Phoning in from Frankfurt—he’s there getting a visa ahead of his conducting debut at La Scala—Kazuki Yamada radiates positivity down the Zoom call. An extremely popular conductor in Birmingham, where he is currently City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director and artistic advisor, it was recently announced that Yamada would succeed Robin Ticciati as the […]
Tag: Conductors
Posted inHistory
Bernardino Molinari’s Fifth Season
In his memoir Overtures and Beginners, the English conductor Eugene Goossens described Bernardino Molinari, long-standing music director of Rome’s Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, as “the most ridiculously hot-tempered of all maestri… Stories of his stick-breaking, desk-biting, and watch-smashing exploits have long since passed into the realm of legend.” Both Goossens and Molinari had […]
Posted inInterview
Breathing Room
The 24-year-old conductor Aurel Dawidiuk is Associate Conductor with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Recently, I spoke with him about the right repertoire at the right time, facing your insecurities in front of an orchestra, and why he didn’t become a soccer goalkeeper. VAN: I read that you’ve wanted to be a conductor since […]
Posted inInterview
“You Have to Be Relentless”
To look at his schedule or to watch him huff, stomp and jab with his hands—without a baton, always—at the podium, Antonio Pappano would seem to be one of the hardest-working conductors in the classical music business. For much of the past two decades, he has led Italy’s finest symphony orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale […]
Posted inInterview
The Constant Dance
On February 20, Marin Alsop makes her debut conducting the Berlin Philharmonic at the orchestra’s Biennale, leading a premiere by Outi Tarkiainen alongside pieces by Brett Dean, Aaron Copland and Heitor Villa-Lobos on themes of nature and climate change. Last spring, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, but this next gig has the […]
Posted inProfile
The Last of the Kapellmeisters
“He who has no time must make time” is a Confucian maxim with dangerous implications for musicians. The line separating the moment of satisfaction from an expanse of respectable boredom is thin. And it’s different for everyone, informed by mood or previous experience. As I got on the bus at the Elbphilharmonie after a recent […]
Posted inInterview
Puzzles and Courage
Masato Suzuki plays the harpsichord and leads the Bach Collegium Japan with a clean, pearly touch, creating performances with the delicacy of freshly trimmed and polished fingernails. The son of the ensemble’s founder, Masaaki Suzuki, Masato will lead the group’s latest European tour, beginning January 21. We spoke on video call about composing in the […]
Posted inEssay
Seven Lives
I often think about the life Sibelius led in his remote villa of Ainola. He had stopped traveling to his favorite cities—Berlin, Vienna and London—and must have felt quite lonely and isolated. Perhaps part of the reason he burned his Eighth Symphony was that he didn’t feel connected to the new modernistic trends in Europe. […]
Posted inInterview
A Fast-Rising Star Reveals His Humble Origins
Tall, thin as a rake, with wispy hair and piercing blue eyes, Kurt Dirigent looks more like an imaginary character than the artistic director of the ground-breaking ensemble Lorem Ipsum. He orders a flat white at the Soho branch of London-based independent coffee shop Gail’s, with the pained look of a man who has seen […]
Posted inInterview
The Authenticity of Spirit
“See the music, hear the dance.” Listening to the Czech Philharmonic this fall, both at their home in Prague, the Rudolfinum, and in their many recent recordings under current music director Semyon Bychkov, that quote from George Balanchine often came to mind. What was different about these renditions of classics? The orchestra’s dark, rustic strings […]