Visa delays are causing tumult in the classical music industry, leading to a wave of cancellations just as live performances are finally returning.When the Seattle Symphony finally performed before a full audience last month for the first time in a year and half, something was missing: its music director, the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard, who could not get a visa to travel to the United States.The New York Philharmonic had to find a last-minute substitute this week for the esteemed Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who could not get a visa, either. The Metropolitan Opera had to replace two Russian singers in its production of “Boris Godunov.” And the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a British chamber orchestra that has been regularly visiting the United States since 1980, had to abandon a 10-city tour.As the easing of coronavirus restrictions has allowed live performance to return, many cultural organizations are struggling with another problem: their inability to get artists into the United States because of a long backlog of visa applications at American embassies and consulates. The delays have hampered many industries, but they are particularly upending classical music, which relies on stars from all over the world to make a circuit of leading concert halls and opera houses.Many artists have been caught in the middle, forced to dip into savings to make up for lost concert fees and scrambling to fill their schedules.“It’s like training for the Olympic Games for four years and then at the last minute learning you cannot compete,” said Arthur Jussen, a Dutch pianist whose engagements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra were canceled this month because of what the orchestra described as “unprecedented delays” in getting his visa, just weeks after a 14-concert tour in China, with his brother Lucas, fell through. “It is a bitter pill to swallow.”The classical touring industry was one of the first sectors hit by the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, and now it may be one of the last to recover. Dozens of performances have been canceled in recent weeks in China, Australia, Japan and other countries with sweeping travel restrictions and quarantine rules. The pandemic has served to deepen concerns about the viability of global tours, which have long been considered an essential but expensive part of the classical music ecosystem.But some of the most acute problems are surfacing in the United States.While the Biden administration plans to lift a pandemic-era ban on travelers from 33 countries next month — allowing fully vaccinated visitors from the European Union, China, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, India and other countries — the backlog of visa applications remains a problem.Even in normal times, it can be difficult for visiting artists to obtain the visas they need to perform in the United States. Now they face even longer lines and staff shortages at American embassies and consulates around the world. The earliest available appointments for visa interviews in some cities are for next spring, months after some artists have scheduled performances.The government has allowed exceptions to the travel ban, which remains in effect until early November, for visitors who can prove their work is essential to the U.S. economy. But consulates have in recent weeks been flooded with such requests, adding to the pileup. And some fear the lifting of the travel ban could yield more visa requests — and more delays.Boston Symphony Orchestra with Lucas and Arthur Jussen in September 2019.Winslow TownsonThe State Department, in response to questions about the delays, said the pandemic had resulted in “profound reductions” in its ability to process visas. “As the global situation evolves, the department seeks ways to safely and efficiently process visa applications around the world,” the department said in a statement.In the United States, the visa woes are injecting uncertainty into a fall season that was already rife with challenges, including tepid ticket sales and the ongoing threat posed by the Delta variant.Arts groups are calling on the government to fast-track visas.“The overarching concern is that it would have a chilling effect on international cultural activity and everything it has to offer,” said Heather Noonan, vice president for advocacy at the League of American Orchestras. “When arts organizations can’t rely on the process to work, it makes it very expensive and somewhat risky.”The problems have dampened some of the reopening festivities. For months the Seattle Symphony had promoted the return of its music director, Mr. Dausgaard, who had been stuck abroad since March 2020, for its opening night gala. But he was forced to cancel at the last minute because of visa issues.Mr. Dausgaard, who is now on track to get his visa so he can travel next month, said that the restrictions had meant that he and the orchestra had missed opportunities to develop, including by performing new works together.“It is super painful to see ideas, not least those ideas connected to recordings or touring or something bigger than a single concert, go away,” he said. “The most painful part is the lack of contact with the musicians.”Even some of the industry’s biggest stars have been affected by the delays, including Lang Lang, the celebrated Chinese pianist, whose visa to enter the United States for concerts last month came through only at the last minute.In an interview, Mr. Lang said he hoped restrictions around the world would eventually be lifted so that touring could resume in force.“It is essential to show our audiences that concerts are back,” he said. “The world needs live music.”Outside the United States, the obstacles for touring artists are also formidable.China, once a bustling, lucrative market for touring, including for many American orchestras, has also remained closed to most foreigners, including performers.Wray Armstrong, who runs a music agency in Beijing, said many ensembles cannot afford the time and money spent on quarantines, even if they are able to get visas. “We just have to be patient until the rules change,” he said.China’s strict quarantine rules, which require isolation of up to three weeks for anyone entering the country, have had the effect of dissuading many Chinese artists from traveling. The composer and conductor Tan Dun has canceled nearly all appearances outside China since the start of the pandemic, delaying the premiere of several works, including “Requiem for Nature,” which he was to conduct in Amsterdam next month.Travel restrictions have added to pressures on many orchestras, which have traditionally depended on tours for branding and prestige. The pandemic has prompted many to cancel plans to travel overseas or to consider scaling back; some larger orchestras are considering sending smaller ensembles instead.Zubin Mehta, the renowned conductor, said it was important for American orchestras to maintain robust touring schedules so that they can develop and show off the strength of music in the United States internationally.“An orchestra always comes back from a major tour a better orchestra,” he said. “A great American orchestra playing in Berlin getting a standing ovation is a reflection on America.”For artists dealing with delays gaining entry to the United States, the experience has been trying.Stephen Stirling, principal horn for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, said the ensemble’s fall tour would have helped him offset some of the thousands of dollars he has lost in fees when he was unable to perform during the pandemic.Mr. Stirling said it was jarring to be dealing with travel restrictions at a time when many cultural institutions are reopening across the world.“Most people’s business is picking up, but we’re still getting cancellations,” he said. “The sooner things can return to normal, the better. We’re desperate to tour again.” More

Kirill Gerstein’s immense recording project “Music in Time of War” surveys works by artists who witnessed World War I and the Armenian genocide.Kirill Gerstein, a Soviet-born pianist whose parents sold their only proper asset — a garage — so that they could afford plane tickets to the United States for their son’s education, approaches music in a way that recalls something his countryman, the conductor Kirill Petrenko, once told him: “I sacrificed so much in my life to not do things by default.”The career of Gerstein, 44, is filled with moments that defy a belief in doing things “by default.” There was the time when he devoted a significant portion of his $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award to commissioning new piano music from composers across jazz and classical music, placing Chick Corea and Brad Mehldau alongside Oliver Knussen and Alexander Goehr. Or there was the time, in 2017, when Gerstein championed a new, shockingly modest critical edition of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 rather than the grandiose, more recognizable version. Or when, as many streamed performances during the pandemic, he instead organized a series of free, online seminars that featured musicians alongside luminaries from the wider arts scene.Now comes Gerstein’s latest project, “Music in Time of War,” a recording that is expansive in its program and packaging: a 141-minute double album of works by Claude Debussy and the Armenian composer and ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet, accompanied by a 174-page book of conversations, essays and photographs that situate the music deep in its historical context.The album — which beyond solo piano pieces also includes works for piano and soprano (with Ruzan Mantashyan), and piano duo (with Katia Skanavi and Thomas Adès) — was released in mid-April. Its timing came at a poignant midpoint for both composers: March 25, the anniversary of Debussy’s death, and April 24, the date Armenia commemorates as the beginning of the 1915 genocide in which up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire. That led to post-traumatic stress disorder for Komitas, who while living in Constantinople (now Istanbul) was deported to Anatolia and brutalized by a guard before being released, then eventually suffered a nervous breakdown.What began as a goal in Gerstein’s “self-development program” — to record Debussy’s Études (1915) — quickly accumulated connections owing to the collection’s composition during one of history’s darkest moments. “Our understanding of a piece of music cannot be divorced from the historical and cultural setting in which it was created and received,” Gerstein, who lives in Berlin, writes in the foreword for his new album’s book.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Grammarians wonder: Should there be an apostrophe in “The Tortured Poets Department”?When Taylor Swift announced at the Grammys that the title of her new album would be “The Tortured Poets Department,” what was your reaction?Maybe it was: “My gosh! Her first new album in more than a year. I can’t wait!”Maybe it was: “Ho-hum. I’d rather listen to Shostakovich/Metallica/Baby Shark.”Or, just possibly, it could have been:“Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in that title?”Yes, plenty of people, upon hearing the biggest music announcement of the year, started thinking about diacritical marks and then talking about them on social media.“I ruined this album release for my students by making it a lesson on apostrophe usage,” wrote Erin Weinberg, an instructor in the department of English, theater, film and media at the University of Manitoba, on X. (Others opined via Reddit, TikTok and elsewhere.)If you do insist on adding an apostrophe, there are two potential places. It could be before the “S”: The Tortured Poet’s Department. That means the department belongs to just one poet.“Is it a department just for a single tortured poet, where they can sit alone and write tortured poetry?” Weinberg asked.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The music manager acquired the rights to the pop superstar’s first six albums as part of a deal with her former label, Big Machine. Now he has sold them to the investment firm Shamrock Capital. More

A collection of 257 CDs and eight DVDs released by Deutsche Grammophon offers the breadth of Abbado’s approach, and its legacy.Claudio Abbado lit a cigar and looked uneasy, as he often did.The Italian conductor, who died in 2014 but would have turned 90 on June 26, was at a meal with the actor Maximilian Schell, in a scene captured in a 1996 documentary. Schell, who was typecast playing Nazis for much of his Academy Award-winning career but worked with Abbado on Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw,” among other things, was telling everyone at the table that conducting must naturally give a musician a sense of power.Abbado smiled, quizzical. Power has nothing to do with music, insisted the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, an orchestra on which Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan had once imposed their interpretive will. “For me,” Abbado added, “power is always linked with dictatorship.”But not all power is political, Schell said; for instance, what might Abbado call the power of music over people? “Love, or respect, or understanding, or tolerance,” the conductor replied. “Remember that, for thinking people, music is one of the most important things in life. It’s part of life itself. That has nothing to do with power.”The pianist Martha Argerich, left, with Abbado in 1968.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIf Abbado’s life had a theme, it was this question of power: of what power means in music, where it comes from, and to what ends. Few of his peers enjoyed such a vita — before Berlin, he held posts at the Teatro Alla Scala, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera — yet were so ambivalent about authority and attention. Shy, quiet, stubborn, he took bows timidly, avoided publicity and denied that he had anything so ignoble as a career. “For me, conducting is not a game,” he told The New York Times in 1973.Berg: ‘Wozzeck,’ Act III interludeVienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 1987Politically a man of the left, Abbado as a musician was most comfortable among equals, if even that; he was a sublime accompanist to the pianists Martha Argerich and Maurizio Pollini, as well as to any number of singers. The film in which he spoke with Schell, “The Silence That Follows the Music,” portrayed him as an embodiment of democracy, an exemplary figure to lead the Berlin Philharmonic after the fall of the Wall and the death of Karajan in 1989, symbols of tyranny and ego alike. If Karajan, as critics described him, saw orchestras as single entities and denied their members any individuality that might impinge on his own, Abbado increasingly saw them, over the course of his life, as more of a collective, in which the players might freely share the spirit of chamber music.Achieving that ideal was no simple task with orchestras of long traditions and routines, though Abbado remade the Philharmonic in his image, and lastingly so. Striving to fulfill that promise led him not only to embrace the energy of youth orchestras, but also to support and found ensembles of like mind: the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra Mozart. The most extravagant was the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, a coterie of colleagues and admirers with whom he gave critically sanctified summer performances from 2003 until just before his death. “All the musicians in the orchestra,” he said in 2007, offering his highest praise to a group that included several noted soloists and sometimes entire string quartets, “they are listening to each other.”But what kinds of interpretations did Abbado’s approach engender? And how will they endure?Many certainly will last, on the evidence of a comprehensive collection of his recordings for the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips labels that the Universal Music Group released earlier this year. Complete with a hardback hagiography and a price tag that, at some retailers, has drifted into four figures despite the easy prior availability of its contents, it compiles 257 CDs and eight DVDs. The breadth is extraordinary — what other conductor was as adept as Abbado in Rossini as well as in Webern and Ligeti? — yet it still excludes records he made for EMI, RCA and Sony, as well as most of his vaunted Mahler from Lucerne.Schubert: Symphony No. 3, finaleChamber Orchestra of Europe, 1987Slide a sleeve out of the box, and chances are that you will select a confirmed classic — the joyful distinction of his Schubert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, or the formidable La Scala “Simon Boccanegra” and “Macbeth” that are the best of his Verdi. You might happen upon a less celebrated gem, like his early Stravinsky or his late Pergolesi, his “Fierrabras” or his “Khovanshchina.” Far from every disc is faultless, though the worst to be said about all but the weakest of them — his Haydn is dismayingly fussy, some of his Mozart wan — is that they are anonymous, refined but bland. But that was the risk that Abbado took in the name of beauty.BORN INTO A richly musical and bravely antifascist Milanese family in 1933, Abbado spent his youth watching the leading conductors of the day as they passed through La Scala. He trained as a pianist, making a couple of recordings, but his fascination was always with the magic men of the podium. Denied entry to observe rehearsals at the Musikverein in Vienna when he was a student there, from 1956 to ’58, he sang his way into them instead, joining the basses of a choir that performed Bach with Hermann Scherchen, and Mahler with Josef Krips.In 1958, Abbado triumphed at Tanglewood in the United States, then, after three years spent teaching chamber music in Parma, won a year as an assistant at the New York Philharmonic. “He is a talented conductor and one of temperament,” the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote after his Lincoln Center debut in 1964. If his basic approach was evident from the start — “he seems to allow his players a freedom to enjoy themselves and yet provides an unobtrusive discipline,” one reviewer noted in 1967 — it was surely made possible by the quality of the ensembles he was quickly blessed to work with. “Now I can choose only the best orchestras,” Abbado said while still not yet 40.And how he used them. The earliest sessions in the Universal box date from February 1966, when Abbado and the London Symphony excerpted Prokofiev ballets with enjoyable flair. There are moments, in the decade or so of recordings that followed, in which his awareness of the past seems to weigh a touch too heavily — a stolid Beethoven Seven from Vienna, a morose Brahms Three from Dresden — but the impression on the whole is of a young conductor of rare intelligence.Scriabin: ‘The Poem of Ecstasy’Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1971All the Abbado hallmarks grace the ear, such as the immaculate balances of his crushing Tchaikovsky “Pathétique” and the poetic elegance of his first Brahms Second in Berlin, although it is striking how the incision that marks his fledgling readings of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” and “Italian” Symphonies and Berg’s “Three Pieces for Orchestra” would be sanded down in equally successful later accounts. At his best, Abbado was already considerable: His Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, from 1970 to ’71, are not just some of the finest recordings he made, festivals of color composed with the eye of a master, but count among the choicest in the history of that orchestra.Abbado remained acutely conscious of conducting history, symbolically wearing a watch given to him by Erich Kleiber, a fellow champion of Berg. When he appeared on the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs” in 1980, he selected favorite recordings by Pierre Monteux, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and his one idol, Furtwängler, whose rare ability to generate tension he admired. But Abbado came to sound little like any of these predecessors, and took from none of them an aesthetic agenda to promote as his own. He barely spoke in detail about his artistic principles at all; “he tells you about a piece by conducting it,” one of his producers said in 1994.Given that Abbado was a slightly elusive interpreter, any generalities to be offered about him are necessarily weak. But even after he started trialing new sonorities and scales of ensemble with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the early 1980s — developing an immediacy of communication that encouraged a taste for details in him that could become a little much — there were clear traits that ran through his recordings: a warm lucidity, a smooth, long line and an ability to bring out the lyricism in a work, however dense, that critics reductively called Italianate.Debussy: ‘La Damoiselle Élue’London Symphony Orchestra, 1986With the London Symphony, there is tender, precisely shaded Ravel, a survey of cultivated Mendelssohn, exquisite Debussy, fiery Prokofiev and touching Strauss. The Chicago Symphony, too, often gave him its best, including some of his more persuasive Mahler, in whose music he was not as reliable, or at least not as distinctive, as his lifelong fidelity to the composer might suggest.Abbado leading the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001.Riccardo Musacchio/EPA, via ShutterstockThe recordings from Vienna and Berlin are more variable. Typically, the more distant a piece is from the most commonplace repertoire, the more impressive the results, though there are exceptions: chiefly, a magnificent Brahms cycle from around the start of his tenure in Berlin, audibly in the lineage of his predecessors, if gentler.There is a gorgeous “Pelléas et Mélisande” and a sweeping “Gurrelieder” from Vienna, but there are also unusual choral works by Schubert and Schumann, endearingly done, plus unmissable Berg and Boulez. Both orchestras supply Beethoven cycles. The Vienna is patchy, the Berlin livelier but finicky, the shrunken ensemble blanched of tone. Abbado’s Berlin era is better approached through other routes: a ravishing Hindemith disc; charming Mozart and Strauss with Christine Schäfer; a moving, if dimly recorded, Mahler Third along with a profoundly humane Sixth, taken from his first return to the Philharmonie since his departure in 2002, after treatment for cancer.Mahler: Symphony No. 6, finaleBerlin Philharmonic, 2004Illness left Abbado unable to conduct more than sporadically, mostly at Lucerne and with the Orchestra Mozart, which he founded in Bologna in 2004; experimentation decorates his late recordings with that ensemble, including with period-instrument practice, though more affectingly in his concerto collaborations with friends such as the flutist Jacques Zoon and the hornist Alessio Allegrini than in his Mozart, Schubert and Schumann symphonies.“You never arrive in a lifetime,” Abbado had told The Times in 1973. Perhaps it was apt that his last recording was of an unfinished symphony, Bruckner’s Ninth, in a farewell Lucerne account that, in its final bars, seems almost to glow with compassion. He died five months later. More