Classical, and Sexy, Crescendo

The orgasm heard around the world was reported by Magnus Fiennes, a composer and music producer. After going to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in April, he tweeted about a woman sitting near him at Walt Disney Concert Hall who had a “loud and full body orgasm” during Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Fifth.

Some in the audience tweeted back, wondering if the moaning was due to a medical condition. The woman has not come forward to clear it up.

Whatever happened, the scream is a metaphor. As we discuss which musical genres are expiring, it seems that classical music is getting hotter.

Albert Imperato, a New York music promoter, says the idea is breaking through that classical music is not supposed to be safe and relaxing. It is supposed to tingle.

“Let’s not forget that the word ‘climax’ is a common musical term,” the soprano Renée Fleming told me. “It has to do with musical tension and its release.” She said Sergei Rachmaninoff and Franz Liszt “had it down” when it comes to sexy pieces.

Elim Chan, the 36-year-old conductor with the baton that night, told me she watched the woman in her peripheral vision until she “calmed down.” She said she likes when audience members audibly react — “I don’t want to be a piece of museum art.”

After the dark years of Covid, she said, people are coming out to concerts to “feel something” that will exist only in that time — “and if you miss it, you miss it.”

The scream reminded me of the golden era in Hollywood, when moguls put their biggest stars — Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Ingrid Bergman — into passionate tales about classical musicians. There has been a revival of that recently, with Cate Blanchett in “Tár,” Kelvin Harrison Jr. in “Chevalier” and the upcoming Netflix movie “Maestro,” with Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein.

Several recent surveys have clocked a rise in the popularity of classical music in the last couple of years.

“Maybe that old orchestral and operatic music now sounds fresh to ears raised on electronic sounds,” the music critic Ted Gioia mused on his Substack, or “maybe young people view getting dressed up for a night at the opera hall as a kind of cosplay event.”

Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, agreed. “The average age of our audience used to be in the 60s; now it’s in the 40s,” he told me.

He said that new operas by living composers are big draws. Gelb said that “Champion,” based on the life of Emile Griffith, a bisexual boxer, is the first time the Met has featured two men kissing or drag queens.

New York is the epicenter of the electricity.

At the Met, the 48-year-old conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is a bolt of lightning with bleached-blond hair. In elaborate costumes inspired by whatever opera he is conducting, he shakes off classical music’s conservative air.

Keri-Lynn Wilson, the nearly two-meter-tall glamazon who conducts in black Armani pantsuits with her ponytail swinging — and who is part of a classical music power couple with Gelb, her husband — sparkled in her debut at the Met last fall with Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”

“I actually conducted an orgasm in it,” she said about the climactic sex scene. “Shostakovich achieved it through the sequencing of a relentlessly building and sliding trombone lick in unison with the entire orchestra in a pulsating crescendo.” She said Joseph Stalin banned the work and Shostakovich narrowly avoided the gulag.

New York is also home to Yuja Wang, the 36-year-old pianist who wears high-fashion miniskirts and stilettos for her bravura performances of Rachmaninoff.

Nézet-Séguin told me he thinks we are “beginning another golden age for our art form.”

“Without accusing anyone,” he said, he believes “institutions and maybe artists forgot some aspects of our art form” and “maybe the connection with the audience was just not enough of a priority, in my opinion.”

He said that in rehearsals, he always tells the orchestra to explore the love. “‘Love every note. Love more your eighth notes. Please love this harmony more.’ It’s very connected to classical music being sexy.”

Symphony halls are getting hotter, and bravo for that.