It’s not that John Kander wasn’t touched by John Kander Day. The composer of the song “New York, New York” — played at every Yankees home game and known worldwide from its first five notes — was obviously moved when the city’s mayor handed him a framed proclamation in front of the St. James Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Nor was he jaded, he later said, about having that block of West 44th Street, from Broadway to Eighth Avenue, christened Kander & Ebb Way in recognition of his work and that of Fred Ebb, his longtime lyricist, who died in 2004.Still, of Kander’s thousands of songs, seven movie scores and 20 major musicals, including “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” not one bar was written with the idea of getting a piece of pavement named for him. If Ebb, with his brasher, needier personality, would have eaten up the honor, Kander seems at best to withstand it, embarrassed by too much attention or praise. He is so militantly unassuming that the highest compliment he will pay himself is the one his mother used to offer: “A horse can’t do any better.”So on March 24, as a choir sang and a crowd cheered and his friend Lin-Manuel Miranda read Ebb’s beautiful lyric for the song “First You Dream,” Kander, who had turned 96 days earlier, was thinking less about what was going on outside the St. James than what was going on inside it. There, a few hours after the ceremony, his 16th new Broadway musical, “New York, New York” — named for “that song,” which he doesn’t even like — would offer its first public preview. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, it is set to open on April 26.Anna Uzele, center, as a singer whose troubled romance with a musician is one of the many stories told in the musical “New York, New York,” at the St. James Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the plot is only tangentially related to that of the 1977 Martin Scorsese film starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, the stage musical, with a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, naturally includes its big numbers. Others are from the Kander and Ebb trunk, some never previously performed onstage. But much of the score is new. Six songs are collaborations with Miranda, who said the problem with writing lyrics for Kander is “just keeping up” as the melodies pour out, sometimes via voice memo at 3 in the morning. The rest, whether swingy or Schuberty or uncategorizable, are by Kander alone.At an age when most artists are resting on their laurels, or beneath them, Kander, the last of the great Golden Age composers, just keeps going. Other than arthritis in his hands, he is unimpaired physically; he trots up and down the three-story spiral staircase to his studio faster than I dared when I spent a few hours there with him. To the annoyance of his husband, Albert Stephenson, and everyone around him, he eats dessert regularly and generously, with no ill effect. “I do my chores, too,” he said: washing the dishes and making the bed, tight as a drum, as he was taught at Camp Nebagamon when he was 10.Well, lots of people remain spry seemingly forever. What worries artists, and especially composers, is the possibility of drying up creatively. Even musical theater titans like Rodgers and Berlin succumbed to harmonic meekness and rhythmic sclerosis as they approached their 70s. Certainly after Ebb’s death, and after fulfilling a promise to shepherd as many of the team’s unfinished musicals to Broadway as he could — “Curtains” in 2007, “The Scottsboro Boys” in 2010 and “The Visit” in 2015 — Kander might have been expected to coast into retirement on tributes and revivals.But no: Even before that job was finished, he’d jumped back into the water. In 2013 came “The Landing,” in 2017, “Kid Victory,” and in 2018 a dance play based on the Henry James novella “The Beast in the Jungle.” All three pieces, produced Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater, were experimental in a way you might expect from someone at the start of a career, not seven decades into it. And now, even as “New York, New York” opens, another show is aborning.Kander and the lyricist Fred Ebb in 1987. Their 45-year partnership yielded works like “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” and was more intense and monogamous than many marriages.So it seems almost Sisyphean that while a music assistant is busy digitizing Kander’s archive and preparing the paper assets for eventual donation to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the man himself is sitting nearby at a keyboard, cranking out more every day.That’s not the right phrase, though. Even if he were in fact profoundly lazy, as Ebb insisted and Kander does not deny, composing is hardly drudgery for him. It’s more of a geological process, water rising from an aquifer, desperate to be tapped. If he doesn’t let the music out through his hands — or block it by listening to somebody else’s — it might drown him.Which means he is always listening: Music plays in his head, he said, “like a radio you can’t turn off.” It began, he believes, some 35,000 John Kander Days ago, when, as a baby in Kansas City, Mo., he contracted tuberculosis. Isolated on a sleeping porch and able to sense his family only when they approached the screen door, he learned to associate the sound of footsteps coming toward him with the imminence of loved ones. “I think I began to organize sound in my head then, out of necessity.”FOOTSTEPS GO BOTH WAYS though. If, as he said, a “residue of loneliness” remains from that experience, it’s a loneliness for which “the most fortunate antidote” has been companionship and collaboration. Though many people assumed that Kander and Ebb were a couple — their 45-year partnership was more intense and monogamous than many marriages — the men were not socially close. But he and Stephenson, a dancer in Kander and Ebb’s “The Act,” have been together since 1977, married since 2008. Some of Kander’s loveliest songs were written not for any show but for him.As for collaboration, it’s no accident that Kander surrounds himself with a rotating roster of familiar names. “Next to the greatest sex you can imagine, making art with your friends is as good as it gets,” he said. He’s worked with Stroman six times, Thompson eight times and Washington, a featured performer in “The Scottsboro Boys,” twice. Half the music team are old Kander hands too, making the March 14 sitzprobe — the first rehearsal with the cast and the orchestra — a reunion and, as it happened, a party. You haven’t really heard “Happy Birthday” until a Broadway chorus of 37, accompanied by 19 crack musicians, sings it in a crowded, reverberant room.“There are a lot of really gorgeous places to be on this earth,” Kander told them, “but none as gorgeous as this.”Kander in his apartment with a 1963 painting by Camille Norman. The painting, depicting a scene from “Cabaret,” was given to him as a gift on the show’s opening night in 1966.Photograph by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times; painting by Camille NormanThat a love parade attends him wherever he goes — I’m part of it, having worked for him 40 years ago, sleuthing for a lost score — doesn’t mean he’s a pushover. At the sitzprobe he spoke rarely but made his points. Wanting a song called “A Simple Thing Like That” to be “less waltzy,” he suggested removing the triangle from the downbeats. For “Light,” one of the new Kander-Miranda songs, painting in ethereal music a portrait of Manhattanhenge, he asked for a more unpredictable spacing of the dissonant chords that bring it to such a startling close. And “Gold,” a flamboyant conga sequence, needed more schmaltz. “Lower your standards,” he instructed the orchestra.As that sampling of song types attests, “New York, New York” tells many stories, about people from many backgrounds. The main one is the troubled romance between a Black singer (Anna Uzele) and an Irish musician (Colton Ryan). Secondary ones concern a Polish refugee and his violin teacher; a Cuban drummer and his mother; and a Black trumpet-playing GI. Most have come to New York after World War II to make art or save their souls — or both at once. As a new song called “Major Chord” puts it, they seek the trifecta of “music, money, love.”“Maybe you get one, maybe you get two,” Stroman said. “But it’s hard to get three.”Still, Kander adds, summing up the theme, “New York is where you have the best chance of being who you see yourself as.”He would know, having come here for just that reason, in 1951, after college and military service. The banners welcoming his transport ship from the Pacific — “Welcome Home! Well Done!” — immediately made sense: This was where he was meant to be.The “well done” part he does not take as seriously; his service was mostly spent playing piano for officers and at one point running $400,000 worth of Canadian Club whisky to Manila — along with 11 cows.Yet “well done” surely applies to him now. “He lives his life correctly,” Stroman observed. Perhaps that’s why no one speaks invidiously of him, even though few major chords are as undiminished as his. Music, he has abundantly; money, in spades — “Chicago” alone, the longest-running American musical ever on Broadway, has grossed more than $1.6 billion worldwide. And love, absolutely, even if it had to wait until his 50s. “Happiness is one of the last things you learn, if you ever do,” he said.Joel Grey, center, atop a platform, as the master of ceremonies of the Kit Kat Club in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret.”PhotofestChita Rivera as the film star Aurora in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” which debuted on Broadway in 1993.Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesCharlotte D’Amboise as Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival of “Chicago,” which has been running since 1996.THAT HE IS ADORED by younger colleagues is partly because he serves as a beacon of the possibility of lifelong growth. (Taking them to lunch when they are barely known, as he took Miranda, doesn’t hurt either.) Stroman marvels at the muscle of his musical storytelling, built up by decades of doing it. “If I say to him ‘I imagine a girl walking down the beach and she meets the love of her life,’” she said, “he can leap up to the piano and that is exactly the story you hear in his melody.”But for Kander, aging as an artist is less about the expansion than the concentration of skill. “By the time Verdi wrote ‘Falstaff,’ when he was almost 80,” he said, “he had learned to do in 16 measures what in ‘Nabucco’” — 50 years earlier — “would have taken him a big aria and a cabaletta and all that. There’s nothing wasted, no decoration, just the thing itself. I’m not lucky enough to have had that experience a lot, but I recognize it when I see it and it almost makes me laugh.”There’s that modesty again, reflexive but also pragmatic. Stroman summarizes the two biggest things she’s learned about collaboration from Kander as “no bad ideas” — which actually means plenty of them, freely offered and freely rejected — and “leave egos at the door.” Kander wants his drama onstage only.“What we do is a craft,” he insisted. “I mean you can have a great inner talent, and a lot of people do, but without craft it’s very hard for the talent to emerge. Also the reverse is true. You may not feel particularly inspired by a commitment you’ve made, or a moment you’re supposed to create, but you still have to write those 12 bars to cover someone crossing the stage.”Even worse, you might have to write a second version of “New York, New York.” When De Niro complained that the first was too “light,” Kander and Ebb, in a snit, tossed off the famous one in 45 minutes. “Which does the job and audiences like it and De Niro was right and it’s a great piece of luck,” Kander said ruefully. “But I just don’t get it.”At the sitzprobe, they got it. When the brass and saxes swung in big at the top of the tune, the cast reared back, as if hit by a tornado. Tears of something like joy flew from their eyes, if not from Kander’s. When I later forced him to name some songs he’s actually proud of, he admitted only to ballads, not Ebb’s beloved “screamers.” “I Miss the Music” from “Curtains.” “I Don’t Care Much,” written as a dinner boast between coffee and dessert. And a new one, set in the Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Station, perhaps inevitably called “Can You Hear Me?”Off the top of my head, I could name 30 others he ought to include.“I appreciate that, but it’s independent of me. My fingers find something, as if they have little brains of their own. The keyboard is my friend, since I was 4. Being an artist is much more like being a carpenter than like being God: Something will happen. Or you tear it up. And start again.”A horse can’t do any better. More

Musical acts like Balming Tiger are challenging the idea that K-pop is nothing but polished, perfectly synchronized boy bands and girl groups.What comes to mind when you hear the word “K-pop”? Is it the global boy band phenomenon BTS, wearing studded jackets and dancing in perfect sync? Or the girl group Blackpink, performing at Coachella in trendy fashions and perfectly curled hair?How about an “independent music collective” of casually dressed people, crowded around a mixing board in a one-room studio, across the street from a Seoul restaurant specializing in fried chicken?“Give me some more bass,” said Omega Sapien, a vocalist with electric-green hair and grills, swaying his hips and grunting to the beat. The studio was cluttered with art, vinyl records, dumbbells and other odds and ends. Another singer lay prone nearby, nursing a bad hangover.For Balming Tiger, this is daily life as an alternative K-pop band. Their music, a fusion of diverse genres from electro to hip-hop, is funky and edgy. Their look, unkempt and grungy, is far from the professional styling of the groups that most of the world associates with K-pop.“Even if we wanted to be like idols, we can’t,” said Chanhee, far left, a vocalist with Balming Tiger. Other members are, from left, Mudd the Student, Unsinkable, BJ Wnjn, Omega Sapien and Sogumm. Woohae Cho for The New York TimesBut they claim that label, too. K-pop is any music that comes out of South Korea, according to Omega Sapien. “Everything in that realm is K-pop,” he said.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?  More

Wearing combat boots and a U.S. Air Force flight suit, the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo took her place onstage one recent morning and began to sing about war.“I break down the airfields, the refineries, the consulates and factories,” she sang inside a rehearsal studio in Washington. “I return them to desert, to particles.”D’Angelo was preparing to star in “Grounded,” a new work about drone warfare, composed by Jeanine Tesori and with a libretto by George Brant, that will premiere at Washington National Opera on Saturday, ahead of a run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York next season.On that morning, she was learning how to move around the set in the role of Jess, an F-16 pilot reassigned to drone duty because of an unexpected pregnancy. Because, as with any opera, rehearsals for “Grounded” have been full of the usual considerations about props, musical cues and choreography.But this process has also been anguished and emotional. The opera offers an unvarnished look at the psychological toll of drone warfare, and its themes have taken on fresh relevance amid the escalating violence of the Israel-Hamas war.Tesori, left, and Michael Mayer, the production’s director.Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times“For everyone in the room, it has been intense,” D’Angelo said in an interview between rehearsals. “There are moments of beauty and calm and serenity. And then, total chaos.”Because of its war themes, “Grounded,” adapted from Brant’s play of the same name, has already drawn scrutiny. In the spring, anger erupted after Washington National Opera listed the presenting sponsor of the production as General Dynamics, the military contractor.Critics accused the opera company of serving as a mouthpiece for the defense industry. The house later clarified, saying that General Dynamics had helped underwrite the entire season, not just “Grounded,” and that the corporation had no say over the programming or its contents.Tesori said that the scrutiny had been unexpected, but that she was hopeful audiences would look beyond politics. She noted that she and Brant started working on the opera in 2014, long before they knew where it would premiere or who would be among the sponsors.“Every impulse, every note of this, is done from two writers who are trying to birth this work, and they don’t know what hospital they’re in,” she said. “I think it’s really clear now, and that’s great.”Ahead of the premiere, Washington National Opera is working to promote discussion about the themes of “Grounded” with service members, veterans and their families, inviting them for talks and performances.Timothy O’Leary, the company’s general director, said that it was important to provide context to members of the military and the defense industry. “Grounded” raises questions about the morality of remote warfare and explores its toll on the mental health of service members.“It’s one thing to read about these issues in a newspaper, but to walk in the shoes of somebody on the front lines wrestling with these questions of moral responsibility and life and death — that’s an entirely different experience,” he said. “The stage has always been part of how we understand the costs of war, both to warriors and to the innocent.”“Grounded” premiered as a one-woman play in 2013 and had an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater in 2015, in a production starring Anne Hathaway. After seeing the play, the Met’s leaders, including Peter Gelb, its general manager, and Paul Cremo, its dramaturg, commissioned the opera adaptation.A rehearsal for “Grounded,” which will open the Metropolitan Opera’s season next year.They turned to Tesori, a celebrated composer who has won Tony Awards for the musicals “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Fun Home,” and has written operas like “Blue,” about a Harlem family struck by tragedy.Gelb described Tesori as “one of the most gifted composers around,” and said he expected “Grounded” would resonate.“It’s something,” he added, “that people can understand, given the events in which we live today.”At Washington National Opera, Tesori and Brant have been joined by the theater director Michael Mayer and the conductor Daniela Candillari. Mimi Lien designed a kaleidoscopic set with nearly 400 LED panels that display live video and visual effects.This version of “Grounded” is Brant’s first libretto. He reworked the play for the opera stage, adding characters such as Jess’s husband, Eric (the tenor Joseph Dennis); a commander (the bass Morris Robinson); a trainer (the tenor Frederick Ballentine); and a male chorus that, at times, is called the Drone Squadron.“It was important to be sure that these new characters had full dimension and full agency,” Brant said. “And that required new language.”D’Angelo, and Joseph Dennis, who sings a role created for the opera adaptation of Brant’s play.Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesIn 2016, Brant and Tesori visited the Met, whose stage was set for Puccini’s “La Bohème,” and had the actress Kelly McAndrew perform excerpts from the play to give a sense of how its material would land in the opera house.“It was really then that we all started to get excited because we saw the potential, and we saw what this one character looked like in the space of that vast canvas,” Brant said. “She belonged there, and there was a place for her there.”Tesori spent about 10 months at her home on Long Island working on the score. She was drawn to the idea of writing for a female lead character. “She is the subject, not the object,” Tesori said. “And her launch is not romantic love; it’s something else.”She was a fan of D’Angelo and wrote the opera with her in mind, attending her voice lessons to get a sense of her sound. Tesori also reviewed testimonials of drone operators and pilots. She came away feeling that the psychological damage of remote warfare was “as great, if not greater, because you can’t see it.”“I feel ashamed that I didn’t know anything,” she said. “I think maybe because, what do you do with the information once you’ve seen it?”The Met tends to try out new operas in other cities before putting them on its own stage; it enlisted Washington National Opera for the premiere. (“Grounded” will open the Met’s 2024-25 season, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director.)Preparations for the opera were going smoothly until the spring, when Washington National Opera’s 2023-24 season was announced and questions about the role of General Dynamics — a major sponsor of the opera company since 1997, with a senior vice president on its board — began to spread on social media.A think tank that advocates military restraint labeled “Grounded” a “killer drone opera.” New York magazine gave the opera a “despicable” rating on its Approval Matrix, describing it as “the drone-bombing opera ‘Grounded,’ sponsored by General Dynamics.” RT, a state-owned Russian news outlet, said the work showed the strength of the American military-industrial complex.The team of “Grounded” preparing for the premiere this weekend, which follows criticism over the Washington National Opera’s relationship with General Dynamics, the season’s sponsor.Melissa Lyttle for The New York TimesThe creative team behind “Grounded” grew disturbed by how the opera was being portrayed. It worked behind the scenes to push the Washington National Opera to make it clear that General Dynamics had nothing to do with its work. The company eventually issued a statement that said, “For the sake of clarity, no sponsor or supporter of W.N.O. had any involvement in the creation of ‘Grounded’ or in the contents of its libretto.” But it stopped short of cutting ties with General Dynamics; the company is still listed as a “W.N.O. season sponsor” on promotional materials for “Grounded.”Brant said that he was not aware that General Dynamics was a supporter of Washington National Opera until criticism began to circulate. He said he was pleased by the opera house’s statement.“It was important to know that the sponsor had absolutely no involvement,” he said. “I’m happy that it’s been resolved the way that it has.”Tesori, who was deep in composition when the controversy arose, said she felt that it was important for the company to explain the wall between artists and benefactors. “It had to be clarified,” she said. “It got clarified, and then here we are.”At the rehearsal in Washington, Tesori, Brant and Mayer worked with the cast to plot stage directions, as well as refine the music and libretto.Mayer said that the opera had more to say than its commentary on war. It also addresses, he added, the “increasing dehumanization of the population as the screens start to take over all aspects of our lives.”Mayer said that “Grounded” represents the “increasing dehumanization of the population as the screens start to take over all aspects of our lives.”Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times“It brings into focus how precious genuine connection is, and how tenuous it is,” he said. “It reverberates beyond just a story about warfare.”D’Angelo, who has been preparing for the role of Jess since 2020, said that the opera captured her character’s inner struggle. By day, Jess takes part in drone missions from a trailer in Las Vegas; by night, she returns to her family.“You can understand this rhythm and how disorienting it must be,” she said. “You get just the tiniest little hint of what a person in her situation, her mental state, must be experiencing.”As Tesori walked out of the rehearsal room, she said that she felt the work was finally coming to life, but that she did not yet have the words to describe it.“It’s a feeling of discovery,” she said. “Eventually a piece speaks to you — like a kid, it begins to tell you what it needs.”“There’s no way of knowing,” she added, “until you’re in the room.” More

The conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit discuss Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto, a rarity they are performing in San Francisco.There are piano concertos, and then there is Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto.Completed and premiered in 1904 by the Berlin Philharmonic with the composer, a virtuoso of Lisztian ability, at the piano, the piece retains a near mystical reputation. It is so difficult that only the most commanding of pianists dare take on its 75 minutes and five movements. In the last and oddest of them, a male chorus implores listeners to draw close to Allah, singing from the text of an early 19th-century version of “Aladdin” by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger.If the concerto is performed more often than it used to be, it is still enough of an anomaly in the repertoire that performances are a significant event, one of which is its San Francisco Symphony premiere this week, with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit, joined by the men of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.In a joint interview, Salonen and Levit spoke about the concerto and Busoni’s confounding stature today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Levit said that the Busoni concerto is so difficult, it can “widen your curse words repertoire.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesMy first question is, why?ESA-PEKKA SALONEN May I propose a counter-question? Why not? Last time we performed together, which was many years ago, we had a little chat over dinner about what to do next. We both happen to love the Busoni, and we thought, OK, let’s do it. These are decisions that are easily made over dinner, and then when you get to it, you realize what you’ve done. Still, I’m very happy, and the more I study the piece the more I like it, which is actually a very good sign, because it’s not always like that. Some of the ideas, especially harmonic ideas, are incredible.I can’t make up my mind whether it is a parody, or deadly serious, or what.IGOR LEVIT I think it’s both. It’s highly celebratory. I mean, the roof flies off the building, right? In the “All’Italiana,” it’s very satirical. It’s incredibly beautiful, it’s funny, it’s solemn. It has it all.Busoni has always been one of those role models I never met, in a way like an idol figure, regarding the way he thought and especially wrote about music, his utopian idea about what free music actually is, his idea about what the creator’s job is, which is to set up your own rules and not follow the rules of others.As a composer, as a pianist, as a thinker, teacher, we are speaking here of one of the most incredible minds of at least the 20th century. He was this larger-than-life figure, and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.We hardly ever hear Busoni’s music now, and yet he was so significant historically.SALONEN He really was a trailblazer, and he predicted lots of things that are now commonplace in contemporary music, like microtonality. He even at some point was fantasizing about computers, before the concept even existed.As a Finnish musician, I must say that we are very grateful to him, because he spent a couple of years in Helsinki. He was a very, very strange bird in Helsinki cultural life. And he was an incredibly important influence to Sibelius, because Sibelius suffered from this kind of country boy complex compared to contemporaries like Richard Strauss.Busoni and Sibelius became really good friends. I’m absolutely sure that to have somebody like that as a conversation partner and drinking buddy — they did quite a bit of that apparently — was incredibly important. They even had a little club, a group of friends who called themselves Leskovites, because Busoni’s dog was called Lesko. There’s a bar in Helsinki where they hung out and developed the new music for the next century.LEVIT One of the most important teachers I had in my life was Matti Raekallio. Matti is from Helsinki. Matti’s thesis was on Busoni’s fingering. He introduced me to the concerto when I was 19. He introduced me to the “Fantasia Contrappuntistica.” He introduced me to the way Busoni would play the piano, which is a very positional kind of playing, and not a graphic kind of playing.For, let’s say, a normal piano player, who grew up with rules and who studied in Central Europe or wherever, there is no such thing as Ferruccio Busoni, all you know is Bach-Busoni. You might know two or three of his chorale preludes. That’s it. But you don’t get in touch with the actual man. It was Matti who opened this incredible door for me into the thinking of the man and to the music. So even I know Busoni through Finland.SALONEN It’s funny: The first time I ever heard anything by Busoni was when I was a composition student in Siena, Italy, with Donatoni back in the late ’70s. There was a concert when some Italian pianist played Busoni’s arrangement of Schoenberg’s Opus 11, three piano pieces. He arranged Schoenberg’s piano pieces for the piano. And I thought that was the silliest thing I’d ever heard in my life.Igor, is the concerto as hard as everyone says it is?LEVIT Yeah, this is a piece to widen your curse words repertoire.What are the hardest things in it?LEVIT There are moments in the second movement that, I mean, they’re just beyond what should be acceptable in terms of how much you have to work to achieve a certain result. Toward the end, there’s this rather long passage with incredibly difficult jumps, which are asymmetrical between the left hand and the right hand. This alone is kind of utopian, and it’s also written such that no one in the audience will actually hear what you’re doing, because the orchestra is so massive.The cadenza and conclusion of the ‘All’Italiana’John Ogdon, piano; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Daniell Revenaugh, conductor (Warner)There is a spot in the “All’Italiana,” right after the cadenza, where the piano has these huge chords in left and right and they run toward each other. It’s sort of unachievable, and yet, so what? You constantly are aware of the fact that you as a pianist, are in the middle of playing something extraordinary.Busoni “was this larger-than-life figure,” Levit said, “and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.”Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesIt doesn’t strike me as an easy piece to conduct, either. The balances, for one thing.SALONEN Well, it’s massive, and as Igor said, there are moments that if you don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out, the piano will be drowned.LEVIT [Laughing] Please don’t reduce the dynamics and sort it out.SALONEN But there are moments in Brahms’s piano concertos where the piano kind of sinks into the orchestra, and I think part of the expression is that zoom-in, zoom-out thing. It would be very boring if you had 75 minutes of the piano being completely on the surface at every moment. And in this case, the piano has different roles.What is the finale there for?SALONEN I have seen many incomprehensible, weird texts in my life that composers have used, but this one is right up there. I think he was planning to write a music-dramatic work based on the text by this Danish guy. He never got further than setting the final chorus, and then that found its way into the Piano Concerto.The story of this text is so funny, because the playwright was Danish, and he wrote the text in German, but his German was not great. He went and read it out loud to Goethe, and he read it out of the Danish version and translated it into German on the fly. I’m trying to imagine Goethe just sitting there listening to this guy go through this endless play, in bad German. And then various editors went through three or four rounds to fix the grammar, and finally, there is a version that is grammatically acceptable. However, Busoni liked the first version with all the wrong cases and wrong articles.LEVIT Of course he did.SALONEN And there’s something really fabulous about that. It’s basically the boulders in the cave where Aladdin takes the lamp back to. The boulders are very grateful, and they praise Allah for the beauty of nature. And a lot of it is completely incomprehensible.LEVIT But then again we’re speaking about Busoni, who was one of the great internationalists. You’re talking about this universally educated and universally interested guy. So it’s all incomprehensible and odd and weird, and yet not surprising whatsoever.SALONEN So, we’re fans.LEVIT Exactly. More

When the Coachella outdoor music festival returns for the first time in two years this April, performers will be greeted by a sea of unmasked — and potentially unvaccinated — fans, as the struggling concert industry stirs back to life.On Tuesday, organizers said that attendees will not be required to wear masks or be vaccinated or tested for the coronavirus at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which drew up to 125,000 fans a day to Southern California and was one of the biggest music festivals of the pre-pandemic era.“There is no guarantee, express or implied, that those attending the festival will not be exposed to Covid-19,” Goldenvoice, a division of the global concert giant AEG Live, said on the Coachella website.Goldenvoice noted, however, that the festival’s Covid policies may change “in accordance with applicable public health conditions.”Goldenvoice also said that Stagecoach, a country music festival in Southern California, also said on Tuesday that there would be no requirements for guests to be masked, vaccinated or tested. The festival was set to run for three days at the end of April and the beginning of May.It has been a turbulent two years for the concert and touring industries, as a number of events were canceled because of the virus. In the last year, since the Covid vaccine became widely available, organizers have grappled with decisions over whether to hold the events at all and whether to require masks, vaccines and testing.Over four days last summer, the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago ran at full capacity, with its 400,000 attendees being required to show either proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test. According to data released by the city after the festival, infection rates among the concertgoers were very low.Coachella did not run in 2020 or 2021, and was canceled three times over the pandemic, including a rescheduled date in the fall of 2020.Before the pandemic, Coachella, which is widely seen as a bellwether for the multibillion-dollar touring business, had put on a show every year since 1999 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio. It typically runs over two weekends in April.The organizers of Coachella announced in January, after weeks of speculation, that the festival would be back this year. It is set to be headlined by Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Kanye West. More