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New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Best Classical Music of 2025, So Far
'Salome' Those looking for the full, lurid grandeur of Strauss's 'Salome' could find it this spring in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera. But in February, the scrappy company Heartbeat Opera pre-empted the Met with a thrillingly pared-down version, putting the audience just feet from the action and reducing a huge orchestra to two percussionists and an octet of clarinetists who played a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones. Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity. ZACHARY WOOLFE Read our review of Heartbeat Opera's 'Salome.' Takacs Quartet Among the glories of the renovated Frick Collection, which reopened in April, is a new space for chamber performance, replacing the museum's much-venerated music room. The roughly 220-seat, curved Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, subterranean but airy, with crackling acoustics, was put through its paces in a burst of six excellent concerts, featuring a variety of ensemble sizes, instruments and repertory, from Tudor to today. Most indelible was the veteran Takacs Quartet, coruscating in works by Beethoven and Janacek. And, in Brahms's Piano Quintet, the group's electric music-making was abetted by Jeremy Denk on a late-19th-century Steinway. WOOLFE Read our overview of concerts at the Frick's new concert hall. Yunchan Lim When Yunchan Lim said, right after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto, that he wanted to play Bach's 'Goldberg' Variations, the reaction was largely amused disbelief. Not every teenage virtuoso turns so quickly to performing Bach's 75-minute labyrinth, which requires preternatural reserve and concentration more than technical fireworks. But in April at Carnegie Hall, Lim, now 21, showed that his true gift is for restrained poetry, as he rose from studious, polite opening minutes to eventually offer a 'Goldbergs' of heightened, nearly Romantic intensity and contrasts. It was an exhilarating journey. WOOLFE Read our review of Lim's 'Goldbergs.' Sondra Radvanovsky What makes a great Tosca? To get a sense, watch the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who returned to the Metropolitan Opera in January with what amounted to a master class. She embodies Puccini's breakneck tragedy at its finest, with a fearlessness that is both musical and dramatic: an openness to vulnerability, even fragility, that can inspire sympathy but, with a formidably strong core, whip into the fury of fight-or-flight desperation. I won't soon forget the penetrating softness of her 'Vissi d'arte' or the chilling sotto voce with which, standing above Scarpia's corpse, she growled, 'And before him all of Rome trembled.' JOSHUA BARONE Read our review of Radvanovsky in 'Tosca.' 'Akhnaten' Philip Glass's 'Akhnaten' has been performed on major opera stages in the past decade with something of a monopoly: the same production, by Phelim McDermott, starring the same countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo. But at the Komische Oper in Berlin this spring, the director Barrie Kosky unveiled a refreshingly different vision for the work: pure abstraction and a minimalism that, in climaxes of opulence, mirrors the deceptive richness of Glass's score. The company's chorus, in near-constant movement, was heroic, and John Holliday's sound as Akhnaten was gorgeously expressive and, in an ideal reflection of the role, as human as it was heavenly. BARONE Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Frick's Gift to New York: A Superb New Concert Hall
Most everything at the Frick Collection, which reopened last month after a nearly five-year renovation, is the same as it was, but better. Hand-loomed velvet wall coverings have been replaced, making Vermeers and Rembrandts pop with fresh vibrancy. Chandeliers and skylights have been cleaned. It's the museum we knew, with the grime wiped away. What a relief. For almost a century, the jewel-box Frick has held a special place in the city's heart. Why mess with perfection? But sometimes messing around is worthwhile. The public can now enter the Frick family's upstairs living quarters, turned into intimate galleries. And the museum has returned bearing another gift: a superb space for music, which has swiftly become one of the best places to hear chamber performances in New York City. The Frick's well-loved concert series has moved from an ovoid room off the garden court, where performances took place since the 1930s, to a new, 220-seat, curved-amphitheater auditorium two stories underground. In a debut burst of six concerts over two weeks, the theater was put through its paces. Youthful Baroque ensembles blazed through early music. A long, spare piano solo by Tyshawn Sorey had its New York premiere. The Takacs Quartet and Jeremy Denk played memorably volatile Brahms. There were pieces from Tudor England as well as a just-written song for the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. If you went to all six performances, you heard two Steinway pianos — one from the late 19th century, one recent — as well as a fortepiano, a harpsichord, a synthesizer, a violin fitted with old-style gut strings and another with modern metal ones. Through the very different programs, instruments and textures, the sound was clear, vividly present and resonant. There's a crackling aliveness to music in the hall. Every slowly decaying tone in Sorey's 'For Julius Eastman' registered. The acoustics encourage both transparency and blending — each of the Takacs players had a defined voice, but those voices also melded — which is difficult to achieve in a relatively small room like this one. It's also tough to make a subterranean space feel airy and bright. But the new Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium — designed by Selldorf Architects, which led the Frick renovation, with acoustical consulting by Arup — avoids claustrophobia. With pale walls, stylish brown leather seating and a gently wavy proscenium framing the performers, the hall is spacious yet cozy, with frisky touches. (Those zigzag banisters!) Even in a cultural center like New York, ideal homes for chamber music — gatherings of just a few players, historically in domestic salons — are rarer than you might think. Alice Tully Hall, where the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center resides, sounds good, but with nearly 1,100 seats, lacks the immediacy this repertory lives on. Weill Recital Hall, a staid shoe box at Carnegie Hall, holds fewer than 300, but if seated at the back, you can feel far from the action. The Morgan Library's Gilder Lehrman Hall benefits from partnerships with Young Concert Artists and the Boston Early Music Festival, but the space is precipitously raked and feels stifling, with flinty acoustics. The Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory is an ornate delight, but its limited season concentrates on vocal recitals. In this company, the Frick's auditorium stands out. Concerts at the museum began in 1938, just a few years after the former home of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick opened to the public. The artists presented in that early period were a who's-who of legends like Claudio Arrau, Andrés Segovia and Gregor Piatigorsky. Seating 175, the damask-lined, amber-glowing music room encapsulated the Frick's gentility; until 2005, by which time the focus had shifted from stars to rising artists, tickets were free and had to be requested by mail. Some devotees were furious when it was announced that the room would be given over to exhibition space in the renovation. 'Destroying the Frick's music room — a chamber concert venue beloved for generations — is an erasure of New York City's cultural and civic memory,' one resident testified at a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing in 2018. But while the music room had old-school charm, its acoustics were inert compared to the zestiness of the new auditorium. In the opening concert, on April 26, Lea Desandre's mezzo-soprano floated atop the sparkling Jupiter Ensemble in Handel arias. The following weekend, Alexi Kenney, whose violin sported those gut strings, joined Amy Yang on fortepiano in scorching Schumann sonatas. The dazzling flutist Emi Ferguson combined with the vivacious group Ruckus for a playfully conceived but seriously virtuosic program interweaving miniatures by Telemann and Ligeti. Even if the space no longer resembles a 19th-century salon, it is, if anything, more intimate. At the Takacs concert, a tall young man in the front row leaned forward at one point, listening intently, and his face was just a couple of feet from the first violinist. While the fortepiano was characterful in the Schumann, and Denk's 1880s piano blended well with the Takacs in the Brahms, one acoustical issue concerns the modern concert grand. The Steinway used during Susan Rothenberg's Sorey premiere and Mishka Rushdie Momen's juxtaposition of Tudor works and contemporary pieces tended to sound stony and blaring in the new hall, even in softer passages. After spending the first few performances in the center near the front, I sat in a back corner for Rushdie Momen's recital, and the piano sound bounced off the wall so strongly that it almost made my ear ring. Some kind of dampening panels or other intervention might help with the trouble. But it's hardly unusual for new halls to need acoustical tweaks. Jeremy Ney, appointed the Frick's head of music and performance a year ago — a blink of an eye in the long-planned world of classical music — has hit the ground running with this richly varied, brilliantly played festival. Hopefully he is given the resources to continue to organize robust seasons, not a mere scattering. And hopefully, in a landscape of museum performance programs increasingly dominated by wan site-specific productions and strained exhibition tie-ins, the series will retain the commitment of these opening weeks: great music, passionately performed. It's as simple as that.
New York Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At 50, the Takacs Quartet Remains as Essential as Ever
Recently, the Takacs Quartet gave a recital at the University of Colorado Boulder. In many ways, it could have been perfectly routine: some Bartok and Beethoven before an adoring audience at the college where the group has taught in residence since 1986. But the Takacs simply does not do routine. The Beethoven was a perfect example, an exceptional account of the Opus 135 Quartet that was astonishingly vivid even when watched on a livestream. You could have taken any of its four movements and written pages in their praise. Perhaps what struck most, though, was just how constantly and generously each of the players — Edward Dusinberre, first violin; Harumi Rhodes, second violin; Richard O'Neill, viola; and Andras Fejer, cello — was physically and aurally in dialogue with the others, and through them, the listener. It's that ability to communicate, among many other talents, that makes the Takacs the essential quartet of our time. It's also one of the qualities that has kept the group so identifiably itself as time has passed: The quartet marks its 50th anniversary this year. As part of a season of celebrations, it appears with the pianist Jeremy Denk at the Frick Collection on Thursday. The name Takacs has become a synonym for assured, collective excellence, but its story is one of evolution, not stasis. Read either of Dusinberre's eloquent memoirs relating the history of the quartet, and it becomes clear that it has been a personal drama, played out through the scores that its members rehearse and perform. Time certainly has remade the Takacs. Only one of the four young Hungarians — Gabor Takacs-Nagy, Karoly Schranz, Gabor Ormai and Fejer — who stepped into their first lesson in communist Hungary, ready with a Mozart quartet, remains. Both Roger Tapping and Geraldine Walther, the violists who followed Ormai in turn, have come and gone. 'Changing a player in a string quartet is a trauma that must be played out under the watchful eye of an expectant public,' Dusinberre has written. Some of those traumas have been more painful than others, above all the death of Ormai from cancer, in 1995. Change, though, has also brought the Takacs renewal, adaptation, promise — and even, for the two current violinists, marriage. Along the way, the Takacs that once carried forward the great Hungarian tradition of string quartets has morphed into something else, entirely its own. 'It's interesting,' the Attacca Quartet violinist Amy Schroeder said admiringly, 'because they have such a unique voice that I can't really pinpoint whether it's European, American, a combination of both or just the Takacs thing.' The Takacs thing. 'They have always been one of the world's pre-eminent string quartets, and they have a unique approach to the repertoire,' said John Gilhooly, the director of Wigmore Hall in London. 'Whatever they have, they have it in abundance.' ORMAI AND FEJER were teenagers when they decided to form a quartet. In 1973, a year before they entered the fabled Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, they asked Takacs-Nagy to be their first violinist, but they had to content themselves playing trios for the two years it took them to find a second. Takacs-Nagy eventually found Schranz at a soccer match. Hear Takacs-Nagy and Fejer talk about their education now, and it becomes obvious how lasting its imprint has been. Their teachers — Andras Mihaly, Ferenc Rados and, intriguingly, Gyorgy Kurtag — tried to instill a sense of musical morality in their students. 'It was not aimed at chasing mistakes; they were looking for values,' Takacs-Nagy said. 'We knew that behind every bar, every note, there are gold mines, diamond fields.' Fejer recalled that they 'thought we knew, if not everything, most things, and these three wonderful teachers made that confident feeling disappear in a matter of hours.' 'That was the last time any one of us thought we knew anything,' he added. Despite the travel difficulties imposed by life behind the Iron Curtain, the Takacs rose quickly, winning a series of competitions. They studied Bartok with Zoltan Szekely, who had premiered the composer's Second Violin Concerto and still called his old friend Bela. They also found a mentor in Denes Koromzay, who, like Szekely, had played in the legendary Hungarian String Quartet. In time, Takacs-Nagy said, they became more aware of themselves as part of a distinguished national lineage. 'The Takacs offered all the virtues of Central Europe's string-playing tradition and only occasionally its defects,' Bernard Holland of The New York Times wrote after hearing them on their first U.S. tour, in 1982. Other quartets might be more precise, he went on, but with the Takacs, 'one felt always in the presence of music.' After a series of shorter stays in the United States, the Takacs members defected in 1986 and moved to Boulder, where Koromzay taught. The Hungarian String Quartet had once been in residence there, and the Takacs found a community proud to give personal and professional aid. One local philanthropist, Fay Shwayder, eventually bought it four new instruments; after Takacs-Nagy left the quartet with hand trouble in 1992, another benefactor offered Dusinberre, fresh from his studies at the Juilliard School, a loan to buy a house. The Takacs was already a fine quartet, with a lyrical, emotionally frank sensibility that rarely underplayed the character of a phrase. Soon after Dusinberre and Tapping joined Schranz and Fejer, though, critical admiration turned into critical adulation. In 1998, the Takacs released a set of visceral Bartok quartets on Decca that remains a reference today. Even more celebrated was a later Beethoven survey that the New Yorker critic Alex Ross judged 'the most richly expressive modern account of this titanic cycle.' Showered with awards, it showcased the kind of playing — daring yet secure, humane yet heaven-bound — that listeners could spend a lifetime with. Indeed, it shaped entire careers. 'I had their cycle, and I was just so amazed by it,' recalled O'Neill, who first auditioned for the quartet while he was a student at Juilliard two decades ago, before eventually replacing Walther after her retirement 15 years later. 'It started this lifelong obsession of wanting to play the entire cycle because of them.' HOW, THEN, HAS the Takacs so reliably stayed the Takacs? There are small things, like the way that the players sit a little farther apart than the norm, or the means they have found to conclude arguments, including sending a player out into a hall to give a verdict on a phrase. Perhaps more important is the Takacs's fundamentally inquisitive nature, a professed desire to stay humble in front of the music and one another. All great quartets have had a similar curiosity, but it remains remarkable that you can select almost any of the Takacs's recordings — especially those it has made since a savage Schubert 'Death and the Maiden' announced the group's move to the Hyperion label in 2006 — and find playing that takes nothing for granted. Stephen Hough, the English pianist and composer who wrote his first quartet for the group, recorded the Brahms Piano Quintet with the Takacs in 2007 and toured the piece again with the current foursome this year. 'Each of them was injecting new ideas, night by night,' Hough said of those concerts. Dusinberre felt something similar from the earliest hours he spent in Boulder, rehearsing during his audition. ''Playing it safe' didn't seem to form any part of the Takacs's musical philosophy,' he wrote of that experience. Rhodes cites the 'good, healthy danger' of Schranz's playing as one of the main reasons she decided to become a second violinist at all. When she first heard the quartet, she said, 'all the pieces had this feeling of exploration and adventure, and there was this overall feeling of mischief, like children having fun together.' Even if every new player subtly changes the character of the quartet, their predecessors are palpable through the scores they left behind. Still, that can work both ways. As a young, introspective player, Dusinberre found the thick markings on Takacs-Nagy's parts too intimidating to use, despite the respect he had for such a charismatic musician. O'Neill, however, has found the visual history of the quartet he has at his disposal more helpful, from the careful, almost mathematical precision of Ormai's red and blue pencil lines, to the creativity of Tapping's fingerings, to the single words with which Walther distilled hours of rehearsal debate. Over time, there has also been a shift in the music that the Takacs has chosen to play. It has always been more than the Bartok-and-Beethoven foursome of lore; consult its discography and you will find Franck, Dutilleux, Britten, Shostakovich and Dohnanyi alongside Haydn and Brahms. But its increasing interest in music by contemporary composers like Clarice Assad and Nokuthula Ngwenyama has been a welcome surprise, as have its superb recordings of scores by Amy Beach, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and, on an album released last month with the pianist Marc-André Hamelin, Florence Price. 'If you look at our quartet, we're clearly a multigenerational group,' Rhodes said. 'We come from completely different cultures and backgrounds. I guess from my point of view, it would be weird if we weren't representing that in some way.' Eventually, there will come a time when Fejer departs and the transformation of the Takacs will be complete. Although the quartet is careful to promise nothing, Fejer suggested that it would be an 'extreme pity' if the Takacs did not endure, even without the last of its founding members. 'But luckily,' he added, 'we are not there yet.'
