On January 27, after the New York Philharmonic named Jaap van Zweden as its next music director starting in 2018, an outcry from local journalists and international bloggers decried the decision. One blogger confidently proclaimed: “New York Philharmonic appoints the wrong music director.” These premature judgments based on insufficient evidence ignore the fact that in his demonstrated knowledge and appreciation of Jewish ritual and cultural history, van Zweden is a fine match for music-loving Manhattanites. He was a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, who decades ago urged van Zweden, once an orchestral violinist, to seriously embrace conducting. In return, van Zweden became a Bernstein devotee, prepping for a 2015 performance of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish” with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra by filming a meditative visit, wearing a kippa, to Amsterdam’s venerable Portuguese Synagogue. In another video, about a work by Shostakovich reflecting the sufferings of World War II, van Zweden explains how his grandmother fought in the anti-Nazi resistance and “killed a lot of Germans,” which he assured her was the “right thing to do” at the time, although decades after the fact, she had reservations about having taken so many human lives. Would that the Philharmonic resolved to rename the revamped Avery Fisher Hall in honor of van Zweden’s admirable grandmother instead of the unheroic media mogul David Geffen who merely forked over the loot for the renovation.
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