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.
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.
João Carlos Martins at Carnegie Hall Farewell Concert, 9 May 2025; photo: Jorge Gustavo Elias
Happy 85th birthday to o Maestro, João Carlos Martins! Born on 25 June 1940 in São Paulo, Martins established himself as one of the most brilliant keyboard interpreters of Johann Ses=bastian Bach in the second half of the 20th century.
Yet his Bach legacy is just one component of an artistic journey marked by both acclaim and adversity. João Carlos Martins’s story is as much about resilience and reinvention as it is about musical brilliance. Following prodigious beginnings – he made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 20 – repeated injuries to his hands forced Martins to step away from the piano, just as he was reaching the height of his international career. But rather than retreat from music, he redirected his focus to conducting, bringing the same fervor and eloquence to the podium that once defined his playing.
Martins additionally became an enormously influential cultural force in Brazil. Through his Bachiana Foundation, he has brought classical music to thousands of young people, many from underserved communities, creating access where there was none. Alongside this work with the Fundação Bachiana, Martins has also been a champion of Latin American composers.
His initiatives have blended high artistic standards with social impact, forging a vision of music as both an expressive art and a tool for transformation. Under his leadership, the Bachiana Filarmônica SESI-SP has become one of Brazil’s most dynamic cultural foundations – a platform for emerging talent and a vehicle for national pride, performing everywhere from favelas to major concert halls.
Martins’s late-career return to the keyboard – made possible by specially adapted bionic gloves – has added an inspiring new chapter to an already remarkable artistic narrative. Following his moving farewell concert at Carnegie Hall last month, Martins continues to extend a career that has continually defied limitation as he devotes himself to a broad new initiative to improve music education across Brazil.
Feliz Aniversário, Maestro! Your artistry continues to resonate far beyond the concert hall.
João Carlos Martins at Carnegie Hall Farewell Concert, 9 May 2025; photo: Jorge Gustavo Elias
Tan Dun conducting Seattle Symphony, with harpist Xavier de Maistre; photo (c) James Holt / The Seattle Symphony.
A concert built around the artistry of composer, conductor, and cultural connector Tan Dun offers no shortage of conceptual fascination. This week’s concerts mark his turn to the Seattle Symphony podium after a memorable debut here two and a half years ago, when he led his monumental Buddha Passion.
Raised in a remote village in China’s Hunan province and shaped equally by Western classical forms and ancient Chinese traditions, Tan – who since 1986 has been based in the US – brings a theatrical imagination and a deep sense of ritual to the concert stage. He framed last night’s program with a pair of short but intensely colorful works by two early 20th-century composers he admires, serving as explosive preludes to two large-scale pieces from his own catalog.
A vivid reading of Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance, from his 1915 ballet El amor brujo, crackled with rhythmic energy and flared with instrumental color, setting one element against another as water came into protracted focus in the ensuing Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra, composed by Tan in 1998 and dedicated to Tōru Takemitsu.
Tan draws out music’s ritual origins in intriguing ways. Percussionist Yuri Yamashita not only performed the solo part but dominated much of the piece with an almost shamanistic stage presence – from the way she mindfully released droplets from her fingers to the immersive sound world she conjured using bowls of wood or glass, as well as gongs dipped mesmerically into one of two large water bowls over which she presided.
At some moments she even softly vocalized, as if engaged in a conjuring. Enhancing the theatrical experience were three video screens suspended above the orchestra –- one large at center and two smaller flanking it – which projected close-up footage of the bowls and the rippling water, inviting the audience into the tactile, elemental, organic world of the piece.
The orchestra functioned as a kind of elemental chorus, not so much a counterpart as a kaleidoscopic resonator. Specific voices occasionally emerged from the fabric – most memorably in a luminous duet between Yamashita and principal cellist Efe Baltacıgil, whose tone seemed to bloom out of the water’s surface. A long, improvisatory cadenza captivated with its focus on the physicality of sound.
Still, the Water Concerto’s meditative pacing and episodic structure began to feel diffuse over the span of the piece – though whether this observation reflects a Western bias about form or a real imbalance in proportions is a fair question. In any case, this was a welcome opportunity to hear the work in live performance.
After intermission came a brisk, glittering account of Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), a four-minute burst of orchestral color dating from a little before the young Russian’s leap to international fame with The Firebird.
To this taste, the highlight of the program was Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women – a 13-part multimedia concerto that unfolded with greater emotional clarity and formal cohesion than the Water Concerto. Nu Shu originated as a commission for a harp concerto from the Philadelphia Orchestra but, inspired by Tan’s immersive research into a little-known linguistic and social tradition from his native Hunan Province, grew into a sui generis fusion of concerto, orchestral narrative, and ethnomusicological-sociological documentary.
The “secret songs” in question have to do with the vanishing Nüshu tradition — a secret, invented language once used by women in rural Hunan to communicate among themselves in calligraphy and through chanting and song. Tan painstakingly researched the small community of remaining Nüshu speakers, capturing their voices and stories in multiple videos.
Nu Shu unfolds in 13 short video portraits created by the composer and his team – shown on the three screens above the stage – each anchored in the landscapes of the women’s daily lives and their stories of isolation and solidarity, which are shared from generation to generation.
For Tan, the harp represents “the most feminine of instruments,” writes Esteban Meneses in his excellent program note, and serves as “an intermediary between what the composer imagines as the future – the Western orchestra – and the past, represented by the microfilms.”
Xavier de Maistre was the eloquent soloist, playing a kind of bard who mediates these stories and showing remarkable dynamic and expressive range. Tan likewise assigns a crucial narrative role to the orchestra, which acted as a bridge translating memory into something shared and immediate.
Dalia Stasevska and Augustin Hadelich with Seattle Symphony; (c)Jorge Gustavo Elias
Dalia Stasevska has returned to guest conduct Seattle Symphony this week with a relatively brief but refreshing program. Thursday night’s performance offered plenty of dazzling energy, albeit a curious combination of early Prokofiev sandwiched between two vibrant Latin American works.
Alberto Ginastera’s Malambo from the 1941 ballet Estancia — music that put him on the international map – launched the concert with such kinetic force that it reminded me what a crime it is that his music remains so rarely programmed in the US. (Bravo to the Miró Quartet for recording the entire Ginastera string quartet cycle, forthcoming later this year as part of the ensemble’s 30th-anniversary celebrations.) Stasevska articulated the layered rhythms and boldly strident dissonances of Ginastera’s dance with razor-sharp clarity. Even at just a few minutes in duration, it left the audience breathless.
So did violin soloist Augustin Hadelich — though in a very different way. A Seattle favorite – he gave a deeply memorable account of the Britten Violin Concerto on his last stop with the orchestra two years ago – Hadelich brought his signature artistry Prokofiev’s precocious Violin Concerto No. 1.
From his first phrases, which open the concerto, Hadelich astonished with the sheer beauty of his sound, caressing Prokofiev’s melodic line as if entering into a dream. Phrasing glissandi with effortless sprezzatura, he brought a transportive intensity to his account that was never schmaltzy. Hadelich embraced the concerto’s oneiric, fairy-tale character with personal warmth. Stasevska created a more integrated, immersive orchestral blend by positioning the brass stage right and offered sensitive, fluid support.
Hadelich then delighted with an encore that nodded to the evening’s Latin American framing: his own arrangement of Carlos Gardel’s Por una Cabeza, proving, with wryly elegant melancholy, that it doesn’t always take two to tango.
The concert’s second half was devoted to Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’s La noche de los Mayas, a quasi-symphony fashioned from his score for the now-forgotten 1939 film of the same name, which uses a tragic love story to romanticize pre-Columbian Mayan culture. Stasevska underscored the piece’s rhythmic elan and churning colors, along with its touches of chaos a la Stravinsky Rite.
The musicians seemed to thoroughly enjoy giving their all to the score – whether in the weighty brass chords evoking solemn ancient rituals, the mixed meter and collective revelry of a nighttime fiesta, or a touching Mayan serenade duet for flute and percussion.
The last movement opened up into a tour de force spectacle for a massively expanded percussion section that calls for an orchestra-within-the-orchestra, complete with rattles, güiro, and conch shells. I came way impressed by Stasevska’s versatility—a world away from the Sibelius of her last Seattle appearance, and wholly in the spirit of the evening’s exuberance.
“I am a religious Russian Orthodox person and I understand ‘religion’ in the literal meaning of the word, as ‘re-ligio’, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the ‘legato’ of life. There is no more serious task for music than this.” – Sofia Gubaidulina
The great Sofia Gubaidulina has died at the age of 93. She passed away on 13 March at her home in Appen, Germany.
From her publisher, Boosey & Hawkes: “Sofia Gubaidulina, the grande dame of new music, has passed away on 13 March 2025, aged 93, at her home in Appen, near Hamburg in Germany. She was considered the most important Russian composer of the present day and a person who drew inspiration from a deep faith. Her interest in the world, in people and in the spiritual touched everyone who met and worked with her. In her work, she always focussed on the elementary, on human existence and the transformative power of music.
She is like a ‘flying hermit’, said conductor Simon Rattle, because she is always “in orbit and only occasionally visits terra firma. Now and then she comes to us on the earth and brings us light and then goes back into her orbit.” Conductor Andris Nelsons has noted that “Sofia Gubaidulina’s music – its intellect and its profound spirituality – is deeply touching. It really gets under your skin”.
According to NPR: “In a 2017 interview with the BBVA Foundation, Gubaidulina talked about the power of music in sweeping terms. ‘The art of music is consistent with the task of expanding the higher dimension of our lives,’ she said. A deeply religious artist, she once described her writing process as speaking with God.” She also said: “The art of music is capable of touching and approaching mysteries and laws existing in the cosmos and in the world.”
This weekend brings another of my picks for the first few months of 2025: Cappella Romana presents the world premiere of the complete Canon for Racial Reconciliation, a collaboration between composers Isaac Cates and Nicholas Reeves that fuses the sound worlds of Orthodox and Gospel church music.
Cates and Reeves have set a remarkable poem in the form of an ancient Byzantine canon written by Dr. Carla Thomas, one of the leaders of the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black, whose mission is “to share the Orthodox Christian faith with African Americans and people of color.”
Combining two choirs – each coming from Orthodox and Gospel traditions, respectively – Canon also calls for violin, trumpet, guitar, piano, a Hammond B-3 organ, and pre-recorded sound samples of sermons and related material.
James Bash has written an excellent preview for Oregon.live here, which includes this observation from co-composer Nicholas Reeves: “This piece was not a response to anything specific that is happening at the moment. It touches on issues that have been part of America for a long, long time. There are no political positions in the piece. The Canon of Racial Reconciliation comes from a compassionate and reconciliatory perspective. It recognizes misdeeds and violence and justice and tries to find a way forward that moves everyone ahead. The goal is healing in America. We move ahead even when there is no forgiveness or justice present. The music is an expression of mutual and peaceful co-existence.”
Performances are Friday 28 February at 7.30pm at Town Hall in Seattle and Saturday 1 March at 7.30pm at First United Methodist Church in Portland. Go here for tickets or call 503-236-8202 (use the code CANON for a 20% discount in advance). There will be a conversation with the composers and conductors right before the performances (free with registration).
replica of a Viennese fortepiano built by Rodney Regier that will be used for the Mozart concertos
A week after its sold-out immersion in Winterreise with baritone Charles Robert Stephens (on Schubert’s birthday), Seattle Chamber Orchestra presents a program exploring the fortepiano – the kind of keyboard Mozart knew.
Mozart had to carve out his own path as a freelance artist in Vienna during the final decade of his career. He relied on his reputation as a celebrity virtuoso to cultivate a core audience, largely through his dazzlingly inventive series of piano concertos (as we call them), which he typically premiered in subscription concerts that doubled as crucial fundraising opportunities.
Conductor and pianist Lorenzo Marasso, SCO’s founder and music director, has curated a program around two of these concertos, which will be performed using a fortepiano: K. 449 in E-flat major and K. 488 in A major, with Tamara Friedman and Marasso as the soloists. He will also conduct SCO in Mozart’s Divertimento in D major, K133, and the great G minor Symphony, K. 550.
“A fortepianois an early piano,” Marasso explains. “In principle, the word fortepiano can designate any piano dating from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698 up to the early 19th century. Most typically, however, it is used to refer to the mid-18th- to early-19th-century Viennese instruments, for which composers of the Classical era, especially Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, wrote their piano music.”
The concertos will be performed on a replica of just such a Viennese fortepiano, which was built by Rod Regier and is borrowed from the collection of historical keyboards of Prof. George Bozarth and Tamara Friedman.
The concert will be held on 7 February 2025 at Plymouth United Church of Christ in downtown Seattle (1217 6th Ave). A pre-concert talk will take place at 7:15pm; the performance begins at 8pm. Admission includes the pre-concert talk and the performance, accompanied by drinks and appetizers. Tickets here.
The newly formed SCO is rooted in our cherished Pacific Northwest’s casual and open culture and brings together the region’s top instrumentalists to create an all-sensory experience of music where you are invited to be part of the experience rather than merely witnessing it. Founded in 2021, the Seattle Chamber Orchestra seeks to bring music lovers tantalizing combinations of the traditional and contemporary repertoire, performed by world-class professional musicians. Brought to life through thoughtful programming that educates as much as it inspires, SCO seeks to reinvigorate live classical music by providing opportunities for musicians and audiences to explore traditional and new music and challenge established boundaries.
Ludovic Morlot’s return to Seattle Symphony during the first month of this already profoundly troubled year has been a balm, offering some reassuring proofs of music’s ability to uplift in times of uncertainty and upheaval. Earlier in January, he led members of Seattle Symphony at Seattle Opera in an immersive account of the second part of Les Troyens, the grandest and yet most personal of Berlioz’s masterpieces at Seattle Opera.
Even without full staging, this performance of the “Carthage” part of the epic opera was spellbinding from start to finish. Incredibly, Seattle Symphony’s conductor emeritus insisted on continuing with the engagement despite losing his home and entire musical archive to the recent wildfires in the LA region.
The connection they made with Berlioz’s multi-dimensional score turned out to be the perfect preparation for this weekend’s all-French program back in the concert hall. Fauré’s Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande instantly brought back treasured memories of Morlot’s early years with the orchestra. (They recorded it on their all-Fauré album on Seattle Symphony’s in-house record label in 2014.)
Morlot also reminded us of his commitment to contemporary composers. It’s always a risk-taking venture, but one that during his tenure resulted in some wonderful new music by John Luther Adams, for example. He led pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet and principal harp Valerie Muzzolini in the world premiere of Hanoï Songs, a duo concerto commissioned from French composer Benjamin Attahir that strives for a Ravelesque combination of fantasy and meticulous clarity.
The best part of the program was the all-Ravel second half. Introduction and Allegro, written as a showpiece for the double-action pedal harp, benefited from Morlot’s gently fluctuating sonic choreography, subtly balancing ensemble and soloist. Muzzolini, now fully in the spotlight, played with luminous charm.
Morlot then led the orchestra in the complete Mother Goose — not just the suite but the expanded ballet score that Ravel fleshed out with connecting material to create a more coherent sense of narrative. It was sheer bliss to experience how deftly Morlot conjured each atmosphere, leaning into exquisite sound colors that were both transparent and intricate while articulating the score’s rhythmic subtleties with grace. The musicians played with rapt attention and obvious enjoyment.
Much more than an endearing string of fairy-tales, Morlot’s MotherGoose conveyed an opera’s worth of emotions, along with a sense of tonal refinement that has deepened and matured. The concluding “Enchanted Garden” at times even radiated an almost “Parsifal”-like serenity that, for some precious minutes, kept the chaos outside at bay.
Seattle Symphony released a bombshell announcement this afternoon:
The Seattle Symphony and Benaroya Hall today announced that Dr. Krishna Thiagarajan, President & CEO, will resign after six and a half years of dedicated service to the organization. His last day will be April 30, 2025.
“It’s been a deeply fulfilling experience to work with all the talented and dedicated people at the Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall and its foundation,” stated Dr. Thiagarajan. “Leading the organization through COVID, the rebuilding of audiences and the historic appointment of Xian Zhang as the first female and woman of color Music Director have been some of the highlights of my time here.”
… The Symphony board of directors is forming a search committee to launch an international search for Dr. Thiagarajan’s successor. While the Seattle Symphony begins its search for its next President & CEO, Maria Yang, Chief Development and Project Officer, will serve as Acting CEO to ensure a smooth transition.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 