RECITAL

The Morgan Library and Museum
Young Concert Artists

Omer Quartet with Hanzhi Wang, accordion

Scarlatti - Keyboard Sonatas, K. 9, 146, 159
Alfred Schnittke - Revis Fairy Tale
Moszkowski - Étincelles
Haydn - String Quartet in G minor, Op. 20, No. 3
Katherine Balch (YCA Composer) - With Each Breathing
Piazzolla - Two Tangos

"The collaboration of the Omer Quartet and Hanzhi Wang was the real surprise of the evening, a genuine find and a genuine delight." —Communities Digital News (Washington, D.C.)

HERE IS THE ENTIRE CONCERT. We were one chair to the side of the center camera!

One of the pieces she played...

LECTURE

Socrates in the City
Eric Metaxas & Peter Thiel

"Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He cofounded PayPal, led it as CEO, and took it public; he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director; and he cofounded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies including SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young entrepreneurs, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking. He is also the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future."

There we are on the front row just to the right of the picture.

That is the back of my head just left of the center of the picture.

If you zoom in you can see Carolyn's head in the very center of the picture.

LINCOLN CENTER

David Geffen Hall
New York Philharmonic

Gustavo Dudamel - Conductor
Sergio Tiempo - Piano

Ives - The Unanswered Question
Esteban Benzecry - Piano Concerto, Universos infinitos (New York Premiere)
Dvořák - Symphony No. 9, From the New World

"This first of Gustavo Dudamel’s two weeks at the Philharmonic features Dvořák’s beloved “postcard” from the New World — a cascade of beguiling melodies, majestic horn calls, and an expression of homesickness for his native Bohemia. The Orchestra also performs Ives’s mini philosophy lesson about man’s eternal search for meaning and the New York Premiere of Esteban Benzecry’s Piano Concerto evoking, in the composer’s words, “humans and their connections with their internal and external universes, in a world before our civilization, where times were governed by planetary and agricultural cycles.”

Gustavo Dudamel conducted the New York Philharmonic in works by Ives, Dvorak and Esteban Benzecry on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Review: Gustavo Dudamel Jolts the ‘New World’ Symphony to Life

By Anthony Tommasini

Jan. 16, 2020, 12:23 p.m. ET

Though Dvorak’s stirring, tuneful “New World” Symphony is justly popular, it tops my list of works that are heard too often for their own good. Perhaps my attitude comes in part from overkill during college: The instructor of a gym class I took played excerpts during exercise sessions. Even today, when I’m at a performance and the stern, pulsing third movement begins, I feel like I should be in the aisle doing jumping jacks.

So all credit to Gustavo Dudamel, who led the New York Philharmonic in a fresh, insightful and exciting performance of the work at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday. This varied program opened with Ives and included the New York premiere of a colorfully eclectic piano concerto by Esteban Benzecry. Yet Dvorak’s war horse was the unexpected highlight.

This was Mr. Dudamel’s first appearance with the Philharmonic in 11 years. He has been busy elsewhere, of course — mainly as the visionary music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (That orchestra announced on Wednesday that his contract was being extended through the 2025-26 season, his 17th there.)

But New York is making the most of his return: This was the first of two programs he is leading, over two weeks. The hall was packed.

In the Dvorak, Mr. Dudamel jolted the familiar score with vitality and imagination. Yet the performance stood out just as much for the subtlety, restraint and even gravity he brought out. There was a touch of elusiveness in the way he shaped the slow introduction to the first movement. Once the main Allegro section started, with the assertive minor-mode main theme, the music had engrossing ambiguity, the mood both rousing and unsettling. The emphatic execution of small details made a big difference, as in the way the orchestra would hold the final note of a rising phrase for its full value, with unwavering sound.

When the Allegro turned reflective, in the elegiac second theme, the rich, dark sound of the Philharmonic turned warm and sunny. When themes returned, Mr. Dudamel often took a slightly altered approach, drawing out a phrase more expressively or pressing a crescendo more forcefully. He has long been an admirably intuitive musician, willing to respond in the moment, and the final charge to the brassy, vehement conclusion of the movement was thrilling.

The brass chorale that opens the slow movement was grim and resounding, rather than majestic, which set up the poignantly sweet main theme, Dvorak’s evocation of an American spiritual, to be all the more affecting. This melody is first heard on English horn, and Ryan Roberts played it beautifully. The bucolic middle section of the movement was vividly rendered, with rustling strings and woodwinds conjuring twittering birds.

In the scherzo, the performance shifted deftly, from stretches of somber, driving intensity to passages of lightness and grace. The finale charged forward fearlessly. Yet there were also moments of Brahmsian grandeur.

The program opened with an effectively hushed account of Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” which introduced themes of timelessness and mysticism that were then taken up in Mr. Benzecry’s piano concerto, “Universos Infinitos.” This composer grew up in Argentina but has lived in Paris since the late 1990s. Mr. Dudamel and the soloist, the pianist Sergio Tiempo (making his Philharmonic debut), gave the premiere of this kinetic, three-movement, half-hour work in the fall in Los Angeles.

Mr. Benzecry’s program note covers lots of ground. The piece has to do “with humans and their connections with their internal and external universes,” he writes, “in a world before our civilization” that was governed by “planetary and agricultural cycles.”

The music itself was colorfully orchestrated, restless and likable — if a little generic and, for all its tumultuousness, thin. The first movement is run though with an assertive four-note theme, like a somber fanfare. I heard echoes of Prokofiev and Messiaen in the piano part, full of pounding rhythms, cascading chords, spiraling swirls of fast notes, and that four-note theme, played in every contortion. The mercurial, mysterious slow movement was the strongest music, with intriguing cluster chords in the piano and shimmering, eerie orchestra sonorities. The finale is a dizzying perpetual-motion toccata. Mr. Tiempo gave a scintillating and virtuosic performance.

Hearing this new piece certainly helped me hear the “New World” Symphony afresh. But it was Mr. Dudamel’s probing, exuberant performance of the Dvorak that really accomplished that. At the end, when the lingering final chord trailed off into silence, the audience was reluctant to break the mood with applause. How often does that happen at a “New World” performance?

LINCOLN CENTER

Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Suk - Elegie for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 23 (1902)
Janáček - Sonata for Violin and Piano (1914-15)
Debussy - Quartet in G minor for Strings, Op. 10 (1893)
Brahms - Quartet No. 2 in A major for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 26 (1861)

"Claude Debussy’s innovations made modern music possible. His only string quartet, the first truly Impressionist-style chamber music, opened a new era for the string quartet. Surrounding Debussy’s iconic work are Czech novelties both traditional and modernist, plus a milestone work of the German school, Brahms’s mighty A major Piano Quartet."


“There is no law except pleasure.”

"This was how Claude Debussy defined his groundbreaking approach to composing. During the late 19th and early 20th century, his innovations changed the way music was written, heard, and performed. About Debussy’s work on tonight’s program, composer Bruce Adolphe states: “His String Quartet is the perfect example of the huge imagination that brings to the score a completely new vision of what chamber music can be, and what music itself can be.”

From the performer’s perspective, Debussy’s string quartet, along with Ravel’s (composed a decade later and modeled on Debussy’s), constitute an essential chapter in the handbook of string quartet technique. Much in the way that learning and mastering quartets of Haydn provides the groundwork for tackling the later works of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn, so do these two French Impressionist-era quartets require of the performer skills eventually needed for Bartók, Shostakovich, Janáček, and Korngold, to name just a few. Debussy’s quartet presented challenges on an unprecedented level in 1893, much the way Beethoven’s Op. 59 quartets required, for the first time in chamber music history, players of professional level. Debussy’s complex, layered harmonies demand perfect intonation; the fluidity of the music, combined with its frequent gossamer textures, requires players of consummate individual and ensemble skill; and most importantly, the quintessentially French nature of the music needs to be rendered with the same perfection as that country’s incomparable cuisine.

It was our intention in this program to frame Debussy’s quartet with works of strong contrasting personality. Both Suk and Janáček, like Debussy, were ardentnationalists whose music embodied all they loved in their native Czech culture. And Johannes Brahms embodied the opposite approach to Debussy: he was destined to uphold the very rules that Debussy discarded, carrying the classical tradition all the way through the Romantic era with unparalleled dedication. But four years after Debussy’s iconic quartet appeared, Brahms died, and with him the dominance of 19th-century Romantic sensibility. The future of music was passed to Debussy and to all those inspired and liberated by his genius."

PERFORMANCE

Merkin Hall
Tuesday Matinées

Omer Quartet

Schubert – String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major, Op. 125, No. 1, D. 87
GabriellaSmith – Porcupine Wash
Beethoven – String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat Major, Op. 127

"Anyone hoping to catch a glimpse of tomorrow’s most promising concert-music attractions today would be well advised to look into the 'Tuesday Matinées' series at Merkin Hall, a dependable incubator for burgeoning talent." – Steve Smith, The New Yorker

"A invigorating interpretation, [played] with a sense of discovery and adventure, but also with considerable finesse.” - San Diego Union

Winners of the Gold Medal at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and the 2017 Young Concert Artists International Auditions.