A Season of Rage at the Philharmonic and the Met

John Corigliano’s First Symphony, which Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic presented early in the new season, begins with a blistering wail of orchestral rage. Strings play a unison A that quavers under the pressure of sawing bows. Timpani, bass drums, and piano follow with a concussive thud. After a second howl of strings, the percussion delivers two more thuds in quick succession—a dark echo of the stamping rhythm of Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Finally, the entire ensemble unleashes a dissonant scream, with pitiless timpani strokes recalling both Brahms’s First Symphony and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s antiwar opera, “Die Soldaten.” Corigliano wrote his symphony in the late nineteen-eighties, to lament friends who had died of AIDS and to decry indifference to those deaths. The work contains sonorous bouts of sorrow, but rage is its primary register.

Dudamel, who officially begins his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director next season but is already effectively in charge, has never been a brazenly political artist, yet politics has a way of catching up to him. A product of the Venezuelan music-education program known as El Sistema, he long remained silent about human-rights issues in his home country. Then, in 2017, he voiced concerns about the regime of Nicolás Maduro, resulting in a years-long absence from Venezuela. Now, as he ends his tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and turns his attention to New York, he is brushing against a fresh wave of repression, this time emanating from the White House. This past summer, he planned to bring the Simón Bolívar Symphony, the flagship orchestra of El Sistema, to the Hollywood Bowl, but the appearances were cancelled, according to the L.A. Phil, on account of “travel complications”—presumably, Donald Trump’s travel ban.

Against that backdrop, and with the Trump Administration demonizing trans people and undermining gay-rights advances, the Corigliano First lands with particular force. Dudamel and the orchestra delivered the score with absolute conviction and an almost punishing vehemence. Carter Brey’s cello solos in the first and final movements provided a vulnerable, intensely human contrast to the onslaught. Corigliano, who is eighty-seven, was on hand to accept a tremendous ovation.

Two things struck me about the launch of the Philharmonic season. First, the orchestra is embracing pluralism and diversity in the face of a right-wing Kulturkampf. The opening program included “of light and stone,” a luminous new piece by the Native Hawaiian composer Leilehua Lanzilotti. It quotes songs by Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last monarch of Hawaii, making the point that the islands have a proud cultural tradition that long predates their seizure by the United States. That work was paired with Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, written in New York by an exile from Nazi-aligned Hungary. Later in the season, Dudamel will conduct an orchestral version of Frederic Rzewski’s protest masterpiece, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”; Thomas Adès will reprise his 1999 cantata, “America: A Prophecy,” which incorporates apocalyptic Mayan texts; and Kwamé Ryan will lead a new score by the great Black composer George Lewis. These events are part of a series observing the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the United States, but no one will mistake them for triumphalist propaganda.

Just as notable was the sense that Dudamel was using his celebrity to advance the cause of contemporary music. During his early years in Los Angeles, he focussed primarily on the classical canon, but of late he has given increasing attention to new work, placing special emphasis on Latin American composers. Encouragingly, he seems poised to carry on that mission in New York, and perhaps even push it further. Nor does he confine himself to easy-listening material. Corigliano’s symphony is assaultive in style and confrontational in intent. If Dudamel hadn’t been on the podium, I imagine that quite a few seats would have emptied out after intermission. I went to two performances, on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and on both occasions the vast majority of the audience stayed to the end.

In older repertory, Dudamel achieved mixed results. In the Bartók, he deferred to the astonishing young pianist Yunchan Lim, who, in the slow movement, voiced chords with a dreamy sensitivity that brought to mind the incomparable Radu Lupu. A sappy encore, in the form of Ennio Morricone’s movie song “Love Affair,” reminded us that Lim is still a kid. Dudamel’s rendition of Ives’s Second Symphony was initially undercharacterized, but in the Adagio the cellos heightened the mood with lustrous, amber-hued phrasing, and the finale was rambunctious to the max. The least satisfying offering was Beethoven’s Fifth, which preceded the Corigliano. The first movement puttered along more than it drove forward; Dudamel slowed momentum by inserting odd little ritardandos. The second movement lacked songfulness, and the third was short on mystery. Throughout, the horns blared too loudly. Only in the finale did the performance snap to life. The orchestra seemed only fitfully engaged with Dudamel’s direction—a warning sign amid hoopla.

Less than a week later, Dudamel was back in California, inaugurating his final season at the L.A. Phil. Again, a première was matched to a warhorse. Ellen Reid’s choral-orchestral work “Earth Between Oceans,” receiving its world première, is a thrillingly chaotic paean to the power of nature, which, the composer says in a program note, will inevitably outlast “rising political chaos.” The Los Angeles Master Chorale uttered nonverbal syllables, yet the message was somehow clear. Reid’s score alternates between rhapsody and pandemonium, with the latter winning out in a riotous coda. (Dudamel will bring the piece to New York in the spring.) An authoritatively paced account of Strauss’s “Alpine Symphony” had a welcome wildness, as if influenced by Reid’s narrative. Dudamel’s charisma and energy will be missed in L.A., although, with Esa-Pekka Salonen slated to serve a five-year term as creative director, the orchestra is unlikely to lose ground.

Politics also surfaced at the Metropolitan Opera’s opening-night gala, which featured the local première of Mason Bates’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” The fact that gay themes play a role in the story perhaps explains why Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, addressed the audience by saying, “At the Met, we’re proudly standing for freedom of artistic expression.” When Gelb walked onstage, he was greeted with applause and also some boos. The booers might well have been thinking of the Met’s recently announced collaboration with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where expression is not free and homosexuality can be punishable by death. Gelb then introduced Senator Chuck Schumer, who said, “The arts are under attack,” prompting several people in the crowd to reply, “Do something about it!” Others shouted, “Endorse Mamdani!” When a Met crowd starts getting feisty, all is not well in the land.

After the curtain went up, the evening lapsed into predictable patterns. Once again, the Met has commissioned a new piece on an ambitious topic—here, Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel about two Brooklyn-based Jewish cousins, a closeted American and a charismatic Czech émigré, who concoct a Nazi-fighting comic-book superhero—and given it to a composer who demonstrates more proficiency than personality. Like Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” from 2022, and Jeanine Tesori’s “Grounded,” from 2024, “Kavalier & Clay” flips through a catalogue of styles without finding a distinctive, generative voice. At the start, we hear brooding D minor followed by brooding first-inversion G-sharp minor. Much the same progression appears in John Williams’s score for “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” to stronger effect. Later, chugging string figures and portentous drones have the flavor of Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer. It makes sense for a comic-book opera to draw on comic-book movies, but, as with Bates’s attempts at big-band swing and Broadway warbling, the music is stale to the point of indigestibility. The libretto, by Gene Scheer, is little better. The drudgery of combat and war work is evoked with the lines “Back and forth. / Up and down. / Over and over. / On and on!”

A deft, kinetic production, with direction by Bartlett Sher and sets, lighting, and video design by the collective 59 Studio, keeps the eyes engaged. “The Escapist,” the cousins’ comic book, is sketched in real time; wartime mayhem is juxtaposed with domestic routine; the Empire State Building becomes a platform for a nocturnal gay tryst. Miles Mykkanen, a plaintive Sam Clay, and Andrzej Filończyk, a rugged Joe Kavalier, headed a large and able cast that produced particularly striking turns by Lauren Snouffer, as Joe’s doomed sister, and Edward Nelson, as Sam’s doomed lover. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in the pit, let the voices ring out clearly. Yet the entire spectacle felt inadequate to the weighty sprawl of Chabon’s novel, which celebrates the exterior glamour of pop culture while observing its deceptions. Joe, Chabon writes, “was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man.” An opera which seriously addressed that theme would be equal to the crisis that is engulfing the American experiment. ♦