By 04/01/2026
This concert jumped right out of the gate with a new work by John Adams: “The Rock You Stand On”, which he wrote last year for Marin, a longtime champion of his music. (“She is one of the very few conductors whom I can trust to do the right thing with what I’ve written,” Adams says. “She ‘gets it.’”) Obliquely inspired by Alsop’s perseverance as one of the first successful woman conductors, the music was compact, rhythmic and propulsive, staking its claim to a rightful place among John’s other high-flying openers, including “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” and “Lollapalooza.”
Last night’s sold-out house was largely thanks to the presence of Japanese pianist Hayato Sumino, making his Carnegie Hall orchestral debut. Sumino, a Tokyo native who now lives in New York, is a former Chopin competition semifinalist with more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers and a fashion-forward presence that warranted a profile earlier this week in GQ. Wearing the same double-breasted Saint-Laurent tuxedo he modeled in the magazine, Sumino fluidly played Gershwin’s jazzy Piano Concerto in F – including his own dazzling cadenzas – showing he has at least as much substance as style. After a standing ovation, Sumino responded with a wild, finger-flying encore of his own variation on Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” that had me thinking a certain pianist named Oscar had somehow snuck back into the building. (I learned during intermission that Sumino often plays jazz in his recitals.)
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