Aurelia Butler

The orchestra could have rented Carnegie Hall for the celebration, but “our supporters are here, our audiences are here,” its chief executive said.When the New Jersey Symphony was planning this season’s centennial celebrations, which come to a close this weekend, a question kept coming up: Would the orchestra be going to Carnegie Hall?After all, appearing at Carnegie — even if that means renting the hall — is a mark of excellence and validation, an exclamation point on a tour or a special occasion. Like a 100th birthday.While the New Jersey Symphony has given many Carnegie performances over the years, most recently in 2012, it decided this was not the right time to return.“Sure, we can go to Carnegie,” Gabriel van Aalst, the orchestra’s chief executive, recently recalled thinking. “We could have hired it out; we could have done it. But I strongly felt that this major tentpole celebration should be us in our state. Our supporters are here, our audiences are here.”These were striking words from an institution long characterized by what — and where — it is not. The elephant in the concert hall is that New Jersey is squeezed, geographically, between two of the world’s greatest ensembles, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Smaller than either of those giants, the New Jersey Symphony has lately punched above its weight in programming ambition — and, as the music world continues to rebuild from the pandemic, has prided itself on thinking locally rather than trying to compete with its famous neighbors. In Xian Zhang, its music director since 2016, the ensemble has an energetic, collaboration-minded leader well liked by the players.“I felt this orchestra was, for me, very easy to conduct,” said Zhang, who has been music director since 2016. “They read me easily.”Douglas Segars for The New York Times“Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve hired 10 positions,” Zhang said. “We only have 66 musicians total, so that’s a high number. And after the pandemic, when everybody came back, there’s been even more of a sense of unity and wanting to be together. It feels closer now, psychologically.”What was initially called the Montclair Art Association Orchestra made its debut on Nov. 27, 1922, boasting female members at a time when that was unusual. The inaugural program included Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which Joshua Bell will reprise in this weekend’s season finale.In its early years, the orchestra benefited from its closeness to New York, since many of its players were also part of the Philharmonic — and even now, the proximity can be valuable for attracting talent. (The star pianist Daniil Trifonov might not be such a perennial presence if he didn’t live just across the Hudson River in Battery Park City.)Under the decade-long directorship of the young conductor Samuel Antek, who died suddenly in 1958, community outreach — lowering ticket prices, appearing on the radio, hiring local choruses, creating children’s concerts — was a priority. Ten years later came the glamorous tenure of Henry Lewis, the first Black music director of a major orchestra, who presided over the kind of booming institutional growth that spread throughout the American orchestral world in the 1960s and ’70s.Henry Lewis, the first Black music director of a major orchestra, presided over a golden era of institutional growth. Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe ensemble has been known for charismatic podium leaders. Hugh Wolff’s programming was creative, and his performances polished. Under Zdenek Macal, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark opened in 1997, providing a home base for the orchestra, and Neeme Järvi, in charge from 2003 to 2009, led enthusiastically received concerts.When Zhang, born in China in 1973, made her first guest appearance, in 2010, her English was still a work in progress, recalled Eric Wyrick, the orchestra’s concertmaster.“She was very businesslike” at those initial rehearsals, he said. “Very straight up and down with her delivery. But then, at the performances, she just exploded. For a tiny person, she was just huge.”“I felt this orchestra was, for me, very easy to conduct,” Zhang said. “They read me easily.”With swooping yet clear gestures, she has guided the ensemble into repertory it hadn’t touched in a long time — like, earlier this year, Mahler’s Third Symphony — as well as major commissions from composers like Steve Mackey, many of them based in New Jersey.At a recent rehearsal for a concert that featured Randall Goosby as the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, she worked with the musicians on a new piece by Chen Yi, emphasizing buoyancy and the length of the musical line: “Everything needs to be lighter and have a lot of space.” (With the composer in the house, it was a rare moment in the music world — a rehearsal being guided entirely by women of Asian descent: Zhang, Chen and the ensemble’s assistant conductor, Tong Chen.)“They’re faster than a lot of orchestras to grasp different things,” Zhang said after the rehearsal — a necessity, since the group is constantly traveling among its five main performance spaces across the state.“Because we’re not a behemoth, we can be more responsive to community needs,” van Aalst said. “Traditionally orchestras either say, ‘Come to us, we’re wonderful,’ or they go out into communities and say, ‘Hey, listen to us.’ We were very intentional that we were going to go to communities and ask, ‘What do you need from us?’”Zdenek Macal with the orchestra at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, which became its home base.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThis approach has meant bigger and richer Lunar New Year celebrations than at most American orchestras, and an intriguing performance of Indian music in May that aimed to engage with the state’s substantial South Asian community. The players’ contract has a strong chamber component, encouraging participation in educational activities.“We’re not going to compete with the New York Phil,” van Aalst said. “We’re not going to compete with Philadelphia. That’s not the point. We have been very intentional about framing the orchestra as ‘your New Jersey Symphony.’ We’re here for your community.”Zhang’s current contract extends through the 2027-28 season, at which point hers will be, at 12 years, the longest music directorship in the orchestra’s history. “She could have done this for eight years and gone and done other things,” van Aalst said. “But I think she loves being here; there’s a symbiosis.”There are also things to look forward to: new repertory, including more Mahler and a robust slate of commissions, as well as hopes to create a new building that the orchestra would own — unlike the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which is its own entity — devoted to offices, rehearsals and education. In the even longer term, there are dreams for a summer venue for the region, along the lines of the Hollywood Bowl.While Zhang said she would love to lead the orchestra on tour, including internationally, there doesn’t seem to be much worry about proving the ensemble’s bona fides — particularly nearby.“I would rather commission two new pieces from New Jersey composers than spend the money to go to Carnegie Hall,” van Aalst said. “That’s actually driving the art form forward; that’s actually celebrating the orchestra.” More

After 12 straight weeks at the top, the country star’s “One Thing at a Time” yields to Swift’s “Midnights,” which was reissued in expanded editions.For 12 weeks, nothing could stop Morgan Wallen’s domination of the Billboard chart with his latest album, “One Thing at a Time.” Not Metallica. Not Ed Sheeran. Not the Jonas Brothers or solo projects from two members of BTS.Then came deluxe reissues of “Midnights,” Taylor Swift’s seven-month-old LP.With two expanded editions featuring bonus tracks, “Midnights” returns to No. 1, notching its sixth time at the top. One of the new versions, called “The Late Night Edition,” was primarily sold as a CD at Swift’s current stadium tour, though for 24 hours it was also available as a download from the singer’s website. Counting all variations, “Midnights” logged the equivalent of 282,000 sales in the United States last week, including 196,000 copies sold as complete packages and 108 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate.“Midnights” has been a steady hit since it came out last October. In its 32 weeks on the chart, it has never left the Top 10, and in all but three of those weeks it was in the Top 5. In the United States, “Midnights” has had the equivalent of nearly five million sales and been streamed 3.2 billion times.Lately, as Swift’s Eras Tour has become a cultural juggernaut, her wider catalog has also dotted the upper ranks of the album chart. Last week, Swift had nine titles in the Top 40. (“Lover,” from 2019, is No. 6 this week.) Swift also announced recently that a rerecorded version of her 2010 album “Speak Now” — featuring the hits “Mine,” “Back to December” and “Mean” — will come out in July.The return of “Midnights” bumps Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” to No. 2. Its 12-week consecutive run at the top was historic, falling just one week short of tying a record set by Stevie Wonder in 1977 among albums that open at No. 1 and hold there. Wallen’s last release, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is No. 5 this week, its 122nd appearance in the Top 10.Also this week, “Almost Healed,” the new album by the Chicago rapper Lil Durk — featuring guest appearances by Alicia Keys, 21 Savage and Wallen — starts at No. 3 with the equivalent of 125,000 sales, including 168 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package. SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4. More

The Finnish composer, who died at 70, is remembered by one of her longtime collaborators.The history of classical music is a history of creators of distinct originality. Its evolution has always happened through the work of visionary individuals and their ability to expand our understanding of the world through their works. These artists widen our horizons, invent, search, open doors and create paths for others. It takes extraordinary force, and courage, to follow an inner voice that no one else knows or understands yet.One of these visionaries was the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died on Friday at 70. Her legacy is monumentally important, luminous and larger than we can fully comprehend at this time.When I first got to know her as a person in the early 2000s, I had already admired her from a distance. She was a well-known figure in Finland, from the group Korvat Auki! (Ears Open!) in her youth and her collaborations with Avanti!, a summer festival, and in my mind, she and her music were one and the same.I conducted “Cinq Reflets” at the Helsinki Festival in 2002, and over the years that followed, I got to know both her and her musical universe more profoundly; and I came to understand how deeply personal her music really is. It is not something external, which is given or delivered to us. Rather, as I see it, it is something that allows us to enter into her intimate inner world. We are, generously, given an opportunity to look within her.It’s mind-blowing to see how a deeply personal creative voice can be so powerful that, even if the language expands in time and is more and more refined over the years and decades of their creative work, its originality shines through from the very beginning, so bright that it is immediately recognizable. Unlike anything else, it becomes a new element in the greater musical universe.Kaija’s music is like this: both new and timeless, both personal and universal, from the moment it is first heard. Whether her works are electronic or acoustic, staged or in concert, we are always transported to another time and place.The creative process for a composer is fundamentally solitary, but a characteristic element of Kaija’s working process was collaboration. She knew how the interaction between a creator and an interpreter means much more than simple questions of technique, volume or tempos — how it also means having the willingness to be on the same wavelength to be able to transmit the right atmosphere with the greatest care and respect. To write a role for a certain singer, a concerto for a soloist genuinely interested in her view of the instrument, an orchestra piece or an opera, knowing who would be conducting would, I believe, liberate her creative energy to full freedom.Her music is spellbindingly beautiful and reflects colorful imagination, but in a way it’s also a form of sonic research, through science and artisanship — and, always, poetry and reflection. Kaija has changed music because she has changed our perception and our way to listen. This music is living. It vibrates and breathes, and it has to get its own space and freedom, and it feels like it speaks to us from another world. Electronics and acoustic instruments, solo or full orchestra, the human voice, words, dreams — it’s fascinating and impressive how, in spite of different tools and changing proportions, the final result is always unique, but at the same time it also perfectly coheres with other pieces. It is a language in which specific sounds blend together and become an amazing paradox of crystal-clear precision and luminous haze.The most refined nuances are our sensory vocabulary, and in Kaija’s works nuance is everything: Understanding the essential meaning in each expression is key. For a composer, having her message passed on to the audience in the right way, with the right sensitivity, is absolutely essential.Kaija’s closest longtime collaborators — such as Jean-Baptiste Barrière, her husband; the cellist Anssi Karttunen; the flutist Camilla Hoitenga; and the conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen — recognized her talent and trusted her instinct, understanding her unique voice from the beginning. There were us others of a younger generation who joined Kaija’s musical family later, and she would never fail to express how grateful she was for our work. We in turn will forever feel a deep gratitude for the trust, for all the ways she supported us through her warmth and care, and for all the friendships that have grown out of our shared love for her art.She was a mother, exceptionally devoted to her children and family. In time, her children Aleksi and Aliisa also became working partners, and Kaija repeatedly spoke about how much she learned from them and their observations. But this nurturing and caring weren’t limited to them alone. Having been allowed to be a part of her artistic family has been the greatest privilege imaginable; her generosity in supporting the young generation of composers and musicians is also an indicator of her thinking, which was aimed to keep building things bigger than ourselves. She was warm and funny too, and a very wise and compassionate friend — a truly, remarkably beautiful person, both outside and in.The courage with which Kaija built her life’s work is enormous, considering the condescending or humiliating attitudes she had to endure as a woman early in her career — be it in the press, by institutions or in private encounters. She never wanted to draw much attention to this, but there were hurtful experiences she only shared after years of close friendship. Her nobility and strength to rise above all that, however — in keeping on, then showing the way to others — was incredible, strong and exemplary. She knew that even in that respect, her work carried huge importance, but she chose to let the music speak for itself.She is and remains a role model, not only for her place in music history, but also for her ethics and her courage to speak up about topics that she considered important. She chose complex subjects for her operas, such as those of “Adriana Mater” and “Innocence,” and the theater would include everything: the unbearable truths, but also the soothing dream world — which for her was the most central element of “Innocence,” not the tragic events themselves. Through this genuine fearlessness and honesty, she restored many people’s belief in opera as art form.It is impossible to imagine the world — the music world or my own life — without Kaija. But her presence is with us in her art. What helps now, in the grief, is the inner light present in her works, which we will now keep carrying forward, always moving toward the light. More

The beloved tenor’s latest book and album emerged from a time when the pandemic forced him to question what exactly he does when he sings.Spring this year has been a particular joy for touring singers like me. The cloud of Covid seems to have evaporated: Restrictions have been lifted, audiences have (nervously) returned and the prospect of being stranded in foreign parts with a positive test is gone, not to mention the diminishing threat of serious or voice-impacting illness. Things will never be the same — they never are — but some semblance of normalcy has returned.When the endless travels of classical music were interrupted, though, and when I was forced into a kind of silence, I had time and the inclination to question what I was doing, to ask what exactly I’m up to when I stand up and sing a song. This interacted with two projects that were conceived before the pandemic but were largely undertaken during it: “Song and Self,” lectures and a resulting book, and a recording of “The Folly of Desire,” a song cycle written by and performed with the pianist-composer Brad Mehldau.This spring saw the consummation of both, with the book out from the University of Chicago Press in April, and the album out on June 2 on the Pentatone label. In my writing, I looked at some iconic works — by Monteverdi, Schumann, Britten and Ravel — exploring them in the light of concerns about gender identity, colonialism and death. Mehldau’s work, resolutely art and not remotely a work of analysis, treats the multiform and problematic nature of sexual desire, sometimes with a shocking directness and sometimes with a glowing compassion, but always with a visceral beauty.WHEN I BECAME a professional musician, in the mid-1990s, I forged my reputation as a singer of songs — particularly of lieder, German art song, that very niche but hugely significant branch of classical music reinvented by Franz Schubert in the 1820s and brought to global prominence by the legendary baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau after World War II.Ian Bostridge, right, performing “The Folly of Desire,” with Brad Mehldau at the piano in 2019 at Zankel Hall in Manhattan.Stephanie BergerThe big discovery I came to, as I made my first tentative steps into the world of music theater, was that the distinction I had unconsciously made between “song” and “opera” was misconceived and inhibiting. The boundary between the two was, rather, fluid and permeable.Having seen Fischer-Dieskau perform toward the end of his career in the 1980s, I had already half-learned this lesson. To watch him perform even as purely lyrical a song as Schubert’s “Meeresstille,” a setting of Goethe’s poem about a ship becalmed at sea, was to see a master actor at work. Some of the great stage directors I have worked with in opera — Baz Luhrmann, David Alden, Deborah Warner — have encouraged me to bring the special intensity of the song recital, the “expressive intimacy” identified by my baritone colleague Christian Gerhaher in a recent book, to opera.Conversely, song recitals involve the presentation of a persona just as much as any other piece of music theater. And the boundaries between acting as impersonation (think Daniel Day-Lewis’s film performances) and as intensification of the reinvented self (now think of Cary Grant’s work with Hitchcock) are constantly shifting.Hybrid forms, neither opera nor conventional recital, are particularly interesting in this regard. Three pieces of music theater that I have been lucky enough to bring to Lincoln Center in New York — Seamus Heaney’s translation of Janacek’s “Diary of One Who Vanished,” directed by Warner, and Netia Jones’s stagings of Schubert’s “Winterreise,” in a version by Hans Zender, and of Britten’s “Curlew River” — were exactly that: staged song cycles in the first two cases, and reimagined ritual in third. They encouraged me even more to explore an issue that I found slippery and abstract at first, but that gradually took on a clearer form.Identity is something that all performers have to confront. Each time we stand onstage to deliver a text — literary or musical, or some combination of the two — we have a decision to make about its character, and about our stance toward it. How do we go about embodying it? Do we take on the identity of the material we have absorbed, or does it reconfigure itself as it is molded to our own identity? What is our duty to the text? To the audience? To ourselves?My book “Song and Self” explores and worries at issues of identity that come to the fore in some of the works I love — issues of gender, for example. Is the real protagonist of Robert Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -Leben” not the woman we see on the surface, but rather the composer, whose anxieties and passions inflect the cycle at every point? What difference does it make if the cycle is sung, as it was in the 19th century, by a man? Should I sing it today?Then again, how important is the gender of the Madwoman, which I have sung, in “Curlew River”? Britten uses the ritual resources of Japanese Noh theater to create a sort of distancing. Cross-gender casting is a part of this, but one which in blurring our perceptions of gender only amplifies the impact of the austerely told story: The Madwoman is all of us.Troubling political issues can also intersect with the sung persona as I discovered in my research into Ravel’s “Chansons Madécasses.” The second section of this powerful cycle, for voice and instrumental trio, is a setting of an 18th-century protest against longstanding French attempts to colonize Madagascar, voiced by a Malagasy. “Méfiez-vous des blancs” (“Beware of the whites”) he cries — but that cry was written by Évariste Parny, an opponent of slavery yet a slave owner.Ravel wrote the song in the midst of French colonial wars in North Africa, only a few decades after the bloody French conquest of Madagascar in 1896. Some early audiences saw the piece as political provocation. There’s something troubling about these twin acts of ventriloquism, Parny’s poem and Ravel’s music. In addressing the song we have to ask questions about the poet’s bad faith as a slaveholding abolitionist, about the composer’s motives and about our own. Who should sing this song? Who owns it?“Song and Self” is very much an exploratory work. It takes the notion of the essay at its word — as an attempt, an experiment. If I draw any conclusion, it’s that the way to approach classical music, in an era in which its relevance or ideological stance is constantly being questioned, is to explore where it comes from more closely, not to throw it away. Questioning is built into the classical music tradition; and interpreting this complex music that we have inherited means negotiating between the preoccupations of the past and the present so that we can discover more about ourselves.MEHLDAU’S “THE FOLLY OF DESIRE” demands similar questioning. I had first met Brad five or six years ago; he was playing jazz improvisations and I was singing “Winterreise,” we hit it off, and he offered to write song cycle for the two of us. What emerged, about 18 months later, was a group of songs that set the past and the present against each other in a way that also opened up new ways of thinking — in this case, concerning what William Blake called “the lineaments of gratified desire.”“Folly” both fits into and challenges the tradition of Romantic lieder that Mehldau and I love so much. It sets a series of poems in a dizzying sequence of musical styles that reflect the shifting perspectives on desire opened up by each poem he sets: the delicate darkness of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose”; the classical horror of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”; the sly lubricious perversity of a sonnet by Bertolt Brecht so obscene that his estate will not allow it to be translated; the rollicking jocks of E. E. Cummings’s “The Boys,” set in the style of Supertramp “with Wurlitzer.” The cycle ends with an epilogue based on one of the great poetic expressions of the ambiguities and compromises of sexual relationships, W.H. Auden’s “Lullaby”: “Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm.”We performed the songs in recital with Schumann’s “Dichterliebe.” The pairing reinvigorated the weirdness and perversity of a piece from the 19th century so familiar as to be in danger of losing its edge. Mehldau’s cycle can also be shocking, but, as in the Schumann, to dramatic effect; juxtapositions of violence and serenity intensify our engagement with the mysterious movements of text and music. When a tiny motif from the first Blake setting reoccurs in the last — “What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? / Or Wisdom for a dance in the street?” — we are moved, even if we hardly know why.In the end we decided to complete our recording with the jazz encores we had performed over the years, rather than with the Schumann. But hearing these standards — “These Foolish Things,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day” — set against Mehldau’s cycle also opens them up to questioning.“The Folly of Desire” explores different identities through text and music, some rebarbative and some consolatory, and in doing so shines a light on our experience of desire — its capacity for mindless destruction, its sublime creativity, its sheer idiocy. Folly indeed. As Mehldau writes in a composer’s note, it was written in a period when desire and its dangers were very much at the fore of public discourse, as #MeToo forced everyone to come to terms with the troubled issue of consent.But the piece is, as Mehldau says, “untouched by prosaic discourse.” Like other great works of the classical tradition, it allows us to inhabit other personas, other worlds. And it offers no answers, doing what art does in that spirit of negative capability, which Keats so perfectly encapsulated: to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” More