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      Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry.

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      The artist’s phosphorescent electronic albums helped make way for the recent bloom of lifestyle playlists and background music. He’s turned on that trend to take on real life.Tim Hecker could not name his most streamed song on Spotify, even after several guesses.Was it “Chimeras,” the electronic musician guessed by phone before a recent Berlin performance, selecting a 2006 piece where prickles of electric guitar scatter like a galaxy around a lulling beat? (Not in the Top 10.) He tried “Sketch 3,” an 80-second piano reverie he considered “an oddball.” Closer, in second place.Informed that “Boreal Kiss, Pt. 1” — a deep cut from his obscure 2001 debut that sounds like a glass harp routed through a dial-up modem — had six million streams, far more than everything else in the Top 10 combined, he chuckled. “That is crazy, crazy,” he said slowly.He was an Ottawa civil servant then who had just finished a master’s in political philosophy and was making music on the weekends from his basement home. His ideas were inchoate, his approach innocent. “I was so optimistic about the tools I had,” Hecker, 48, said. “Those were first passes at chord progressions you’ve been playing your whole teenage life.”In the decades since, Hecker has become one of the most pre-eminent and nuanced electronic producers of his generation, his phosphorescent pieces constantly tunneling among bliss and terror, depression and wonder. His albums, including “Harmony in Ultraviolet” (2006), “Virgins” (2013) and “No Highs,” which arrived earlier this month, revel in ambiguity, conjuring dream states that make you wonder if you like dreaming at all.These meticulous instrumentals also helped reopen the gates for the tide of ambient music that has seeped into life’s quiet corners, whether soundtracking yoga classes, co-working spaces or meditation apps. The impressive stats of “Boreal Kiss, Part 1” stem from a popular playlist called “Ambient Essentials.” Hecker wants no part of it.“Ambient music is the great wellspring — but also the bane of my existence,” he said in a sudden rush weeks earlier, in a call from his Montreal studio. “It’s this superficial form of panacea weaponized by digital platforms, shortcuts for the stress of our world. They serve a simple function: to ‘chill out.’ How does it differ from Muzak 2.0, from elevator music?”Hecker described his early life outside of Vancouver as the “classic Canadian suburban experience.” He played trumpet and ran cross-country, occasionally went camping. When he was a dishwasher at a Canadian steakhouse chain called The Keg, a co-worker passed him cassettes of British post-punk and American folk. The long-running CBC radio show Brave New Waves became his “voice in the night,” he said, its experimental music fascinating him as he drifted to sleep. He began borrowing guitars and drum kits, exploring for himself.“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThere was a latent sadness, too: When Hecker was 12, his mother died. He suppressed the turmoil until after he became a father himself, going to years of intensive therapy recently, well into his 40s. Still, he admitted, the loss was “bound up in the melancholy of youth.”This multivalence seemed to follow Hecker. He would spend his collegiate summers in the British Columbia wilderness, planting as many as 4,000 trees each day in clear-cut forests. (Each sapling, strung to a hip belt, took five seconds to get into the ground.) As he worked, he dieted on psychedelics and early British electronica. Grizzly bears prowled near the planters’ camp at night. Danger, beauty and intrigue commingled, a fertile landscape for Hecker’s imagination.Later, frustrated by the exigencies of starting a band, like remembering what they’d played the day before, Hecker began experimenting with drum machines and samplers. He needed no one else. “The original impulse was this awe-struck excitement,” Hecker said, recalling his titanic computer tower, gargantuan monitor and pirated software. “Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal. Computers had this utopian promise.”Hecker first made techno under the alias Jetone, then slid into the sort of ambient music that is now a streaming commodity because it felt less dependent on being young or sticking to a scene. His sonics and sentiments quickly deepened, suggesting a constant and often very loud tug of war between anxiety and enlightenment. This reflected, he said, “the rainbow of possibility for people — extreme joys, incredible suffering.”To achieve that balance, Hecker has long relied on an iterative, labor-intensive process. When he’s found a motif he likes, maybe a delirious rhythm or entrancing melody, he repeatedly improvises over it, letting as many as 200 pieces pile up like strata of handbills amassed on a light pole. He excises bits that don’t fit, editing that mass of sound until all the layers interact.“There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem,” he said. “I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion — the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel.”“Digital audio was a river of data you could shape, like liquid metal,” Hecker said of his early forays into electronic music. “Computers had this utopian promise.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn the early days of lockdown, Hecker, like so many, felt only confused and anxious, home-schooling kids and managing bills. He worried there would be no music industry on the pandemic’s other side, and he wondered what he was supposed to make. He turned down an offer to produce sounds for an upstart meditation app and instead focused on film and TV scores, including Brandon Cronenberg’s subversive thriller, “Infinity Pool.”He was grateful to respond to someone else’s cues rather than make decisions himself. “I had no music in the tank,” he admitted. “I was out of ideas.”Finally, in the winter of 2022, he fled Montreal for 10 days, taking suitcases crammed with keyboards, cords and small speakers to Oaxaca. He set up a makeshift studio in an apartment there, kneeling on pillows for hours on end as he built and broke rhythms, searching for moments that felt new, even hallucinatory. They became the core of “No Highs.”Soon after Hecker returned to cold Montreal, he asked his longtime friend, the powerhouse saxophonist Colin Stetson, to improvise alongside those still-nebulous pieces. “We didn’t discuss concept, theme — the tracks were just scaffolding,” Stetson recalled in an interview. “But one was madly exultant. Another was innocent, searching. A couple were relentlessly tense. He was not running down a single alleyway.”“No Highs” is a sly and discomfiting record, elements of unease lurking beneath a cool exterior and tongue-in-cheek titles like “Monotony” and “Living Spa Water.” Almost half the tracks circle the eight-minute mark, Hecker’s attempt to undermine streaming algorithms he believes prefer clarity and concision. “No Highs” is an attempt to give himself a playlist pink slip.“What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesHecker doesn’t doubt the salubrious value of pleasant instrumentals, whether called ambient, New Age or easy listening. And he understands the need to break from hectic social rhythms; “No Highs,” after all, stemmed from his own paradisiacal escape from new lockdowns back home.A long-lapsed Catholic, Hecker began studying Buddhism early during the pandemic and meditating in his studio nearly every morning. When touring for “No Highs” ends, he plans to return to the San Diego monastery of the Thai Forest monk Thanissaro Bhikkhu for a week, making breakfast for the monks and doing chores. That work reminds him of planting those trees after college. He’s started camping again and is interested in extended backpacking trips, inspired by Bhikku and Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail chronicle, “A Walk in the Woods.”“It’s not a panacea for living in the world,” he said of such resets. “But the frequency of the mind is slowed, less prone to flailing.”And many mornings, he looks at Apple Music to see if there’s something new from Michiru Aoyama, a beyond-prolific Japanese musician who sometimes releases an eight-track album of placid music every day. (By mid-April, he’d issued 93 in 2023.) Hecker called Aoyama the “ambient genre, par excellence.” These are calming but pointed reminders of what his own music isn’t, even if they sometimes share stylistic descriptors.“It is totally opposite from my own work — arguably overwrought, taking too long,” he said, laughing. “There’s something reassuring about waking up to a new Michiru album, like coffee being served. I want my spa music, too.” More

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      A New Show Celebrates the Guitar and Its Symbolism

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      Opening in May at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, the exhibition will delve into the instrument’s myriad representations and stars who have played it.This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.Guitarists and their music — from folk singers to rock ’n’ roll stars and protest songs — figure prominently in American history and culture, but the instrument has a notable heritage of its own.“The guitar itself can have meaning, other than simply being beautiful or making music,” said Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, where “Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art,” on view from May 26 to Aug. 13, will explore the guitar’s symbolism in American art, from late 18th-century parlor rooms to today’s concert halls.On display will be more than 165 works: paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, illustrations, videos, music in multimedia presentations and musical instruments, including a rare cittern, a popular string instrument in the 18th and 19th centuries, and seminal guitars by Fender, Gibson and C.F. Martin & Company.Twelve thematic sections, with names like “Cowboy Guitars,” “Iconic Women of Early Country Music” and “Hispanicization,” will weave in how artists and photographers have used the guitar as a visual motif to express the American experience and attitudes, from thorny issues like race and identity to the aesthetics of guitars themselves.The guitar was seen as a symbol of cultivation and sophistication, as used in Thomas Cantwell Healy’s portrait of Charlotte Davis Wylie (1853). Estate of Mary Swords BoehmerArtworks in “Leisure, Culture, and Comfort: 18th and 19th Century America,” including a painting by Charles Willson Peale from 1771, the earliest image in the exhibition, will show old-fashioned scenes of women playing for pleasure or holding guitars passively.“The guitar was seen as a symbol of cultivation and sophistication, a sign of domestic achievement, like needlework or writing poetry,” Mr. Scala said. But throughout the show, many images of guitar-playing women counter this gender stereotype, he said, by signaling self-confidence, independence, creativity and even sexual liberation.“Guitars are kind of equal-opportunity story facilitators,” said Leo Mazow, curator of American art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, who organized “Storied Strings, where it recently closed. (The exhibition will be adapted for the Frist, mainly to reflect Tennessee culture.)He attributes the instrument’s popularity to its portability, affordability, easy to learn repertoire and ability to host many different genres: “One of the reasons guitars appear frequently in American art is they fit neatly within the picture plane, especially on the diagonal and one’s lap.”William H. Johnson’s “Blind Musician” was painted around 1940.Smithsonian American Art MuseumThe section “Blues and Folk” will focus on the role of both idioms “in the formation of a voice that comes up from the people, music that has often been conflated to express identity or to encourage change,” Mr. Scala said. Works featuring figures like Lead Belly, Odetta, and Josh White appear here. Romare Bearden’s 1967 collage, “Three Folk Musicians,” a nod to Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” Dr. Mazow said, “is a powerful work because it contrasts the guitar with its Western European origins to the banjo with its West African origins, but carries little to none of the racially vexed baggage that the banjo does.”Dr. Mazow said that one of his favorite works was Thomas Hart Benton’s “Jessie with Guitar,” of the artist’s daughter, from 1957. “Every birthday he would make a drawing or a painting of her,” he explained, “and this painting is based on sketches completed the morning of her 18th birthday.” Based on conversations with Jessie, who died in February, he said, “this guitar provided a way for the older dad to bond with his young, hip daughter, who was something of a folk sensation.”This photograph of the folk and protest singer Woody Guthrie was taken in 1943. Jessie Benton Collection. T.H. and R.P. Benton Trusts / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York“A Change is Coming” will highlight the guitar as a vehicle of political change, with images and videos of musicians — like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez — who “protest the hypocrisy of America’s social and political systems,” Mr. Scala said. Dorothea Lange’s 1935 photograph “Coachella Valley” details a Mexican laborer playing a guitar at a camp in California, and Annie Leibovitz’s 1984 photo of Bruce Springsteen used to promote his “Born in the U.S.A.” tour will be on view.“Making a Living” will look at the role of money in music, “from historic paintings of blind street buskers to the ultrarich stars of today,” Mr. Scala said. Highlights include a 1912 oil painting by Robert Henri “Blind Singers,” a 1941 photograph by Walker Evans “Blind Man with Guitar,” and more recent images of Chet Atkins and the Carter Sisters performing at the Grand Ole Opry, and Dolly Parton on her tour bus.“Personification” will explore how the guitar is often associated with the human body, through words to describe it like “neck” and “waist” and at times, phallic connotations. A photograph of B.B. King hugging his guitar named Lucille reflects how the guitar can also be a kind of extension of, or an avatar for the human body, Mr. Scala said.“The Visual Culture of Early Rock and Roll” will feature electric guitars from the 1950s and ‘60s, including a 1959 Les Paul, instruments played by Eric Clapton, by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and footage of Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing electric guitar, a musician who is credited with transforming Black church music. “Most of the guitars in this section were played by male rock ’n’ roll stars,” Mr. Scala said. “I wanted to show her influence on the early development of rock ’n’ roll, puncturing the gender-specific notion of the ‘guitar god.’”This Gibson Explorer guitar was played by Eric Clapton and dates back to 1958.Private collection, TexasSeveral design milestones have contributed to the guitar’s appeal as a visual icon. “The first American guitar manufacturer, C.F. Martin,” right after he arrived from Germany in 1833, Dr. Mazow said, “is very concerned with aesthetics. There are several parts of early Martins, like the ornate deck decorations around the sound hole, that are not structural at all.” More than a century later, a 1954 Fender Stratocaster, which will be on view, is believed to be the first custom-painted model, he said. “It takes us back to a moment when one of the premier electric guitar makers decided that aesthetics count.”Paul Polycarpou, a guitar collector, whose rare pink Stratocaster appears in the show, said, “It’s art you can play.” Mr. Polycarpou, former editor and publisher of Nashville Arts Magazine, arrived in Nashville in the 1980s from England to play guitar on tour with Tammy Wynette. “It really is ground zero for guitar players,” he said of Nashville. “Not just in country music, but in all genres, whether it’s jazz, rockabilly, rock ’n’ roll or bluegrass.”The Frist recently opened a companion exhibition, “Guitar Town: Picturing Performance Today,” on view through Aug. 20, featuring works by 10 local photographers who celebrate Nashville’s music scene, with images of guitar players performing in venues across the city. “Anywhere in America, if you’ve got a story to tell, the guitar will help you tell it,” Mr. Polycarpou said. “That’s what makes it such a powerful symbol. Who can forget Elvis Presley, rocking with that guitar? You can’t forget that image of a young Bob Dylan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on a black-and-white television. You can’t forget that once you see it. It’s that powerful.” More

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      ‘Good Night, Oscar’ Review: Sean Hayes With Demerol and Cadenzas

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      The “Will & Grace” star is unrecognizable in a Broadway biography of Oscar Levant: wit, pianist and “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.”He says it again, or a version of it, in “Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.Certainly the play, by Doug Wright, fails to make much of a case for the genius part of the joke. Instead, it offers a spray of Levant’s most famous quips, like the one about Elizabeth Taylor: “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” And instead of dramatizing how marvelous Levant was, it just says so repeatedly. “America’s greatest wit.” “A goddamn lion.” A Horowitz at the piano “with a grace and an ease that even Chopin might envy.”Fulsome praise, but what we see in the director Lisa Peterson’s production is a far cry from any of it. Mostly it’s just a cry; Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill.Pathos not being much of a dramatic engine, Wright works very hard, if fictionally, to crank up the stakes. It’s 1958, on the day during sweeps week when “The Tonight Show,” with its host, Jack Paar, will make its West Coast debut. Paar’s marquee guest, leading a lineup that also includes the sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and the ventriloquist Señor Wences, is Levant, who two hours before showtime hasn’t arrived. NBC’s president, Robert Sarnoff, threatens to replace him with the popular bandleader Xavier Cugat.But where Sarnoff (Peter Grosz) sees Levant as unreliably neurotic, and thus unappealing to the network and the audience, Paar (Ben Rappaport) sees him as an artist whose unreliability and neurosis are exactly his strengths. He’s the national id: the man Americans hope they’ll catch “saying something on television they know damn well that you can’t say on television.” He’s good for ratings; no wonder Paar calls him his favorite mental patient.That line is no joke. It is only thanks to the machinations of Levant’s wife, June (Emily Bergl, excellent), that Oscar has been sprung on a four-hour pass from the institution he currently calls home. When he finally arrives at the studio, with a miffed orderly (Marchánt Davis) in tow, he’s strung out, rumpled and morose. June calls him “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Hayes and Emily Bergl as Levant’s wife, June.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHayes, no longer the adorable sprite from “Will and Grace,” has clearly made a careful study of Levant’s mannerisms, many of them the result of a longtime addiction to painkillers. The work is startling, but the performance is less an inhabitation of character than a nonstop loop of perfectly rendered facial tics, trembling hands and compulsive gestures. His speech is pressured, his mood explosive, his target anything that crosses his path — including himself. Past this stockade of behavior, little of an inner life can get out.To address the built-in problem of revealing such a locked-down soul, and in the manner of period psychiatric melodramas like “Now Voyager” and “Bigger Than Life,” Wright gives Levant occasional reality breaks and hallucinations. Most involve George Gershwin: Levant’s friend, benefactor and bête noire, dead 20 years yet still a kind of Oedipal rival. “I’m scared to death of failure,” Gershwin’s glamorous ghost (John Zdrojeski) says. “But you? You don’t mind it.”Whether or not Levant minded it, it’s true that by Gershwin standards he failed; few people today remember him. Huge swathes of dramaturgically suspicious exposition must thus be rolled out to cover the gaps. “I know the critics all say your greatest performance was in ‘An American in Paris,’” a young production assistant (Alex Wyse) tells Levant, and us. “That musical sequence — the Concerto in F — it’s a showstopper!”When characters start informing other characters of what they would obviously already know, and (as often happens here as well) braying madly at mild jokes, something is wrong.What that is becomes clearer when, in the second half of the 100-minute play, Levant finally sits down for the live broadcast, after proving himself merely tiresome for the first half. The music starts, the curtain rises, the lights come up, and he’s still tiresome. Firing off one-liners, especially nasty ones, is no mark of special genius; thousands of comedians do it. Nor does the fact that the one-liners come from a man who is obviously deeply troubled make them especially funny. For me, watching Hayes as Levant — like watching kinescopes of Levant himself — is excruciatingly sad.The weight of shoring up the point of the play thus falls heavily on Levant’s pianism — and Hayes’s. Peterson, the director, has been building up to it from the beginning. The nested shoeboxes of Rachel Hauck’s handsome set, representing Paar’s office and, when that breaks away, Levant’s dressing room, now disappear entirely to reveal a fully padded television studio with a Steinway center stage. Hayes steps up to it and, after a last, mortifying fight with Gershwin’s ghost, proceeds to play a seven-minute excerpt from “Rhapsody in Blue.”The playwright illuminates Levant’s inner world with occasional hallucinations, most involving Levant’s long-dead friend and rival George Gershwin (John Zdrojeski).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s fine.Even if it had been mind-blowing, I don’t see how it would have given “Good Night, Oscar” a satisfying shape; issues raised in theatrical terms want to be resolved in them, too. Wright has followed that principle in “I Am My Own Wife,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, and in his book for the unconventional musical version of “Grey Gardens,” each of which uses the raw materials it was built from to fashion an organic conclusion.“Good Night, Oscar” can’t get there, but it understands the problem. A coda following the concerto may not tie up the larger themes of genius and insanity but does resolve some relationships in the way you would expect from a melodrama set in 1958. Selflessness and renunciation are involved. Jokes that were formerly just origami with words now become ways of slipping painful truths past the interpersonal censors.In those last few minutes only, you see into Levant’s soul. It is not a soul made for television, though that’s how most people of his time would have known him. Somehow they accepted him as he was, which may not have been a blessing. When asked, on a 1965 episode of “What’s My Line,” “Have you ever managed to make a great deal of use out of various illnesses that you’ve had?” he answered, “My health is the concern of the nation.” The blindfolded panel knew immediately who he was.I only wish after “Good Night, Oscar” we did.Good Night, OscarThrough Aug. 27 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; goodnightoscar.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      How Fred again.. Jolted Dance Music

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe most rapid ascent in dance music over the past three years belongs to the British producer and songwriter Fred again.., a protégé of Brian Eno and a onetime songwriter for Ed Sheeran and others who has built a formidable catalog using found vocals — from YouTube, Instagram or regular conversation — as the skeleton for high-energy club-pop.Fred’s main innovations aren’t necessarily musical, though. They’re his open-eared and arms-outstretched approach to production, which has made room for a wide range of collaborators, and his sense of live whimsy — whether announcing a last-minute rave with Skrillex and Four Tet at Madison Square Garden, or playing a peculiarly intimate set on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about dance music’s new wave of big-tent ambition, how Fred again.. turns unlikely source material into catchy pop, and how far interpersonal good will can go as a music-making tool.Guest:Foster Kamer, the editor in chief of Futurism, who writes for New York magazine, The New York Times and othersConnect 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 popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Morgan Wallen Fends Off Metallica for a Seventh Week at No. 1

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      The country star has two releases in the Top 5 of Billboard’s album chart, continuing a dominating run anchored by streaming.The country star Morgan Wallen fended off a challenge from Metallica to hold the top spot on the Billboard album chart for a seventh week with “One Thing at a Time,” his latest streaming blockbuster.In its most recent week out, “One Thing at a Time” had the equivalent of 166,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total, a composite that incorporates both streams and old-fashioned unit sales, included 202 million streams and 12,000 copies sold as a complete package. Since its release, “One Thing at a Time” has been streamed nearly two billion times in the United States.For weeks, Wallen has stayed at No. 1 by holding off challenges from new releases by the alt-pop singer Melanie Martinez, the rapper NF and the K-pop acts Jimin and Twice.Metallica posed more of a threat to Wallen than any other with “72 Seasons,” its first studio album in seven years. It opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 146,000 sales, including 16 million streams and 134,000 copies sold as complete albums. The album’s publicity campaign included a four-night residency on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and an online “Metallica Logo Generator” that let fans render their chosen text in the band’s signature lightning-bolt font.Also this week, SZA’s “SOS” is No. 3, Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 4 and Wallen’s last album, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” is in fifth place. More

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      Review: Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra Gets Ambitious at Carnegie Hall

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      After decades away, the musicians, led by Kent Nagano, were back in the United States to perform works by Sean Shepherd, along with Beethoven and Brahms.“Go big or go home” must have been the rallying cry for the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra’s debut at Carnegie Hall Saturday night. The last time this group appeared in the United States was more than 50 years ago, in 1967. So for this program, the Hamburg musicians, led by the conductor Kent Nagano, went large-scale ambitious, performing the world premiere of the American composer Sean Shepherd’s t12- movement “An Einem Klaren Tag — On a Clear Day” for cello, choruses and orchestra.Here, that ambition demanded the participation of no fewer than five choruses culled from both Germany and New York: the Audi Jugendchorakademie (a youth chorus sponsored by the car manufacturer); Alsterspatzen (the children and youth choir of the Hamburg State Opera); the Dresdner Kreuzchor (a boys’ choir that dates back to the 13th century); the Young ClassX ensemble (a youth choir from Hamburg); and the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. By my count, more than 200 instrumentalists and singers were jammed onto the Carnegie stage, plus Nagano and the soloist Jan Vogler on cello, for the nearly hourlong work.The concert began with the music of a Hamburg native: Johannes Brahms. The orchestra performed his brief, sonically luminous and emotionally ambiguous “Schicksalslied” (Song of Destiny) with the Audi singers. Written in three movements with an ancient Greek-inspired text by Friedrich Hölderlin, “Schicksalslied” descends from radiant joyfulness into dark despair before resolving into something akin to solace. Nagano, deeply mindful of shape and phrasing, coaxed the strings into producing a warm glow that seemed to be lit from within.Nagano and the orchestra continued that careful, deeply intentional sculpting of rhythm, articulation and dynamics in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. In a work full of lithe charm, the Hamburg musicians, who also serve as the orchestra of the Hamburg State Opera, were able to showcase a more exuberantly playful side of their collective personality. After all, this is a symphony in which Beethoven, for all his callbacks to the structure and style of Haydn and Mozart, takes a radical tack: the Eighth lacks a slow movement, and dances at its own singular pace. Even with that whimsical spirit, the musicians created each moment with great deliberation.That pinpoint precision subsided in the sweep of Shepherd’s massive and earnest piece. Mostly using poetry by the German writer Ulla Hahn, Shepherd calls “On a Clear Day” both “a plea for compassion toward our fellow human” and an outcry against environmental calamity. Despite Vogler’s presence, it’s not a concerto per se; rather, Shepherd used the cello more as an actor who steps into a variety of roles to present occasional plaintive and virtuosic soliloquies against a colossal backdrop: here, a melancholic companion for the singers, trading a melody back and forth; there, channeling the spirit of a beleaguered Mother Earth.Shepherd has a fantastic gift for orchestral color; for example, in the sixth movement, he juxtaposes a rapturous, lyrical passage for solo cello with winds, brass, harp, piano and percussion — including glockenspiel and sleigh bells — to glittering, mysterious effect. The piece is so expansive in both size and scope, however, that it sometimes felt like Nagano was less a conductor than the captain of a giant cruise ship, wrestling his oversized vessel into a modest port. The even keel at which he had led the Brahms and Beethoven had vanished.Hamburg Philharmonic State OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Now Celebrated, Julius Eastman’s Music Points to a New Canon

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      The 92nd Street Y, New York and Wild Up presented a three-concert festival of works by this pioneering Black queer composer. What next?At last, it no longer feels accurate to describe the music of Julius Eastman as “long lost.”We’re firmly enjoying some new period of appreciation for the pioneering but once-overlooked work of this Black queer composer and multi-instrumentalist; archival recordings and new interpretations are widely available, and the art world more broadly has taken an enthusiastic interest in him. And at the 92nd Street Y, New York, this weekend, Eastman was celebrated with a three-concert series by the ensemble Wild Up, called “Radical Adornment.”

      Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy by Wild UpThe first two programs, both of which were well attended, presented works that, in recent years, have re-emerged as pillars of the American Minimalist repertoire. Friday’s show offered the evening-length “Femenine” — gentle at the outset, then thundering (if overamplified) as conducted by an energetic Christopher Rountree. And on Saturday afternoon, the rollicking, pop-aware “Stay On It” received a luxurious, 20-minute reading that was even better than on Wild Up’s recording of the piece.These concerts capitalized on Wild Up’s devoted attention to the Eastman catalog, which so far has included two portrait albums released on the New Amsterdam label. (A third volume, also excellent, is due for release in June, and a total of seven are planned.)As if to note that there is still work to be done in the Eastman revival, Wild Up spent Saturday evening performing an immersive, five-hour take on “Buddha” — an enigmatic piece built from spare melodic lines, written out within an egg-shaped oval that Eastman drew around the margins of a one-page score. Like “Femenine” and other works, it invites interpretive choices and improvisation; and by now, this group expertly responds to such calls.As you might expect, that meditative “Buddha” finale was the most sparsely attended of the three events. By the end — precisely at midnight — the audience had thinned out to only a handful of attendees, some of whom were musicians who had played in earlier shifts of the relay-style performance.Yet this marathon set also thrillingly shone a spotlight on the players who had done so much to make the prior concerts, and Wild Up’s recent recordings, so captivating. And it corrected some of the concerns I had had about amplification issues during “Femenine.” I had left that Friday show thinking that I hadn’t heard enough of the saxophonist Shelley Washington — in part because of the heavy prominence of electric keyboard in the amplified mix — but “Buddha” offered a form of redress. Specifically, I cherished the chance to hear her supple approach in moments of mellow melody as well as in passages of forceful group exultation.Tariq Al-Sabir during Eastman’s “Buddha” on Saturday night.Joseph SinnottElsewhere, the violist Mona Tian — an expert in the string quartet music of Wadada Leo Smith — was liable to place a dollop of edgy timbre or rhythmic pulsations into the dronescape whenever things threatened to go slack. And crucial to the opening hours of “Buddha” were the saxophonists Erin Rogers and Patrick Shiroishi. Rogers’s own music is often hyper urgent and fast-acting, but in the relaxed time scale of this performance, she savored every extended-technique tool in her embouchure. Shiroishi led fiery episodes and often grinned while listening to Rogers’s solo playing.For stretches of that performance, I longed for a recording of this “Buddha,” and had a similar sensation during the Saturday afternoon set, when Richard Valitutto took on Eastman’s through-composed, fully notated “Piano 2.” He gave the proper sternness to Eastman’s thick systems of melody, strewn between the hands in syncopated passages. But he also had a theatrical sense of swagger when encountering jaunty lines that press forward with parallel thrust — a quality not as present on an otherwise excellent recording of the work by Joseph Kubera, a contemporary of Eastman’s.And as the metaphorical curtain was coming down on Saturday, I started thinking about the kinds of Eastman concerts I have yet to hear. Up until now, the focus has reasonably been on simply presenting his music. That was the case at the 92nd Street Y, as it was in 2018 at the Kitchen for the festival “Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental.” But now that bigger institutions have taken notice of Eastman, it is time to turn curatorial attention to the broader context in which he worked.In his time, Eastman was a rare Black artist in the otherwise mostly white classical avant-garde. But as George E. Lewis noted in his forward to the scholarly essay collection “Gay Guerrilla,” edited by Mary Jane Leach and Renée Levine Packer, Eastman was not the only one. Benjamin Patterson was a part of Fluxus. Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble, which played music by Eastman and counted him as a member in the 1970s, also worked with Muhal Richard Abrams, a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective that also nurtured composers like Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill and Wadada Leo Smith. (Gallingly, Braxton’s 75th birthday passed in 2020 without an appropriate New York City retrospective, even after pandemic restrictions on performances were lifted.)What would an Eastman festival sound like that also included the works of all those artists, many of whom are still alive? They have written fully notated works like “Piano 2” and improvisatory, conceptual pieces like “Buddha.”The problem, as ever, is one of committed resources. Last season, the New York Philharmonic played Eastman’s recently reconstructed Symphony No. 2 during Black History Month. But there is no sign of a recording; for now, just a minute of that performance lives on YouTube. And what is stopping American orchestras from broadly taking up the music of Braxton and Mitchell while those artists are still around?The 92nd Street Y has a role to play in this as well. And the broad success of its Eastman festival with Wild Up should encourage it to continue along a similar path. That way, in addition to the small matter of putting on exciting shows, it might also help classical music avoid the future problem of needing to belatedly celebrate other American composers who died with too little recognition. More

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      Review: In ‘La Bohème’ at the Met, the Star Is in the Pit

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, is conducting a beloved production of Puccini’s perennial classic for the first time.Winter grips Paris at the start of the third act of Puccini’s “La Bohème.”The shock of the cold is there in the loud, abrupt pair of notes as the curtain sweeps open — a slap across a frozen face. A soft but terse march in the flute and harp is a pricking chill, which deepens in a muted chord that builds from the bottom to the top of the strings, then the woodwinds. The cellos shiver, almost inaudibly, below. In just a few seconds, Puccini has conjured February, frigid and lonely.The Metropolitan Opera has put on “La Bohème” nearly 1,400 times, more than any other work; its players could do this moment in their sleep. But rarely are those chords at the beginning of Act III as poised and precisely tuned as they were when the company revived Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved production on Friday evening, their resonance as they built so evocative of the echoing bells Puccini calls for soon after.That tiny refinement is the kind of effect that needs real rehearsal to achieve, but “Bohème” doesn’t usually get that. For an expensive repertory factory like the Met to function, not every piece can be given equal attention; some, particularly the core Italian standards, must be thrown onstage with very little attention at all. The result is that this Puccini chestnut tends to get done on a high level but not the highest, with experienced but not starry maestros.Not so on Friday, when “La Bohème” was led for the first time at the Met by its current music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin — with the resources, energy and focus that always attend productions overseen by a company’s artistic leader.This hasn’t happened in decades. James Levine conducted “Bohème” more than 40 times at the Met, including the premiere of the Zeffirelli production in 1981. But not since Levine led a benefit performance in 1992 — about 400 “Bohèmes” ago — has a music director of the company been on the podium for it.So there was an overall sense of polish and verve on Friday, particularly in the orchestra: the tanginess of the winds when the bohemians’ landlord is regaling them in Act I, the delicacy of the strings at the beginning of Mimì’s aria introducing herself to Rodolfo. Like Nézet-Séguin’s approach to Verdi’s “La Traviata,” his “Bohème” is characterized by close juxtapositions of the sumptuous slowing down of tempos and furious bounding ahead. The goal of these back-and-forth extremes of speed seems to be feverish intensity, but the result is more often an atmospheric, even lightheaded dreaminess, beautiful and detailed but a bit unnatural.As Rodolfo and Marcello’s wistful duet began in the final act, for example, Nézet-Séguin pulled the reins until the music almost solidified into nostalgic amber: Time literally stopped. It is, he wrote on Instagram, “fulfilling my dream” to conduct this score at the Met, and there was throughout a sense of his lingering over it, however lovingly.The chorus, like the orchestra, was adroit, even in the Latin Quarter chaos of Act II. Best in the cast was the bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, his Colline solidly, capaciously and wittily sung. As Marcello, Davide Luciano seemed to be showing off the size of his substantial baritone by sometimes bellowing. Alexey Lavrov’s baritone, on the other hand, often vanished as Schaunard, and Sylvia D’Eramo had an expressive face but a wispy soprano as Musetta.There’s often a certain blandness to Stephen Costello’s calm, restrained tenor. But as his voice warmed through his performance as Rodolfo on Friday, what started off as coolness came to feel more like poignant reserve. The soprano Eleonora Buratto was a forthright rather than fragile Mimì, with muscular high notes tending toward the steel more often associated with Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”All in all, it was clear who the central figure of this “Bohème” was: the man waving the baton. These days, splashy contemporary operas and new productions get the spotlight — and get the music director. But for the sake of the company’s artistic health and vibrancy, it’s important to also have Nézet-Séguin in the pit for titles that too often get taken for granted.La BohèmeYannick Nézet-Séguin leads performances through May 14; the run continues through June 9 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More