All essays

Das Lied von der Erde is Mahler’s great farewell — but it is a farewell that will not end. It refuses to be numbered a symphony, it refuses to conclude, and its final chord refuses to resolve, fading instead on the word ewig. In this essay I follow those three refusals, and ask why this may be the deepest meditation on mortality that Western music has given us.

Bartók’s only opera gives us a castle with seven locked doors, and a wife who insists on opening every one. In this essay I read Bluebeard’s Castle as a drama about the longing to be fully known — and about what it costs. I write too about the orchestra as the castle itself, and about why the conductor here must lead rather than follow.

I have always thought of Pelléas et Mélisande as an opera that withholds more than it says. Debussy wrote music that suggests rather than declares — and at the one moment where we expect the great love duet to blaze, the orchestra falls silent instead. In this essay I follow that art of suggestion through four moments, and ask what it means to love something one is not allowed to possess.

The famous Ritual Fire Dance has taken on a life of its own — but it is a scene, not a crowd-pleaser. My reading is that El amor brujo does not depict a ritual from outside; it is a ritual in music. From the 1915 Pastora Imperio commission and the Andalusian Roma world of Granada, the work carries the shape of an exorcism: a call, a lament, the fire that burns something out, and the morning bells that return us to day. On leading an audience through an action, not merely an i

El sombrero de tres picos is two things at once: an authentic Spanish festival of dance and an advanced modernist score. From the 1919 Ballets Russes premiere in London — Ansermet, Massine, Picasso, de Falla — the work carries both the folklore and the modernism without letting go of either. For me as a conductor it is at once the invitation to let loose and the reminder that I may not. On the opening '¡Olé!', the miller's farruca, and the closing jota.

Symphonie fantastique opens not in a symphonic landscape but inside a head — one that remembers, dreams, searches. My reading is that this is the first work where the orchestra is so openly moved into a consciousness: the sound points not outward toward storm or bird, but inward. The unanswered horn call is not an image of loneliness — it is loneliness. On the transformations of the idée fixe, and what it means for a conductor to make the orchestra a mind rather than a narrat

I thought I knew La Traviata. It took me half an hour of the first rehearsal to understand that I really didn't.