On a balmy spring morning, after a breakfast of espresso and plain yogurt at a luxurious Manhattan lodge, Jaap van Zweden grabbed his bag of conducting batons and scores by Mozart and Gubaidulina and set out for Lincoln Heart via the wilds of Central Park.
“I like the air, I like the timber,” he mentioned. “Everyone can do no matter they need right here. That is freedom, absolute freedom.”
Van Zweden, 63, will go away the New York Philharmonic this summer season after six seasons as its music director, the shortest tenure of any maestro since Pierre Boulez, the eminent French composer and conductor who led the Philharmonic within the Seventies. Van Zweden helped the orchestra emerge from the turbulence of the pandemic; shepherded it via a attempting, nomadic season when its residence, David Geffen Corridor, was present process a $550 million renovation; and led the orchestra when it reopened the glowing, reimagined corridor forward of schedule, to the delight of musicians and audiences.
However all through his tenure, van Zweden, an intense, exacting maestro from Amsterdam, confronted persistent questions on whether or not he had the star energy, inventive drive and powerful connection to New York wanted to steer the Philharmonic.
Through the pandemic, he spent greater than a 12 months at residence within the Netherlands, which fractured his nascent relationship with the ensemble. And in 2021, he introduced that he would step down from his publish, far sooner than many individuals anticipated.
Van Zweden mentioned he felt no different Philharmonic music director had confronted such profound challenges.
“We needed to begin over again,” he mentioned. “I really feel like we’re nonetheless within the technique of attending to know one another.”
He concludes his time period on the Philharmonic as a transitional determine: A maestro who by no means totally left his mark. Whereas he led greater than 200 concert events and employed 23 musicians, a few quarter of the orchestra, he has been criticized for missing a signature creative imaginative and prescient.
“Folks simply noticed him as intense,” mentioned Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president and chief govt from 2017 till final 12 months. “They by no means noticed the opposite sides of him.”
His reserved method, he acknowledges, was most likely a mismatch for the glamour and grandiosity of New York. He doesn’t typically communicate to audiences or socialize with the Philharmonic’s musicians, workers and donors — he doesn’t drink alcohol, contemplating it a distraction from his musical research — and he likes to retreat to his workplace at Geffen Corridor after concert events. When the Philharmonic introduced final 12 months that he would get replaced by Gustavo Dudamel, the gregarious, movie star conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the distinction was stark.
“We can not assist ourselves, who we’re,” van Zweden mentioned. “I notice that New York wants someone who’s a star, someone who likes to be in entrance of the lights. And that’s utterly regular. I perceive. That belongs to the town.”
The van Zweden period was certainly one of change and turmoil, because the Philharmonic confronted pressing issues: how you can navigate the challenges of the pandemic, handle racial and gender disparities and guarantee monetary stability throughout a time of concern about the way forward for classical music. Van Zweden’s best ambition — to carry the Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in america, to a brand new degree of brilliance and virtuosity — was by no means totally realized. No fashionable music director spent so little time with the Philharmonic’s musicians and audiences.
Carter Brey, the Philharmonic’s principal cellist, described van Zweden’s six seasons as “a interval that left unfulfilled guarantees in its wake.”
Brey blamed the pandemic. “It was like being in a racecar,” he mentioned, “and getting as much as fifth gear after which having all 4 of your tires blow out.”
VAN ZWEDEN, WHOSE NAME is pronounced YAHP van ZVAY-den, arrived in New York in 2018 from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the place he constructed a status as a taskmaster and was credited with serving to reinvigorate a fading ensemble. At one level throughout his time in Dallas, he was the most effective paid conductor in america, incomes greater than $5 million in a single season. (In New York, he earned a extra modest $1.1 million within the 2021-22 season, the latest 12 months for which data can be found.)
Whereas he was not a marquee title, he emerged as a favourite for the Philharmonic publish due to his chemistry with musicians throughout visitor appearances, together with a effectively regarded efficiency of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 2015.
“Instantly, the orchestra favored him,” mentioned Oscar S. Schafer, the previous chairman of the Philharmonic’s board. “And since they favored him, I favored him.”
Nonetheless, some questioned whether or not he was the proper match. The critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that his choice was a “curious end result,” including that he was not the type of maestro who may “fill a live performance corridor and trigger a leap in subscriptions.”
Van Zweden’s skeptics additionally nervous that he would possibly focus too closely on the usual repertory as a substitute of latest music. However with Borda as a companion, he made some extent of prominently that includes residing composers, serving to to steer Venture 19, a multiyear effort to fee works by girls to mark the centennial of the nineteenth Modification. In 2020, he performed the premiere of Tania León’s “Stride,” which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, one of many roughly 20 premieres he has led with the Philharmonic.
He gained accolades as a talented interpreter of latest works who approached them simply as he did Mahler symphonies.
“He has an virtually boyish vitality and curiosity — a need to really feel related to what’s new and what’s taking place on the bottom,” mentioned the composer and pianist Conrad Tao, a frequent collaborator.
The composer Julia Wolfe recalled van Zweden taking the bizarre step of including a rehearsal for her 2019 multimedia oratorio, “Fireplace in my mouth,” in regards to the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist manufacturing facility hearth.
“He actually took it significantly,” she mentioned, “and that doesn’t at all times occur.”
Van Zweden, with a shaved head and durable physique, had a status for brusqueness in Dallas. He adopted a extra affable demeanor with the New York musicians, although some nonetheless discovered him abrasive. (Reflecting on his work model, he described himself as “slightly bit fanatic,” including, “I actually attempt to be as delicate as doable.”)
Cynthia Phelps, the orchestra’s principal violist, mentioned that whereas van Zweden might be chopping, he helped encourage the musicians to pay attention extra carefully to one another.
“He doesn’t mince phrases; he’s a gruff presence,” she mentioned. “Nevertheless it’s couched on this unimaginable dedication and love for no matter artwork we’re placing onstage.”
Van Zweden mentioned he was harm by solutions that he was not the proper maestro for the job, and he turned delicate to even gentle criticism. Whereas reviewers praised his embrace of latest music, they typically discovered his performances of the classics, like Stravinsky’s “The Ceremony of Spring,” unsatisfying.
Shortly earlier than van Zweden’s debut as music director in 2018, Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Instances that a few of his performances of Mahler and Wagner lacked “subtlety, lyricism and depth.” He questioned whether or not New York wanted a maestro who had a status as “a disciplinarian and orchestra-builder.”
“I desire a music director with clear concepts about what a significant American orchestra must be,” Tommasini wrote.
Accustomed to typically constructive evaluations, van Zweden mentioned it was tough to have “a troublesome newspaper round your neck.”
“You already know the minute you stroll onstage that you’re susceptible,” he mentioned. “However after all if you end up questioned about whether or not you’re the proper particular person otherwise you get a nasty assessment, it hurts.”
He tried to attract classes from evaluations, and he requested Borda at one level if she thought opinions about him would possibly ever change. She instructed him that he must wait no less than eight years.
“It was consuming at him — that he was beneath fixed assault, that he couldn’t do something proper,” she mentioned. “He by no means felt welcomed right here.”
He took some consolation in the truth that his predecessors on the Philharmonic, together with Leonard Bernstein, a mentor whose photograph hangs in his workplace, endured their share of withering evaluations. He turned to Zen Buddhism for steering on coping with exterior views. (“Let it come and let it go,” he instructed himself. “Really feel slightly little bit of ache generally, however don’t react.”)
However he by no means received used to being a daily topic of scrutiny.
“In New York,” he mentioned, “the smallest step you make, you might be within the image.”
THE PANDEMIC HIT in the course of van Zweden’s second season. The orchestra was pressured to impose painful finances cuts and cancel greater than 100 concert events, together with its total 2020-21 season. It misplaced greater than $21 million in income.
Because the virus unfold and cultural life got here to a standstill, van Zweden returned to the Netherlands, the place his spouse and 4 kids dwell. For greater than a 12 months, he was minimize off from the Philharmonic, staying in contact solely via occasional Zoom calls. In seclusion in Amsterdam, he underwent a bodily transformation, shedding about 70 kilos.
The pandemic made him extra reticent, he mentioned, whilst Borda inspired him to talk extra typically with the gamers. (He doesn’t have a Fb account and says he dislikes videoconferencing.)
“With music-making, it’s such a heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye, private relationship for me,” he mentioned. “I’m not such a contemporary particular person, to be sincere. For me, being in entrance of a digital camera doesn’t work a lot.”
He added: “ You can not change an animal.”
The gap strained his relationship with the musicians, although a number of mentioned they didn’t blame him for being overseas.
“We had been all type of misplaced,” mentioned Judith LeClair, the principal bassoonist. “Nevertheless it was onerous to have a relationship with anyone at that time.”
Van Zweden’s absence was extended by a ban on European vacationers in america. He lastly made it again to New York in March 2021, for the primary time in 13 months, to tape applications for the Philharmonic’s streaming service. However in April of that 12 months, when the Philharmonic returned, after 400 days, for its first indoor live performance earlier than a dwell viewers, the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen was on the rostrum, not van Zweden.
Van Zweden described the pandemic as a “very unlucky and unhappy scenario that was out of all people’s management.” He mentioned he regrets not doing extra to attach with musicians. “The connection onstage was the one for which I needed to be with them,” he mentioned. “Not on Skype.”
He gave up his Lincoln Heart condo in June 2020 and commenced staying in resorts throughout his journeys to New York. In fall 2021, simply because the Philharmonic and different cultural establishments had been coming again to life, van Zweden introduced he was departing. He mentioned the pandemic had made him rethink his life and priorities.
“It isn’t out of frustration, it’s not out of anger, it’s not out of a tough scenario,” he mentioned on the time. “It’s simply out of freedom.”
WHEN VAN ZWEDEN RETURNED to New York in Could for his closing few weeks of rehearsals and performances, he was distracted. His 34-year-old son, Benjamin, who’s autistic, had not too long ago had a seizure, and within the days earlier than he left Amsterdam for New York, he and his spouse, Aaltje van Zweden, had taken him to the hospital.
At his first rehearsal, van Zweden took a second to deal with the gamers. Whereas he was away, the Philharmonic had been in turmoil. An article in New York journal in April had revived accusations of misconduct in opposition to two gamers, whom the administration had tried to fireplace in 2018, throughout van Zweden’s first week as music director. The ensemble was pressured to reinstate the gamers in 2020 after the musicians’ union challenged their dismissal. They had been suspended with pay after the article was revealed.
Talking from the rostrum, van Zweden instructed the musicians that the expertise of elevating his son had taught him the significance of nurturing a safe setting.
“I do know when his home will not be protected,” he mentioned. “We give our coronary heart on daily basis, and once we are giving our coronary heart, we want a protected place the place we will make music collectively. My feelings are with you, and my coronary heart is with you.”
When van Zweden introduced he was leaving New York, he mentioned he had loved the break from his jet-setting life throughout the pandemic. He listened to extra pop music, performed desk tennis and have become a faithful follower of the tv collection “Succession” (the present’s theme track is his ringtone). He spent extra time together with his household and with the Papageno Basis, a company that he and his spouse based in 1997 that makes use of music to assist kids with autism.
It was a shock to some when he revealed that he would have a busy post-New York profession, taking up music directorships on the Seoul Philharmonic and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in Paris.
Van Zweden mentioned he didn’t anticipate the alternatives however was drawn by the problem of reshaping these ensembles. In Seoul, the place his tenure started in January, he has obtained a heat welcome from audiences and critics; the mayor has promised a brand new live performance corridor. When he begins his job in Paris in 2026, van Zweden mentioned he hoped to have the ability to spend extra time together with his household, together with at their trip residence in southern France.
“You by no means know what’s within the stars,” he mentioned.
Again in Central Park, van Zweden smiled as he handed horse-drawn carriages, distributors hawking sliced mango and even a person mendacity throughout a path with a ukulele by his aspect.
“Any person would have mentioned one thing in Amsterdam when you would lie down like that, however right here it’s high quality,” he mentioned. “That freedom is superb.”
He had been up at 7 a.m., purple pencil in hand, learning his rating of Mozart’s Requiem, which the composer wrote on the finish of his life and which van Zweden made some extent of that includes in a few of his closing concert events with the Philharmonic. (“He says goodbye to life,” he mentioned, “and I say goodbye to my life in New York.”)
Van Zweden mentioned he doesn’t take into consideration his legacy, however that he hoped New Yorkers remembered that he beloved and felt deeply related to the Philharmonic, even when he was not at all times seen.
He in contrast himself to a judo athlete and mentioned he had way back turn into resigned to the truth that a lot of life was exterior his management.
“I did my greatest to not battle something — to attempt to go together with the vitality and the circulate of what was taking place,” he mentioned.
Then, taking a deep breath as bicycles and runners whizzed by, he mentioned, “I discovered my lesson.”
