newyorker.com
And now there are four. The Chicago Symphony, arguably the supreme exemplar of American orchestral virtuosity, announced on Tuesday that Mäkelä will become its next music director in 2027, succeeding Riccardo Muti. Mäkelä explained in a press release that Chicago and Concertgebouw will eventually become his “main responsibilities,” but that he plans on returning to the Paris and Oslo orchestras “on a regular basis after my official tenures are completed.”
To quote Vince Lombardi: “What the hell’…
17 days ago
newyorker.com
Bartók, like Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, had the fortune to be a popular modernist, appealing to a broad audience while keeping his place in the twentieth-century vanguard. His quartets exhibit an extraordinary degree of motivic coherence, their structures often extrapolated from a core motto of five or six notes. The string writing is at once violently inventive and acutely expressive, incorporating guttural distortions of pitch, cawing glissandos, clattering bowing effects, and the “Bartók…
25 days ago
newyorker.com
Since 2022, Ukrainian artists have been thrust into a tragic spotlight, and composers are no exception. Their work has popped up on programs around the world, from élite European new-music festivals to, more rarely, American orchestral concerts. A recent online stream from the Dallas Symphony, under the direction of the Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits, features Victoria Polevá’s Cello Concerto, a mournful post-minimalist meditation, and Anna Korsun’s “Terricone,” which evokes devastation in…
3 months ago
newyorker.com
Lewis grew up in Chicago, the son of Southerners who had come North as part of the Great Migration. As a third grader at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, he took up the trombone, which, he later wrote, appealed to him as “big, shiny, and weird.” He went on to Yale, where he studied music theory and majored in philosophy. On a break from college, he joined the A.A.C.M., which had formed on the South Side of Chicago in 1965, with Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Joseph Jarman, R…
3 months ago
newyorker.com
Pygmalion’s Monteverdi Vespers
There is no grander curtain-raising gesture in music than the brightly billowing D-major fanfares that open Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. A version of this prelude had already appeared at the outset of Monteverdi’s epochal opera “Orfeo,” from 1607, but the sonority is even more integral to the sacred splendor of the Vespers, which celebrate the Virgin Mary. The countertenor turned conductor Raphaël Pichon, in a magnificent new recording of Monteverdi’s work…
4 months ago
newyorker.com
Conductors are still necessary, as Bernstein goes on to explain. They not only guide performances but mold interpretations in rehearsal, monitor standards, evaluate auditions, attend to administrative matters, raise money, and shape the repertory. The rarest members of the species add an unquantifiable charismatic charge, one that elevates both the musicians’ playing and the audience’s perception of it. The most spectacular modern instance of that phenomenon was, of course, Bernstein himself. In…
4 months ago
newyorker.com
Jones was wise to insert the qualifying phrase “to a certain extent,” since there is ultimately no way to assess how a given environment shapes artistic thinking. Nothing that happened in California—percussion music, drone music, electronic soundscapes, psychedelic fusions of classical and rock—happened only in California. Still, many generations of composers have attested to the disinhibiting effect of life on the West Coast. Such has been the experience of Esa-Pekka Salonen, a Finnish ex-moder…
5 months ago
Search by beat, location, outlet & position to find the right journalists for your story.
Sign up for freenewyorker.com
The forty-year-old American oboist James Austin Smith, who recently presented “Hearing Memory,” an adventurous program of East German music, at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn, has made his path all the more challenging by choosing to work outside the orchestral cocoon. Someone with his high level of training—he studied at Northwestern University, the Yale School of Music, and the Leipzig Hochschule für Musik und Theater—might have been expected to make the rounds of orchestra auditions, in the ho…
5 months ago
newyorker.com
Nevertheless, Japanese audiences and artists have continued to engage with “Butterfly,” not least because it has influenced Western perceptions of Japan for generations. In the fifties, the Fujiwara Opera, based in Tokyo, collaborated with New York City Opera on a bilingual production: Japanese singers took the Japanese roles, and white singers portrayed the callous Lieutenant Pinkerton and the more sympathetic consul Sharpless. The 1953 musical “Chōchō-san Sandaiki” (“Three-Generation Butterfly…
6 months ago
newyorker.com
The Met débuts a new production of the darkly magnificent “Don Carlos.”
about 2 years ago
newyorker.com
A monumental project to expand the flute repertory will continue until 2036.
over 2 years ago
