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      Review: ‘The Ordering of Moses’ Shines at Riverside Church

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      The Harlem Chamber Players presented R. Nathaniel Dett’s 1937 oratorio in honor of the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance, for the Juneteenth weekend.The Harlem Chamber Players offered a rare, heartfelt performance of R. Nathaniel Dett’s 1937 oratorio “The Ordering of Moses” at Riverside Church on Friday, as part of a centennial celebration of the Harlem Renaissance that had been delayed by the pandemic.Timed to coincide with the Juneteenth weekend, the event felt like a broad community gathering, as though a sampling of city dwellers stepped off a subway train and headed to the same place. New Yorkers across ages and races, including a crying baby or two, filled the pews. Some dressed in natty suits, others in picnic shorts. The only thing stuffy about the evening was the weather outside.With the concert running behind schedule, Terrance McKnight, a host for WQXR and artistic adviser for the ensemble, was on hand to M.C. Noting that the performance was being recorded for his radio station, he encouraged the audience to make some noise: “What’s a Juneteenth celebration in New York City sound like?” The reply: jubilant shouts and applause.That energy continued into a stirring rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” arranged for chorus and soprano soloist (a hard-to-hear Janinah Burnett) by the evening’s conductor, Damien Sneed. Known as the Black National Anthem, it brought the congregation to its feet. Sneed’s harmonization gave it a discordant underbelly reflective of struggle — a reminder that it has been only two years since protests for George Floyd swept the globe, and one year since Juneteenth, an annual observation of Emancipation dating to 1866, was consecrated as a federal holiday.Damien Sneed, conducting the pieces on Friday.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe evening’s centerpiece, “The Ordering of Moses,” tells the story of Exodus: Moses, inspired by God’s call, overcomes his hesitation and leads the Israelites out of Egypt with his sister Miriam.Dett ingeniously wove spirituals into the typical oratorio structure of soloists and chorus expounding a biblical story with orchestra. In a letter around the time of the premiere, he wrote of the synergy between folk lyrics and scripture, calling it “striking” and “natural.”The score elides musical styles, as well. The emotional restraint of the soloists’ parts suits the solemn subject, and when their voices intermingle, the lines move perhaps too neatly. But the orchestration admits richer, Romantic influences, and a call-and-response with the chorus gives the music the sway of a spiritual.Central to the structure is one spiritual in particular, “Go Down, Moses,” and Dett’s bracing fugue on its melody honors its august history. Harriet Tubman sang its promise of deliverance from oppression on the Underground Railroad, and Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson popularized it across a segregated country.At Riverside Church, the bass section of the Chorale Le Chateau strongly anchored the fugue, and the altos lent it clarity. The tenors and sopranos shied away from the swiftly moving harmonies, reflecting a general timidity among all the choristers when they didn’t have a clear melody to sing.The tenor Chauncey Parker (Moses) let his voice ring and popped out triumphant high notes. The soprano Brandie Sutton (Miriam) phrased her music with confident individuality, echoing the style of the evening’s dedicatee, the legendary Jessye Norman. The baritone Kenneth Overton (the Word and the Voice of God) sang authoritatively, and the mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann (the Voice of Israel) offered glimmers of radiance in the taxing contralto writing.The Harlem School of the arts alumni, teen and junior ensembles, in “The Ordering of Moses.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn her opening remarks, Liz Player, the Harlem Chamber Players’ executive and artistic director, noted that “The Ordering of Moses” was the ensemble’s largest-ever undertaking. It showed sometimes in the careful tempos and less-than-sure-footed ensemble.But moments shone. As the story opens up, moving from Moses’ self-doubt to an affirmation of his purpose, so does the music: A lonely cello (touchingly played by Wayne Smith) begins the piece, and an orchestra in full cry ends it, with Parker and Sutton declaiming their lines on high as the chorus cushioned them with long, held notes. The effect was resplendent.Juneteenth, asserted McKnight, is “a celebration of liberty for all Americans,” and in those final moments, as the music bathed the diverse assemblage in its glow, it seemed he was right. More

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      Drake’s ‘Honestly, Nevermind’ Review: Now It’s Time to Dance

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      On his seventh album, “Honestly, Nevermind,” the pop disrupter who rethought rap’s relationship with melody opts for a new direction: nightclub abandon.For more than a decade, the Drake factory has been operating at full capacity — recalibrating the relationship between hip-hop, R&B and pop; balancing grand-scale ambition with granular experimentation; embracing the meme-ification of his celebrity. But in recent years, for the first time, it’s felt like the machines might be grinding to a pause. Maintaining the throne is hard work, and the wear and tear were beginning to show.What Drake has needed is an opportunity to refresh, a chance to be unburdened of old assumptions. It’s the sort of renewal you only really find after-hours.“Honestly, Nevermind,” Drake’s seventh solo studio album, which was released on Friday just a few hours after it was announced, is a small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.The expectations Drake is seeking to upend here, though, are his own. For almost the entire 2010s, hip-hop — and most of the rest of popular music — molded itself around his innovations. Blending singing and rapping together, making music that was unselfconsciously pop without kowtowing to the old way of making pop, Drake has long understood that he could build a new kind of global consensus both because he understood the limitations of older approaches, and because the globe is changing.Nevertheless, the bloated “Certified Lover Boy,” released last year, was his least focused album, and also his least imaginative — he sounded enervated, fatigued with his own ideas. What’s more, the people who have come up behind him may have exhausted them, too.Those conditions force innovation, though, and “Honestly, Nevermind” is a clear pivot, an increasingly rare thing for a pop icon. Drake fully embraces the dance floor here, making house music that also touches on Jersey club, Baltimore club, ballroom and Amapiano. Each of these styles has trickled up from regional phenomenon to tastemaker attention in recent years, and like the skilled scavenger he is, Drake has harvested bits and pieces for his own constructions.Part of why this is so striking is that Drake has made a career out of caress. His productions — always led by his longtime collaborator, Noah Shebib, known as 40 — were emphatically soothing. But the beats here have sharp corners, they kick and punch. “Currents” features both the squeaky-bed sample that’s a staple of Jersey club, and a familiar vocal ad-lib that’s a staple of Baltimore club. “Texts Go Green” is driven by jittery percussion, and the piano-drizzled soulful house buildup toward the end of “A Keeper” is an invitation to liberation.This approach turns out to be well-suited to Drake’s singing style, which is lean and doesn’t apply overt pressure. It’s conspiratorial, romantic, sometimes erotic — he’s never singing at you so much as he’s singing about you, in your ear.Most of the songs are about romantic intrigue, and often Drake is the victim. In places, this is a return to Instagram-caption-era Drake. “I know my funeral gonna be lit ’cause of how I treated people” he intones on the hard-stomping “Massive.” On the slurry “Liability,” he moans, “You’re too busy dancing in the club to our songs.”But part of the trade-off of this album is in lyrical vividness — on most songs Drake is alluding to things more than describing them. The words are prompts, suggestions, light abstractions that aim to emulate the mood of the production. (Also, social media moves too fast now, and doesn’t reward the same kinds of patient emotional poignancy that he excels at.)There is recent precedent for Drake’s choices here: Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak” and the more fleet parts of “Yeezus”; Frank Ocean’s flirtations with dance music.But music like this has always been a part of Drake’s grammar: think “Take Care” with Rihanna from 2011, with its Gil Scott-Heron/Jamie xx breakdown. Or the serene sunrise anthem “Passionfruit” from 2017 (which also had a Moodymann sample); “Fountains,” from “Certified Lover Boy,” a blissed-out duet with the Nigerian star Tems, was in this vein, too, but seemed to portend that the next hard Drake pivot would be toward Afrobeats, which he’s long engaged with, including collaborations with Wizkid.But Drake opted for club music — the average b.p.m. here is over 100 — building an explicit musical bridge to Black and queer musical subcultures. That said, the sweaty, countercultural house music that he’s taking influence from has also in recent years become a template for music of privilege — it is the soundtrack of the global moneyed elite, the same in Dubai and Ibiza as Miami and Mykonos. It’s music that’s inviting but also innocuous; it’s filled with meaning and reference, but also smooth to the touch.Drake is in an unenviable position only a handful of pop superstars have been in before — he is one of the most famous musicians on the planet, and his fame is premised upon being something of a chameleon. But it’s hard for a juggernaut to be nimble. Nevertheless, “Honestly, Nevermind” is the work of someone unbothered by the potential for alienating old allies. The last two years have been unmooring, and the pandemic has freed artists to do the unexpected simply by removing the old reward structures. (Structurally, “Honestly, Nevermind” is a similar turn to the Weeknd’s electro-pop experiment “Dawn FM,” released in January.)The coronavirus era has also nurtured the rise of hip-hop scenes that thrive in the virtual chaos of social media. That’s been most evident in the rise of drill, which has been recentering hip-hop in grit and nerve. Even though Drake has toyed with drill before, collaborating with Fivio Foreign and Lil Durk, among others, “Honestly, Nevermind” is an anti-drill record. Drake is 35 now, and undoubtedly reckoning with how to live alongside his children’s children.He only truly raps on two songs here: “Sticky,” which verges on hip-house (“Two sprinters to Quebec/Chérie, où est mon bec?”), and “Jimmy Cooks,” the final song, which features 21 Savage, samples Playa Fly and feels like a pointed coda of bluster after 45 minutes of sheer ecstatic release.That’s the sort of hip-hop insider wink that Drake albums have long flaunted, but as he and his fans age, they may not be the stuff of his future. Whether “Honestly, Nevermind” proves to be a head fake or a permanent new direction, it’s maybe an indication that he’s leaving the old Drake — and everyone who followed him — in the rear view. Like a great quarterback, he’s throwing the ball where his receivers are already heading, not where they’ve been.Drake“Honestly, Nevermind”(OVO/Republic) More

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      ‘God’s Fool’ Review: A Singing, Beat Poet Saint

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      In Martha Clarke’s piece about St. Francis of Assisi, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, the song carries the dance.The life of St. Francis of Assisi was a dramatic one. The child of a wealthy Italian merchant, he had a 12th-century playboy youth, went to war and spent a year in captivity. He had mystical visions, stole from his disapproving father to give to the church and devoted himself to a life of poverty in imitation of Christ, founding a religious order. He saw God in nature, thanking the sun, preaching to birds — setting an example of equality and ecology followed by many, including the current Pope.Very little of this drama registers in “God’s Fool,” the dance theater work about Francis that opened at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater on Thursday. And despite being conceived and directed by Martha Clarke, the creator of many acclaimed dance theater pieces, “God’s Fool” contains very little dance theater.Instead, Francis (Patrick Andrews) and his followers mostly wander around a gravel-strewn stage in friars’ robes, talking about God and faith. When in doubt, they sing.That’s not a problem in itself, since the singing, mostly unaccompanied, is excellent. Arranged and directed by Arthur Solari, it helps establish the world from the start, as the cloaked cast enters intoning an Easter vigil. And the frequent retreat into song gives a sense of a confused flock clinging to fellowship.But the singing does contribute to some of the show’s confusion of time and genre. The selections stray from Francis’s time into an African American spiritual and some Gustav Mahler. When Francis breaks into a Broadway-style duet of the American folk song “Wayfaring Stranger” with Clare, the female member of his flock, we’re definitely not in Assisi anymore.Andrews’s Francis is wholly American, a lost boy. In manner, he wouldn’t seem out of place in a David Mamet play or maybe “Rent.” He does big swings of mood, laughing hysterically, weeping when necessary, mooning over nature like a Beat poet. The saint must have been disruptive, bewildering figure, but when Francis’s exasperated father calls him a bum and a brat, it feels all-too accurate.This central performance is at odds with Fanny Howe’s poetic text. The script is spare, alternating between soliloquies and scenes that aren’t naturalistic dialogue but exchanges of fragments. A representative one goes like this:Francis: Beat me Leo.Leo: I can’t beat you Francis.Luca: You should join the circus, Francis.Francis: I should die.The delivery makes this and many similar exchanges unintentionally comic. The veteran performance artist John Kelly, playing a red-horned devil who accompanies Francis and his followers, contributes some intentional comedy and commedia dell’arte flavor. But neither Kelly nor oversize animal heads (masks by Margie Jervis) nor between-scenes bits of movement (everyone blown by the wind or carrying Francis aloft) compensate enough to give the production the strangeness and wonder it needs.And so, while some of the dramatic incidents in Francis’s life are covered — abuse from his father, the preaching to birds, the appearance of stigmata and, more boldly, kissing Clare and the devil — almost nothing comes across convincingly or illuminatingly.What resonates, along with the singing, is something unsung but latent in Howe’s words: “revelations of a world just an inch from our senses, like perfumes you can’t see, perfumes you catch from a May tree.” What “God’s Fool” might have revealed.God’s FoolThrough July 2 at Ellen Stewart Theater; lamama.org. More

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      At Cliburn Competition, Pianists From South Korea, Russia and Ukraine Triumph

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      The war in Ukraine loomed over the prestigious contest in Texas, named for the pianist Van Cliburn, who won a victory in Moscow at the height of the Cold War.For 17 days, the young artists competed in what some have called the Olympics of piano-playing: the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas, one of classical music’s most prestigious contests.On Saturday, the results were in: Pianists from South Korea, Russia and Ukraine prevailed in this year’s contest.Among the winners are Yunchan Lim, 18, from Siheung, South Korea, who became the youngest gold medalist in the Cliburn’s history, winning a cash award of $100,000; Anna Geniushene, 31, who was born in Moscow, taking the silver medal (and $50,000); and Dmytro Choni, 28, of Kyiv, winning the bronze medal ($25,000).“I was so tired,” Lim, who played concertos by Beethoven and Rachmaninoff in the final round, said in a telephone interview. “I practiced until 4 a.m. every day.”“Texas audiences are the most passionate in the world,” he added.The war in Ukraine loomed over this year’s contest, which began in early June with 30 competitors from around the world, including six from Russia, two from Belarus and one from Ukraine.The Cliburn, held every four years in Fort Worth, had drawn criticism in some quarters for allowing Russians to compete. The decision came as cultural institutions in the United States were facing pressure to cut ties with Russian artists amid the invasion.The Cliburn stood by its decision, citing the legacy of Van Cliburn, an American whose victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, during the Cold War, was seen as a sign that art could transcend politics.Choni, the Ukrainian competitor, said he felt proud to represent his country at the competition. He said he almost cried at the beginning of the awards ceremony on Saturday, when a previous winner of the Cliburn, Vadym Kholodenko, who is also from Ukraine, played the Ukrainian national anthem.“It was so touching,” Choni said in a telephone interview. “The situation right now has probably put some additional pressure on me, but it’s just an honor for me to be here.”Geniushene, the Russian pianist, who left Russia for Lithuania after the invasion and has been critical of the war, said she felt uplifted to see a mix of countries represented among the winners.“It’s a huge achievement,” she said in a telephone interview. “We all deserve to be on the stage.” More

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      San Antonio Symphony to Dissolve Amid Labor Dispute

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      The decision will make San Antonio the largest American city without a major orchestra.For almost nine months, the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony were on strike, resisting steep cuts proposed by management that they said would destroy the ensemble. As the dispute dragged on, much of the 2021-22 season was canceled, the players found part-time jobs and mediators tried to negotiate a compromise to save the 83-year-old orchestra.The impasse came to an end on Thursday with the announcement that the symphony had decided to file for bankruptcy and dissolve. The symphony’s board, which had argued that maintaining a large orchestra had grown too costly, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, said it did not see a path forward.“With deep regret,” the board said in a statement, “the board of directors of the Symphony Society of San Antonio announces the dissolution of the San Antonio Symphony.”The board said the musicians’ demands to preserve jobs and pay would require “agreeing to a budget that is millions of dollars in excess of what the symphony can afford.”The decision will make San Antonio, with a population of 1.5 million, the largest American city without a major orchestra.“When you have a major American city which is not able to support an orchestra, it loses history and tremendous inspiration which has been brought to the community,” said Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras. “It’s just incredibly sad.”Many of the orchestra’s players were caught off guard by the announcement and said they were disheartened that a compromise could not be reached. Since the strike began in late September, some have been working as substitutes in other orchestras, including in Boston, New York, Dallas and Nashville.“It is sad and it is completely unnecessary,” said Mary Ellen Goree, the former principal second violin of the orchestra, who was involved in negotiations. “I very much wish that our leadership had removed themselves without burning down the organization.”For years, orchestras in the United States have faced existential questions. Many have struggled to stay afloat with the decline of the old subscription model of season tickets, dwindling revenues at the box office, an increasing reliance on donations and turnovers in leadership.The pandemic, which forced many orchestras to cancel concerts for a season or longer, has exacerbated those problems. The majority of orchestras were able to return to concert halls this past season, relying on government grants and an uptick in donations, but others struggled to reopen.In San Antonio, the orchestra’s administrators cited the pandemic in justifying the need for steep cuts, including slashing the size of the full-time ensemble by more than 40 percent, to 42 positions from 72, shortening the season and reducing pay by almost a third.The musicians resisted those moves, accusing administrators of mismanagement and greed. The dispute grew unusually bitter, with the orchestra cutting off health insurance for the striking players.The board continued to defend the cuts, saying they were necessary to avoid a financial crisis. The musicians, in turn, accused managers of exploiting the pandemic to push through reductions in pay and benefits.Goree, who joined the orchestra in 1988, said its musicians would continue to look for ways to play in the community under a new name. Over the past several months they have held concerts independent of the symphony at a local church, raising money on their own. They hope to soon announce a fall season.“San Antonio is a major city and it can support a major orchestra,” she said. More

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      Donald Pippin, Conductor on Broadway and Beyond, Dies at 95

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      As music director, he contributed to the success of acclaimed shows including “Oliver!,” “Mame,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “A Chorus Line.”Donald Pippin, a versatile conductor and composer who won a Tony Award in 1963 on his first try at being musical director for a Broadway show, “Oliver!,” and went on to work on some of the biggest musicals in Broadway history, including “Mame” and “A Chorus Line,” died on June 9 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 95.His former wife, the Broadway performer Marie Santell, confirmed his death, in a hospital. She said chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may have been a factor.Mr. Pippin had more than two dozen Broadway credits, mostly as music director — the person in charge of preparing the orchestra and often conducting it, interpreting the score and coordinating with the director and choreographer — though he was also often credited with vocal arrangements. He was a favorite of the composer and lyricist Jerry Herman, serving as music director not only for “Mame” (1966), for which Mr. Herman wrote the music and lyrics, but also for “Dear World” (1969), “Mack & Mabel” (1974), “La Cage aux Folles” (1983) and other Herman shows.“La Cage” ran for more than four years, but it wasn’t Mr. Pippin’s biggest success. That was “A Chorus Line,” which opened on Broadway in 1975 with Mr. Pippin as music director and ran for some 15 years, a record at the time.Mr. Pippin talked his way into the music director job on “Oliver!,” the musical based on Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” with few credentials. He’d worked as assistant conductor on the 1960 show “Irma la Douce,” which was produced by David Merrick. When he heard Mr. Merrick was bringing “Oliver!” to Broadway, he hounded his secretary for an appointment, although the two had never met, and told Mr. Merrick that he should hire him. Mr. Merrick did.Mr. Pippin won a Tony Award in 1963 for “Oliver!,” the first Broadway show for which he was the musical director..“You’d better be as good as you think you are,” Mr. Merrick told him, as Mr. Pippin recounted the moment in an interview with the Baylor School of Chattanooga, Tenn., where he went to high school.His self-confidence was not misplaced. The show ran for 774 performances, and Mr. Pippin won the Tony for best conductor and musical director. He was one of the last people to win that award, which was discontinued after 1964.Mr. Pippin’s other Broadway credits as musical director or musical supervisor included “110 in the Shade” (1963), “Applause” (1970), “Woman of the Year” (1981) and another Herman show, “Jerry’s Girls” (1985).The conductor Larry Blank, for whom Mr. Pippin was both friend and mentor, said in a phone interview that Mr. Pippin had a warm personality that was well suited to working with the varied figures in the theater, especially leading ladies like Angela Lansbury (“Mame”) and Lauren Bacall (“Woman of the Year”).“He said to me once that he believed in ‘persuasive accompaniment,’” Mr. Blank said. “He would say it with a twinkle in his eye.”Broadway was only one element of Mr. Pippin’s résumé. He also wrote the score for several musicals, including “The Contrast” and “Fashion,” both staged in New York in the 1970s. In 1979 he was named music director of Radio City Music Hall, a post he held for years. In 1987 he shared an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in music direction for “Broadway Sings: The Music of Jule Styne.”He also appeared as guest conductor with orchestras all over the United States. One program he enjoyed presenting was a salute to his friend Mr. Herman, featuring songs from “La Cage,” “Mame” and other shows, with Broadway singers joining him. Critics agreed that his long working relationship with Mr. Herman enhanced those performances considerably.The director and choreographer Michael Bennett and members of casts past and present at the record-breaking 3,389th performance of “A Chorus Line” at the Shubert Theater on Broadway in 1983. The show was Mr. Pippin’s greatest success.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“Pippin and the orchestra exposed all of the music’s many subtle and complex orchestrations,” John Huxhold wrote in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch when Mr. Pippin presented the Herman program with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1997.In 2020, when Broadway staged a tribute to Mr. Herman, who had died in December 2019, Mr. Blank, who led the orchestra for that show, said he made sure to ask Mr. Pippin to conduct one of the numbers, the title song from “Mame,” using Mr. Pippin’s original vocal arrangement. Mr. Pippin was 93.Mr. Pippin was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Macon, Ga., and grew up in Knoxville, Tenn. His father, Earl, worked at an A.&P. and later was a poultry wholesaler. His mother, Irene (Ligon) Pippin, started him on piano lessons when he was 6. At 8 he won a state piano competition, so when he was 9, since he had already won in the younger age group, the contest organizers put him in the division for 10- and 11-year-olds. He won that too.When Mr. Pippin returned to Knoxville in 1996 to lead a program called “Donald Pippin’s Broadway Melody” with the Knoxville Symphony Pops Orchestra, a high point of the evening came when he paid tribute to Evelyn Miller, his first piano teacher, who was in the audience. In her honor, he played Grieg’s Waltz in A Minor, which she had taught him for that first piano competition.Ms. Miller had also come to a preview performance of “Oliver!” in New York in 1963, and Mr. Pippin invited her to a party afterward, where she met the cast members, including Bruce Prochnik, the British boy who played the title character. He autographed a photo for her, trying for something he thought sounded Southern. “To my Tennessee honey chile,” he wrote.Mr. Pippin’s mother died when he was 10, and in 1938 he was sent to the Baylor School, then a military-style school for boys. The school let him bring his Steinway piano, which was installed in the chapel.He graduated in 1944, then served in the Army Medical Corps in occupied Japan. He attended the University of Chattanooga before moving to New York in 1950 to study at the Juilliard School, paying his way by playing in piano bars and at churches.He left Juilliard without graduating to enter the working world and took a job at ABC-TV writing for its musical productions. He found the job frustrating.“The conductors were so inept that they’d just destroy the music by having the wrong tempos,” he told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1996.That inspired him to learn conducting. He studied with Oscar Kosarin, who had worked on Broadway. Then came “Irma la Douce” and his breakthrough, “Oliver!”He and Ms. Santell married in 1974. They eventually divorced but remained close. Mr. Pippin, who lived in Brewster, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.He especially enjoyed his years at Radio City Music Hall.“Nothing’s more exciting than to come rising out of that orchestra pit on those hydraulic lifts and playing an overture at Radio City in front of 6,000 people,” he told The News-Sentinel.His work there found him conducting the annual Christmas show, which featured live animals, including camels. Ms. Santell recounted a story he used to tell about one particular camel, which apparently took a liking to him when they encountered each other backstage. The beast would even sometimes rest his head on Mr. Pippin’s shoulder.In Ms. Santell’s memory, the camel’s name was Henry; when Mr. Pippin told the story to The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., in 1992, it was Oscar. In any case, what happened during one performance is uncontested: Henry, or Oscar, was led onstage, saw his buddy Don, folded his legs, sat down where he wasn’t supposed to and resisted all entreaties to move along.“He wanted to watch me conduct,” Mr. Pippin explained to the newspaper.Ms. Santell provided the kicker: the note Mr. Pippin received from the stage manager the next day.“To the maestro,” it read. “Do not fraternize with the camels anymore.” More

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      Review: The Met Opera Orchestra Raises a Glorious Noise

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      The orchestra’s power in theatrical music was on display in two concerts at Carnegie Hall led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in an awesome display of its might. After an eventful season, in which concerns beyond music sometimes pulled attention from the stage, these back-to-back concerts were a reminder of the orchestra’s pre-eminence in theatrical material.Each concert paired excerpts from an opera with a programmatic piece, an inherently dramatic form that depicts a story or a character using instrumental forces. The performance on Wednesday matched Richard Strauss’s “Don Juan” with Act I of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” and Thursday’s all-Berlioz program placed arias and an interlude from “Les Troyens” alongside “Symphonie Fantastique,” a groundbreaking work that sounds more like a music drama than a symphony.Opening with “Don Juan” felt like a statement of purpose. Here were world-class musicians tackling a bravura symphonic poem that established the modernist bona fides of the 25-year-old Strauss. The orchestra flaunted the depth and breadth of its tone in the opening motif, an upwardly swinging phrase dripping with swagger. The horns covered themselves in glory, and the concertmaster David Chan and the oboist Nathan Hughes contributed shapely solos. At one point, the ensemble’s sound grew so frenzied it turned strident. At the end, the crowd roared.The opera had come to the concert hall, and it was going to raise a glorious noise.This was Nézet-Séguin the extrovert, who deploys the orchestra in the opera house like an instrument of fate, keeping the baseline volume at mezzo forte. The orchestra comes across as an external force that acts on the characters rather than one that sympathetically expresses their innermost feelings. The best opera conductors, though, know when a scenario calls for one or the other.In that light, the ending of “Don Juan” revealed a weakness: Nézet-Séguin is more effective at big moments than small ones. Strauss gives his swashbuckling Don Juan a poetic, even philosophical, demise, but with Nézet-Séguin, he just sort of dropped dead.You could hear Nézet-Séguin working out the dynamic emphases in real time at Carnegie. Wagner built the twilight setting of Act I of “Die Walküre” out of mellow, amber-colored instruments — cellos, bassoons, clarinets, horns. Nézet-Séguin, though, focused less on mood and more on intoxicating, surging romance. It certainly sounded as if Siegmund and Sieglinde’s fateful union was blessed by their father, Wotan, king of gods: Nézet-Séguin summoned divine — that is, awesome — playing from the musicians.Christine Goerke (Sieglinde) and Brandon Jovanovich (Siegmund), both Wagner veterans, are not singers to be blown off a stage. Goerke, who has sung Brünnhilde, easily navigated Sieglinde’s music with her dramatic soprano, cresting the climaxes instead of getting washed-out by them.Jovanovich had the more grueling part. The writing for Siegmund constantly pushes a tenor into a muscle-y sound at the top of the staff, and Jovanovich’s bottom notes paid the price, taking on a gravelly gurgle. The middle and top of his voice remained virile, handsome and taut, and his narration cycled through a remarkable series of emotions — vulnerable, proud, sweet, disdainful, morally upright — before finding transcendence.Eric Owens, glued to his score, couldn’t suppress the nobility of his bass-baritone as the brutish Hunding; instead he channeled the character’s villainy with an obdurate, distrustful manner.After “Die Walküre,” Nézet-Séguin insisted that the cello section stand for applause — a touching acknowledgment of the leading role it played. He also teased audience members as they moved up the aisles to leave: “We do have an encore planned,” he said, stopping people in their tracks — “it’s called tomorrow night’s concert.”The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato performed excerpts from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” on Thursday.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaAt the start of the next evening, the strings’ quicksilver quality in Berlioz’s “Le Corsaire” Overture indicated a very different concert was in store.Nézet-Séguin took pains to quiet the orchestra for Joyce DiDonato’s two arias from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” DiDonato’s mezzo-soprano is not the typical one for the role of Dido — full, rich, expansive — but she defied expectations, sharpening her light, glittery timbre into a blade for the scena that culminates in “Adieu, fière cité.” Rattled and debased after Aeneas abandons her, Dido fantasizes about murdering the Trojans, but eventually, she accepts her fate, recalling sensuous memories of her time with the questing hero. DiDonato cast a spell, ending the aria on a thread of sound, her Dido a shell of her former self — but what an exquisite shell it was.There was fun, too: Nézet-Séguin bounced joyfully to the rollicking bits of “Le Corsaire” and dug deep into the twisted, macabre finale of “Symphonie Fantastique,” with its cackling ghouls and sulfurous air.After raising hell, Nézet-Séguin pivoted again, welcoming DiDonato back to the stage for an encore, Strauss’s “Morgen.” As he calmed the orchestra to a whisper, DiDonato and the concertmaster Benjamin Bowman intertwined their silvery sounds. This time, Nézet-Séguin got the balance just right. More

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      Bartees Strange Ponders Success in Dire Times

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      On his second album, “Farm to Table,” the indie-rock singer and songwriter finds no easy comforts in his own ascent.By chance, choice and artistic inclination, Bartees Strange has been a lifelong outlier — a position his songs grapple with, exult in and constantly question on his second studio album, “Farm to Table.”His father served in the Air Force, often overseas, and Bartees Leon Cox Jr. was born in England and lived in Greenland and Germany, among other places, before his family settled in Mustang, Okla. He sang in church choirs with his mother, who also performed opera, and he started producing music in a homemade studio in his teens. He began releasing songs on SoundCloud a decade ago, and he played in hardcore bands in Washington, D.C. and in the self-described “post-hardcore” Brooklyn band Stay Inside.Instead of following a Black musician’s stereotyped path into hip-hop or R&B — though he draws on both — Strange, now 33, found his own voice in indie-rock, adopting the churning guitars and destabilizing synthesizers of bands like TV on the Radio, Bloc Party, Radiohead and the Cure. Most of the tracks on his debut EP as Bartees Strange, “Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy,” which was released in March 2020 just as pandemic restrictions began, were moody, volatile, radically reworked versions of songs by the long-running indie-rock band the National.Forging an indie-rock career is an uncharted, self-conscious path at the best of times, navigating revelation and obfuscation, rawness and craftsmanship, instincts and commercial objectives. “I could give the pain for the bankroll,” Strange sang in “In a Cab,” on his debut album, “Live Forever,” released in October 2020. Anything but tentative, “Live Forever” introduced Strange in all his multiplicity. He constructed hurtling rockers (“Boomer”) and pulsating electronic beats (“Flagey God”); he examined yearning and rage, confessions and inventions. “I lie for a living now/that’s why I can’t really tell you stuff,” he sang in “Mustang,” named after his longtime hometown.The pandemic delayed an indie-rocker’s usual next step: touring. But by the time concerts resumed, “Live Forever” had been embraced by listeners and fellow musicians. Strange played opening slots for Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Courtney Barnett and the National; he recorded a fervid band performance that was released in 2021 as “Live at Studio 4”; he did remixes and guest appearances with Bridgers, Illuminati Hotties and others.“Farm to Table” reflects all the conflicting feelings of personal success during dire times. “There’s reasons for heavy hearts/This past year I thought I was broken,” Strange sings in “Heavy Heart,” as the album begins. But the music evolves from lament to gallop, with guitars pealing and piling on as Strange glances through a whirlwind year: travel, loneliness, someone’s death, a romance, growing up: “Some nights I feel just like my dad/Rushing around,” he sings, troubled yet surging ahead.His past also looms in “Tours,” as Strange picks an acoustic guitar and juxtaposes fragmented childhood memories of military postings and family separations — “Where is Kuwait? Is that in the States?” — with his own life on the road. Not that he’s complaining too much; in “Cosigns,” he flaunts and marvels at his ascending career, name-checking his tour mates, but he also worries over his own rising expectations. The track opens with bleary synthesizers and mock-casual rapping, then gathers echoing guitars and a heftier beat until Strange is belting, “Hungry as ever/there’s never enough!”The album’s most richly moving song is “Hold the Line,” an elegy for George Floyd that he recorded in October 2020. “What happened to the man with that big ol’ smile/He’s calling to his mother now,” Strange sings with tender desolation, answered by a keening slide guitar; later, he imagines himself in Floyd’s place.Nothing goes unmixed in Strange’s songs. His productions metamorphose as they unfold, restlessly shifting among idioms; his lyrics refuse easy comforts. In “Mulholland Dr.,” he sets up a skein of guitar patterns like a latter-day Laurel Canyon production, gleaming prettily even as he sings about misgivings and mortality: “I’ve seen how we die/I know how we lose.” And in “Wretched,” he’s desperately missing someone, feeling lost and abandoned, blurting out that “My life feels wrong without you.” But the music carries him, a spiraling crescendo with guitars and synthesizer swells, kicking into a four-on-the-floor beat, pumping toward a final realization: “Sometimes it’s hard, but you know I’m thankful.”Bartees Strange“Farm to Table”(4AD) More