He played in the orchestra for 60 years, performing under the baton of five music directors. He personified the orchestra’s brilliant, even brash, character.Stanley Drucker, who was known as the dean of American orchestral clarinets during a 60-year career with the New York Philharmonic, putting his mark on countless performances and recordings under a legion of celebrated conductors, died on Monday in Vista, Calif., outside San Diego. He was 93.His death, at the home of his daughter, Rosanne Drucker, was confirmed by his son, Lee.Mr. Drucker, who retired in 2009, was only the fourth principal clarinetist of the Philharmonic since 1920 when he took up the post. Few wind players at any of the great American orchestras served as long.He played for the Philharmonic music directors Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, presenting a style and sound that typified the Philharmonic’s character — soloistic, technically and sonically brilliant, flamboyant and on the verge of brash.Mr. Drucker combined shapely phrasing with impeccable fingerwork. With his iron-gray hair and a slightly crooked front tooth, he was known for his youthful look and energy well into his 70s. His nickname in the orchestra was “Stanley Steamer,” a reflection of his swift marches offstage to make the commute to his home on Long Island, in Massapequa. “That’s my exercise,” he often said, “running for the train.”Such a long tenure naturally meant that he encountered the same pieces over and over again, and he greeted them like “old friends,” he said. The different perspectives that various conductors would bring to the music, he added, kept things fresh.“You absorb the personality and talent of whoever’s up on the podium,” he said.Just as much, those maestri would defer to Mr. Drucker’s interpretations of clarinet solos. Such was his influence that when a clarinet-playing New York Times reporter put in a request to perform with the orchestra for an article in 2004, the final say rested not with the music director, Mr. Maazel, not the orchestra president, Zarin Mehta, not even the powerful personnel manager, Carl Schiebler, but with Mr. Drucker.Mr. Drucker’s longevity with the Philharmonic gave rise to impressive statistics: 10,200 concerts with the orchestra, including 191 solo appearances, and performances of nearly every major clarinet concerto and soloist on more than a dozen recordings. He also recorded most of the standard clarinet chamber music works.Mr. Drucker with Leonard Bernstein in Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in about 1967. Mr. Bernstein was just one of the Philharmonic’s renowned music directors for whom Mr. Drucker played.Bert Bial/New York Philharmonic ArchivesHe was nominated twice for a Grammy — for recordings of the Aaron Copland Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp and Piano, with Leonard Bernstein conducting, and of John Corigliano’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, with Zubin Mehta conducting. The Philharmonic commissioned the Corigliano for Mr. Drucker.The publication Musical America named him instrumentalist of the year in 1998, and he was one of the few living orchestral musicians with an entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.A measure for any clarinetist is the great Mozart concerto, one of the composer’s last works. Of a 2001 performance, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Drucker gave a “lively, thoughtfully shaped reading” of the opening movement and “tapped all the aching beauty in the Andante.”“But it was in the finale that he really let loose,” Mr. Kozinn added, “both with phrasing turns that pushed against the constraints of the line and by conveying a sense of heightened dialogue between his instrument and the rest of the orchestra.”Mr. Drucker’s conceived of an orchestral wind section as one organism.“You give and take; you don’t only take,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Times. “It’s a chamber music situation. You play to enhance.” He urged orchestral players to become deeply familiar with an entire work and express “what you have inside, what your sensitivity is.”Stanley Drucker was born on Feb. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn to immigrants from Galicia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they had left it 20 years earlier. He grew up in the Brownsville and Park Slope neighborhoods. His father, Joseph, had a custom tailor shop. His mother, Rose (Oberlander) Drucker, was a homemaker.Like so many clarinetists of the era, Mr. Drucker was inspired by Benny Goodman. His parents, seized by the Goodman craze of the time, bought him a clarinet for his 10th birthday. “They figured it was better than being a tailor,” Mr. Drucker said.His main teacher was Leon Russianoff, a leading clarinet pedagogue of the latter half of the 20th century, after whom Mr. Drucker would name his son. Mr. Drucker attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Astonishingly, he entered the Indianapolis Symphony at age 16. “The object was to play, and get out into the real world,” he said. “I thought I knew everything, but found out quickly I didn’t.” During the summers he would return to New York for lessons with Russianoff.Mr. Drucker’s first formal photo with the New York Philharmonic, in about 1948. New York Philharmonic ArchivesMr. Drucker spent a year touring with the Adolf Busch Chamber Players, a conductor-less ensemble led by Mr. Busch, a violinist, and then joined the Buffalo Philharmonic. By 19 he had joined the New York Philharmonic as assistant principal, after Mr. Busch suggested that the Philharmonic invite him to audition. His getting the post, in 1948, was front page news in The Brooklyn Eagle. “My parents thought I was Joe Louis,” he said.Despite his youth, Mr. Drucker caught up quickly, learning on the job. “It was a master class every day,” he said.Bernstein, the Philharmonic’s music director, appointed him to the principal clarinet position in 1960.In 1998, the Philharmonic commemorated Mr. Drucker’s 50th anniversary during the final subscription program of the season by featuring him playing the Copland concerto. At the time, he pointed out that he was not the oldest player there.“I’ve been there the longest, because I started so young,” he told The Times. “But time compresses, you know? Fifty years doesn’t really seem so long.”Mr. Drucker married Naomi Lewis, a clarinetist who has had a fruitful career in her own right, in 1956. Their son, Leon, who goes by Lee, is a bassist with the rockabilly band Stray Cats, performing under the name Lee Rocker. Their daughter, Rosanne, is an alt-country singer-songwriter.In addition to his wife and children, Ms. Drucker is survived by two grandchildren. He lived for most of his adult life in Massapequa.Mr. Drucker, right, with his son, Lee, a bassist with the rockabilly band Stray Cats, and Mr. Drucker’s wife, the clarinetist Naomi Lewis, in 2006.Richard Perry/The New York TimesAlong with the clarinet, Mr. Drucker and his wife had a passion for their 30-foot-long fly bridge cabin cruiser, which they christened the Noni, for Ms. Drucker’s childhood nickname. They would take it for a monthlong cruise every summer.Mr. Drucker edited numerous volumes of studies, solo works and orchestral excerpts for clarinet for the International Music Co. He taught at the Juilliard School from 1968-98.But he was not given to high-flown pronouncements about artistry or musicianship.“You learn all of this stuff,” he once said. “And after a point, somebody has to tell you, ‘Forget it all, just go out and play.’”Alex Traub More

Announcing that she and fiance Orlando Bloom are expecting their first child together, the ‘Firework’ hitmaker dubs her pregnancy the longest secret she has ever had to keep.
Mar 5, 2020
AceShowbiz – Katy Perry is pregnant with her first child.
The 35-year-old singer announced the happy news that she and fiance Orlando Bloom are expecting a baby together in her “Never Worn White” music video, which she dropped on Wednesday night (March 04).
At the end of the video, the camera panned away and showed Katy cradling her growing bump.
In an Instagram Live after the video’s release, Katy told fans that the tot is due this summer.
“There’s a lot that will be happening this summer,” she grinned. “Not only will I be giving birth, literally, but also figuratively to something you guys have been waiting for. So let’s just call it a double whammy. It’s a two-for.”
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“I am excited. We’re excited and happy and it’s probably the longest secret I’ve ever had to keep. And I like to tell you guys everything but I knew I would tell you in the best way, which is through a piece of music because that’s… I guess that’s how I speak to you. That’s how we speak together to each other.”
Katy added that she’s been struggling with pregnancy cravings, and carries a bottle of hot sauce around with her wherever she goes. She also admitted she’s been eating “the same burrito for weeks on end.”
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After announcing her pregnancy, Katy took to Twitter to tell her fans she was “so glad” she didn’t have to “suck in” her bump any more, adding, “or carry around a big purse lol.”

While the baby will be the first for Katy, Orlando, 43, is already father to nine-year-old son Flynn with ex-wife Miranda Kerr.
The couple’s pregnancy news comes after they celebrated the one-year anniversary of their engagement on Valentine’s Day last month.

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Irondale Ensemble’s adaptation of Brecht’s antiwar epic captures some of its spirit but lacks any real philosophical or political heft.There’s no virtue in war. But there is profit — for those ruthless enough to get it.So preaches Bertolt Brecht in his play “Mother Courage and Her Children,” a new adaptation of which is now running as part of Irondale Ensemble’s Brecht in Exile series. This production, directed and adapted by Jim Niesen, using John Willett’s classic translation, captures some of the spirit of Brecht’s cynical war fable but none of the philosophical or political heft.Mother Courage (an appropriately brusque Vicky Gilmore, in a knit hat, leather jacket and combat boots), traveling with her three children, is selling goods from a cart during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s Eilif (Nolan Kennedy), her pugnacious elder son who’s recruited as a soldier; Swiss Cheese (Terry Greiss), her honest but dimwitted younger son who becomes an army paymaster; and Kattrin (Jacqueline Joncas), her mute daughter. While peddling her wares over the course of several years, this mother and her family meet soldiers, a cook, a chaplain, a prostitute and a spy, and ultimately her children become direct or indirect casualties of the war she aimed to get rich on.“Mother Courage” is being produced and staged by Irondale at its space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a former Sunday school auditorium with chipped walls and giant plaques announcing the Beatitudes, which would have worked for this no-frills play if it weren’t undermined by what precedes it. Before the show, which has been marketed as an immersive experience, audience members can have a drink in the makeshift lobby set up with picnic tables; beer and soft pretzels, courtesy of DSK Brooklyn, are served from a cart in the corner. It’s meant to recall a biergarten, but is more a gimmick than an actual part of the show.In other words, it looks and feels like any other hipster hangout in Brooklyn.In his staging, Niesen retains Brecht’s title cards, the expository bits of narrative announcing what will transpire in each of the 12 scenes in this tedious two-and-a-half-hour epic.There are songs, too, as in Brecht’s original text — exegetic tunes that the characters break into — set to new music by Sam Day Harmet, who performs here with Erica Mancini and Stephen LaRosa. The score — incorporating banjo, guitar, drums, accordion and a synthesizer — begins with a war march before shooting into different genres, from bluegrass to ’80s synth pop and garage rock.The music’s too chic and eccentric for the production and the actors, who perform on, in and around an unsightly two-level scaffolding structure draped with blankets and curtains (scenic design is by Ken Rothchild).As for the actors: How can they be critiqued when Brecht wrote an unsentimental play with characters who aren’t meant to be empathized with, who don’t appeal to our hearts but our minds? Of the show’s central brood, the women are most memorable — Gilmore’s despicable Mother Courage and Joncas’s skittish Kattrin, who communicates through a series of fearsome croaks. The rest of the cast — all of whom play several characters — appear most comfortable when they tap into the production’s absurd sense of humor, such as Stephen Cross’s indulgent performance as a clucking, mischievous capon and Michael-David Gordon’s huffing and griping as a weary prostitute named Yvette. Many of the performances feel lethargic, and the cast awkwardly hiccups through the dialogue of even the smallest bits of improvised comedy.Niesen’s direction flattens an already challenging work of theater that, despite its influence, didn’t quite catch on in the United States, where agitprop and other kinds of homiletic plays are less popular. This “Mother Courage” feels like pedagogy encased in a bubble, isolated from, say, an overseas war — not to mention the political warmongering and consumptive capitalism in our own country.This production then reads as an indelicate transcription, because Brecht may be stone cold, but that doesn’t mean his work lacks spark. The spark of revolution, that is — though Brecht pioneered the Lehrstück, or “learning play,” his aim wasn’t just to educate but to incite audiences to make change in their society. He wanted his plays to “knock them into shape,” Brecht wrote. Unfortunately, this “Mother Courage” fails to pack a punch.Mother Courage and Her ChildrenThrough June 5 at Irondale, Brooklyn; irondale.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

Young music theater makers are benefiting from the continent’s huge operatic resources while developing their own distinctive voices.Last summer, American directors headlined three of Europe’s most prestigious opera festivals.In Aix-en-Provence, France, you could see the New York-born Ted Huffman’s take on “L’Incoronazione di Poppea”; the Connecticut native Lydia Steier’s spin on “Die Zauberflöte” at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria; or “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival, in Germany, staged by Yuval Sharon, the visionary leader of the Detroit Opera, who hails from a suburb of Chicago.This would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. Until recently, there were few recognizable American directors working on Europe’s major stages. It was a short list that included the avant-garde directors Robert Wilson, 81, and Peter Sellars, 65, and the Alden brothers, David and Christopher, both 73.Now, a new crop of American directors, most under the age of 50, is gaining an unlikely foothold on the continent and leaving its mark on the opera scene.Germany is a launchpad for many. “More young artists from all over the world are coming here,” said Amy Stebbins, a Berlin-based opera director and librettist from New Hampshire. That’s hardly surprising, she said, given the numerous opportunities there for training and employment. Not only does Germany have more than 80 full-time opera companies; the country’s free education system — including music education — and the availability of paid internships make breaking into opera comparatively democratic and egalitarian.In Germany, even provincial opera companies have the wherewithal to put together full and challenging seasons. Ambitious artistic directors are eager to discover new musical and dramatic points of view.“They’re always on the lookout for kind of new voices and different voices,” said Louisa Proske, the associate artistic director of the Halle Opera, in eastern Germany. Proske, a native Berliner and a co-founder of Heartbeat Opera in New York, said many German directors take “a very intellectual approach” and that “what can be attractive is this kind of propensity to storytelling that I think is more in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.”One house that has been particularly instrumental in luring American directors across the pond is the Frankfurt Opera. Both Huffman and another New Yorker, R.B. Schlather, worked at the company’s alternative venue (where Sharon also directed the German premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s “Lost Highway”) before graduating to the main stage.“Both of them, I feel, come out of the tradition of Bob Wilson,” said Bernd Loebe, the Frankfurt Opera’s artistic director, adding that he sees them as directors who “want to escape this superficial approach to opera” that is often found in the United States.Loebe said he wasn’t interested in “the cliché of old-fashioned opera: beautiful sets, beautiful costumes.”“I want to see a link between music and drama,” he added. “I want directors who are interested in the music.”Here’s a closer look at three American opera directors who are leaving their mark in Europe.Jacquelyn Stucker and Jake Arditti in “L’Incoronazione di Poppea” at the Aix-en Provence Festival in France last summer.Ruth WalzTed HuffmanTed Huffman may well be the only American to graduate from singing in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” as a child to directing a new production of the work at one of Europe’s major opera houses.Huffman’s love of music was nurtured by singing Bach and Handel in a church choir. As a child growing up in the suburbs of New York City, he also auditioned for, and landed some, children’s roles in Broadway shows and at the Metropolitan Opera.“I spent a lot of time as a kid being exposed to all of this,” the 46-year-old director said. “And I think, you know, it got in my system, in a good way. It didn’t let go.”In his early 20s, he and a friend founded the Greenwich Music Festival, an innovative music event in Connecticut that ran between 2004 and 2012, where he directed several productions, including Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón.”Yet despite the festival’s success, he didn’t feel that there was much room for him to realize his directing ambitions on a larger scale.“I quite consciously didn’t go the more traditional American route of assisting in big houses and kind of learning that way, because I felt like that was a kind of trap for directors to learn a system of making work on existing sets with existing costumes,” he said.After taking part in the Merola Opera Program, in San Francisco, in 2010, he shipped to Europe on a career grant from that institute and picked up his first assignments in London, including an acclaimed staging of Maxwell Davies’s “The Lighthouse” in 2012 for English Touring Opera.In the decade since, Huffman has become one of Europe’s most in-demand young opera directors, praised for his ability to coax psychologically complex performances from his actors in visually distinctive and uncluttered stagings. He has staged “Die Zauberflöte” in Frankfurt, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Berlin and “Madama Butterfly” in Zurich.Writing in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe named Huffman’s “Poppea” at Aix one of last year’s musical highlights, calling it “a vivid, spare staging” and praising the director for guiding “his youthful cast in scenes that were genuinely sexy.”Along with reimagining the classics, Huffman champions new opera, most significantly as a director and librettist for the British composer Philip Venables. To date, they have worked together on “4.48 Psychosis” (2016) and “Denis & Katya” (2019), both of which have been staged in Europe and America. Their latest collaboration, set to premiere at Aix in July, is co-produced by the Skirball Center at N.Y.U.“One of the most exciting things about Europe is that for a longer time there’s been a mandate to produce new work,” Huffman said. “I think that there’s a huge sea change happening in America now,” he added, referencing the Metropolitan Opera’s recent commitment to staging more operas by living composers. It’s one of the reasons, he said, that he’ll continue to divide his career between the United States and Europe for the foreseeable future.A scene from “Die Zauberflöte,” directed by Lydia Steier at the Salzburg Festival, last year.Sandra ThenLydia SteierLydia Steier wanted to direct opera ever since she saw Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning movie “Amadeus” as a child growing up in Hartford, Conn.Her mother encouraged her interest by taking her to the Connecticut Opera, but the stiffly traditional productions there left Steier unfulfilled. “I was always just confused by how the emotional brutality of this kind of music was actually sort of nullified by seeing it onstage,” Steier said.Now, of the American directors of the younger generation, Steier, 44, is arguably the most firmly entrenched in the European opera scene.In recent seasons, she has staged two new productions of “Die Zauberflöte” at Austria’s prestigious Salzburg Festival, “La fanciulla del West” at the Berlin State Opera and “Les Troyens” at the Semper Opera in Dresden.“Lydia is unbelievably honest about what she has to say about human behavior,” said Laura Berman, the American-born artistic director of the Hanover State Opera, where, in 2019, Steier directed an acclaimed production of the religious potboiler “La Juive” that played with antisemitic stereotypes in ways rarely seen on German stages.“I suppose it’s sometimes quite cynical, but it’s very funny at the same time. And she exposes racism and narcissistic behavior in society,” Berman added.Steier never set out to work in Europe. In 2002, a Fulbright fellowship brought her to Berlin to conduct research about the city’s three opera houses. Afterward, she interned at the Komische Oper there, which led to her taking an assistant position at the house, accompanying productions by innovative directors, including Calixto Bieito and Barrie Kosky.In 2009, she assisted Achim Freyer on his production of “Das Rheingold,” the first part of the “Ring” cycle in Los Angeles. (Freyer’s assistants on the tetralogy also included Yuval Sharon.) A year later, also in Los Angeles, she directed a production of “Lohengrin” that remains her most significant American production to date.That same year, her directing career took off in Europe with an acclaimed double bill of “Pagliacci” and Busoni’s rarely seen one-act “Turandot” (which predates Puccini’s more famous setting) in Weimar, Germany. She became a fixture at opera houses across the German-speaking world, including the Komische, where she had shows in back-to-back seasons, and at Theater Basel, in Switzerland, where her 2016 production of Stockhausen’s demanding “Donnerstag aus Licht” was voted the year’s best performance by the German magazine Opernwelt.Around the same time, Markus Hinterhäuser, the incoming artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, saw and was impressed by Steier’s intimate production of Handel’s oratorio “Jephtha” in Vienna. He offered her “Die Zauberflöte,” one of the festival’s key works. Her 2018 production, and the considerably revised staging she presented at last summer’s festival, took a cue from the 1980s cult film “The Princess Bride.”“Millennials and Gen X are known for having an openness and a preference for ironic and edgy humor,” Berman said. “I think that somebody like Lydia has maybe a more unabashed approach to European culture than a European might have.”Berman, who was in charge of opera at Theater Basel when Steier directed “Licht” there, said that audiences tend to respond to Steier’s inclusion of pop cultural references “in a very kind of brazen way.”Despite her accomplishments on the continent, however, Steier said that work in the United States has been elusive. “It has always been the ambition of mine,” she said, “because I think there’s a lot of what I’ve done that would actually sort of shine a new light on what to do with the standard repertoire in the U.S.”Heather Engebretson, left, and Vincenzo Costanzo as Butterfly and Pinkerton in “Madama Butterfly” at the Frankfurt Opera.Barbara AumüllerR.B. SchlatherUnlike Huffman and Steier, R.B. Schlather, 37, is a rare American opera director whose innovative stateside work has attracted international attention.In five years, Schlather went from directing experimental productions at a gallery space on New York’s Lower East Side to working at one of Germany’s leading opera houses.Schlather’s performance-art re-imaginings of Handel’s “Alcina” and “Orlando,” staged in Lower Manhattan in 2014 and 2015, led to an invitation from Loebe, the artistic director at the Frankfurt Opera, to put on another work by the German composer, “Tamerlano,” at the company’s alternative venue, the Bockenheimer Depot, in 2019.“My manager at the time told me that Bernd Loebe was really interested in me and how they have this old warehouse-like space and that he was looking for directors who were thinking more about site-specific work,” Schlather said, “and I said, ‘Fantastic, absolutely. Sign me up.’”That confidence paid off when his stark production, set in a prison camp, was a critical and popular hit.Two years later, Schlather debuted on Frankfurt’s main stage with Domenico Cimarosa’s “L’italiana in Londra,” a 1778 work that lies far outside of the standard repertoire. Once again, it triumphed. A critic in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper called it “the rebirth of the Frankfurt Opera out of the spirit of comedy.”When Schlather returned to Frankfurt last year, it was not with a rarity, but with “Madama Butterfly” in a daringly stripped-down staging that left much to the viewer’s imagination.“There was no cliché of ‘Madame Butterfly,’ like these terrible romantic productions we have seen,” Loebe said, comparing aspects of it to classical Japanese theater. “It was very clean and clear.”The production was so successful that it will return for eight performances between May and July. And Loebe has invited Schlather back to work at the house during the 2024-25 season. (Like Huffman, Schlather is keeping one foot in the States: In October, he will direct a Handel opera in Hudson, N.Y.).“I love working in a place like Frankfurt, where there’s such a diversity of repertoire and you can see the most obscure thing and the most popular thing always in an interesting point of view,” Schlather said, adding that the house has given him opportunities that he would be unlikely to get in the United States.“He took a big leap of faith on me,” Schlather said of Loebe. “So I think I really lucked out by being what he was looking for, or what he was open to.” More

First come the plants: the Baishan fir and the Qiaojia pine, the coral tree and the suicide palm. Then come the insects, the Franklin’s bumblebee and the Bozdagh grasshopper in turn, then the spiders, the fish, the reptiles, the amphibians, the frogs, 17 kinds in all. Birds fly behind, finches and macaws and vultures and larks, monarchs and thrushes and curlews and crows. Last are the mammals, from the mightiest Javan rhinoceros to the meekest mountain pygmy possum.The Latin binomials of 192 endangered species make up the incantatory text of “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction,” the grim, dark heart of “Vespers of the Blessed Earth,” a new, 50-minute work by John Luther Adams that the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Crossing and the soprano Meigui Zhang will premiere under Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Philadelphia on Thursday, before taking it to Carnegie Hall on Friday.That’s 192 endangered species until low male voices invoke one more, the species that named the others and now threatens them, and itself, with extinction: Homo sapiens.“We’ve got to face that the situation is dire and it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Adams said of the climate crisis, and his latest musical response to it, in a recent video interview from his home in the New Mexico desert. “The only way it’s going to get better is if we face the harsh, stark, sobering, actually terrifying realities ahead of us — and act on them.”Coincidentally, though tellingly, the “Vespers” will have their premiere little more than a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its latest report that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”For Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the new “Vespers” are an example of the role that classical music can play in society.“We all believe that music can change the world,” Tarnopolsky said of the premiere’s creators, “that music can change the way we look at searing issues facing humanity. John Luther Adams’s music — his philosophy, his ethos — encapsulates that in all of his work.”Still, for all the ecological concern that has informed so much of what Adams has composed since he turned away from professional environmentalism several decades ago, he has rarely, if ever, been so direct as in these “Vespers.” Habitual disclaimers that his music and his activism were to some extent distinct used to surround works like “Become Ocean,” the consuming masterpiece that won him the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2014, and “Become Desert,” a New York Philharmonic co-commission that will have its belated Lincoln Center premiere this June.Following the example of Greta Thunberg, Adams took the train to Philadelphia from New Mexico, rather than fly.Aaron Richter for The New York Times“I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics,” Adams wrote in “Silences So Deep,” an eloquent memoir published in 2020. “And yet I refuse to make political art.”But the “Vespers” are markedly more urgent in tone compared with Adams’s typical “passive activism,” as it was called by Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, which has recorded Adams works including “Canticles of the Holy Winds” and “Sila: The Breath of the World.”“He builds these sound worlds that allow you to appreciate the awesomeness, literally, of the world around us, even though you’re sitting in a concert hall that is probably contributing to the problem,” Nally said, pointing as an example to the first of the five vespers, “A Brief Descent Into Deep Time,” which sinks through the layered rocks of the Grand Canyon, eons of geology evoking the permanence of the Earth.“Music for me is a kind of spiritual discipline; it’s as close to religion as I get,” Adams said. “It’s a way of being in touch with mysteries larger, deeper, older than I can fathom, and so, because of that, I’ve never really been interested in expressing myself in music.”That changed, he continued, as he worked on the Philadelphia commission from spring 2020 on, amid superstorms, floods, police killings and the pandemic. His best friend, the nature writer Barry Lopez, died of prostate cancer that December, three months after a wildfire had burned parts of his home near the McKenzie River in Oregon, making him a climate refugee.“In the middle of all this,” Adams recalled, “I found myself composing what is if not the most personal, at least the most overtly expressive music I’ve ever composed.”But the “Vespers” are prayers, not a requiem. Even if Adams said that this score is one of the saddest and most austere that he has composed, it still celebrates the splendor of the enduring Earth, and is more melodic than some of his music has been. “If ‘Ocean’ and ‘Desert’ are Brucknerian,” he suggested, “this is almost Mozartean.”That dynamic of beauty and grief going hand in hand is especially apparent in “Night Shining Clouds,” a movement for strings alone that depicts cloud structures whose chemistry means that they are “getting more beautiful because we’re polluting the Earth more,” Adams said. It’s also clear in “Aria of the Ghost Bird,” the desolate final movement, a setting for soprano of the unrequited mating call of the last Kauai oo, a bird native to Hawaii that has not been heard since the 1980s.“It’s the song of an extinct bird, and yet it’s so beautiful,” Adams said. “One of my friends looked at the score and said, ‘Well, you just can’t help yourself, can you J.L.A., you have to end on a hopeful note.’ I said, ‘Jim, the bird’s extinct.’”Adams has not lost hope yet, though he admits that “the odds don’t look good for us as a species, and regardless even the best-case scenario isn’t very rosy.” The Biden administration’s recent decision to approve further oil drilling in his beloved Alaska is “kind of unbelievable,” he said.What gives Adams succor, even now, is a younger group of activists coming to the fore and working in new ways. Following the example of Greta Thunberg, he has cut back on travel and become more deliberate about his choices when it is unavoidable. To attend the back-to-back premieres of “Vespers” and “Night” — his part in “Proximity,” the triptych that opened last week at Lyric Opera of Chicago — he took the train from Albuquerque, rather than fly.“It’s these next generations that are going to have to sort through the rubble that my generation is leaving to them,” Adams said, “and imagine new ways of living together with one another, and living within the limits of biology — or our goose is cooked. But I’m not betting against them, in the face of all of it.”What role does that leave for an old-time environmentalist, now 70, writing music as the catastrophe that he long worked to avoid gathers speed?Adams often talked with Lopez, he said, about what it meant to be a “senior artist.” They agreed that they were, and could be, nothing like the elders of the Indigenous communities they knew. But when Adams recently reread “Arctic Dreams,” which won Lopez the National Book Award in 1986, he found a passage that reminded him of another ideal they had discussed.“The Inuit have a particular kind of person, an isumataq,” Adams said. “An isumataq is not an elder; an isumataq is a person who creates the atmosphere, or the place, within which wisdom may reveal itself. I think Barry was absolutely an isumataq. And that’s what I’m looking for in my own work, and have been looking for all my life. It’s not because I think I know anything. I don’t. I’m probably more clueless than the next person. It’s precisely because I don’t know, that I do what I do.”“I’m not trying to save you, or anyone else, let alone the world,” Adams continued. “First and foremost, I’m doing this because I’m lost, and I’m looking for religion. I’m looking for God, in that sense.” More