Music

Eerie coincidences make the composer’s final work, “Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold,” seem like a requiem written for himself.In November 1998, the French composer Gérard Grisey went out to dinner with friends in Milan. He could be anxious, but he seemed strangely grounded that evening.Atli Ingolfsson — a former student and friend, who was among those I interviewed for my new book, “The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey: Delirium and Form” — noticed that the composer didn’t complain about the food, as he sometimes did, nor did the cigar smoke from the next table bother him, as it often would.“I feel good,” said Grisey, a pioneer of spectral music, which is inspired by acoustics. “Maybe I won’t compose anymore.”He was unusually satisfied with his latest composition, “Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil,” or “Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold,” a 40-minute work for solo soprano and an ensemble of 15 players. Grisey intended the piece as a requiem for his mother, Lucie Monna, who had died in 1995. He completed it in the summer of 1998 while alone in a village in the Swiss Alps. “After three months in Schlans in the utmost silence and concentration,” he wrote in his journal, “I finished ‘Quatre chants’ with the lullaby of the dawn.”Born in 1946 to Monna and Jules Henri Grisey, a farm boy turned Resistance operative and car mechanic, Grisey became an essential figure in contemporary classical music. He was raised in the provincial eastern town of Belfort. At 5, he began playing the humble accordion. Then, at 9, he wrote his first piece, and progressed quickly, studying composition at the Paris Conservatory with Olivier Messiaen.In 1974, Grisey completed arguably the first piece of spectral music — “Dérives,” for large orchestra — while on a scholarship at the Villa Medici in Rome. In that piece and the more famous works that followed, including six later collated into the orchestra cycle “Les Espaces Acoustiques” (1974-85), he used the harmonic spectrum, noise and linear musical processes as building blocks. Unlike many of the serial composers prominent at the time, Grisey wanted to foreground the capacities of human listening. The contours of his pieces are often easily audible.“We are musicians, and our model is sound not literature,” Grisey said at a lecture in 1982, “sound not mathematics, sound not theater, plastic arts, quantum theory, geology, astrology or acupuncture.”“Four Songs” signified the beginning of a new period in Grisey’s output. By the mid-90s, his first spectral pieces had spawned imitators, and he had grown wary of repeating himself. Four meticulously chosen texts helped him discover a freer way of working. In the first movement, which sets a poem by Christian Gabriel/le Guez Ricord, an angel is pulled down from heaven by lamenting saxophones and metallic percussion. In the second, the soprano recites an archaeologist’s survey of the writing on ancient Egyptian sarcophagi — complete with indications of illegible hieroglyphics and destroyed coffins — accompanied by a slowly mutating harp motive.Grisey as a child in the early 1950s.via Josienne LanzaIn the third movement, which uses a fragment by the ancient Greek poet Erinna, the soprano is overwhelmed by the echoes of her own voice. And in the final two movements, the singer, inhabiting the character of Gilgamesh, describes the myth’s apocalyptic flood and its aftermath.Grisey illustrates his texts as a Romantic lieder composer might: In the fourth movement, pattering rainfall turns into a violent storm, and microtonal tubas evoke the groans of dying elephants. But the work has no traditional ending. In the fifth and final piece, not a complete song but a short “Lullaby,” a crystalline, pulsing texture is there one second and gone the next.On the early morning of Nov. 10, 1998, Grisey returned from Milan to the Paris apartment he shared with his partner, the mezzo-soprano Mireille Deguy. The “Four Songs” were originally meant for her to sing, but during the composition process Grisey decided he needed high notes beyond her range.“Don’t worry,” she told him. “You’ll write another piece for me.”After breakfast, Deguy went to work. Grisey left for a meeting at the Paris Conservatory, where he was a professor. He came home at lunchtime and made an unusual number of calls to friends. Deguy returned to their apartment in the evening. They had plans to meet friends for dinner, but Grisey suggested having a drink before leaving, wanting to savor their early-evening contentment.Deguy remembers that Grisey removed his watch and asked her to do the same before he collapsed from a brain aneurysm. He fell into a coma and was brought to a hospital. He crossed the threshold the following morning, at dawn. He was 52 years old.Intended as a requiem, “Four Songs” became an autorequiem. It’s an unsettling circumstance, made more so by the frequent references to death in Grisey’s writings. “He was fascinated by death, as a symbol and as a fact,” said Gérard Zinsstag, a composer and close friend. In June 1998, after finishing the “Four Songs,” Grisey had written in his diary: “Why are the final decisions the most painful ones? Saying goodbye? Attachment? To what, from what?”Such eerie consonances have a history in classical music. Mozart left his Requiem unfinished when he died in 1791. In 1983, the composer Claude Vivier, a friend of Grisey’s, was murdered, leaving behind the beginning of a piece called “Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul?”Did these composers know — consciously or subconsciously — what was coming?In Grisey’s case, the evidence suggests that he did not. After completing the “Four Songs,” he began sketching a piece based on lines from Samuel Beckett’s French-language poetry collection “Mirlitonnades.” Grisey hadn’t settled on an instrumentation before he died, but he did plan to use a mezzo-soprano voice in Deguy’s range. The couple had spoken about leaving Paris for the country and adopting a child.Many of Grisey’s friends recalled that after completing the “Four Songs,” he was exhilarated about the new aesthetic possibilities he had discovered. He told a friend, the astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet, that he’d found “a new language that begins with this composition.” A letter to the then-artistic director of the Donaueschingen Music Festival in Germany, Armin Köhler, shows that Grisey was planning commissions past the year 2000.Rather than a premonition, “Four Songs” is the remainder of a tragedy: the first piece in a late style that would never come. Grisey’s life ended as the “Lullaby” of the “Four Songs” does. One moment, he was there; the next, he was gone.In February 1999, the “Four Songs” premiered at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, performed by the London Sinfonietta and the soprano Valdine Anderson under the direction of George Benjamin. A group of those close to Grisey — including his son, Raphaël, his ex-wife, Jocelyne, and many friends and colleagues — traveled from Paris to London for the concert. “That a man in the prime of life feels an imperative to write his own elegy without realizing it,” Fiona Maddocks wrote in The Guardian, “raised questions yet more disturbing than the potent work itself.”The effect of the music must have been staggering: After two decades, most of Grisey’s circle still finds the performance impossible to talk about. More

In partnership with Herb Alpert, he turned a small independent label into a powerhouse with a roster full of superstars.Jerry Moss, who with the trumpeter Herb Alpert founded A&M Records, which at its peak from the 1960s to the ’80s was an independent powerhouse behind hits by the Carpenters, the Police, Janet Jackson, Peter Frampton and Mr. Alpert’s group, the Tijuana Brass, among many others, has died at his home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88.His family announced the death in a statement on Wednesday.Over their more than 30 years with A&M, Mr. Moss and Mr. Alpert developed an eclectic roster — Cat Stevens, Carole King, Supertramp and the grunge band Soundgarden all released music there — and established the label’s reputation for being supportive of artists and treating them fairly.Sting, who signed to A&M with the Police in 1978 and has remained associated with the label throughout his career, said in an interview on Thursday that those values radiated directly from Mr. Moss and Mr. Alpert.“They were gentlemen,” he said. “I think their extraordinary success was really predicated on those very human qualities — not being ruthless businessmen or kill-or-be-killed people. They were artist friendly.”Built from humble beginnings in Mr. Alpert’s garage, A&M — its name was taken from the initials of its founders’ last names — became a major force in pop music and eventually earned its founders a huge payday. In 1989, they sold A&M’s recorded music business to PolyGram for a reported $500 million (about $1.2 billion in today’s money), though Mr. Moss and Mr. Alpert continued to manage the label until 1993. In 2000, they sold Rondor, their music publishing catalog, to Universal Music for an estimated $400 million.Mr. Alpert set the tone for how the label interacted with musicians after what he said in an interview on Thursday were his own unhappy experiences, early in his career, with big labels that had treated him “like a number.” That approach also gave some negotiating leverage to A&M, which in its early days lacked the financial resources of its corporate competitors in pursuing new acts.Mr. Moss, who began his career promoting pop and doo-wop records to radio stations, ran the business side of A&M with its longtime president, Gil Friesen, who died in 2012. But he also insisted on fair dealings with artists.“You can’t force people to do a certain kind of music,” Mr. Moss said in an interview with The New York Times in 2010. “They make their best music when they are doing what they want to do, not what we want them to do.”Early on, A&M signed the country singer Waylon Jennings, who cut a handful of singles but disagreed about his career trajectory with Mr. Alpert, who favored pop material. When Mr. Jennings got an offer from RCA Victor’s Nashville office, A&M agreed to release him from his deal.“I looked at Jerry and said, ‘This guy is going to be a big artist.’ He said, ‘I know,’” Mr. Alpert recalled. “At that point I realized we could be a big success with that attitude. We let Waylon out of the contract. He went on to a great career, and we remained friends with him.”Mr. Moss with one of A&M’s most successful artists, Janet Jackson, with platinum albums for her 1986 album, “Control.” The label’s eclectic roster also included (among many other artists) the Police, Peter Frampton and the Carpenters.Lester Cohen/Getty ImagesJerome Sheldon Moss was born in the Bronx on May 8, 1935, to Irving and Rose Moss. His father was a department store salesman, his mother a homemaker.Mr. Moss graduated from Brooklyn College in 1957. While waiting tables at a resort, he met Marvin Cane, one of the founders of Coed Records, who offered him a job pitching records to radio stations for $75 a week. His first big success was the doo-wop ballad “16 Candles” by the Crests, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard pop singles chart in late 1958.Mr. Moss moved to Los Angeles intending to enter the television business, but instead he soon set himself up again as a radio promoter. It was there that he met Mr. Alpert, who had worked as a songwriter and was attempting to establish himself as a vocalist under the name Dore Alpert.In 1962, the two young men went into business together, investing $100 apiece. They released “Tell It to the Birds,” a single credited to Dore Alpert, on a label they called Carnival.After learning that another record company was already using that name, they settled on A&M for their next release: “The Lonely Bull,” a trumpet-led instrumental with atmospheric sounds recorded at a bullfighting ring in Mexico. They borrowed $35,000 to press the single, which went to No. 6 and immediately put A&M on the map.By 1966, A&M was as successful as any label in pop music. That year, Mr. Alpert and the Tijuana Brass outsold the Beatles and had four albums in the top 10 at the same time. The group dominated the easy-listening market of the era with hits like “A Taste of Honey” and “Spanish Flea”; Mr. Alpert himself had a No. 1 vocal hit in 1968 with “This Guy’s in Love With You.” A&M also signed the Brazilian pianist and bandleader Sérgio Mendes and his band Brasil ’66, which toured with Mr. Alpert.In 1966 the label moved into Charlie Chaplin’s former film studio lot in Hollywood. A&M later signed another huge soft-pop act, the Carpenters, and, through deals with other labels, put out records by Cat Stevens (who now goes by the name Yusuf Islam) and Carole King, including her blockbuster 1971 LP, “Tapestry.”In 1976, A&M released Mr. Frampton’s double live album “Frampton Comes Alive!,” which became one of the defining rock hits of the decade, eventually going eight times platinum. In the 1980s, A&M signed Ms. Jackson, whose album “Control” (1986) went to No. 1 and established her as a major talent.After selling A&M, Mr. Moss and Mr. Alpert briefly ran another label, Almo Sounds, whose artists included Gillian Welch and Garbage. The founders were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as nonperformers in 2006.Mr. Moss’s survivors include his wife, Tina Moss; two sons, Ron and Harrison; two daughters, Jennifer and Daniela; and five grandchildren.Mr. Moss at a Songwriters Hall of Fame event in New York in 2012.Theo Wargo/Getty Images North AmericaIn his later years, Mr. Moss had notable success owning racehorses. One, Giacomo — named after one of Sting’s sons — won the Kentucky Derby in 2005, at extraordinary odds. Another racehorse, Zenyatta, was named after one of the Police’s albums, “Zenyatta Mondatta” (1980).Mr. Moss was active in local philanthropy. In 2020, he and his wife donated $25 million to the Music Center, a performing arts complex in downtown Los Angeles that includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Ahmanson Theater, Walt Disney Concert Hall and other spaces.But Mr. Moss said that he was at his happiest making records with Mr. Alpert.“It is the best feeling in the world,” he told The Times. “I’d turn to Herbie and say, man, what in the world did we do to deserve this?” More

A leading Italian soprano, she sang more than two dozen roles at the Metropolitan Opera and was known as a charismatic stage partner — and a demanding one.Renata Scotto, the firebrand Italian soprano and Metropolitan Opera favorite who was acclaimed for her acting and her insights into opera characters as much as for her voice, died on Wednesday in Savona, Italy. She was 89.Her son, Filippo Anselmi, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause.At her best, in roles like Puccini’s Cio-Cio San in “Madama Butterfly” and Mimì in “La Bohème,” Verdi’s Violetta in “La Traviata” and Bellini’s “Norma,” Ms. Scotto achieved a dramatic intensity that electrified audiences and elicited the highest praise from her fellow opera stars. “Renata is the closest I have ever worked with to a real singing actress,” the tenor Plácido Domingo was quoted as saying in The New York Times Magazine in 1978. “There is an emphasis, a feeling she puts behind every word she interprets.”Vocally, Ms. Scotto could not match the sensuousness of Renata Tebaldi or the astonishing technique and range of Joan Sutherland. And miscues on high notes could mar her exquisitely shaped phrases.But her charisma and stage presence made critics overlook her shortcomings. “Her voice may be a bit hard, and seldom does she get through an aria without some kind of vocal flaw, but the important thing is that when she sings, a sensitive mind is at work and a powerful personality comes through,” The New York Times’s chief music critic, Harold C. Schonberg, wrote in a review of a Scotto recital at Carnegie Hall in 1973.A Self-Confident FighterMs. Scotto long reigned as one of the most popular sopranos at the Metropolitan Opera. From 1965 to 1987, she delivered more than 300 performances in 26 roles at the Met. Her stage appearances tapered off after that, until her retirement in 2002.Armed with self-confidence, the diminutive Ms. Scotto jousted with giants of the opera world, including the general managers of La Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as renowned conductors who took issue with her interpretations. “In opera, the singer comes before everything,” she said in a 1972 interview with The Times. “Many times I have had discussions, sometimes fights, and always I win.”She was equally demanding of her colleagues onstage.Ms. Scotto as Musetta in “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1980s.John Elbers/Getty ImagesIn a 1963 performance of Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” in Bergamo, Italy, the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano left her in the middle of a duet to eat an apple in the wings; when he returned, Ms. Scotto slapped him across the face. (The scene called for only a pinch on the cheek, and the tenor’s shocked reaction alerted the audience that something was amiss.)In another incident, Ms. Scotto unleashed a verbal barrage at Luciano Pavarotti for pushing her and other cast members aside to take unscripted solo calls during and after a performance of Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” at the San Francisco Opera in 1979.Yet Ms. Scotto’s combination of talent and hard work drew admiration from fellow singers. “She’s unique in vocal coloration,” the baritone Sherrill Milnes told The Times Magazine. “Even if you don’t understand the language, you feel it. She will also sacrifice vocal beauty to get the word or the emotional intention across.”Renata Scotto was born in humble circumstances on Feb. 24, 1934, in Savona, then a small Italian fishing town on the Mediterranean coast west of Genoa. Her father, Giuseppe, was a police officer; her mother, Santina, was a seamstress. When Savona came under Allied bombardment during World War II, Renata, along with her mother and her older sister, Luciana, took refuge in a nearby Alpine village, Tovo San Giacomo.An Early StartEven as a child, she showed signs of the diva to come.In Tovo San Giacomo, she would stand by her bedroom window and regale passers-by with the latest songs favored by the leading Italian tenor, Beniamino Gigli. The villagers applauded and often tossed her candy. “You see, I never sang for nothing in my life,” she noted in her 1984 memoir, “Scotto: More Than a Diva,” written with Octavio Roca.Ms. Scotto in front of the Duomo in Milan in 1967.Mario De Biasi/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesWhen she was 12, she was invited by an uncle to her first opera — Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” with Tito Gobbi in the title role — at the Teatro Chiabrera in Savona. “Gobbi the great singer and Gobbi the great actor made me decide that night that I would be an opera singer,” she recalled.As a teenager, Ms. Scotto was sent to Milan for voice and piano lessons. The only lodging her family could afford was at a Canossian convent, which she described as “somewhere between a jail and a very austere kindergarten.” The mother superior lectured her on the banality of secular music, and a nun tried to steal her music scores.But outside the convent, her teachers, especially the soprano Mafalda Favero, recognized her talent and helped bring about her career. Several years later, she studied with the Spanish former soprano Mercedes Llopart — who, Ms. Scotto said, “really taught me how to sing.”Ms. Scotto made her operatic debut in her hometown in 1952 at age 18, singing Verdi’s Violetta. She appeared the next day in the same role at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan. A year later, she made her first appearance at La Scala in Catalani’s “La Wally,” singing the role of Walter. Skeptics on La Scala’s staff considered her too short, at 4 feet 11 inches, to play Walter. They also forced her to wear a plastic nose because her own was supposedly too small. But audiences wildly applauded her performances.Ms. Scotto’s international breakthrough came in 1957 at the Edinburgh Festival, where La Scala staged its production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula.” Maria Callas sang the lead role of Amina in the first four performances covered by her contract, but she bowed out of an unscheduled fifth performance, pleading illness. Ms. Scotto then replaced her to great acclaim.“I became a celebrity, I could choose my roles,” Ms. Scotto recalled. “The applause at the end would not stop, with 10, 12 solo calls.” But the episode ignited a lengthy feud between the two divas, stoked by media gossip and overwrought opera fans.Ms. Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti in “La Traviata” in 1965.Reg Wilson/ShutterstockAt La Scala in 1970, Ms. Scotto sang the role of Elena for the first time in a new production of Verdi’s “I Vespri Siciliani.” Ms. Callas, who had performed the same role almost 20 years before and retired in the mid-1960s, was in the audience. As soon as Ms. Scotto walked onstage, a claque of Callas fanatics began yelling “Maria, Maria!” and “Viva Callas!”Ms. Scotto continued to perform despite the frequent interruptions. But afterward, in an interview in her dressing room, she erupted in fury: “Let them get Callas to come and do ‘Vespri’ if she can sing.”A worse incident occurred at the Metropolitan Opera on opening night in 1981, with Ms. Scotto in the title role of “Norma” and Mr. Domingo as Pollione. Though Ms. Callas had died four years before, a band of her rabid followers began shouting her name as soon as Ms. Scotto walked onstage. At intermission, she broke down in tears and had to be persuaded by Mr. Domingo to return and finish the performance. Four hecklers were later arrested.Scotto vs. the MetEven as a young soprano on the rise, Ms. Scotto demonstrated self-assurance in dealing with management at the great opera houses. In 1964, when La Scala’s general manager, Antonio Ghiringhelli, withdrew his promise to cast her as Violetta in a new production of “La Traviata” directed by Franco Zeffirelli, she vowed never to perform there as long as Mr. Ghiringhelli remained. (She did not stick to that vow.)She similarly challenged the Met’s strong-willed general manager, Rudolf Bing. Ms. Scotto complained that in the three seasons after her 1965 debut, she was always offered the same operas: “Traviata,” “Butterfly,” “L’Elisir” and Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” When Mr. Bing refused her any new roles, she left the Met two seasons later after meeting her contractual obligations. The New York press cast her as imperious: “If the Met Won’t Sing Her Tune, Goodbye Scotto,” a New York Times headline read.But once Mr. Bing’s tenure ended in 1972, Ms. Scotto was invited back to the Met. Upon her return in the fall of 1974, her first role was Elena in “Vespri,” conducted by James Levine.“Renata is a direct descendant of the great, expressive Italian sopranos,” said Mr. Levine, who became the Met’s music director in 1976. (Mr. Levine, who was fired by the Met in 2018 over claims of sexual misconduct, died in 2021.) The two got along famously, and the ensuing decade proved to be Ms. Scotto’s glory years.Ms. Scotto, left, conducting a master class with the soprano Brenda Rae and the pianist In Sun Suh at Symphony Space in New York in 2007.Jennifer Taylor for The New York TimesHer artistry and popular appeal reached such heights that The Times declared: “From all appearances, the New York opera season of 1976-77 will be the season of Renata Scotto.” The previous summer, she had drawn an estimated 100,000 people to a concert performance of “Madama Butterfly” in Central Park. Early in 1976, she became the first soprano to perform all three leading roles in Puccini’s three one-act operas, “Il Trittico,” at the Met in the same evening.In 1977, Ms. Scotto broke new ground with a live telecast — the first installment of the long-running PBS series “Great Performances at the Met” — performing in “La Bohème” as Mimì, with Mr. Pavarotti in the role of Rodolfo. As she noted, the broadcast reached more people in a single night than had seen Puccini’s opera since its premiere in 1896.But she was so appalled by her heavy appearance that she went on a diet, losing 30 pounds and keeping them off the rest of her career. “Some people worry that losing weight might hurt the voice,” she said. “I say nonsense: That is a myth to protect the fat singers.”‘You Must Be a Complete Performer’With Mr. Levine conducting, Ms. Scotto gave deeply etched performances in “Norma” and Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” As she explained in a 1976 interview with The Times: “A singer has to give emotion to the audience, and for that you must be a complete performer, not just a good singer and not just a good actress.”This approach endeared her even to critics who faulted her vocal miscues. In an October 1976 review of Ms. Scotto’s performance as Leonora in “Il Trovatore,” Mr. Schonberg cited her rendering of the aria “D’amor sull’ali rosee” as an example: “Miss Scotto scooped her way through it and had trouble with the tessitura. It was not a distinguished example of vocal technique. But Miss Scotto was able to get away with it because of the style she brought to the aria, the conviction with which she sang it,” Mr. Schonberg wrote. “Personality sometimes can count for more than voice alone.”But as Ms. Scotto’s singing talents eroded in her last years on the opera stage, critics asserted that not even first-rate acting could compensate. In a 1986 review of “Madama Butterfly,” the Times critic Donal Henahan wrote that her performance “followed a pattern we have come to expect from the soprano in the late years of a long career: ardently and sometimes shrewdly acted, though erratically and sometimes painfully sung.”Ms. Scotto, right, with Claudia Catania in “Madama Butterfly” at the Met in 1986.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMs. Scotto married a violinist in the La Scala orchestra, Lorenzo Anselmi, in 1960, and they had two children, Laura and Filippo. They survive her, as do two grandchildren.Mr. Anselmi abandoned his playing career to become his wife’s voice coach, musical sounding board and business manager. “The biggest decision that a man can make is to give up his own career to dedicate himself to his wife’s,” Ms. Scotto said. He died in 2021.After retiring as a diva, Ms. Scotto directed a number of operas to modest praise. She also gained renown as a voice teacher.Her advice was often practical. She used to remind her students of an admonition from her first voice teacher, Ms. Favero, that it was necessary to reserve vocal stamina for emotional scenes.She also urged her students to draw on their own life experiences, especially family relationships. She cited as an example how memories of her mother, Santina, helped her interpret Mimì in “La Bohème”: “I would understand Mimì’s sweet desperation and her happiness by remembering Santina the seamstress as she worked and sang.”Alex Marshall More

During a time of year in which anything can be a stage, the joy of music making has room to breathe outdoors.A Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.James Estrin/The New York TimesConsider classical music a late bloomer. In New York, as the city emerges from its winter hibernation — the snow on tree branches replaced by dreamily pastel cherry blossoms, the short, sleepy days extended by increasingly dramatic sunsets — performers tend to remain indoors. A concert in May doesn’t look so different from one in January.But then comes summer.Around early June, orchestras and opera companies close out their seasons, and music making begins to take on new, liberated forms. Instruments that seem so precious onstage make their way outdoors, suddenly looking as casual as the artists wielding them, who sometimes swap their formal concert attire for, well, whatever they want.Samantha Lake with Make Music New York, on Lexington Avenue.The Metropolitan Opera’s float at the New York City Pride March.The old-hat claims of classical music’s elitism and lack of approachability just don’t hold up in summer. Performances pop up as if out of thin air; the New York Philharmonic puts on a series of free outdoor shows that sprawl across the city’s boroughs; everyone, regardless of skill or expertise, is invited to take part in local celebrations for the global Fête de la Musique on the June 21 solstice.A Boston Symphony Orchestra concert at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.During this season, a singer from the Metropolitan Opera might appear on a makeshift stage or in a band shell, performing for passers-by and die-hard fans alike. Friends and families gather on picnic blankets to camp out, some for hours, and enjoy one another’s company, eat and play games before the day culminates in a Philharmonic concert played for thousands more people than could fit inside the orchestra’s home at Lincoln Center.The Met — an institution that throughout its history has been a haven for queer fans but only recently has represented people like them onstage — leaves its velveteen temple to let its hair down and celebrate Pride in the streets, complete with its own float, a mobile concert sung by the likes of the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe.A Death of Classical concert at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.Caramoor.Bard College.Anything, after all, can be a stage in the summer: a patch of grass, a barn, the catacombs of a cemetery. Music moves farther and farther away from concert halls, away from cities into the countryside and mountains. New Yorkers wind their way up the Hudson Valley to the bucolic grounds of Caramoor, or to the expansive lawns of Bard College and its sculptural, Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center.The Boston Symphony Orchestra, which in town has the air of a bastion of tradition, embraces the relaxed — and relaxing — grounds of its idyllic Tanglewood campus in the Berkshires. Students also stay there for the summer, exploring new music with monastic focus and learning from some of the finest artists in the field.The Met’s float at the Pride March.Pride in New York.Tanglewood.Joan Forsyth with Make Music New York.Things that would be unfathomable in a concert hall suddenly seem possible. The cannons of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” can be literal cannons. The joy of music making has room to breathe, inviting the sounds of nature to join in: a chorus of birds and insects, a roar of thunder, hopefully not the needy wail of a car alarm.A New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park.The Philharmonic’s concert.A Philadelphia Orchestra concert in Saratoga Springs.Soon, it won’t be so pleasant to lay out a picnic spread while waiting for the Philharmonic. As the trees shed their leaves and the sunsets come earlier, the concert hall will become a refuge. But come next summer, so will the outdoors. More

The Italian soprano’s dramatic acumen and hard-to-characterize voice brought a range of classic opera heroines vividly and emotionally to life.When fans and critics speak about the Italian soprano Renata Scotto, who died on Wednesday at 89, they immediately seize upon her dramatic acumen — her ability to spin character insights into vocal magic. Her combination of style, beauty and meticulousness as a singer made her one of the most original opera stars of the second half of the 20th century.If she sometimes pushed her voice to harsh extremes in roles that challenged her resources, that only burnished her reputation as a serious artist. And her well-publicized quarrels with general managers and co-stars — including Luciano Pavarotti and the Metropolitan Opera impresario Rudolf Bing — likewise fueled the idea that she had an irrepressible temperament that destined her for the stage.But what really made her special was her specificity — her ability to connect personal insight to vocal inflection in a way that made that insight legible for audiences.James Levine, the Met’s longtime music director, championed her early in his career there and helped introduce her artistry to a wide audience in the first-ever “Live From the Met” telecast, a “La Bohème” in 1977, alongside Pavarotti. Levine shaped the delicate inner world of Scotto’s cripplingly insecure Mimì. Too often, the tenor’s and the soprano’s back-to-back arias in Act I feel like a gift exchange of rhapsodic melodies from one vainly beautiful voice to another.Scotto, though, turned Mimì, a reclusive seamstress, into a foil for Pavarotti’s extroverted, carefree Rodolfo. Her soft tone curled back into itself as she retreated from the light of Pavarotti’s sunny tenor. In Act III, dressed in funereal black, she reasserted the inevitability of Mimì’s lonely life as she broke off their love affair, her voice suffused with self-inflicted pain and feelings of unworthiness.Scotto enjoyed a long, fruitful collaboration with Levine, who gave her the artistic challenges (not always successful) and splashy new productions she craved. He led her in a season-opening “Norma” in 1981; Verdi’s “Macbeth” in 1982; Zandonai’s “Francesca da Rimini” in 1984; and the company premiere of Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito,” also in 1984.Inhabiting repertoire across a breadth of periods and styles, Scotto had decisive thoughts about what constituted good taste. In a 1978 interview with The New York Times, she praised Maria Callas because she “cleaned things up” and popularized a move away from generalized pathos. (She cited Beniamino Gigli and his tear-stained tone as a prime offender). Veristic growling also came in for a scolding (“It’s ridiculous. Vulgar!”). She made bel canto feel more real and verismo, more beautiful.Scotto, right, with Claudia Catania in “Madama Butterfly” at the Met in 1986. Scotto said of Cio-Cio-San: “She has to have a beautiful lyric voice, she has to have a huge dramatic voice.” Scotto had both in the role.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe took these apparent contradictions and reconciled them in singing of indisputable accomplishment. In touchstone bel canto roles like Adina and Lucia, her singing was light and facile without indulgence — she didn’t fuss with the fireworks. In Verdi and Puccini, she was emotionally engaged without sliding around the pitches or gasping in the middle of phrases. Musetta’s and Desdemona’s prayers had a spoken quality; Violetta’s letter reading, a sung one.Scotto contained multitudes, and that extended to her vocal categorization, too. Was she a leggiero, a lyric, a spinto? She was all and none. Some have described her as a lyric by fach and a spinto by temperament, attributing her vocal decline — inevitable for any singer — to the irreconcilability of the two. Her astonishing piano high notes in dramatic music, the unforced warmth of her middle register, the plangency of her tone, the controlled force at the top of the staff, nonetheless speak to a formidable technique.Her Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” preserved on two studio recordings, exploits the permeable boundary among those voice types. “Puccini gives to Butterfly everything possible to do for a singer,” she once told an interviewer. “She has to have a beautiful lyric voice, she has to have a huge dramatic voice.” The 1978 recording with Lorin Maazel bears that out: Her Cio-Cio-San, steeped in a romantic fantasy that turns increasingly bleak, alternates among a ravishing head voice, lacerating outbursts and a radiantly balanced middle register. The progress is not linear; her voice responds to hopes and doubts that the heroine continually surfaces and suppresses.Scotto’s morbidezza — her ability to inflect her middle voice with captivating softness — was arguably her most impressive quality. It’s hardly the flashiest weapon in the arsenal of a singing actress, but it represents its own kind of daring — the courage to lower the volume and expose one’s tenderness. Violetta’s “Ah! dite alla giovine” in “La Traviata” was written for it. But, Scotto reveals, so was much of Desdemona’s music in Verdi’s “Otello”: Her vocal lightness imbued the Act I love duet with the unguarded charm of an open heart and then turned fragile, even fateful, in the Act IV “Willow Song.”Scotto was aware that her singing wasn’t perfect. At full volume, her top notes rarely cooperated with her. At her best, she could harness and focus their power, but too often they careened in hair-raising ways. In florid music, her pitch wasn’t always true, but when a musical phrase was repeated, you could hear her correct herself and tune those pesky staccatos. She was an alert listener to others — her expressive face registering subtle reactions to her co-stars onstage — but also to herself.It’s also fascinating to hear her respond to Riccardo Muti’s conducting in their 1980 recording of “La Traviata.” His simmering drinking song elicits from Scotto a sense of the danger that could engulf the defiant Violetta. The Act I finale, pensive yet propulsive, is full of haunted, pale-gold tone, and Alfredo’s dramatically implausible offstage cries suddenly make sense: This Violetta is tormented by her lover’s ghostly presence in much the same way Lucia is in her mad scene.This is the kind of work Scotto did. She deployed a malleable voice and a sense of taste that could transcend styles to find a through line for heroines like Mimì, Desdemona, Cio-Cio-San and Violetta. She connected the dots to reveal something beautiful, yes, but also somehow new and true. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on the songs that have shaped this summer, or at least attempted to, including:Big-tent chart successes like Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” and Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer”Hip-hop (and adjacent) hits like Gunna’s “___umean,” Toosii’s “Favorite Song” and “Creepin’” by Metro Boomin’ featuring the Weeknd and 21 SavageRecordings that live somewhere between song and meme, like Drake and Central Cee’s “On the Radar Freestyle,” Sexxy Red’s “Pound Town,” Kaliii’s “Area Codes” and Flyana Boss’s “You Wish”Songs that blend the fictional and real, like “World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak” by Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), from “The Idol,” and “I’m Just Ken,” by Ken (Ryan Gosling), from “Barbie”Rural-issues country music red meat like Luke Combs’s cover of “Fast Car,” Jelly Roll’s “Need A Favor” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond”Breakout hits in K-pop, dancehall, regional Mexican music and Afrobeats: Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma’s “Ella Baila Sola,” Byron Messia’s “Talibans,” NewJeans’s “Super Shy” and “Calm Down” by Rema featuring Selena Gomez.New songs from That Mexican OT featuring Paul Wall and Drodi and people featuring AyooLii and Lil SinnConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

A teaser for the Netflix biopic has ignited a new round of criticism that the family described as a misunderstanding.Leonard Bernstein’s three children came to the defense of the actor and director Bradley Cooper on Wednesday after he drew fresh criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of the midcentury American composer and conductor, who was Jewish, in the forthcoming movie “Maestro.”When the makeup was first revealed last year, some questioned the decision by Cooper, who is not Jewish, to play Bernstein, who died in 1990. In the Netflix film, he stars opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein.The debut of a teaser trailer on Tuesday prompted further discussion on social media about both the prosthesis, which critics said played into an antisemitic trope, and about whether an actor who is Jewish should instead have been cast to play Bernstein, the “West Side Story” composer and music director of the New York Philharmonic.David Baddiel, a British comedian and author of the 2021 book “Jews Don’t Count,” cited Cooper as the latest instance of a gentile actor objectionably portraying a real-life Jewish figure. “I’ve talked about authenticity casting not applying to Jews — and what that means — many times,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The only difference here is it’s more — well — on the nose.”In a series of posts on X, the Bernsteins’ three children — Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein — said that Cooper had consulted with them “along every step of his amazing journey.”“It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts,” they said of Cooper. “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”They added, “Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch.”Through a representative, Cooper declined to comment. Netflix did not reply to a request for comment.“Maestro” premieres next month at the Venice Film Festival and, in North America, in October at the New York Film Festival. A theatrical release in the United States will follow in November before a December debut on Netflix.In recent years, the question of which actors are eligible to play certain roles has been a hot-button issue in movies, television and theater, with an increasing consensus against actors’ portraying characters from marginalized groups whose traits they do not share.Tom Hanks told The New York Times Magazine last year that in contemporary times he would correctly not be cast as a gay man with AIDS, as he was in the 1993 drama “Philadelphia.” At the 2016 Emmy Awards, the actor Jeffrey Tambor said he hoped to be the last cisgender man to play a transgender character, as he did in the series “Transparent.”Some critics, like Baddiel, argue that there is a double standard when it comes to casting Jewish characters, whose portrayal by gentiles is widely tolerated.Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, plays the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a biopic coming out this month (even as Liev Schreiber, who is Jewish, plays Henry Kissinger in the film, “Golda”). In the recent biopic “Oppenheimer,” the Jewish title character was played by the non-Jewish actor Cillian Murphy. More

Maxime Pascal, a latecomer to classical music, forged an unusual path to the podium that has paid off for him and for audiences.Growing up, the conductor Maxime Pascal was a self-identified musical dilettante.As a child in the south of France, he had some skill on the violin, and sat in on the piano lessons his mother taught. At night, he watched his father play New Orleans jazz. But he didn’t really listen to classical music until he was 18.Now, though, Pascal, 37, is arguably his generation’s finest conductor of 20th-century music, as well as an essential interpreter of contemporary works. And his schedule reflects both the breadth of his ambition and the respect he has garnered on some of the industry’s most prestigious stages.He is “a fascinating artist who understands the times we live in and the role music theater can have on injecting new life in opera,” said Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France. Pascal spent July at the festival leading his ensemble, Le Balcon, and performers from the Comédie-Française in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera,” in a slightly altered though polarizing orchestration of his own design.This month, Pascal is at the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic for the Martinu rarity “The Greek Passion” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. And in November, in Paris, Pascal and Le Balcon will continue what he said has become his “life’s work” as they mount “Sonntag aus Licht,” their fifth installment in Stockhausen’s immense, seven-opera, 29-hour “Licht” — with an eye toward staging the entire cycle during the composer’s centennial year in 2028.Through it all, Pascal has emerged not only as a conductor of specialized repertoire, but also as a fundamentally persuasive musical communicator. His gestures can seem excessively physical; he takes his bows looking as if he had just fallen into a pool. Yet they don’t have the performative drama of, say, Leonard Bernstein.Pascal was a late bloomer, musically, but has been catching up with his colleagues, and in many cases surpassing them.Fredrik Broden for The New York Times“The audience understands immediately if a gesture is honest or if it’s fake,” said Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, who has made Pascal a regular guest there. “More interesting is honesty. That’s Maxime. In his gesture you get an immediate understanding of what’s going on.”If there’s an honesty to Pascal’s podium manner, it was cultivated unconsciously during his childhood. In retrospect, he said in an interview between performances of “Threepenny” last month, his entire upbringing and musical education funneled into his understanding of conducting today.He was born in Carcassonne, between Toulouse and Montpelier. Even if he wasn’t immersed in classical music, he was surrounded by sound sensations, he said, that he still feels. There was the brassy timbre of his father’s trombone, whether playing onstage or along with concerts on television. The first film he saw in theaters was “Aladdin,” and he was overwhelmed by being engulfed in the vivid images and songs.There was also the first time Pascal played in an orchestra, an experience that was practically epiphanic. “You realize you are part of a very high-level process that has existed since a very long time,” he said. “Musically, of course, and artistically, but also socially. If you want to know what the other child over there is playing, you have to listen. It’s something really strong.”So, when the time came to pick a path for his education, Pascal chose music, eventually making his way to the Paris Conservatory. Quickly realizing how much of a comparative head start his fellow students had, he devoted himself to catching up. From the media library he would check out six recordings a day, following no real agenda. “I discovered everything at the same time,” he said: the standard repertoire alongside the works of Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey and Pierre Boulez.Pascal has a similar headlong approach today. He and Le Balcon don’t repeat programs, so he is constantly learning new scores. In a sense, he has never stopped catching up. “Doing that,” he said, “you will keep a child’s curiosity forever. You will be marveling at small details until the end of your life.”As he attended shows, he wasn’t always satisfied with what he heard. At his first live experience with Boulez’s “Le Marteau Sans Maître,” he was so affected and stunned, he could barely applaud. But at some performances, he said, he felt “a bit too far from the sound and the work.” He wondered what would happen if he put on a concert that was entirely amplified.In 2008, with a small group of composers, a sound designer and volunteer musicians, Pascal put on a program of student works and Ravel songs performed by the soprano Julie Fuchs. When he heard the amplification — meticulously arranged and balanced — he snapped his fingers and said, “That’s it.”“I was no longer just watching and listening to something,” Pascal said. “I was inside the sound.” It felt like watching “Aladdin” all over again.They continued to put on performances, calling their ensemble Le Balcon, inspired by Genet’s play of the same name. The decision felt spontaneous at the time, Pascal said, but “we realized this text could be our manifesto. It talks about representation and what it means to incarnate.”Pascal and his ensemble, Le Balcon, constantly explore new repertoire. “The idea from the start,” he said, “was to always do something that would surprise us, to discover new things.”Fredrik Broden for The New York TimesAt the time, Pascal was familiar with Stockhausen’s music but didn’t yet know how similar the composer’s aims were to his, particularly in the completely amplified sound world of “Licht.” The cycle has been performed piecemeal over the years, especially as it was being written, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. But no company or artist had taken on the entire work before Le Balcon. (In 2019, Audi presented a three-day abridgment at the Holland Festival called “Aus Licht.”)Repeating the “Licht” operas in 2028 would be something of a first for Le Balcon. The ensemble constantly explores new repertoire, Pascal said, because “the idea from the start was to always do something that would surprise us, to discover new things.” Some of those moves have been driven by Audi and Hinterhäuser.Audi asked Pascal to conduct this summer’s “Threepenny” in part because of his talent with 20th-century works, but also because he is “always searching for an honest space for rethinking and reinvention.” Weill was new to Pascal, but, Audi said, “he plunged into it and emerged with a triumphant, refreshing and highly convincing result.” (A recording on the Alpha Classicals label is due for release in September.)In Salzburg, Pascal’s musical terrain has been vast: Debussy and Stravinsky, Grisey and Stockhausen, last year the large-scale “Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher” of Honegger and the harrowingly intimate “Jakub Lenz” of Wolfgang Rihm. “The Greek Passion” is his first appearance with the Vienna Philharmonic, a risky debut for any conductor. But, Hinterhäuser said, “the response is very beautiful” in rehearsals.Critics have received “Passion,” which opened on Sunday and continues through Aug. 27, well. Pascal was praised especially for his handling of the stylistically eclectic, unwieldy score. “Sometimes it sounds archaic, sometimes modern, sometimes lyrical, then again passionate,” Meret Forster wrote in BR Klassik. “That all these facets can be heard and understood in Salzburg is mainly because of Maxime Pascal.”If he has one detracting critic, it’s himself. Pascal said he has spent years learning to be happy with his performances. “For a long time, it was really, crazily bad,” he added. “It happens still: People are saying it was fantastic, the orchestra is applauding, but I think it was so bad.”Whether with Le Balcon or a new orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic, Pascal is striving to realize the ideal performance in his mind but also aiming for simple satisfaction. “It can be very difficult to accept, as an artist, that everything you will do is only a picture of what you are at that moment,” he said. “You may never reach what you are searching for, but you are always approaching it.” More