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New York Times
18-06-2025
- 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.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Keys to success: the 2025 Van Cliburn piano competition, the instrument's Olympics
A distinctive line drawing of a grand piano adorns a clock face in Sundance Square. At night, it beams like a Tracey Emin installation, presiding over Fort Worth's downtown district. At the intersection leading to Bass Performance Hall the crosswalk has been replaced with an oversized keyboard, and, inside the cavernous venue, sartorial style favours black and white stripes. A pop-up gift shop in the lobby boasts an array of musical-themed memorabilia; there's the line drawing on a bubble-gum pink T-shirt, an enormous travel mug, a steak-branding fork. The theme-park feel is confirmed by a white Steinway emblazoned with Mickey Mouse – a limited hand-painted Disney edition (price on request). Welcome to piano city, smiles the sign. Every four years, piano lovers from across the world gather in this Texas enclave for the Van Cliburn international piano competition – the instrument's Olympics. It's not just about the financial reward (the gold medallist receives $100,000 (£74,000); silver $50,000; bronze $25,000, plus there's other discretionary awards): participation potentially catapults an early-career pianist into the industry's orbit. In 2022, at the postponed 2021 instalment, a then unknown Yunchan Lim took gold. Earlier this year I witnessed crowds of fans waiting to present the now 21-year-old with stuffed animals after a spectacular concert in Lucerne, where he played alongside Martha Argerich. Lim's Van Cliburn performance of Rachmaninov's third piano concerto is now the most-watched version of that concerto online, with more than 17m views. If Bass Performance Hall's painted skylight and elaborate candelabras recall a European opera house, the dazzling white balconies are all-American. Conductor Marin Alsop pulls the reins on the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, the Cliburn's house band. It's finals week: six pianists (from the 28 chosen to compete in the competition) perform over four nights. Every performance is livestreamed – this year's simulcast had 20m views across 145 countries – and, for the first time, is available via Apple Music Classical, along with curated playlists. A new Cliburn Keys View offers the option to watch a hands-only perspective, where disembodied lower arms deploy impeccable technique. While instructive, to do so misses the interplay between soloist and ensemble. Most major international piano competitions require their finalists to perform one concerto. There's usually a standard list of repertoire – inevitably Tchaikovsky 1 – and the concert is make or break. The Cliburn finalists (an all-male group; only four women competed in Fort Worth, two of whom made it as far as the semi-finals) play two concertos, one from a designated selection, the other can be anything. Alsop deserves her own gold medal for her openness to the challenge, which this year included the quirky choice of Bartok 2. After one concerto I stepped into a lift alongside Alsop who looked thoughtful and exhausted. Most orchestral seasons feature Rachmaninov 3, Beethoven 4 and Prokofiev 2 over the course of a few months. Alsop had done them all in one evening. The Cliburn judges heard 55 hours of music over the course of the event, as 28 pianists became 12, and then six. British pianist Paul Lewis, head of the jury, described the process as 'overwhelmingly intense'. From 2015-18 Lewis was chair of the Leeds international piano competition, the UK counterpart that feels positively quaint in comparison. Keir Starmer publicly wished participants luck ahead of last year's Leeds competition; Trump is unlikely to congratulate this year's Cliburn laureates who include competitors from Russia, Hong Kong, the US, Israel and combinations thereof. He's missing a trick: the Cliburn has always had political clout. Founder and Texan native Harvey Lavan 'Van' Cliburn charmed audiences at the 1958 inaugural International Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, winning gold at the height of the cold war and returning to that most hallowed of US celebrations, a ticker-tape parade. While some of his recordings are historic gems (his 1958 recording with the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra and Kiril Kondrashin was broadcast with choreographed fireworks at the city's afterparty), Cliburn's main legacy is the quadrennial contest that takes his name. Set up in 1962, its importance for cultural unification was immediately confirmed. There are no public guidelines on judging, what one judge wants from their Brahms 2, say, might vary wildly from another. Aristo Sham's Mendelssohn 1 frothed; Philipp Lynov's Liszt 2 bubbled. 'Why aren't you standing up?' one lady scolded the press line, as each participant received rapturous applause and we struggled to scribble. 'Y'all have a favourite?' one Texan asked me in the loos, where I photographed the doors decorated with a stave. I did, but mine was different to hers. Carter Johnson, the 28-year-old Canadian-American threw a curveball with the Ravel left-hand concerto, a work composed for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the first world war. It's a brooding piece demanding technical wizardry (British left-hand pianist Nicholas McCarthy plays it at this year's Proms opening weekend); Johnson danced and pedalled with elegance. Vitaly Starikov employed some quirky tempi in the Schumann; Evren Ozel's Tchaikovsky 1 was almost as muscular and thrilling as Cliburn's own historic performance. At this level, differentiation is down to matters of taste. Unusually – judging at this level can require UN levels of diplomatic negotiation to reach a consensus, depending on individual rules – the announcement came on time, with all finalists and jury members present. (There are sometimes resignations: in 1980 Argerich left the International Chopin piano competition in protest at the elimination of Ivo Pogorelić in the third round; and there are sometimes huffs: one young pianist refused to participate in the celebratory performance at the conclusion of last year's Hamamatsu international piano competition in Japan.) And, all prizes were awarded (the Tchaikovsky competition regularly withholds gold if a clear hierarchy of winners cannot be agreed, with joint silver given instead). Sham took the top spot, becoming the first pianist from Hong Kong to win in the Cliburn's history. The unassuming polymath – Sham is a former child star (featured on Channel 4's 2009 documentary The World's Greatest Musical Prodigies) who studied economics at Harvard and music at Juilliard – was a surprise choice to the press, but not to Cliburn viewers – he won the Audience award by more than 9,000 votes. Starikov won silver and Ozel placed third, also winning the Mozart Concerto award. I was disappointed not to see Lynov's talents recognised – he was too; it was some time before he appeared at the reception, but crucially, he attended. Talk was all about the verdicts; everyone had a different top three. After the huge success of Lim, the pressure to find the Next Big Pianist was palpable. But Lim is exceptional; competitions spit up dozens of superb musicians and only one in a generation will have his distinctive touch. The latest clutch of piano olympians gathered at a small table, looking as if they wished it was a piano stool. Journalists asked the necessary inane questions and received the necessary inane answers (Q: how does it feel? A: good). At one point Starikov, fatigued or bored, passed on the microphone to Ozel. All three wore shiny medals and consulted unseen bank accounts, blinking into bright futures. Listen to live performances from this year's Cliburn competition on Apple Music Classical: watch all the finals round concerto performances at
Los Angeles Times
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
There's more to Korean music than K-Pop. Young composers show how in L.A. Phil's Seoul Festival
K-pop. Oscar-celebrated cinema. Samsung in the living room. Political urgency in the press. However prominent Korean culture seems to be, there is surprising lack of coverage of the classical scene at large. Already at 21, Yunchan Lim, winner of the 2018 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, has reached superstar status. Myung-Whun Chung, whose conducting career began as an assistant to Carlo Maria Giulini at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1977, was just selected, over a veteran Italian conductor, to head La Scala in Milan with the blessing of Italy's nationalist president, Giorgia Meloni. And now the L.A. Phil has turned to the South Korean capital for an eight-day Seoul Festival as a follow-up to its revelatory Reykjavik and Mexico City festivals. Unsuk Chin, today's best-known Korean composer, is the curator. She is, in fact, today's only Korean composer who's well known internationally. Despite a seeming wealth of renowned performers, Korea remains a musically mysterious land. Most of what happens, even now, in Seoul's classical music scene doesn't roam far from Seoul. The mostly youngish composers and performers in the first L.A. Phil festival event, an exceptional Green Umbrella concert of new music at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday night, were all discoveries. Korean music is a discovery for much of the world. But California does have a head start. Chin, whose music has a visceral immediacy, has long fit in to L.A., championed by Kent Nagano at Los Angeles Opera and by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gustavo Dudamel and Susanna Mälkki at the L.A. Phil. Moreover, ancient Korean court music and its instruments became an obsession with the echt-California composer Lou Harrison. Its noble gentility has been subtly adding to the DNA of the California sound. Only two Korean composers before Chin have made an indelible impression on the world stage, and both, as is Chin, became avant-gardist emigres. As outsiders, they have striking relevance. Isang Yun ((1917–1995) had a shocking career. A brilliant pioneering composer who melded traditional Asian music with contemporary techniques, Yun had been briefly arrested for his participation in the Korean independence movement of the early 1940s. He fled to West Germany, where he became a prominent composer before being kidnapped and returned to Korea. Imprisoned, tortured and threatened with a death sentence, he was eventually freed thanks to pressure from a consortium of internationally influential musicians (Igor Stravinsky, György Ligeti and Herbert von Karajan among them) and returned to West Berlin. And then there was Nam June Paik (1932-2006). Though famed for having been the first major video artist, Paik was a classically trained pianist and composer who began his career following in Schoenberg's footsteps by writing 12-tone music. His route to video was an erratic one that began when he fell under the spell of John Cage and became one of the more outrageous members of the anarchic Fluxus art and performance movement. I once asked Paik, who taught briefly at CalArts when it opened, about whether he always considered himself a composer. He said only a yuppie — 'you know, those people who work in a bank during the day and only go to concerts at night' — would think he wasn't. The Yun and Paik zeitgeist of going your own original and expressive sonic way while always being aware of tradition, whether embraced or rejected, pervades Chin, 63, and the generation of Korean composers who came after her and whom she has invited to the festival. Chin herself left Seoul to study with Ligeti in Europe. The Hungarian composer's music, thanks to Salonen's advocacy, is also in the L.A. blood. The orchestra has, of course, had a Ligeti festival. For the Green Umbrella concert, Chin revealed a great range of approaches among the four exceedingly interesting next-generation composers. She also invited a dazzling array of soloists specializing in Western and Korean instruments as well as the magnificent Ensemble TIMF, which joined the L.A. Phil New Music Group. All were making debuts alongside the luminous and poetic young conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi. In the four pieces (each about 15 minutes), Korean, European and American traditions can serve as sources for reinvention. Juri Seo's Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, given a dashing performance by pianist HieYon Choi, consists of short movements that include a jazz fughetta and Schumann-esque romanticism. Sun-Young Pahg's austerely formal 'L'autre moitié de Silence' for daegeum and ensemble featured Hong Yoo as soloist bending notes and bending time on the bamboo flute used in Korean folk and traditional music. In Yie-Eun Chun's spritely Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by the L.A. Phil for the festival, scale-like passages got the Paganini treatment from soloist SooBeen Lee. Dongjin Bae's 'reflective — silky and rough' for standard western flute and spacey strings, another L.A. Phil commission, had an ancient feel with its silences and breathy solos played with enthralling focus by Yubeen Kim. Chin's 'Gougalon (Scenes From a Street Theater),' which ended the program, is a riotous evocation of Hong Kong. Rather than musically reproduce street sounds and people sounds, Chin transforms them into spectacular orchestral chatter. The effect is what their joy must sound like, what their meals must sound like, what their walking and talking and laughing and crying must sound like in a language you don't understand because exhilaration isn't language. All of this is music by distinct personalities, each striving for something sonically personal. Musically mixing East and West dispenses with regulations when crossing borders and becomes an an act of individuality and often resistance. Chun's do-re-me scales become cockeyed before you grasp what's happening. Bae's silky flute, when rough underneath, evoke the feeling you might get when taking a break from Bach an instant before the world's most compelling composer overtakes your own senses. The conductor Soo-Yeoul Choi favors transparency and sensuality at the same time with expressive gestures that seem to magically mold sound. Each piece had different instrumental combinations involving both L.A. Phil and TIMF players. Everything worked. The festival continues with weekend orchestra concerts featuring different mixes of four more new Korean scores commissioned by the L.A. Phil, Chin's 2014 Clarinet Concerto and a pair of Brahms concertos. A chamber music concert with works by Schumann and Brahms played by Korean musicians is the closing event Tuesday. Meanwhile, for a better idea of what Unsuk Chin is up to, last month in Hamburg Kent Nagano conducted the premiere of her new opera, 'The Dark Side of the Moon.' It is a philosophical reflection on the relationship between quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung that profoundly reflects how ideas and traditions interact. It can be watched on YouTube.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 3 album review – hear the performance that made Yunchan Lim a star
As soon as the 2022 Van Cliburn piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas, was over, news travelled across the Atlantic that the latest winner was very special indeed. Over the following year or so, Yunchan Lim's recitals in Europe and a first disc for Decca (of the Chopin Études), together with recordings that documented his performances in the competition, of Liszt's Transcendental Études in his semi-final recital, and Rachmaninov's Third Concerto in the final, confirmed that the reports had been no exaggeration: he is the real thing, a once-in-a-generation talent. Now Decca has reissued the Fort Worth concerto performance, but with the sound significantly cleaned up and rebalanced, and the wonder of Lim's playing if anything enhanced. What is immediately striking is the sheer confidence and poise of everything he does, and the overriding sense that there is never any doubt about the direction in which this majestic concerto should be taken; it's hard to believe that this is the performance of an 18-year-old. Needless to say, every technical challenge in the keyboard writing seems to be effortlessly negotiated, yet the brilliance is never an end in itself; it is always part of a bigger picture, without ever diminishing the thrill of such astonishing command, so that the way the unadorned melodic lines of the slow movement are phrased becomes just as telling as the way in which the densest flurries of notes are negotiated. Just perhaps in the finale, when Lim can seem too headstrong for his own good, does his performance betray his age; otherwise it deserves a place alongside the finest versions of this concerto on disc, from those by Rachmaninov himself and Vladimir Horowitz to Martha Argerich and Vladimir Ashkenazy. Despite Decca's remastering, though, the sound is by no means perfect; some orchestral detail remains too distant, and the string sound is sometimes scrawny and undernourished. Normally such shortcomings might preclude a five-star recommendation, but Lim's playing is so astonishing it's almost irrelevant. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
RPO/Petrenko review — Yunchan Lim outshone by Strauss
'Thank you for joining the journey,' said the note from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in my inbox the morning after. Unlike dozens at the Royal Albert Hall, I had actually finished the journey too. Many fans of South Korea's global piano star Yunchan Lim clearly decided they were too overcome by their idol's first-half performance to strap on their crampons and join Strauss's Alpine Symphony . It was a night that felt like two concerts hoicked together. Two mountains — we had Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain as well as Strauss's Alp — flanked a performance by a 21-year-old already at the summit of the classical music world. Despite his fame, the refreshing thing about Lim — and this seems to be baked into
