Does last week’s news that Los Angeles Philharmonic Chief Executive Chad Smith will leave the orchestra to head the Boston Symphony, coming on top of Gustavo Dudamel’s announcement that he will become music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026, create worrisome uncertainty for an otherwise successful orchestra? Salonen’s Sinfonia Concertante, a potent organ concerto, uniquely filled the hall …
“How to Listen,” the six-month weekly series that dived into so-called classical music, was not my idea. Many critics approached Cage’s silent piece, “4’33”,” emblematic of the early days of the pandemic, when industrial noise and traffic diminished and ears perked up to the wonders of environmental sound. I chose Machaut’s luminous “Messe Notre Dame,” for instance, because it helped …
Everyone is asking, or predicting, “what’s next.” That’s what you do in a pandemic. When now?” And Luciano Berio, applying Mahler’s symphony and Beckett’s novel as framework in his “Sinfonia,” took “What next?” to the next step. Berio took the second movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection,” and added musical commentaries in the form of snippets of …
