JANUARY 25, 2025: the New York Philharmonic marks the centennial of former Music Director Pierre Boulez by remounting one of his legendary ‘Rug Concerts’. Originally performed in 1974, the concert explores connections among works by composers ranging from J.S. Bach and Schubert to Boulez himself. Part of the NY Phil’s Sounds On.
PIERRE BOULEZ
The Magus, by Alex Ross, The New Yorker
January 18, 2016
Whorl, n. – Each of the turns, coils, or convolutions in any spiral structure and
Eddy, n. – A circular motion in water, or air, contrary to the current.
As someone who spent a decade attempting to tame the tricky winds that flow from mouthpiece to bell, I have a deep love of the horn and enormous admiration for those who can master its treacherous physics. The thoughts swirling in my head as I wrote for Andrew Bain were largely connected to the beauty of his sound and the purity of his tone in all registers.
Whorls and Eddies
By David Robertson
Commissioned by LA Phil, with generous support from the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund
World Premiere by LA Phil New Music Group / Green Umbrella
LA Phil Etudes: Book 1
Conducted by John Adams
April 16, 2024
Walt Disney Concert Hall
“It’s always a good sign when an orchestra’s players light up with smiles at a conductor. And on Thursday night at David Geffen Hall, that happened over and over, with grins passing between the musicians of the New York Philharmonic and its podium guest, David Robertson, throughout a beguiling, smart program.”
Anastasia Tsioulcas, The New York Times – Critic’s Pick
On David Robertson and the New York Philharmonic
October 20, 2023
Le temps et l’écume was premiered on December 11, 1989, at the Maison de Radio France by the Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, conducted by the American David Robertson. It was Robertson’s first in-depth engagement with spectral music. “I remember thinking, OK, this is complex stuff, let me go to the piano and play it,” he said. “There were thirteen notes in the first chord that starts the piece off, and I could only play three of them on an equally tempered piano. That left me feeling quite daunted.” Robertson had to accept that he would not be able to hear the music in his head before he gave the first downbeat. But he rehearsed with Grisey, whom he found “very calm, but very exacting,” and the premiere was a success. The concert was long and had too many new works, Robertson recalled, but the audience could tell that Le temps et l’écume “was a serious piece in the repertoire.”
Delirium and Form: The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey
By Jeffrey Arlo Brown
Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press
August 8, 2023
318 Pages
Available from Boydell & Brewer, and other booksellers
Three-Year Tenure Begins in 2023-24 Season
Salt Lake City, December 7, 2022— David Robertson—a distinguished and renowned American conductor, composer, thinker, artist, and visionary—will join Utah Symphony | Utah Opera’s artistic leadership team in the newly-created role of Creative Partner for a three-year tenure beginning in the 2023-24 season. The symphony’s international search for its next Music Director is ongoing and Robertson looks forward to a close collaboration with that position… [read the full announcement]
A GLIMPSE OF THE BUTTERFLY
“The great joy is when you feel you’ve found the right key that unlocks things only that orchestra can do… Who knows what will come? That’s the nature of living with the unknown in front of us, as Boulez liked to say.”
An interview with composer and conductor David Robertson
VAN MAGAZINE
By Jeffrey Arlo Brown
November 10, 2022
- “…la musique incertaine de leur voix…”
- Anfore del cuore
- Rounding to Joy
Written for and dedicated to Orli Shaham. Commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, Eric Jacobsen, Music Director, 2022.
World premiere performances, October 15 – 16, 2022
Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Orli Shaham, piano
Dr. Phillips Center – Steinmetz Hall
Orlando, FL
“I leave the best for last, which was the presence of the brilliant conductor David Robertson, surely one of the most accomplished conductors of today for the repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries. With great musicality and clear gestures, Robertson is a sure guide in scores of great complexity.”
Nelson Rubens Kunze, Concerto
On performances with the Sāo Paulo State Symphony Orchestra
April 8, 2022
“David Robertson, back at Disney Hall [with the LA Phil] for the first time in five years, led Mahler’s most enigmatic, least-played symphony as if in visceral acknowledgment of war and its implications… Robertson did not deny Mahler his glorious lyricism, but he defied his nostalgia. That meant marches that marched with relentless energy. It meant startling percussive accents. It meant whipping up a frenzy. The wind playing was spectacular. The brass filled every sonic inch of Disney. There was no sleeping in this night music, no time to stop and smell the roses… When everything is on the line, you can’t always look back. That’s the only way to preserve nostalgia for the future.”
Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
On Mahler’s Symphony No. 7, Los Angeles Philharmonic
March 25, 2022
David Lang
Brian Eno
Richard Serra
Michael Gordon
Michael Tilson Thomas
Russell Hartenberger
Robert Hurwitz
Stephen Sondheim
Jonny Greenwood
David Harrington
Elizabeth Lim-Dutton
David Robertson
Micaela Haslam
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
Julia Wolfe
Nico Muhly
Beryl Korot
Colin Currie
Brad Lubman
CONVERSATIONS
Steve Reich
Hanover Square Press, Harper Collins
March 8, 2022
To Purchase
“The conductor David Robertson clearly returns every orchestral detail of this complex score, which he evidently knows well: his is an objective reading, without sentimentality, but he does not let the feelings, passions and impulses of these characters escape.”
Mauro Mariani, Giornale della Musica
On Kát’a Kabanová, Opera di Roma
January 19, 2022
Leoš Janáček had a singular conception of operatic composition. He arrived at his vision of music drama through a long apprenticeship, and Káťa Kabanová, written at an age where most societies expect a person to retire, is a work of outstanding genius. It may be helpful to look at three aspects that make him such a unique figure in the history of opera: his use of speech melody, his harmonic and melodic language, and his approach to orchestration.
Káťa Kabanová by Leoš Janáček
Opera di Roma
January 18 – 27, 2022
“The main thing that everyone needs to establish is trust. The singers need to trust that the conductor is there for them at every moment. If one evening they need a little bit more time for a breath, they trust that the conductor will hear it and give it to the orchestra. And the conductor has to trust that the orchestra is paying attention at every moment. I am grateful to know that after 25 years of working at the Met that I have established that trust with the orchestra, with the chorus and the solo voices.”
Ona Jarmalavičiūtė, OperaWire
David Robertson on ‘Porgy & Bess,’ Listening, & The Future of Opera
March 31, 2021
AND THE GRAMMY GOES TO...
… The Metropolitan Opera production of The Gershwins’ PORGY and BESS! The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards recognized the extraordinary musical collaboration of the Met Opera 2019-20 season with the distinction of BEST OPERA RECORDING! The award is shared by Angel Blue, Eric Owens, Frederick Ballentine, Latonia Moore, Denyce Graves, The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Conductor David Robertson, Producer David Frost, and the entire Porgy and Bess creative community. Thank you Recording Academy!
David Robertson
The great conducting teacher, Hans Swarowsky, told his students at Vienna’s Academy of Music and Performing Arts that a conductor has only three jobs: start the piece, make any changes within it, and finish it. Indeed, certain elements of time keeping would seem to render that task in conducting rather simple.
***
This article was originally published in The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm, edited by Russell Hartenberger and Ryan McClelland, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 90-94.
VOGUE
As life under lockdown continues, the arts community is finding new ways to evolve its performances to online formats. From special Broadway productions to weekly Met opera streams, these virtual offerings foster creative collaboration, while continuing to inspire and entertain audiences who are sheltering in place. The latest to partake in the movement is the Juilliard School in New York City. The performing arts school—which is often regarded as the best in North America—banded together its current students and celebrity alumni for a special Zoom performance, set to French composer Maurice Ravel’s classic “Bolero.”
Called “Bolero Juilliard,” the almost 10-minute-long video, which was released on April 30, includes performances from more than 100 students who volunteered from across the school’s divisions: dance, drama, and music. Special celebrity alumni also partook in the video as well: It features appearances from names such as Laura Linney, Emanuel Ax, Christine Baranski, Jon Batiste, Renée Fleming, Isabel Leonard, Patti LuPone, Yo-Yo Ma, Andrea Miller, and Bebe Neuwirth, among others.
Damian Woetzel, president of Juilliard, says the project began when he and the faculty were searching for ways to keep everyone at the school connected, as many students returned to their homes and moved to remote learning formats. “In every time, the arts are our mirror, and our memory,” Woetzel tells Vogue. “It’s so important for our students to find ways to continue performing in this time when we are all at home, and this project was a way to collaborate artistically, and then share that work as a video performance.”
For the video, all of the performers rehearsed live on Zoom, then recorded their individual parts. In the end more than 500 video clips and 150 audio tracks were then edited and synchronized for the clip. “The result is this short film, which is full of the emotions of this time, from sadness and frustration, to engagement and joy, and perhaps, most of all, hope,” says Woetzel. The end result showcases a variety of art forms as well—Ma playing his signature cello, Batiste playing the piano, Linney and LuPone acting out their getting-ready routines.
Juilliard conductor David Robertson reimagined and arranged “Bolero” for the piece, “to include earlier examples of the bolero form, as well as recognizing the influence of jazz on Ravel,” says Woetzel. Further, Woetzel worked with Larry Keigwin to choreograph the project with students. “I wanted him to make a new version working with students from across Juilliard’s music, dance and drama divisions, creating something together for this time when we are all apart,” says Woetzel, adding that “Bolero Juilliard” is just one of the many future projects the school is undertaking during this time of remote learning.
By Christian Allaire
May 3, 2020
On March 12, 2020, cultural institutions of every description shut down to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The Juilliard School quickly transformed its many programs into online studies – and the now ubiquitous Zoom class became the only available forum for the highly physical, emotional, intellectual and sensory process of learning conducting. What would that mean for my Juilliard conducting students? These are their lessons from the Spring 2020 semester – try this at home!
Opera is, above all, a collaborative project.
From the stage and lighting, with its builders, technicians and crew, the costumes put together with care by the wardrobe department, the dancers, the orchestra, and the chorus with their musical staff and librarians, not to mention the material support for all this from the administrative staff; it’s a big undertaking. No wonder it is often called “Grand.”
Even the works themselves are touched by many hands before they go into production. A man named Dubose Hayward pens a story, which plays a significant role in the Harlem Renaissance, giving his work the name of its principal character, Porgy – incidentally the name of a common, unremarkable fish. Heyward’s wife, Dorothy, turns it into a play, which then gets put on Broadway to great success by Rouben Mamoulian, who also added important touches. George Gershwin, already enchanted by the book, works together with the Heywards, his brother Ira and Mamoulian to turn the play into an opera , but with a small change to the title: Porgy and Bess.
New York City, February 15, 2020
David Robertson conducted James Robinson’s new production of Porgy and Bess at The Metropolitan Opera, starring Eric Owens and Angel Blue, which had its premiere on September 23, 2019
“This has been a strong and important phase in the SSO’s history. Robertson leaves an orchestra with a sense of artistic purpose, playing as well as it ever has, and millions of memories in the minds of those who were there.”
Nick Galvin, The Sydney Morning Herald
On David Robertson’s tenure as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
November 30, 2019
“David Robertson led a vigorous yet nuanced performance, the finest conducting of ‘Porgy’ I’ve heard. From the start, with the bustling orchestral introduction, he never tried to jazz up the score superficially, plumbing the music for inner voices, pungent harmonies, layered orchestral strands and rhythmic complexities….”
Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
On Porgy and Bess at The Metropolitan Opera
September 24, 2019
“David Robertson has the Met’s orchestra whipping up Verdian gales and caressing Puccini-esque arias.”
Justin Davidson, New York Magazine
On Porgy and Bess at The Metropolitan Opera
September 24, 2019
“What amazing music this is, a feast of colors alternately bold and pastel, textures by turn delicately transparent and busily turbulent. Robertson and the DSO made it all as fresh and vivid — and frankly sensuous — as it must have been at its premiere. The music never lost balletic buoyancy or visceral urgency.”
Scott Cantrell, Dallas Morning News
On Stravinsky’s Firebird
Dallas Symphony Orchestra
April 26, 2019
In a Musical ‘Death in Venice,’ the Author Is Present
The New York Times, April 2, 2019
The production was asking bigger questions: “Where does creativity come from? Where does love stem from, and what happens when love and creativity are blended together?”
Mr. Robertson said he thought the project was a wholly new take on Mann’s story. “This doesn’t replace the novella, the film or the opera,” he said. “It augments this fantastic creation that Thomas Mann has made.”
DEATH IN VENICE
April 4 – 13, 2019
David Robertson and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Internationaal Theater Amsterdam
Directed by Ivo van Hove
Original Music by Nico Muhly
COHESIVE DYNAMISM
“… carefully paced cohesive dynamism from conductor and SSO Artistic Director David Robertson…”
Peter McCallum, The Sydney Morning Hearld
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
February 11, 2019
STRIKINGLY FRESH
“The program ended with a strikingly fresh account of Sibelius’s popular Second Symphony. Mr. Robertson drew out the music’s misty colorings and hints of Finnish folk song, while emphasizing the visionary elements of this 1902 score, especially its structural daring, full of startling disruptions to the music’s flow.”
Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
New York Philharmonic
October 11, 2018
Brahms Revelation: A Sydney Symphony Orchestra Mini-Festival
“Conductor David Robertson and the orchestra realised Dean’s evocative accompaniments with flair and precision, smoothly shifting between foreground and background.”
“He and the orchestra tore straight into the finale from the scherzo, and the impassioned urgency was almost overwhelming.”
Murray Black, The Australian
On the World Premiere of Brett Dean’s Cello Concerto, and Brahms Symphony No. 4
August 24, 2018
CRESCENDO, VALEDICTION... PORTAL: Sydney Symphony Orchestra 2019 Season
You could call the Sydney Symphony Orchestra 2019 Season valedictory, a crescendo or culmination, and it is all of those things for David Robertson, but it’s also a portal. Although 2019 is his final season as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director with Sydney, he lends a willing hand to the Orchestra as it begins the search for a successor, and to the city he has fallen in love with as its beloved Sydney Opera House prepares to close for a major renewal.
“This is a transition year in certain ways so that was one of the things we thought about,” DR told Limelight, Australia’s Classical Music and Arts Magazine. “How does the SSO move to the next chapter?” For his part, “I’ll be coming back every season for the foreseeable future.” With pleasure.
To help the SSO build bridges to its future, DR welcomes – and welcomes back – esteemed colleagues to the podium. In recognition of his 50 year relationship with the SSO, former Principal Conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy will return as Conductor Laureate, Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles will become Principal Guest, and the Australian Simone Young will assume the title Guest Conductor.
Perhaps the most consequential of new beginnings is the first official season of Emma Dunch as the Orchestra’s CEO – and a fitting musical celebration for DR, Australian-style, is a first order of business: “Next year we celebrate the conclusion of David Robertson’s acclaimed tenure as our Chief Conductor and Artistic Director and his concert weeks will be pulling out all the stops with ten blockbuster programs,” she said, as an introduction to 2019.
DR kickstarts the festivities with the February 2019 SSO Season Opening Gala, featuring an encore performance of Nigel Westlake’s 2017 Spirit of the Wild oboe concerto, with SSO Principal Diana Doherty, and music by R. Strauss and Grainger – and ends on a November high note, with American Harmonies: the Australian premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Bassoon Concerto and John Adams’ Harmonielehre, with Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite. That’s only a taste of the terrain DR traverses in the musical adventure of the 2019 season. Stuart Skelton sings Britten’s Peter Grimes in concert performances; The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra joins their SSO colleagues for the Australian premiere of Wynton Marsalis’ The Jungle – Symphony No. 4; Susan Graham sings Canteloube’s ethereal Songs of the Auvergne in a Francophile’s dream, with music by Charbier and Saint-Saëns; and Lang Lang returns for a gala Mozart performance, with music by Berio and Schubert. Varèse, Janáček, Reich, Bartók, and Shostakovich, also ignite the season – but the show stopper may be Tom Stoppard and André Previn’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour: A Play for Actors and Orchestra… it’s hard to choose!
GET THE DETAILS: David Robertson’s 2019 Sydney Symphony Orchestra Season
On July 16, 2018, David Robertson and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra received the Helpmann Award – Australia’s equivalent of the Tony Awards – for Best Symphony Orchestra Performance for their performances of Bluebeard’s Castle at the Sydney Opera House, November 29 – December 2, 2017. On November 21, 2017, Limelight – Australia’s Classical Music and Arts Magazine – published the article below, “David Robertson on the Darkness at the Heart of Bluebeard’s Castle.”
Like Béla Bartók, many turn of the century composers were attracted to the story of Duke Bluebeard, perhaps because for the first time the complexity of women was being taken seriously. Major novelists like the Brontës and George Sand, and characters in literature like Madame Bovary, meant that all of a sudden, Bluebeard was seen as not just a European version of the Thousand and One Nights, but a deeper questioning of the differences between the sexes.
On the one hand, you can look at Perrault’s 1697 folk tale with its inquisitive wife as an extension of the Wagnerian Lohengrin-Elsa dilemma or the Christian idea of Eve’s curiosity being her downfall, but by the time we get to the works of Maeterlinck, which influenced Béla Balázs’ poem from which Bartók’s libretto was taken, there was a sense that psychoanalysis had gazed into the depths of the human soul. It’s as if you are looking into a very deep well and you can’t see the bottom, but occasionally you can put a bucket down and bring something up.
AN URGENT MUSICAL ARGUMENT
“Through an absorbing, wide-ranging and emotionally consequential reading of the Haydn, one of the composer’s late great London symphonies, he and the players made everything count…. In the long and eventful first movement, the conductor and his adopted San Francisco players mustered a premonitory pressure in the slow opening bars. When the valve was released, in the quickening second subject, the driving impetus kicked in. Robertson turned the angular shifts and whirling development into an urgent musical argument, punctuated by hairpin-turn dynamics and dramatically sudden rests.”
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle
On leading the San Francisco Symphony
May 27, 2018
It’s been an amazing partnership right from the start. It’s one of those things that lives on, and so to some extent, although I won’t have the regular rendezvous on the stage of Powell Hall, I can’t think of the experience with the orchestra in the past tense because it’s a living thing, it’s one of the things that has made me who I am, and so you carry that around with you all the time. There was this immediate chemistry, and then it developed into something which has meant a thirteen-year music directorship where you can argue who’s been blessed the most by this, whether it’s been the musicians, the community, or myself… it’s just been an amazing, amazing thing.
David Robertson, on spending thirteen years with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Charlie Brennan Show, KMOX St. Louis, April 24, 2018
ROBERTSON is a BRILLIANT POLYMATH
“Robertson is a brilliant polymath who can casually toss a connecting reference to a painting or a work of literature into a musical discussion. He’s got a great ear for talent, a gift for gab, a well-tuned sense of humor and a friendly way with audiences… Over 13 seasons, Robertson introduced dozens of pieces new to the repertoire, including some commissions. He and the SLSO played the soundtracks to Charlie Chaplin’s silent films and brought in new audiences. He started a series of contemporary chamber music with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, with concerts that sold out almost instantly…He’s put his mark on the orchestra in other ways, too, hiring 44 of the SLSO’s current 91 musicians, including 10 principal players. Under Robertson’s leadership, the St. Louisans have been in the forefront of American orchestras…Robertson made the orchestra synonymous with the work of composer John Adams and made three recordings of his music for the Nonesuch label. That paid off: In 2015, the SLSO’s recording of “City Noir” won the Grammy Award for best orchestral performance. It was the orchestra’s first Grammy since 1991… In 2012, Robertson took the orchestra back to Europe for the first time since 1998 [including] an unforgettable debut for the SLSO at the BBC Proms in Royal Albert Hall. There were also four trips to Robertson’s native California, including university residencies. Visits to New York’s Carnegie Hall were once again a regular event…”
Sarah Bryan Miller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A look back on David Robertson’s tenure as Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
May 4, 2018
BUOYANT
“David Robertson’s conducting was buoyant (as in the clipped phrases of the chorus “Bella vita militar!”) and hauntingly transparent when necessary…”
Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal
On Così fan tutte, at The Metropolitan Opera
March 19, 2018
A POTENT DRAMA, MASTERFULLY ILLUMINATED
“Over the course of four movements, no precise narrative is spelled out, yet Adams’ descriptive titles and his cinematic music go a long way in unfolding a potent drama, masterfully illuminated by conductor David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra… It begins with a strum of harp strings, the whoosh of winds and the clatter of a cimbalom (hammered dulcimer), as if a brightly colored curtain is swept back, inviting listeners inside. Here, we meet Scheherazade in the form of violinist Leila Josefowicz, a longtime Adams collaborator and courageous champion of new music, who gives a searing performance.”
Tom Huizenga, NPR Music
On Scheherazade.2 by John Adams
September 22, 2016
FOCUS and FIRE
“David Robertson, the St. Louis’s music director, shaped ‘Canyons’ with a sure hand. He quelled any suspicion that the work is indulgent or rambling; at the same time, he respected Messiaen’s meditativeness, his silences. The orchestra responded with playing of focus and fire.”
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
On Messiaen’s From the Canyons to the Stars…
February 22, 2016
