Markus Hinterhäuser at the Ojai Festival

The New York Times

A Quirky Violinist and a Festival to Match

By Zachary Woolfe

Excerpt from review...

On occasion Ms. Kopatchinskaja seemed to favor extremity for its own sake: super-quiets, for example, that drew attention merely to how quiet they were. But there was no such self-consciousness on Saturday afternoon, when she was joined by the pianist Markus Hinterhäuser (taking a weekend off as the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival), in two duos by Ustvolskaya, a Shostakovich pupil who went on to develop a stony style in virtual isolation.

This is music of constant forced transformation: A grinding march suddenly lightens into a lullaby; after that melody, in turn, seems to wander into lethargy, it suddenly snaps back to attention. Then Mr. Hinterhäuser was simply astonishing in an unbroken hour of Ustvolskaya’s six piano sonatas, from the gentle loneliness of the first to the thunderous full-forearm cluster chords of the last. (Ms. Kopatchinskaja was his page turner.)

I won’t soon forget his account of the Fourth Sonata, with a dark undertow that begins inexorably dragging the softly winding melody under. Ustvolskaya was, in this playing, unfailingly grim but never icy or smug. This was human music, to the last — full of intense dignity.

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What's on TV Saturday: medici.tv

The New York Times

By Sara Aridi

LESSONS IN LOVE AND VIOLENCE 2:30 p.m. on Medici.tv. This new opera by the composer George Benjamin and the playwright Martin Crimp centers on a love triangle inspired by the relationship between King Edward II of England and his courtier Piers Gaveston. Filmed at the Royal Opera House in London, the production is led by the baritones Stéphane Degout and Gyula Orendt and the soprano Barbara Hannigan. In his review for The Times, Anthony Tommasini named the opera a Critic’s Pick and praised Mr. Benjamin’s work. “The writing is so lush, haunting and detailed — radiant one moment, piercingly dissonant the next — that you are continuously enveloped by the raucous beauty of the sounds.”

The secret life of a music director

The Washington Post

By Anne Midgette

Gianandrea Noseda, 54, ushers a visitor into his spotless Kennedy Center office. As the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, he has a large room that is, at the moment, minimal in its decor: walls bare, shelves empty. The sole personal touch is a gleaming silver espresso machine, courtesy of the Italian coffee company Lavazza, and even that is more than just an expression of personal taste. Lavazza has sponsored Noseda’s work in the past and, now that he’s here, has landed the Kennedy Center coffee franchise: There are Lavazza machines in food service areas throughout the building. ¶ A music director is the public face of an orchestra. He or she sets the course of programming, oversees auditions for new players, meets donors and attends fundraising events and tries, however he or she can, to establish a significant presence in the community. And yet Noseda’s bare office bears witness to another salient fact of the job: The music director is hardly ever here.

Noseda’s face is plastered on posters all over the Kennedy Center to let people know a new era has begun. But on May 20, when he leaves Washington after his final subscription concerts of his inaugural season, he will have been here for eight weeks since September. Next season, he will increase his presence to 12 weeks. That’s not unusual for a major music director. Christoph Eschenbach, Noseda’s predecessor, was never at the NSO for more than 10 weeks a season. At least Noseda and his wife, Lucia, have gotten an apartment in Washington; many international music directors, like Riccardo Muti at the Chicago Symphony, live in hotels. (Noseda’s home, when he’s there, is on Lago Maggiore, in Italy; he also has an apartment in Milan.)

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Concert review: London Symphony Orchestra/ Noseda at the Barbican

The Times (UK)

By Rebecca Franks

★★★★☆

"With fluid, unshowy gestures the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda let the music tell its own storyWith fluid, unshowy gestures the Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda let the music tell its own story"

Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony emerges from darkness. This poem of suffering was written between July and September 1943. The Nazis were in retreat, the Russians were triumphant. Stalin wanted upbeat trumpets and drums. Shostakovich gave him those, but, ironically, enveloped in a vast symphony lamenting the scourge of war, the trauma, the emotional toll and the millions of lives lost. Shock, sadness, anger, despair, fear, helplessness, numbness, the meaningless of life — it’s all there.

And it was all there in Gianandrea Noseda’s outstanding performance with the London Symphony Orchestra. With fluid, unshowy gestures, the Italian conductor let the music tell its own story. Of course, that’s an illusion. A symphony on this scale doesn’t play itself. Noseda found the right tempos, drew out the unusual colours and textures of the orchestration and caught every mood. From sepulchral basses to intense violins, the strings were formidable, as were the wind and brass solos — shrieking E flat clarinet and piccolo, eloquent cor anglais and bassoon, an ethereal horn.

The Eighth starts in C minor and heads to C major for the finale, but this is not a tragedy-to-triumph narrative in the Beethovenian mould. Shostakovich gives us a quieter, more equivocal victory. The fade to black has been interpreted as disappearance into nothingness, but here those soft moments felt like a weakly flickering candle. This glimmer of life, not even necessarily of hope, said nothing more and nothing less than I am still here, I survive.

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Apollo's Fire at Carnegie Hall

The New York Times

Shared Madness

By James R. Oestreich

AT 1 MINUTE 55 SECONDS

More Vivaldi. Any time the composer’s display of mad fiddling — “La Follia,” featuring dueling violinists — comes along, I sit up and take notice. Jeannette Sorrell and her Cleveland-based early music band, Apollo’s Fire, ended their fine program of Baroque gems at Zankel Hall on Thursday with Ms. Sorrell’s own expansion of the Vivaldi work for full string orchestra. It preserves intricate interplay between the two soloists in a number of places but generally shares the wealth of virtuosity and abandon with the group’s other gifted violinists to thrilling effect. 

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Noseda gives new lightness to powerful and familiar Requiem

The Washington Post

By Anne Midgette

Powerful, dramatic and familiar, Verdi’s Requiem is supposed to be a specialty of the National Symphony Orchestra’s new music director, Gianandrea Noseda. It’s one of his signature pieces, in fact: a calling card he’s left at his various international way stations in the course of his career. But the piece is so well known, and so often done — especially in Washington, this chorus-filled city — that I confess I harbored a certain skepticism. At least, I did until Thursday night, when he conducted the Requiem with the NSO at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, and completely won me over.

The wonderful thing about this Requiem was that it was entirely unexpected, without being obviously showy. When you think of an Italianate Verdi Requiem — this piece that began as a tribute to the Italian patriot Alessandro Manzoni, too theatrical for any church — you might expect a certain kind of heart-on-the-sleeve, thundering drama. Noseda delivered drama aplenty, but it was organic rather than melodramatic. His line was fluid and supple, his touch light, so that even the thwacks of the bass drum in the “Dies Irae” were forwardly propulsive and part of a bigger picture.

Noseda is also a born opera conductor, as he showed anew Thursday with his careful attention to the singers, the words, and their meaning. The joint forces of the Washington Chorus, in its first months with its own new music director, Christopher Bell, and the Choral Arts Society of Washington sounded warm and glowing and responsive, from the resilient whispers of the “Kyrie” to the full-throated near-shouts of the “Dies Irae.”

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Carnegie Debut of Apollo's Fire

The New York Times

By William Robin

Beginning in 1720, Café Zimmermann — the largest coffeehouse in Leipzig, Germany — launched a weekly concert series featuring the Collegium Musicum, the city’s most prestigious ensemble. Nine years later, Johann Sebastian Bach took over direction of the Collegium, inaugurating one of the great historical moments for the intertwining of caffeine and music.

The Cleveland period-instrument group Apollo’s Fire takes Bach’s Zimmermann residency as the theme for its Carnegie debut on Thursday [March 22, 2018], with a program focused on popular fare performed by the Collegium at the famed coffeehouse, including works by Telemann and Handel as well as Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos No. 4 and 5. With harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell at its helm, Apollo’s Fire has been celebrated for its boisterous revitalizations of canonic Baroque works such as Sorrell’s thrilling orchestration of Vivaldi’s “La Follia” sonata, which will be featured at the Zankel Hall performance. 

A Look Back 100 Years Later on Debussy’s Violin Sonata—the Last Piece He Wrote Before His Death

Strings Magazine

MARCH 14, 2018

By Brian Wise

Claude Debussy, battling late-stage cancer and faced with the growing hardships of World War I, had only a few self-deprecating words about his swan song, the Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor. “I only wrote this sonata to be rid of the thing, spurred on by my dear publisher,” he wrote to a colleague in June 1917. “This sonata will be interesting from a documentary point of view and as an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war.”

Composers’ deathbed works often carry an aura of gravitas and poignancy—be it Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s Die Winterreise, or Berg’s Violin Concerto—but Debussy’s correspondence suggests that the sonata was less poetic than a dispiriting grind. Later biographers and critics perhaps didn’t help its reputation: Edward Lockspeiser’s two-volume biography deemed it “an illuminating failure” while critic Paul Griffiths, in a 2001 New York Times review, called it “disappointingly retrograde.”

“The opening is so dreamy and full of promise. It’s so personal but you need a wonderful touch. Most of us spend a lifetime learning that.”

—Anne-Sophie Mutter

But over the past century, violinists have come to embrace Debussy’s compact and exquisitely autumnal Violin Sonata—if partly out of gratitude to the French composer for devoting his fading energies to a solo instrument that he largely passed by earlier in life. In 2018, the centennial year of Debussy’s death, the sonata seems primed for a fresh appraisal.

“It’s such a wonderful example of French music,” says Anne-Sophie Mutter, who recorded the piece in 1995, and this year plans to return it to her recital programs. “It’s so different. The sonata is just an incredible example of sound colors, of delicacy, and subtlety of tonal development.”

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Noseda, NSO prove to have ‘Gospel’ truth

The Washington Post

By Anne Midgette

Context, they say, is everything. I hadn’t thought I cared for John Adams’s “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” (2012), a sprawling retelling of the last days of Christ from the points of view of Mary Magdalene and her siblings, Martha and Lazarus. But I found myself won over by the National Symphony Orchestra’s performance of the work, under Gianandrea Noseda, and in the presence of the composer on Thursday night.

It’s not that the piece isn’t problematic. Peter Sellars, the director, polymath and provocateur, has developed a technique of stitching together his libretti for Adams works from a pastiche of existing texts — in this case, excerpts from works by writers from the Jamaican author June Jordan to novelist Louise Erdrich, interwoven with the Bible. The result is an oblique collage of words that evoke moods and meanings, but leave it to the composer to determine the narrative. But Adams, adept and powerful a composer as he is, often follows Sellars’s lead and writes similarly evocative, slightly oblique music — creating works that are dramatically static.

Yet this piece worked for me Thursday as it hadn’t on recordings, and I was shocked when the music ended to see that more than 2½ hours had passed (partly because of a late start and a long intermission).

The biggest reason for this was Noseda, who, in the absence of a clear narrative, took hold and found one himself. It was an impressive, dramatic and passionate performance from the new music director of the NSO, who deserves a lot of respect: To agree to undertake an unfamiliar piece in a repertoire you’re not associated with as one of the biggest projects of your maiden season shows a striking open-mindedness, and he clearly approached the work with sincerity and feeling, and made something of it. Zinging silences between episodes, the spongy arpeggiations of the strings and the big, dark pounding chords of the low brass and low winds all were imbued with a drama that was at best inherent in the score.

It was also nice to see the orchestra devoting a whole evening to a significant contemporary work. This “Gospel” engages with the present, placing the Bible alongside accounts of Cesar Chavez, modern prisons, drug addiction and poverty and social ills — an approach that’s a Peter Sellars hallmark. It was exhilarating to see the orchestra embrace another part of its past — the commitment to big new American works that it used to have under Leonard Slatkin. The house wasn’t very full Thursday, and nobody would claim that contemporary works are always big box office, but it gave those who were there a different kind of brain fodder than the usual program, and helped the NSO be a more active part of the national conversation. (Indeed, medici.tv is going to broadcast Saturday’s performance live.)

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Kennedy Center Festival features Gianandrea Noseda

The New York Times

Classical: Kennedy Center Festival

By William Robin

March 5 to 19; www.kennedy-center.org.

Under the direction of Deborah Rutter, the traditionalist Kennedy Center in Washington has inched into the 21st century: In recent seasons, it has engaged compelling artists like Q-Tip and Jason Moran to oversee programming across genres. The latest initiative is the new festival Direct Current, a celebration of contemporary culture that ranges from the performance artist Taylor Mac (March 6) to the hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces (March 17).

The festival’s most promising contemporary classical offerings include music by John Cage and Viet Cuong, played by the ensemble So Percussion (March 9); a survey of Philip Glass’s complete études by a team of pianists including Mr. Moran and Mr. Glass (March 9); Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anthracite Fields” (March 13); and the environmentalist documentary “The Colorado,” featuring live music from Roomful of Teeth (March 18). The biggest ticket, though, may be the National Symphony Orchestra performing John Adams’s potent oratorio “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” under Gianandrea Noseda, himself in the midst of a promising first season as the orchestra’s music director (March 8 and 10).