New York Times Fall Preview–Finally, a Lot of Classical Music and Opera to Hear This Season
New York Times Fall Preview written by Zachary Woolfe, September 17, 2021
The coming classical music season has an unsettled quality, a sense of a culture trying to orient itself in the midst of crisis. You can detect in the offerings bottled-up energy from a long dormancy; wariness about the continuing health and financial effects of the pandemic; pressure, in the wake of protests against racial injustice, to demonstrate that a hidebound art form can become truly more diverse.
NEW ENGLAND PHILHARMONIC Music director searches at orchestras tend to be secretive; few, inside or outside an ensemble, usually know for sure who’s even in the running. But this group in Boston, which punches well above its weight in adventurous programming, is throwing a rare ray of sunshine on the process, publicly naming its four finalists, each of whom will get a concert this season: Adam Kerry Boyles (Dec. 5), Nicholas DeMaison (Feb. 26), Tianhui Ng (May 1) and Yoichi Udagawa (June 18).