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).