    The album begins with a scraping scrawl, the start of an arrangement of a folk song originally written for a Ukrainian-Russian variant of pan pipes. It’s not the kind of sound that typically opens a classical music album, and it’s emblematic of why Kopatchinskaja is not to all tastes. Someone in the field once asked me why The New York Times gave so much coverage to a violinist whose playing was so ugly.

    But I don’t think it’s ugly. It’s unforgettable.



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  • Martha Argerich, the Elusive, Enigmatic ‘Goddess’ of the Piano

    Martha Argerich, the Elusive, Enigmatic ‘Goddess’ of the Piano


    “I have already told you everything,” she said. “I should have the freedom to do what I would like.”

    But she did not object when I accompanied her back to her hotel. She stayed up for hours in the lobby chatting with friends about Jungian astrology, the controversy at the 1980 Chopin competition and a suitor who once told her that she had so many personalities, she could date several people at once. She grew obsessed at one point with proving that a waxy-looking plant in the lobby was real, burying her nose in its branches and digging into the soil.

    “Look at this,” she said to her friends. “You see? Every leaf is different. It’s alive.”

    As we parted around 4 a.m., I asked Argerich one more question. I noticed that evening that she had lingered outside the concert hall, looking at the stars. I wondered if she ever pondered her place in the universe.

    Argerich said she sometimes reflected on the absurdity of a life spent hunched over black and white keys. “What are we pianists?” she said. “Nothing. We think it is so extraordinary. But it is not.”

    As a storm blew in, filling the streets with rain, Argerich said she had made peace with her life.

    “I don’t ask anymore,” she said. “I just play.”

    Audio excerpts, all with Martha Argerich: Schumann, Piano Concerto in A Minor, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, conductor; Schumann, Piano Concerto in A Minor, Orquesta Sinfónica de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Washington Castro, conductor; Bach, Partita No. 2 in C Minor; Ravel, “Gaspard de la Nuit”; Schumann, “Kinderszenen”; Beethoven, Violin Sonata No. 8 in G Major, Renaud Capuçon, violin; Chopin, Polonaise in A-flat Major; Chopin, Scherzo in C-Sharp Minor; Chopin, Mazurka in A Minor; Chopin, Nocturne in F Major; Chopin, Cello Sonata in G Minor, Mischa Maisky, cello; Rachmaninoff, Suite for Two Pianos No. 2 in C Major, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, piano. Credit: Warner Classics (“Martha Argerich: The Warner Classics Edition“); Teatro Colón; Deutsche Grammophon (“Maisky-Argerich, Live in Japan”).



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  • Review: A Kronos Quartet Glow Up: New Players, Newly Lustrous Sound

    Review: A Kronos Quartet Glow Up: New Players, Newly Lustrous Sound


    The Kronos Quartet was at Zankel Hall on Friday with a typically eclectic program that included new works drawing on jazz, psychedelic rock and Nordic folk music. The vibrant performance was not only the ensemble’s return to a space it reliably fills with devoted fans; with the quartet’s ranks refreshed by three brilliant new players, it also felt like a comeback.

    In recent years, the aging ensemble — founded in 1973 by David Harrington, who continues to lead it as first violin — sometimes seemed to have had slid into an identity crisis. The Kronos brand was still strong: Ambitious commissions kept pushing the boundaries of quartet music, resulting in more than 1,000 new works and arrangements drawing on every imaginable style. In the run-up to its golden jubilee, the ensemble initiated a commissioning project, 50 for the Future, and made the sheet music to all 50 pieces available free online.

    But the quality of the playing had become inconsistent. And the spoken introductions the players offered at concerts felt perfunctory and tired. When the violinist John Sherba and the violist Hank Dutt, who had been in the lineup since 1978, retired last year, the quartet might have disbanded. Instead, Harrington brought in fresh talent and — judging by the music-making on Friday — strong personalities. The quartet’s middle voices now belong to the violinist Gabriela Díaz and the violist Ayane Kozasa, who join the composer and cellist Paul Wiancko, who came onboard in 2022.

    During the kaleidoscopic first half of the concert the two women asserted themselves as the quartet’s engines of emotional intensity and a newly lustrous, rich sound. This came through most powerfully in Aleksandra Vrebalov’s incantatory “Gold Came From Space,” which gradually grows in sonic density and expressive intent from tremulous whispers. Time and again, Kozasa’s viola stole the spotlight with its absorbing mixture of lyricism and throaty candor. She channeled Nina Simone’s tough-nosed tenderness in Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of “For All We Know” (composed by J. Fred Coots) and set the tone for Wiancko’s arrangement of Neil Young’s protest song “Ohio.”

    Two songs by Sun Ra, “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” (wittily arranged by Garchik) and “Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye,” in a psychedelic arrangement by Terry Riley and Sara Miyamoto, sparkled with experimental glee. That exploratory zest had always been a hallmark of Kronos. But the heart-on-sleeve directness the group brought to Viet Cuong’s stirring “Next Week’s Trees,” in which the quartet sometimes sounds like a giant harp, felt new.

    The second half was taken up by a single work, “Elja,” by Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjogersen. Maurseth, who joined the Kronos players for the performance, is a master on the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, a violin-like instrument with four extra resonating strings and a curved neck and carved scroll that evokes the bow of an ancient ship. For the 45-minute piece, which also featured recorded nature sounds, the Kronos players switched to hardanger versions of their own instruments. (The viola and cello fiddles were specially built for Kronos by the Norwegian luthier Ottar Kasa.)

    Forty-five minutes felt too long for this extended study in stillness with breathy harmonics animated by rippling arpeggios evoking a wind harp set up in a desolate landscape. But the collective sound the Kronos produced, even with these unfamiliar instruments, was cogent and unified.

    For a half century, Kronos has shaken up expectations. With the current lineup, it has the potential to go in new directions, including — perhaps surprising in a group that long cultivated a certain brand of cool — the ability to dig for a deeper emotional connection to sound.

    Kronos Quartet

    Performed Friday at Zankel Hall



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  • The Conductor Joana Mallwitz Mixes Intensity With Approachability

    The Conductor Joana Mallwitz Mixes Intensity With Approachability


    The conductor Joana Mallwitz apologized for arriving late for her interview at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, but she had needed to catch her breath after rehearsal. “Conducting is sweaty business,” she said, as she settled into a straight-backed posture on a sofa in the press lounge, her striking hands with long fingers elegantly crossed at the wrists.

    On Monday, Mallwitz, 39 — the music director of the Konzerthaus Berlin and one of the fastest rising classical stars in her native Germany — makes her Met debut with Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” She has been in close relationship with that opera since her first job, at 19, at Theater Heidelberg, a small house where her duties included “everything that one does as Kapellmeister,” she said: rehearsing singers, playing the continuo part on the harpsichord and, when needed, jumping in at short notice to conduct a performance.

    “You develop a relationship with such a work,” she said of “Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”

    At the end of that afternoon’s rehearsal she had worked with the orchestra on minute details in the overture, finessing dynamic contrasts and highlighting the shock value — “like rock music,” she told the musicians — of the loud outbursts that interrupt the garrulous bubbling fast notes. The key, she said afterward, was to “bring a certain energy into the sound that doesn’t become hard when the playing gets louder.”

    Working with the Met musicians, she said, was a joy because after fine-tuning a small section, “they are able to feel what my style is and transfer it” to the rest of the piece. “They’re able to pick it up because mentally, too, they are virtuosos,” she said. “It’s incredible what this orchestra is able to deliver in terms of tempo and transparency and diversity of effects. You want to draw on all of that but also achieve a combination of lightness and drama.”

    Lightness and drama, approachability and uncompromising seriousness in her approach to a score — these are at the heart of Mallwitz’s striking rise to prominence in a profession long dominated by men. In 2014, at 28 she became the music director of Theater Erfurt, the youngest conductor to hold such a position in Europe. In 2018, she took over the leadership of the Nuremberg State Theater, an institution that had also served as a springboard for the conductor Christian Thielemann when he was 23. In her second season there she was voted best conductor of the year by a jury of German critics. A celebrated run of Mozart’s “Cosí Fan Tutte” at Salzburg in 2020 catapulted her to international attention.

    With the Konzerthaus orchestra, she produced a stormy recording last season of rarely heard early works by Kurt Weill for Deutsche Grammophon. Her Met debut follows by just weeks her debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she paired works by Tchaikovsky and Schubert with a techno-inspired piece by the Serbian composer Marko Nikodijevic.

    Mallwitz’s precocity is all the more notable since she did not come from a musical family. Her talent on the piano at home in Hildesheim was quickly apparent, but for three hours each afternoon she was banned from touching it and sent to play in the garden instead. Still, she rose quickly through the national network of youth music competitions on both piano and violin and entered the Hanover conservatory at 13, in the newly minted Institute for the Early Advancement of the Musically Highly Gifted. Her cohort of four included the pianist Igor Levit.

    “Until then, I had practically lived behind the moon,” she said. She knew the chamber pieces she had studied but she had hardly ever attended concerts. At the institute, she recalled, “they just placed the scores in front of us by Schubert, Schumann, Stravinsky, Wagner’s ‘Tristan,’ saying, ‘what do you hear in your head when you read these notes.’ I thought, ‘How is it that I didn’t know there was such fabulous music?’”

    She was seized by the desire to dedicate her life to this music, and since the works that so overwhelmed her were largely orchestral, that meant becoming a conductor.

    The conductor Martin Brauss, who directs the institute in Hanover, remembers witnessing these epiphanies in the classroom. “When you deal with talent as a professional it is sometimes almost frightening to see what nature can produce,” he said in a phone interview. “Joana was one of these cases. She peers into the notes and, purely through vision, an inner hearing unfolds.”

    Because she was hired so young by her first theater in Heidelberg, Mallwitz mostly developed her conducting technique, which combines graceful precision with sweeping gestures that convey gusts of excitement, on the job. “She looks at what the music does to her and sets it in motion,” Brauss said. “She literally embodies it.”

    Jens-Daniel Herzog, the intendant of the Nuremberg State Theater, said that audiences responded both to the intensity of her conducting and the easygoing rapport she has built up in her public-facing work. “She has a way of infecting people with her enthusiasm that is completely un-schoolmasterly,” he said. “She took everyone by storm. It was breathtaking.”

    In Berlin, Mallwitz was almost immediately forced to add political advocacy to her many roles. Dramatic and sudden cuts in the city’s culture budget announced last year caused painful cancellations. “Sometimes it tears you apart,” she said of the lobbying work she has had to juggle with her conducting and administrative duties. Raising a young child with her husband, the tenor Simon Bode, she often sits up at night studying her scores.

    But she said fighting for public arts funding was essential, not to prop up an elitist tradition, but to keep ticket prices at a level at which almost everyone can afford them. “The word ‘subsidies’ is completely misplaced in this context,” she said. “We are not some mismanaged corporation in crisis. If Germany is going to take pride in its culture, keeping concerts affordable should be a basic civic right.”

    Budget cuts threaten the outreach programs that are so important to her and that have been such an integral part of her success. In Berlin, her preconcert lectures now routinely draw over 1,000 listeners. To win over new kinds of audiences she offers novel formats such as the Night Sessions, which bring in celebrities from other art forms and explore subjects like rhythm in conversation with a techno artist or timing with a stage actor. “At these sessions I want to learn something,” she said. “I am curious myself.”

    After the Night Session devoted to rhythm, she said, “The best thing was finding out afterward that a group of youngsters who were relentlessly Googling something on their phones had been looking up works by Steve Reich because they now wanted to hear more. That’s when I told myself: ‘See? Brilliant. That’s exactly what I was after.’”



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  • Under Trump, Kennedy Center’s Classical Offerings Will (Mostly) Go On

    Under Trump, Kennedy Center’s Classical Offerings Will (Mostly) Go On


    The Kennedy Center’s flagship opera company and symphony orchestra announced Thursday that they plan to present robust and fairly typical programs next season, the first full season since President Trump took over the institution.

    But one prominent work was missing from the lineup: Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce’s “Fellow Travelers,” an opera set in the 1950s about two men working for the government who become lovers. The work was withdrawn by its creators because of concerns about Mr. Trump’s takeover, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times.

    Washington National Opera said the 2025-26 season would include classics like Verdi’s “Aida” and less commonly heard works like “Treemonisha,” an opera by the ragtime composer Scott Joplin. The National Symphony Orchestra is planning warhorses by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich and world premieres by Carlos Simon, the Kennedy Center’s composer in residence; Valerie Coleman; and others.

    In a sign of the political sensitives at the Kennedy Center, the leaders of the opera and the symphony declined to be interviewed about the new season.

    The center has been in flux since Mr. Trump purged its previously bipartisan board of Biden appointees and had himself elected chairman. The president’s actions have prompted an outcry, leading some artists to cancel engagements there in protest. The musical “Hamilton” scrapped a planned tour there next year.

    The classical field, in which seasons are planned years in advance, has largely been unaffected. But the creators of “Fellow Travelers,” an opera based on the 2007 novel by Thomas Mallon, confirmed this week that they were pulling the work, which was supposed to have its Washington premiere next year.

    The creators said in a recent letter to Washington National Opera that Mr. Trump’s takeover ran counter to the values of “freedom and liberty for all people” that are highlighted in the opera. “We have made the impossibly difficult decision that the Kennedy Center is not a place the team feels comfortable having the work presented,” said the letter.

    In a statement, the leaders of Washington National Opera, Tim O’Leary and Francesca Zambello, said they were disappointed by the decision to withdraw “Fellow Travelers.”

    “We deeply regret that the creative team of ‘Fellow Travelers’ has decided to deprive W.N.O. audiences of the chance to experience this opera,” Mr. O’Leary and Ms. Zambello said. “Art and music have the power to rise above division and bring people together to find common ground. The W.N.O. has long been a place for everyone to enjoy the power of the opera and it will remain a place for patrons of all backgrounds and beliefs.”

    “Fellow Travelers,” which is set in Washington and premiered at Cincinnati Opera in 2016, will be replaced by a new production of Robert Ward’s “The Crucible.” It will be conducted by Robert Spano as part of his inaugural season as the opera company’s music director.

    The season announcement came as the Kennedy Center undergoes significant change under Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, whom Mr. Trump appointed as the Kennedy Center’s new president.

    This week, the center gutted a community outreach program known as Social Impact, firing several employees and deleting some references to the program on its website. The program had worked to expand the audience for opera and symphony performances; to commission works by underrepresented voices; and to “advance justice and equity.” (The Trump administration has shuttered many diversity-themed efforts across the federal government.)

    Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who was dismissed as a vice president at the center who oversaw Social Impact, lamented the end of the programs. “They were wildly successful, they were growing, there was a positive trajectory,” he said in an interview. “There was no evidence at all that the programs were a detriment to the institution.”

    The Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment about the cuts. But Donna Arduin, the center’s new chief financial officer, wrote in a letter to staff on Wednesday that the center was facing serious fiscal challenges.

    “The road out of this economic environment will not be easy and the shift will be felt across the center,” she wrote.

    Mr. Grenell, in a social media post on Wednesday, said the center would begin by “cutting executive pay and downsizing the staff where possible.”

    Despite the upheaval, many artists and employees have chosen to stay on. The conductor Gianandrea Noseda recently renewed his contract as music director of the National Symphony through at least 2031.

    And Mr. Simon, the center’s composer in residence, said in an interview that he would maintain his affiliation, saying he felt his music could “reflect what’s happening in the world — unapologetically.” Mr. Simon, who will premiere a double concerto for violin and cello next season with the National Symphony, said he felt he had creative freedom at the center.

    “Now is not the time to pull back,” he said. “Now is the time for artists to create.”



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  • Dismayed by Trump, the Star Pianist András Schiff Boycotts the U.S.

    Dismayed by Trump, the Star Pianist András Schiff Boycotts the U.S.


    András Schiff, an eminent concert pianist who has boycotted strongman rule in Russia and his native Hungary, said on Wednesday that he would no longer perform in the United States because of concerns about President Trump’s “unbelievable bullying” on the world stage.

    Mr. Schiff, 71, a towering figure in classical music, said he was alarmed by Mr. Trump’s admonishments of Ukraine; his expansionist threats about Canada, Greenland and Gaza; and his support for far-right politicians in Germany. Mr. Schiff, who was born to a Jewish family in Budapest that witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust, said that Mr. Trump’s calls for mass deportation reminded him painfully of efforts to expel Jews during World War II.

    “He has brought an ugliness into this world which hadn’t been there,” Mr. Schiff said in a telephone interview this week from Hong Kong, where he is performing. “I just find it impossible to go along with what is happening.”

    So Mr. Schiff decided to stop performing in the United States. He said that he was canceling appearances next spring with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a recital tour this fall with a stop at Carnegie Hall.

    Mr. Schiff, revered for his interpretations of the music of Bach and Mozart, is the latest artist to boycott the United States because of Mr. Trump. Last month the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff announced he would no longer perform in the country, citing Mr. Trump’s embrace of Russia, among other concerns.

    The small but growing cultural boycott is a jarring reversal. In the past, it was American performers who often canceled engagements overseas to protest war, autocracy and injustice. Now the United States is seen by some as a pariah.

    The White House has appeared unconcerned by boycotts by foreign artists, saying Mr. Trump’s priority is the United States.

    Stephen Duncombe, a professor of media and culture at New York University, said it was not surprising that performers were shunning the United States because, he said, it is “lurching away from democracy.” He noted that these artists follow a long tradition. Pablo Picasso, for example, refused to have his “Guernica” displayed in Spain until it embraced democratic rule.

    Mr. Schiff has been an outspoken critic of right-wing movements in Europe. He has denounced the erosion of democracy in his native Hungary under the far-right populist leader Viktor Orban, a Trump ally. (Mr. Schiff said he could not believe that Mr. Trump had expressed admiration for Mr. Orban: “Viktor Orban is the last person I would think of as a role model,” he said.)

    Mr. Schiff has not returned to Hungary since 2010. He told the BBC in 2013 that he faced threats that his hands would be cut off if he returned.

    In the early 2000s, Mr. Schiff, who lived for years in Austria, spoke out forcefully against anti-immigrant and antisemitic rhetoric embraced by some conservative politicians there. And after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Mr. Schiff refused to play in the country, joining many Western artists in a cultural embargo.

    Mr. Schiff is considered one of the greatest pianists in the world, and has made a number of classic recordings. He holds German and British citizenship, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014. He has been a fixture in the United States since the late 1970s and built a devoted following. He said that he had long cherished the United States as a “beacon of freedom and liberty and democracy.”

    It was not just Mr. Trump’s rise that had disturbed Mr. Schiff in recent years: He was also alarmed by some actions taken by the far left in the United States, including efforts to limit speech at universities.

    Mr. Schiff said that he waited a few weeks to see how Mr. Trump’s second term unfolded before making a decision about his commitments in the United States.

    Mr. Schiff said he agreed that the war in Ukraine should be brought to an end, but that he was taken back by the president’s “methods and manners,” which he called “truly unacceptable.” He was particularly disturbed, he said, by Mr. Trump’s attacks on President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during an explosive meeting in the Oval Office in February.

    Equally distressing, Mr. Schiff said, were Mr. Trump’s immigration policies.

    “When I hear this word deportation, it rings a bell — it rings a terrible bell,” he said. “My family, my Jewish family, was deported — some to Auschwitz, and some to other concentration camps.”

    Ultimately, Mr. Schiff said, he could no longer appear in a country whose politics he so viscerally disagreed with. “The general election shows that a substantial part of people support these viewpoints and actions,” he said.

    Mr. Schiff said that he did not expect his boycott would have much of an impact, but that it was important to speak up.

    “Maybe it’s a drop in the ocean; I’m not expecting many musicians to follow,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s for my own conscience. In history, one has to react or not to react.”



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