September 29, 2025 • 9:37 am Comments Off on The Freedom of Change: Víkingur Ólafsson’s Conversations Across the Centuries
I wrote this profile of Víkingur Ólafsson for Cal Performances, which is featuring the pianist as Artist in Residence for the 2025–26 season:
“You should always try to escape your own success,” Víkingur Ólafsson says. “Because that success so easily turns against you and limits you and your choices and what you want to do next” …
Filed under: Bach, Beethoven, Cal Performances, pianists
September 25, 2025 • 7:59 pm Comments Off on Goethe’s ‘Urworte.Orphisch’ Set to Music by Bernd Richard Deutsch
To open the season this weekend, Franz Welser-Möst leads the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in the American premiere of Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch’s ambitious, nearly-hour-long Urworte, which sets Goethe’s famous stanzas to music.
Movements:
Sunday’s concert will be livestreamed on Adella, digital home of The Cleveland Orchestra.
My introduction to the work can be found in the Cleveland Orchestra program notes here.
Composers often set aside ideas that strike them in a flash of inspiration, waiting until the right moment arrives to wrestle them down in detail and give them an enduring form. For Bernd Richard Deutsch, one such idea was to write a work exploring the elemental forces that shape our lives….
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Filed under: Cleveland Orchestra, Goethe, new music, program notes
September 21, 2025 • 11:32 pm Comments Off on Les Arts Florissants: Gluck’s Paris ‘Orphée et Eurydice’
Some thoughts on the splendid new release from Les Arts Florissants:
What a delight to come upon Les Arts Florissants’s latest recording, Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice. As coincidence would have it, I’d just experienced their performance of another Orpheus story on stage at the Lucerne Festival this summer: Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, led by the ensemble’s founder, William Christie. Charpentier’s exquisite tragédie en musique breaks off mid-story, with Orpheus still in the Underworld and Eurydice’s fate unresolved. In its fragmentary state, Charpentier’s 1686 opera captures the stark tragedy of the myth: a descent without resolution.
Filed under: CD review, Early Music America, Gluck, Les Arts Florissants
September 18, 2025 • 4:48 am Comments Off on Opening Night at Boulez Saal in Berlin
I reviewed opening night with Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal for The Strad:
In his famously mischievous binary, Ned Rorem asserted that ‘the entire solar system is torn between two aesthetics: French and German’ – with the kicker: ‘If you agree with all this, you’re French. If you disagree, you’re German’. …
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Filed under: Brahms, Maurice Ravel, Mozart, pianists, Pierre Boulez Saal, reviews, The Strad, violinists
September 11, 2025 • 1:04 am Comments Off on Teddy Abrams Named Artistic and Executive Director of Ojai Festival
Big and exciting news from the Ojai Festival:
Ojai, CA – September 10, 2025) – Ojai Music Festival Board Chairman Jerry Eberhardt announced today the appointment of conductor/composer/pianist Teddy Abrams as Ojai’s next Artistic and Executive Director effective September 1, 2026, with his first Festival being the 81st Festival in June 2027. He will join the ranks of such distinguished predecessors as Ara Guzelimian, who concludes his tenure with the 2026 Festival, Thomas W. Morris, Ernest Fleischmann, and Lawrence Morton. Mr. Abrams’ collaboration with the Ojai Music Festival will be concurrent with his post as Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra….
Filed under: music news, Ojai Festival, Teddy Abrams
September 10, 2025 • 5:37 am Comments Off on Touching Eternity: Matthew Barley’s Dialogue with Pärt and Bach
September 7, 2025 • 3:11 pm Comments Off on Chaya Czernowin and Claire Chase in Lucerne
The amazing work of Lucerne Festival‘s Academy, focused on contemporary music, was on full display at Saturday morning’s concert featuring the incomparable Claire Chase, who joined members of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) led by Vimbayi Kaziboni for the first Swiss performance of Chaya Czernowin‘s ‘The Divine Thawing of the Core’, which she premiered last month.
Czernowin’s gripping response to the political turmoil of the last several years in her native Israel, which she metaphorically imagines as ‘the forced thawing of a democratic society into a theocracy’ – hence the ironic title – ‘Divine Thawing’ is a substantial, 53-minute work for contrabass flute and an ensemble of six flutes, six oboes, six trumpets, trombone, tuba, percussion, piano, and three cellos. More than expressing pain, Czernowin’s astonishing score enacts it, with a devastating, claustrophobic sense of helplessness that presses on you like a physical weight. Rarely have triads sounded so terrifying.
‘It is a very elemental, naked and maybe an intimate beginning,’ remarks the composer, ‘which is forced to melt away through irony into an elemental brutality, in an uneven process, which includes a demonic waltz, in a gradual thawing of its features into a kind of a wholly different way of expression which is more coherent, ceremonial and brutally primitive.’
Chase’s contrabass flute anchored ‘Divine Thawing’ with an uncanny blend of ferocity and vulnerability. With her intense breaths woven into the texture, she seemed to live every extreme of Czernowin’s score, conveying its sense of struggle and resistance and raw endurance. A stunning performance.
Czernowin’s work also reflects her deep admiration of Galina Ustvolskaya‘s Symphony No. 2 from 1979 (‘True and Eternal Bliss!’), which was performed immediately preceding ‘Divine Thawing’, with Stefan Jovanovic as the reciter. The incredible originality of this music made a tremendous impact, uncompromisingly fierce, under Kaziboni’s guidance. The LFCO musicians are truly fearless.
Opening the program were the stark sonorities of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Trio for Three Trumpets from 1976, which summoned the audience into the unfamiliar terrain of the rest of the concert with a magnetic incantation.
Filed under: Claire Chase, Lucerne Festival, Lucerne Festival Academy, classical-music, music, new music, news, reviews
September 5, 2025 • 1:22 am 1
Big news this week: just after Esa-Pekka Salonen wrapped up his Lucerne Festival visit with the Orchestre de Paris, it was announced that he has been named the ensemble’s Chief Conductor starting in 2027. Parallel to that, he’ll become the take up the new Creativity and Innovation Chair of the Philharmonie de Paris. Salonen’s collaboration with the orchestra in Lucerne offered a vivid taste of that future partnership in two very different programs last weekend.
In the first, Augustin Hadelich was the soloist in an account of the Brahms concerto notable for its shadowed lyricism and spacious pacing, illuminating the score’s darker hues. Hadelich played his own cadenza and his arrangement of a Carlos Gardel tango as a steam-vent of an encore following such intensity. If Salonen brought structural clarity to the Brahms, the suite from Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that followed surged with dramatic sweep. The episodes seemed to unfold as part of an inexorable tragic arc rather than a set of contrasting miniatures.
His second evening with the Paris musicians revealed a touch more humor alongside the testosterone of ‘Don Juan’. But all that Straussian horn-iness set the stage for the much-anticipated world premiere of Salonen’s own Horn Concerto written for Berliner Philharmoniker principal Stefan Dohr. It’s a big piece, heroic in its way and abounding in the composer’s deep knowledge of the literature across music history, especially Mozart, Beethoven, and Bruckner (Salonen also trained as a horn player). He colorfully remarked that these moments from the musical past ‘appear and disappear like fish coming to the surface to catch an insect before diving to the depths of the sea again’.
The concerto teems with exposed solo passages that seem to test the limits of breath and control — not to mention imagination, indispensable to giving expressive shape to Salonen’s fertile ideas. Around the horn, the orchestra cast a kaleidoscope of refined colors. The concerto will travel widely in the coming months, so I hope to get a chance for more encounters.
Horn sounds resounded still again, sublimely, in the Sibelius Fifth. Salonen’s control of the art of transition, with subtly judged but dramatically thrilling accelerando, was a marvel. For all the monumentality of the closing chords, I fancied amid their awe an echo of mortality, like the trees being felled at the end of ‘The Cherry Orchard’. But the solace of Sibelius’s glorious Swan Theme circled in the mind’s ear as the swans on Lake Lucerne outside the KKL glided serenely by in serene silence.
Filed under: Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lucerne Festival, music news, Sibelius, classical, classical-music, music, orchestra, piano
September 2, 2025 • 3:02 pm Comments Off on The Concertgebouw Orchestra at Lucerne Festival
Deeply grateful for the chance to experience both Concertgebouworkest concerts at this summer’s Lucerne Festival. On the first night, Janine Jansen seemed to guide us along a silvery path into the stars with Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto — sans the guilt of escapism from a troubled world: the effect was too transfiguring. On either side of the Concerto were
Mozart’s ‘Paris’ Symphony, scintillating with surprise, and a Concerto for Orchestra that caught the double edge of Bartók’s thinking in this last-minute artistic reprieve, the grip of its shadows yet allowing for the persistence of hope.
The second program began with Berio, in his fascinating and now seldom-heard “Rendering”, as he summoned Schubert’s friendly, curious, half-smiling ghost, without a trace of rear-view mirror parody, but neither as a holy relic drifting through fragments. The culmination was pure revelation: Mäkelä led a Mahler Fifth overwhelming in its simultaneity of detail, yet which clarified the sense of Mahler at an existential crossroads in life and art. Above all, the sheer vibrancy of the finale swept away the cranky Adorno-inspired doubts about “happy endings” (though the Seventh remains another story entirely). I really felt as if I were hearing the Fifth for the very first time. Brilliant, packed pre-concert lectures by Lucerne Festival dramaturge Susanne Stähr filled the KKL Auditorium and set the stage for each program.
Filed under: conductors, Lucerne Festival, Mahler
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 