Latest news with #SymphonyinThreeMovements
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Dr. Gustavo Dudamel leads the New York Philharmonic, with L.A. style
New York — After triumphantly bringing the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Coachella, Gustavo Dudamel is taking his biggest bite so far out of the Big Apple. He is in town for a three-week New York Philharmonic residency. He has devised two ambitious programs to close the orchestra's season in David Geffen Hall and will then be the big attraction for thousands of New York picnickers at free New York Philharmonic parks concerts throughout the boroughs. In the meantime, Dr. Dudamel picked up an honorary doctorate Saturday from the Juilliard School. A welcome mat doesn't get more welcoming than that for a conductor, and this is someone who has yet no official title with the orchestra. The three main 'People of the New York Philharmonic' featured on the orchestra's website are pianist Yuja Wang (artist in residence), Matías Tarnopolsky (newly appointed president and chief executive) and Alec Baldwin (radio series host). In September, Dudamel becomes music and artistic director designate. A year later, having completed 17 seasons as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he takes charge of the country's oldest and most celebrated orchestra. But who's counting days, months or years? From the moment Dudamel walked on stage at Geffen Hall to begin the dress rehearsal of his first concert of the series last week, there could be no question that it's his show. The orchestra has become fully Dudamel-branded, his image plastered everywhere you look. The talk of the town is that a music-director-designate-to-be has already transformed one of the world's great orchestras, which is said to be playing at a new level and with a new sound. New Yorkers still take pride in not being easily hoodwinked. The press glorifies Dudamel as the next Leonard Bernstein one minute and looks for flaws anywhere it can find them the next. But there is something in the air that even an outsider could feel at the rehearsal, which was open to donors and press interlopers. Dudamel simply seemed, without ostensibly trying, to belong. He knew exactly what to do and how to do it. When he asked the players for something, an orchestra famed for being difficult responded instantly. But Dudamel was doubtlessly trying to belong. The program, composed of nothing he has performed elsewhere, was meant to be a tribute to the New York Philharmonic. He began by pairing the first work the 183-year-old orchestra had ever commissioned with a premiere of a startling new commission. After intermission, he introduced the largest and most robust of the recent symphonies by the city's best-known composer, a veritable icon — Philip Glass — to an orchestra that had done its best to ignore for half a century. With orchestra and audience in his hands, Dudamel had yet another triumph. The New York Times called this program a love letter to New York. If so, the love letter had a postmark from L.A. Stravinsky composed his Symphony in Three Movements, written during and reflecting World War II, while he lived in West Hollywood. Like Schoenberg before him, the Russian émigré composer tried but failed to get a lucrative contract scoring a Hollywood film. Instead, Stravinsky reused bits he had meant for the 1943 epic 'The Song of Bernadette' in his war symphony. The newly commissioned work that followed was Kate Soper's 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,' a sensationally witty and profound monodrama about the meaning of music for amplified soprano and large orchestra. Soper herself was the talented soloist, as she had been a few weeks earlier when she appeared at the L.A. Phil's Green Umbrella concert in a far riskier early work, 'Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say.' A favorite of operatic progressives, Soper has had three operas staged by Long Beach Opera, including the premiere of her astonishingly fanciful 'Romance of the Rose,' perhaps the most original American opera of the decade. When it came to breaking the New York Philharmonic's Glass ceiling, Dudamel brought an L.A. Phil hammer. The first concert work by Glass that the New York Philharmonic ever performed was Concerto for Two Pianos in 2017, conducted by Dudamel's predecessor, Jaap van Zweden. It was Dudamel, however, who had given the premiere of the concerto and the L.A. Phil that commissioned it. Dudamel's performance of Symphony No. 11 thus became the first New York Philharmonic attempt at a Glass symphony. (He's written 15, and the L.A. Phil commissioned the 12th.) The 11th has everything audiences and orchestra players are said to dread. It is long (40 minutes), orchestrally big-boned in the manner of Bruckner and echt-Glass in its repetitions and romantic effusions. But in an act of remarkable conductorial persuasion, Dudamel emphasized Glass' talent for orchestral go-with-the-flow magnificence to blow the audience away. The crowd stood en mass and cheered the frail 88-year-old composer seated on the first tier. For all that, the performances were nonetheless on the stiff side, the famously virtuosic orchestra effortfully coming to terms with the unfamiliar. But the needle has moved. What felt unfamiliar was a general feeling of acceptance in Geffen Hall. The audience-friendly renovation during the pandemic helps with a powerful acoustic that encourages openness. This is no longer the uptight atmosphere where John Adams was angrily booed and where people noisily walked out as Zubin Mehta premiered major new works by Olivier Messiaen and Iannis Xenakis. The New York Philharmonic, moreover, has many younger players. And Geffen Hall has found novel means of reaching new audiences, particularly with its large video screens in the lobby, where every concert is streamed for free for passersby or those who want to take in the whole event. The video work is the most creative I've encountered. The sound system is not high-end and there are plenty of distractions. But I watched a matinee and found the experience compelling and the sound good enough to tell that by the second performance of the program, the orchestra had already gotten tighter. All this bodes well for Dudamel, who now has the West Coast support team he wanted. Deborah Borda, who hired Dudamel at the L.A. Phil and poached him at the New York Philharmonic, remains as an adviser to the orchestra. When Tarnopolsky ran Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, he became close to Dudamel. Adam Crane, the orchestra's vice president of external affairs, worked under Borda in L.A. when Dudamel made his U.S. debut at the Hollywood Bowl and was hired by the L.A. Phil. It is too soon to tell where this may lead. By now New Yorkers should know that Dudamel will not be the next Bernstein. He may well change New York, but he is not likely to be a New Yorker. Bernstein lived in New York, walking distance from Carnegie Hall and, when it was built, Lincoln Center. Bernstein raised his family at the Dakota and was, day and night, at the center of New York cultural, intellectual and political life. Dudamel says he still thinks of L.A. as home and the L.A. Phil as family. The New York Philharmonic is a new family. But Dudamel, in fact, now lives in Madrid and has Spanish citizenship. Yet for whatever reason, an L.A. mindset does seem to have reached the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center. The orchestra follows Dudamel's appearances with 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back' in concert and then heads off on an Asian tour with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. L.A. opera directors Yuval Sharon and Peter Sellars, nowhere to be found in L.A. at the moment, are prominent at the Lincoln Center. Sharon's production of 'The Comet/Poppea' he created for the Industry in L.A. last year will have its New York premiere here in June. Sellars' collaboration with composer Matthew Aucoin, 'Music for New Bodies,' is in July.
San Francisco Chronicle
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Esa-Pekka Salonen and S.F. Symphony release new recordings on Apple Music
As Esa-Pekka Salonen reaches the beginning of the end of his tenure as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, his work with the institution is being further memorialized on Apple Music Classical. The music platform has released Salonen and the Symphony's performance of Jean Sibelius' ' Finlandia,' recorded live in concert March 14-16, for fans to stream. Three additional digital-only spatial audio recordings are set to release on the Apple Music Classical app in the coming months. Igor Stravinsky's ' Symphony in Three Movements ' will be made available on July 4, followed by Sibelius' Symphony No. 1 on Aug. 15, and Salonen's Cello Concerto featuring principal cello Rainer Eudeikis, which does not have a release date yet. They are all produced through SFS Media, the Symphony's audio-visual label. The Symphony began its partnership with Apple Music Classical upon its release in 2023, and Salonen and the orchestra have previously released 11 recordings through the platform, including compositions by composers Anders Hillborg, Elizabeth Ogonek and Ottorino Respighi. Apple Music Classical is available for free to most Apple Music subscribers and allows its users to make playlists, utilize optimal search features, and enjoy high-quality immersive audio. Salonen's final shows with the Symphony are nearing as the 2024-25 season draws to a close, but classical music fans have a few more opportunities to catch the conductor in person. He is scheduled to conduct Stravinsky's 'The Firebird' Friday, May 23, through Sunday, May 25, and his last scheduled performances will be of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, 'Resurrection,' on June 12-14. The Finnish conductor and composer took over the music director position from Michael Tilson Thomas in 2020 and announced his departure from the Symphony last spring. He attributed his decision to differences with leadership, stating that he does 'not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.' Salonen currently has no plans to join the forthcoming season's lineup, not even to return for a guest appearance.
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
BBCNOW/MacMillan/Childs review – James MacMillan's nostalgic celebration of the euphonium
Named for the sweet euphony of its tone, the euphonium is proving itself outside the brass band world and coming into its own in contemporary repertoire. Much music for euphonium is commissioned by David Childs, one of the instrument's strongest and most gifted advocates – his whole family veritable champions – the latest being James MacMillan's new concertante work for euphonium and string orchestra. Its title, Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock, refers to the confluence of river and tributary in the Ayrshire town of the Cumnock where MacMillan spent his early years. It is dedicated to Childs and to the composer's euphonium-playing grandfather, George Loy; an element of nostalgia is thus imbued in the piece's character, evident from the opening solo statement – slow, lyrical and reflective. Yet the fast scale passages that emerged from the strings like eddying ripples and were quickly taken up by Childs signalled the soloist's virtuosity immediately. It was this balance of arching melody and increasing rhythmic vitality that drove the performance, the absence of other wind instruments ensuring the soloist never risked being compromised. Only a long, expansive phrase with euphonium and strings in unison was curious for being undeniably rich but somehow not entirely convincing. The piece had its premiere the previous night in Cardiff's Hoddinott Hall, but the Swansea audience surely got the better experience, the warmth and finesse of Childs' playing and the burnished strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales wonderfully resonant in the Brangwyn Hall. MacMillan conducted with a composer's authority, and it was with a composer's sympathy that he approached the other works in this wide-ranging programme, ostensibly embracing folk inflections. In the case of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, those inflections are imagined rather than authentic but evocative nevertheless, and eloquently realised by the BBCNOW winds. Stravinsky's later Symphony in Three Movements, with its mix of strident energy and longing for his Russian past, had great verve. But the threads of melancholy in Gustav Holst's Capriccio, and then in Vaughan Williams's early tone-poem In the Fen Country, also had their own impact. So this was quite a workout for the emotions, all told. The Cardiff performance is available on BBC Sounds until 2 June.
