The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics attend far more performances than they review. Here are some that hooked them during the past month.
Mahler Firsts
JOSHUA BARONE Despite years of hearing live music, we both had Mahler firsts this month; for me, the Eighth Symphony and for you the Third. Maybe it says something, that a composer so often performed still has his rarities.
ZACHARY WOOLFE Certainly these pieces are difficult to mount; they’re as large in scale as symphonic music gets.
BARONE True. I saw the Eighth at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it was mind-boggling to witness how much money it must have cost. This piece calls for eight vocal soloists, all of which were luxuriously (though imperfectly) cast, two standard choirs and a children’s choir. Mahler described it as having a Barnum & Bailey quality, which I don’t see as an advantage. At Symphony Hall, the opening felt as though it couldn’t have been anything other than an impenetrable wall of sound.
WOOLFE The Third also demands choirs — women and children — though just one soloist. At Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin were joined by a star: the mellow-voiced mezzo Joyce DiDonato. She had a kind of majestic clarity, which for me extended to the performance as a whole; it was vivid but never exaggerated.
BARONE In Boston, that kind of heaven-sent sound came from the soprano Ying Fang, who sang from a balcony to the side of the circuslike stage, literally above it all. It should be said that this circus was well managed by Andris Nelsons, who, after an intelligently paced, affecting Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic over the summer, seems to be in an exciting new period as a Mahler conductor. Still, I don’t feel like I need to hear specifically the Eighth again any time soon.
WOOLFE After the hour and forty minutes of the Third, I was kind of pumped to get back inside that capacious world.
‘The Listeners’
In the New York region, the unmissable opera of the season so far hasn’t been at the Metropolitan Opera, but at Opera Philadelphia, where Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s “The Listeners” recently had its American premiere. This work’s main character is driven toward madness by an unending hum that only she and a few others can hear. The support group that some of them join under the leadership of a self-appointed guru begins to resemble (OK, more than resemble) a cult, with music full of pseudo incantations. Both dark comedy and wellsprings of emotion ensue.
Most memorable were the series of monologues sung by people in the group. Given Mazzoli’s gift for inventive yet restrained orchestral textures that let clear, lyrical vocal lines speak plainly, these were effective, enigmatic, unsparing arias. Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production — alert to both the opera’s naturalism and its surreally sensual touches — presented them as reality-TV-style confessionals to a camera, blown up and projected onstage in a way that enlarged and sharpened their impact.
The cast was excellent, and it’s been particularly hard to shake the memory of the mezzo-soprano Rehanna Thelwell’s focus in playing a sad, lonely woman on a journey from over-the-top satire to something approaching tragedy. ZACHARY WOOLFE
Ray Chen: ‘Player 1’
What a happy sight to see a major label like Decca elevate video game music to the symphonic realm. Classical music, after all, has inspired some of the finest video game soundtracks, and video games in turn have influenced some of the finest classical music, like Andrew Norman’s “Play.”
The music of video games is encyclopedic: by turns epic and intimate, triumphant and anxious. Unlike the cues of movie soundtracks, these scores are designed to respond to a story as it develops, lingering for seconds or hours at a time. On the violinist Ray Chen’s album “Player 1,” with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Cristian Macelaru, there are no barriers among genres, united above all by Chen’s lyrical, grippingly expressive sound.
Chen’s style is particularly well suited to Korngold’s Violin Concerto, a product of Hollywood’s Golden Age and presented here as an ancestor to the modern soundtracks. He also lends a soaringly adventurous voice to the theme from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom; pleasant nostalgia to the Pallet Town theme from Pokémon Red; and allure to the newly commissioned, Joe Hisaishi-esque “Serenade,” by Eunike Tanzil.
Sometimes, “Player 1” has the crossover sound of the YouTube star Lindsey Stirling, but that comes with the territory. Perhaps a similar broad appeal will, too. JOSHUA BARONE
A Fresh Approach to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’
How do you commemorate the centennial of “the worst masterpiece” of American music, as the pianist and composer Ethan Iverson called Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”? If you’re the Knights, you pay it forward with an ambitious commissioning project and then bring in Aaron Diehl, one of the most versatile jazz pianists on the scene, to bring fresh rhythmic vigor to Gershwin’s classic.
And sure enough, Diehl’s intricately eclectic cadenzas were the highlight of the Knights’ recent performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” at Zankel Hall. But while the ensemble, conducted by Eric Jacobsen, supplied bold color contrasts and fresh phrasing, the seams between thematic episodes were often jarringly apparent. To some extent, that is in keeping with the individualistic charm of this group, which grew out of chamber music parties in Brooklyn. But as the ensemble grows, its sound seems caught midway between that of a collective of equals and a smooth symphonic blend.
Michael Schachter’s own vibrant rhapsody for piano and orchestra, “Being and Becoming,” hewed so close to Gershwin’s model that it sometimes felt like a shoe box of postcards from the 1920s. The rhapsodes of Homer’s time derived their name from the Greek words for stitching and singing. This genre allows a composer to spin free ideas. But it also requires some patience for needlework. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
Afromodernism at the Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic’s exploration of Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite” in 2021 alerted me to the bluesy quality that Sheryl Staples, the principal associate concertmaster, can bring to music by Black American composers. I was reminded of her facility throughout Carlos Simon’s “Four Black American Dances,” which opened the orchestra’s recent “Afromodernism: Music of the African Diaspora” program.
That concert ended with a lovely account of William Grant Still’s neglected Fourth Symphony. In the finale of that work, the conductor Thomas Wilkins’s deliberate pacing lent extra gravity to a climax that can seem slight if given a pedestrian reading. But even earlier, in the opening movement, the Philharmonic had real snap, with a gorgeous presentation of an early, D major theme leading to some noirish panache during the development, in which Still writes with a flurry of chromatic ideas.
Also on the program was a new cello concerto, “Had to Be,” written by the flutist, vocalist and composer Nathalie Joachim. In some densely orchestrated passages, she embraces the tumult of early modernist trends in classical and jazz. Yet her solo lines, for the cellist Seth Parker Woods, are often truly singable. Hope that a recording is on the way. SETH COLTER WALLS
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