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      Gerstein’s ‘Music in Time of War’ Pairs Debussy and Komitas

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      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

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      Sting on Setting His Music to Dance in Message in a Bottle

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      In “Message in a Bottle,” a dance show opening at City Center, Sting’s songbook helps tell the story of a family fleeing conflict.When the choreographer Kate Prince set out several years ago to create a dance show based on the music of Sting, she was unsure what story she might be able to tell using his varied songbook.Then she saw photos of young Syrian refugees taking desperate risks to reach safety in Europe, and she had an idea. She would use some of Sting’s and the Police’s most affecting music, songs like “Desert Rose” and “Every Breath You Take,” to tell the story of a family displaced by war.The result is “Message in a Bottle,” which premiered in London in 2020 and comes to New York City Center in Manhattan for a two-week run beginning on Tuesday. In the nearly two-hour show, featuring Prince’s dance company, ZooNation, she draws on freestyle dance, salsa, Lindy Hop, street dance and other styles to bring to life 27 songs.“People get married to my songs, people play my songs at funerals,” Sting said. “I’m always happy that they have a function. And here the function is to tell an important, worthy, wonderful story.”In a recent interview at City Center, Prince, Sting and the composer and arranger Alex Lacamoire discussed the refugee crisis, the challenge of setting Sting’s music to dance and the role of art in times of conflict. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.A scene from “Message in a Bottle,” which had its premiere in London in 2020. Sting said he is “always happy” that his songs have a function “and here the function is to tell an important, worthy, wonderful story.”Helen MaybanksWe 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

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      Student Orchestra Shouts ‘Mambo!’ and Meets Gustavo Dudamel

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      Our photographer followed 95 young musicians for six days as they prepared to perform with Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic.The student musicians, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, were rehearsing an excerpt from “West Side Story” in a high school auditorium one recent afternoon. Then, as the trumpets blared and the timpani went wild, a voice broke out from the conductor’s podium.“Oy yo yo yo yo yo yo,” said the superstar maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who was leading the rehearsal. “You are not dancing together.”Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, paused for a moment, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound. Then he put his hands in his pockets and swaggered around the stage.Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, guided the youth ensemble, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound.James Estrin/The New York Times“This is cool, really cool music,” he said, eliciting laughter from the students. “We need something that goes with the nature of the body.”The students, part of a 95-member youth ensemble nominated by schools and arts programs and assembled by the New York Philharmonic, were at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan for six days last week. They were preparing for a concert on Friday with Dudamel, who has vowed to expand the Philharmonic’s presence in schools and in the community when he takes over in 2026.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

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      Taylor Swift Debuts at No. 1 on Billboard 200 With ‘Tortured Poets Department’

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      Only the Beatles have more No. 1 LPs now: The pop superstar reigns atop the Billboard 200 for the 14th time with the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales.There was never any doubt that Taylor Swift’s latest release, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was going to be big. The question was just how big.And the answer is, gigantic.“The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift’s 11th studio album, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with historic numbers, including huge results in streaming and vinyl sales. It is Swift’s 14th chart-topping title, tying her with Jay-Z for the second-most No. 1 albums by any act in the 68-year history of Billboard’s flagship album chart; only the Beatles, with 19, have more.In its first week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales in the United States, according to Luminate, which tracks the data behind Billboard’s charts. That is the biggest overall first-week take for any album since Adele’s “25” in 2015, which opened with nearly 3.5 million, driven by in-store CD sales.The “equivalent” figure is a composite, based on a formula used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways listeners now buy and consume music. And in each way, “Tortured Poets” was a smash.It sold 1.9 million copies in traditional album sales, including 859,000 for vinyl alone, which blew away Swift’s own previous record of 693,000 LPs, set just six months ago. Advance sales through Swift’s website — begun the day Swift announced the album, at the Grammy Awards — were key. She offered an array of tinted vinyl variants and CDs, some in “deluxe” versions advertised with autographs or on-brand trinkets like engraved bookmarks that went for as much as $50 apiece. According to Billboard, 1.4 million copies of the album were sold on its first day, many preordered over the last two months.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

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      Jazz Saved the Bassist Luke Stewart. Now He’s Working to Rescue Others.

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      Stewart’s many projects — Silt Trio, Irreversible Entanglements, Blacks’ Myths and others — make strong statements and foster community. A new LP is out Friday.On a Sunday afternoon in March, Luke Stewart — a bassist and composer who has gradually emerged as a galvanic force in the contemporary jazz vanguard — stood at the corner of Pine and Broadway, in Manhattan’s Financial District, running down some local history. He pointed across the street, where the American Stock Exchange sat next to Trinity Church, and noted our proximity to the former site of New York’s municipal slave market.“You see this pattern really all over the world,” Stewart said, “where literally people are taken from the auction block, where we started, right down here to be saved in the church and sold, and then sent off to wherever they’re going.”Stewart is wont to drop deep knowledge, whether he’s pointing out the sites of bygone jazz lofts in NoHo or spontaneously unpacking a Ravel score at the New School, where he is an adjunct professor. Sitting in the university’s performing-arts library, he traced the arcs of the notes with his fingers, posing rhetorical questions in his deep, faintly drawly voice: “What kind of emotion did the composer want?” “What was going on then?” “What is classical music, anyway?”Stewart, 37, chuckled at the increasing loftiness of his inquiries, but his point was serious: always dig deeper — an ethos he seems eager to pass on to listeners. Introducing an interdisciplinary performance earlier in the month under his platform Union of Universal Unity, he urged the audience to “Leave here changed.”Onstage, in each of his many projects, the tall, goateed bassist is a riveting presence. On Friday, he’ll release “Unknown Rivers,” the third album by his group Silt Trio — featuring Warren Crudup III (known as Trae) and Chad Taylor trading off on drums, as well as the tenor saxophonist Brian Settles — which makes a persuasive case for Stewart as both a composer of concise, memorable themes and a speaker-rattling powerhouse on his instrument.Stewart onstage at the HSA Theater Harlem School of the Arts in Manhattan in 2022.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe 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

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      Review: Asmik Grigorian’s Met Opera Debut in ‘Butterfly’

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      Asmik Grigorian, a star singer abroad, made her Metropolitan Opera debut by lending lyricism, complexity and spontaneity to a classic role.In the most heartbreaking scene of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,” the title character waits. A teenage geisha married off to an American naval lieutenant, she remains devoted to him long after he abandons her. He will return, she believes — one fine day.When she sees his ship approaching the shores of Japan, she and her maid ecstatically prepare the home for him. They gather flowers and spread them at the door; Butterfly rouges her cheeks and puts on the wedding garments she wore the night she and the lieutenant fell in love. Then she, their son and the maid look out through a screen and wait. The boy falls asleep first, followed by the maid. But Butterfly stays awake all night, expecting a husband who never comes.Moments like this are perfect for the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, a fiercely intelligent and captivating singer who made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday. She comes to New York having already reached star status abroad, and it didn’t take long in “Butterfly” to see why.After Grigorian knelt to wait, she smiled at her son, played by an affecting bunraku puppet. Then she let out a deep exhale and perfected her posture before reaching out to hold the hand of her maid, Suzuki. As the scene went on, her eyes seemed on the verge of tears, but only on the verge. She appeared overwhelmed with either anticipation or disappointment, or both.Opera is known for its elevated expression, of which there is plenty in “Butterfly,” a tragedy from start to finish. But Grigorian is the type of singer who also behaves like a skilled, nuanced actress. She persuasively inhabits a character, imbuing performances of plush lyricism with empathy, sophistication and even a touch of spontaneity.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

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      Review: Gustavo Dudamel Saves the Day at the Philharmonic

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      Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s incoming music and artistic director, stepped in after a guest conductor fell ill.It was lucky that Gustavo Dudamel was in town.On April 20, the New York Philharmonic announced that Juanjo Mena, who was scheduled to conduct the orchestra in three sold-out concerts starting on Thursday, had fallen ill. Dudamel, the ensemble’s incoming music and artistic director, was already expecting to be around to lead the spring gala on Wednesday.And so he saved the day. Stepping in for Mena, Dudamel, who assumes his Philharmonic post in 2026, led, in his only subscription concert appearances this season, a dichotomous program of dazzling crowd-pleasers and a thorny modernist work with utmost finesse. Pieces by Ravel and Pablo de Sarasate shone as they should, and the evening’s unlikely centerpiece, Ginastera’s Violin Concerto, was a 30-minute fever dream of serialist fancies and ferocities. (“Ibéria,” from Debussy’s “Images for Orchestra,” was cut after Mena bowed out.)An evening built from Spanish-tinged French pieces could have slipped into fiery and fragrant clichés, but instead it demonstrated the musical values that the Philharmonic’s audience can expect from Dudamel, including snappy rhythms, neatly managed transitions and fortes so punchy, they could leave a mark on your cheek. Orchestral tuttis had clarity and body from top to bottom.Dudamel used Ravel’s exquisite interplay of instrumental timbres to enliven the moods of “Rapsodie Espagnole,” which opened the concert. Sharply vivid rather than suggestively chimerical, the scenes and dances had a trim, finely honed character. Dudamel’s clockwork sophistication was better suited to the concert’s closer, Ravel’s beloved “Boléro,” in which he methodically developed tonal richness, sculpted the sound and dialed up the intensity over the piece’s 15-minute span. The sudden, layered climax had the effect of a tsunami: hitting and washing over the auditorium at the same time.The Philharmonic, which Dudamel will lead more frequently next season before officially undertaking his duties, is already showing signs of his influence. And he collaborated seamlessly with the evening’s soloist, the violinist Hilary Hahn, the orchestra’s artist in residence.A musician of poise and rounded tone, Hahn proved in the Ginastera that she can make just about anything sound beautiful. In her interpretation, the piece shed its acrid angularity. She folded trills, stops and sweet harmonics into unbroken lines, and when she harmonized with herself, she utilized the plushness and patience familiar from her Bach recordings.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

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      Andrew Davis, 80, Dies; Renowned Conductor Who Championed Britain’s Music

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      Celebrated for his long tenure with Lyric Opera of Chicago, he led this and other orchestras with force and a notably energetic podium presence.Andrew Davis, an ebullient British conductor who brought energy to his countrymen’s compositions and passion to hundreds of opera performances, died on April 20 in Chicago. He was 80.His manager, Jonathan Brill, said the cause of Mr. Davis’s death, in a hospital, was leukemia.More than many conductors, Mr. Davis was remembered by those who worked with him as deriving a sense of physical enjoyment from the music — “almost a palpable pleasure,” the pianist Emanuel Ax said in an interview. And that translated into a pleasure for his collaborators. “People loved playing for him,” Mr. Ax said.Mr. Davis spent 21 years, from 2000 to 2021, as music director and principal conductor of one of America’s great opera companies, Lyric Opera of Chicago, in a vast repertoire ranging from Mozart through Wagner to Berg. He also led orchestras in Canada — the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, from 1975 to 1988 — and Australia — the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, from 2013 to 2019. He also conducted at the Glyndebourne Festival in England from 1988 to 2000.But it was as an interpreter of 20th-century British music, and particularly the works of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Delius, Holst, Britten and others, that Mr. Davis made his mark and earned his way into the affections of his fellow Britons. With its fervid, billowing patriotism and ruminative pastoral interludes, this music sometimes struggles to cross national boundaries.Mr. Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1995. He was the orchestra’s principal conductor for a decade.Robbie Jack/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMr. Davis, as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 2000 and at summer London Proms concerts in front of enthusiastic audiences of thousands in the Royal Albert Hall, made the most of the British compositions that were his specialty. This deep homegrown commitment led The New York Times’s Bernard Holland, reviewing a 1987 Avery Fisher Hall appearance by Mr. Davis that included little-known works by Arnold Bax and Michael Tippett, to write that “the music of 20th-century Britain has hugely profited from the fervent ministrations of British musicians and the British musical press.”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