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      Outspoken Composer to Lead International Contemporary Ensemble

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      George E. Lewis, a Columbia scholar who has documented how Black composers have been excluded from experimental music, will lead the renowned group.A composer and scholar who has spoken forcefully about the exclusion of Black artists from experimental music will lead the renowned International Contemporary Ensemble, the group announced on Friday.George E. Lewis, a professor of music at Columbia University known for his groundbreaking work in electronics, will take the helm as artistic director later this month. Lewis, 69, a trombonist and frequent collaborator with the ensemble, will be the first Black leader in its 21-year history. He said in an interview that he hoped to bring more of a multicultural focus to one of New York’s premier new music groups, and to feature a wider variety of artists.“I’m looking to bring newer people who happen to have great ideas, but who might be overlooked by other ensembles or institutions, to the forefront so they can be noticed by everybody,” Lewis said. “It’s a sense of widening the community.”Lewis is an influential voice in the effort to “decolonize” classical music, at a time when the field is reckoning with questions about racial injustice and a legacy of exclusion.“The composers and improvisers are not the ones producing the sounds of colonialism,” he wrote in a recent essay. “Rather, it is the music curators and institutions who have been composing and improvising colonialism.”Lewis has called on music schools to recruit more young composers who belong to racial and ethnic minority groups. He has also said that ensembles should commission more works from composers of color.“There is no reason why major music institutions that tout themselves as international should continue to present all-white programs,” he wrote in the essay.The International Contemporary Ensemble, with its 35 members, has long been an important outlet for modern composers — including Lewis, long revered among avant-garde jazz fans. In 2011, the ensemble premiered his “The Will to Adorn,” inspired by a Zora Neale Hurston essay and also the title of a 2017 album of his works made by the ensemble.Lewis will replace Ross Karre, a percussionist who after five years as artistic director is stepping down to take a teaching position at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The ensemble was co-founded and led for years by the flutist Claire Chase.The group’s leaders said Lewis, a board member since 2018, had long had an outsize influence on their work.“George’s impact on this ensemble is almost immeasurable,” Rebekah Heller, a bassoonist and board member, said in a statement. “His voice and his vision have been quietly shaping the musical direction of our collective.”Lewis said he hoped to help the ensemble move beyond rigid notions of genre, in part by encouraging artists to listen to each other through improvisation.“At a certain point, classical music becomes so fluid that it becomes like a permeable membrane where you start to realize that it’s a point of connection rather than a set of practices or a set of received histories,” he said. “It’s something that accretes and accumulates new information, rather than something that excludes or does gatekeeping.” More

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      Review: A ‘St. Matthew Passion’ Balances Grandeur and Calm

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      Bernard Labadie led the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and three choirs, in Bach’s sprawling, meditative masterpiece.Of Bach’s two surviving Passions, “St. John” is the more fiery, dramatic and troubling. “St. Matthew” is something like its wise and contemplative sibling.And that’s how the “St. Matthew Passion” came across on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, with Bernard Labadie leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, along with three choirs and a half-dozen soloists. That is the battery of musical forces required for Bach’s Lenten masterpiece, which over nearly three hours recounts the death and resurrection of Jesus, with reflective asides in the form of chorales, recitatives and da capo arias.Bach’s score begins as if its volume were being carefully turned up. Here, it was more like a radio dial finding a station, with the orchestra unsteady before settling into flowing momentum. Under Labadie’s baton, the music was unwaveringly measured but balanced; its flashes of grandeur didn’t need to be overstated to land powerfully. From the start: The opening calmly built toward what the conductor John Eliot Gardiner has called an aural analogue to an “altarpiece by Veronese or Tintoretto” — immersive, its elements gaining sweep from their interplay.The Orchestra of St. Luke’s played with qualities of historically informed performance but not a wholesale devotion to it in the strings’ lightly gliding bows, judicious ornamentation and the use of largely modern instruments. Split into two groups, it also had two concertmasters: Krista Bennion Feeney, a violinist with a gift for elegant phrasing, and Benjamin Bowman (who has the same role with the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra), impressively agile and clear. Stephen Taylor’s humane oboe took on the character of a vocal soloist, and Mélisande Corriveau’s viola da gamba had crisp, authoritative articulation befitting her prominent placement at center stage.But the performance’s stars may have been the choirs: La Chapelle de Québec and the Handel and Haydn Society Chorus, and the boys of the St. Thomas Choir aloft in the first ring of boxes, all virtually without fault in trickily woven polyphony and memorable even in passing moments like the jolting vigor of “Sind Blitze, sind Donner.”Julian Prégardien, center, as the Evangelist, a role he sang with a raconteur’s conviction and excitement.Richard TermineAs the Evangelist, the tenor Julian Prégardien (inheriting a role from his father, Christoph) recounted Matthew’s story with conviction and excitement; tellingly, he was the only soloist not singing with a score in hand. Expressive, with a soft and sympathetic upper range, he was also at times less steady and assured at full voice — unable to match the quaking turmoil of “Und siehe da” following Jesus’s death.Jesus was sung by the bass-baritone Philippe Sly with stoic fatalism, his smooth warmth rending for its tragic dignity in lines like “Du sagest’s,” then shattering in its resigned agony at his final words, “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?”Joshua Blue, a tenor stepping in for the ill Andrew Staples, had a consistent brightness — much like his fellow soloist, the soprano Carolyn Sampson, who after warming up bounded through runs with skillful control and enunciation. The young countertenor Hugh Cutting was on less sure footing in similar passages, in which his intonation was unreliable compared with smoother legato melodies. Those were where he shined and showed the most promise: Cutting possesses penetrating strength and a lushness that doesn’t come easily to his voice type. His instrument might not be fully formed, but his “Erbarme dich” was.Another standout was Matthew Brook, who during Part I was chameleonic in arias attached to Judas and Peter but in Part II took a solemn turn: first in “Komm, suß Kreuz,” then in “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,” which he sang soothingly, with the rocking phrases of a lullaby.That aria was all the more moving for how unforced its sentiment was. The “St. Matthew Passion” is more meditation than melodrama, and this reading carried that belief to the final measure — its dissonance barely held, the slightest tension resolving with the grace of the restfulness it’s meant to reflect.Orchestra of St. Luke’sPerformed at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: A Chinese Concerto and a Romantic Classic Gaze Back

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      The New York Philharmonic, under Long Yu, played works by Rimsky-Korsakov, Qigang Chen and Rachmaninoff at the Rose Theater.The New York Philharmonic played Russian music on Thursday, for the third week in a row. It was yet another argument against President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims that his country’s culture is being canceled in the West.That wasn’t the only political resonance of the orchestra’s concert on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It is still all too uncommon for Chinese composers and artists — especially conductors — to be featured by American orchestras outside of Lunar New Year celebrations. But this program was led by Long Yu, experienced with the Philharmonic over the past decade, and included a substantial work by Qigang Chen.They are two of China’s most eminent classical artists. Yu leads no fewer than three major ensembles there: the China Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Shanghai and Guangzhou symphonies. And Chen served as music director for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.But though the New York Philharmonic has played three of his pieces in the past, they have all been on Lunar New Year programs; this was his subscription series debut. And his pristine cello concerto “Reflet d’un Temps Disparu” (“Reflection on Time Past”), written in the mid-1990s, was the highlight on Thursday.The aim of the half-hour, single-movement work is by now a familiar one: to bring together traditional Chinese sounds with the forces of a Western orchestra. But Chen, who studied in France with Olivier Messiaen in the 1980s, makes the interaction both surprising and natural.The melodic germ is “Meihua san nong,” an ancient tune whose title is often translated as “Three Variations on the Plum Blossom.” The cello soloist — here the eloquent, calmly commanding Gautier Capuçon — begins alone, notes subtly bending to evoke the twang of a qin. (It’s in a version for that Chinese zither that “Meihua san nong” is best known.)A woozy veil of winds casts a cloud of Messiaen-style European modernism, quickly settling into more openhearted warmth. But darkness keeps threatening, from groans in the low winds and brasses, and the cello’s line shifts from quietly clicking taps to pizzicato plucks of gonglike resonance — echoed in a large battery of percussion, including temple blocks.Trills and brushy arpeggiated motifs conjure the Bach suites at the center of the cello’s repertory, as the solo line goes back and forth from anxiously repetitive riffs to serene, expansive lyricism. The cello doesn’t quite lead the orchestra, but its music keeps being echoed within the ensemble; the soloist is something like a diamond in a ring, supported by and glinting onto its setting.Before the piece ends in wisps, it climaxes in a huge, lushly Romantic, quite saccharine explosion, like something out of John Williams.Or out of Rimsky-Korsakov, whose “Tsar’s Bride” Overture opened the concert. Or Rachmaninoff, whose “Symphonic Dances” followed intermission. These dances, like Chen’s concerto, are Proustian music, evocations of the Russian past presented in a modern, occasionally even jazzy, light. (The work’s alto saxophone solo is one of its most distinctive elements.)With its ingenious recastings of Russian Orthodox chants and the Catholic “Dies Irae,” this can be a grand, mesmerizingly intense score, a danse macabre written as World War II was underway. But while Thursday’s performance under Yu had robustness and dash, it was ever so slightly square — loud and quick, when warranted, but overall mellow in its impact.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Camila Cabello Gets in Her Head, and 16 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kelsea Ballerini, Syd, Oliver Sim and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Camila Cabello featuring Willow, ‘Psychofreak’Alienation gets an electronic lilt in “Psychofreak” from Camila Cabello’s “Familia,” which is actually stacked with songs about jealousy. In “Psychofreak” she sings about feeling dissociated, insecure and suspicious: “Tryin’ to get connected, no Wi-Fi/tell me that you love me, are you lying?” Against brittle percussion and impassive chords on the off-beats, Cabello sounds relatively unruffled despite what the lyrics say, but Willow (Smith) focuses and ratchets up the anguish. JON PARELESMiranda Lambert, ‘Actin’ Up’Miranda Lambert’s “Actin’ Up” could have been just another feisty, bluesy country-rock song. “I want a sunset ride, a velvet rodeo/A Colorado high, a California glow,” she declares. Its richness is in its arrangement: its stereo, reverbed guitar picking, its syncopated drumming, the echoes and pauses placed behind her boasts. PARELESKelsea Ballerini, ‘Heartfirst’On her 2020 album “Kelsea,” Kelsea Ballerini honed her keen ability to spotlight the sort of anxiety and self-doubt that many other country singers conveniently crop out of the frame. The single “Heartfirst,” though, is all about pushing those impediments aside and jumping headlong into new romance: “That voice in my head says to slow down, but it can’t feel your hands on my hips right now,” she sings. Recommended for anyone who revisited Taylor Swift’s version of “Red” last year and wished someone were still making glimmering, wholehearted pop-country songs like that in the present tense. LINDSAY ZOLADZBanks, ‘Meteorite’Banks’s songs bring a deep wariness to her relationships. “We’re already in bed, you may as well lie,” she sings as “Meteorite” begins. But in this track, syncopation fights pessimism. Handclaps, stop-and-start drums and backup vocals that hint at Balkan and African call-and-response insist that this iffy romance could still push ahead. PARELESPieri, ‘Vente Pa Aca’It was only a matter of time until the textures of hyperpop collided with reggaeton. Consider the Mexican-born, Brooklyn-based artist Daniela Pieri its champion: Her new single “Vente Pa Aca” interlaces a muted dembow riddim, serrated synths and gauzy speaker feedback lifted straight from a PC Music compilation. In an Auto-Tuned shrill, one that carries just enough of a punk edge, she intones, “No te quiero perder/tú y yo hasta el amanecer” (“I don’t want to lose you/Me and you till dawn”). ISABELIA HERRERASyd, ‘Fast Car’“Broken Hearts Club,” the first album in five years from Syd — a member of the R&B collective the Internet and a one-time Odd Future upstart — is mostly an intimate chronicle of a relationship’s demise, but the sultry “Fast Car” conjures a moment before things went sour. A driving, 4-4 beat and glossy ’80s sheen provide a backdrop for Syd’s vaporous vocals (“No one can see inside,” she croons, “do with me what you like”) before a glorious, Prince-like guitar solo breaks the whole song open like a cracked sunroof. ZOLADZOliver Sim, ‘Fruit’Harnessing the high drama of a power ballad, but holding all the airiness of the xx’s gauzy R&B, Oliver Sim’s “Fruit” is the kind of queer anthem only he could make. Produced by his bandmate Jamie xx, “Fruit” is a love letter to a younger self coming to terms with queer identity. “You can dress it away, talk it away/Dull down the flame/But it’s all pretend,” Sim whispers, oozing melancholia. He may have been the last member of the xx to go solo, but it has been well worth the wait. HERRERAFlorist, ‘Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)’This one’s a tear-jerker. Emily Sprague — sometimes a solo artist, sometimes the leader of the Brooklyn indie-folk group Florist — recounts the life of her late mother and her own early childhood in a series of vivid, cleareyed snapshots (“I’ve seen photos of the living room, we didn’t have a lot”), sung atop a gentle, fingerpicked chord progression. Synthesizer whirs mingle with bird chirps in the song’s airy atmosphere; Sprague and the band actually recorded it on a porch. That sonic embrace of the natural world becomes even more poignant toward the end of the song, which will appear on a forthcoming self-titled Florist album, when Sprague sings in a peaceful murmur, “She’s in the bird song, she won’t be gone.” ZOLADZDaniel Rossen, ‘Unpeopled Space’“Unpeopled Space,” a dazzling highlight from the former Grizzly Bear guitar virtuoso Daniel Rossen’s first full-length solo album “You Belong Here,” is a searching meditation about leaving the city for the country, as Rossen himself did a decade ago. But his arrangement is so full of compositional surprises and instrumental chatter — shape-shifting acoustic guitar riffs, croaking strings and dynamic percussion from his former bandmate Christopher Bear — that he makes the natural world sound every bit as alive as a teeming metropolis. “Whatever was, whatever will,” he sings to the vast green space around him, “we belong here now.” ZOLADZPink Floyd featuring Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox, ‘Hey, Hey Rise Up’Andriy Khlyvnyuk from the Ukrainian band Boombox returned to his homeland to fight the Russian invasion. From Kyiv, he made an Instagram post of his defiant, full-throated rendition of a resistance anthem, “The Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” singing with a rifle slung across his chest. It moved Nick Mason and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd to build a full-length track around it — their first new Pink Floyd song since 1994, which will benefit Ukrainian relief. Pink Floyd accompanies Khlyvnyuk with somber gravity, buttressing him with organ chords and choir harmonies; a wailing, clawing Gilmour guitar solo sustains the mood of grim determination. PARELESJoyce Manor, ‘Gotta Let It Go’Emo bands tend to be verbose, but Torrance, Calif.’s Joyce Manor are unusually efficient — as if Taking Back Sunday had attended the Guided by Voices school of songwriting. “Gotta Let It Go,” a two-minute ripper from the band’s forthcoming album “40 oz. to Fresno” (out June 10 and named after an autocorrected text about Sublime) showcases the lead singer and guitarist Barry Johnson’s rabid but melodic holler, alongside the sort of crushing waves of distorted guitar that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on late-90s alt-rock radio. “You say it’s cute but you think it’s ugly,” Johnson shouts on the pummeling bridge — yep, a bridge in a two-minute song! Told you these guys are efficient. ZOLADZEl Alfa, Braulio Fogón, French Montana and Kaly Ocho, ‘Máquina de Dinero’El Alfa’s ascent as the king of Dominican dembow has come with its fair share of missteps: diluted EDM bangers, or pop-dembow tracks with a little too much gloss. So “Máquina de Dinero,” from his fourth studio album, “Sabiduría,” is an unexpected bombshell. El Alfa deploys his double entendres and witty raps over a gritty, shrapnel-like beat from his go-to producer Chael Produciendo, its deliciously raw, unfinished texture aligning more closely with the coarseness of his own early hits. His guests are surprising, too — Braulio Fogón and Kaly Ocho, titans of el bajo mundo (the underground dembow scene), along with French Montana. Just try not to laugh out loud when Montana says, “’Rican or Dominican, she bustin’ out the skirt,” and mimics the addictive hook from El Alfa’s summer heater “La Mamá de la Mamá.” HERRERAAlicia Keys, ‘City of Gods (Part II)’Alicia Keys let herself be treated as a mere hook singer alongside Fivio Foreign and Kanye West on “City of Gods,” shunted aside as they touted their careers. But with “City of Gods (Part II)” she reclaims the song as the plea of a spurned lover, begging, “Don’t leave me, go easy,” amid towering piano chords and cavernous bass tones, a voice trying to find its way through the cityscape. PARELESSun’s Signature, ‘Golden Air’Sun’s Signature is the partnership of Elisabeth Fraser from Cocteau Twins and Damon Reece from Massive Attack. In the 1990s, both groups conjured encompassing atmospheres, but in different registers. Cocteau Twins were mistily ethereal; Massive Attack was bassy and seismic. “Golden Air,” the first song from an EP due in June, is more protean. It works through multiple transformations — tinkly Baroque-pop, Minimalist a cappella vocal layers, shimmering psychedelic march — as Fraser sings cosmic musings: “My heart shall say to me/Do with me something.” PARELESS. Carey, ‘Sunshower’S. Carey, a longtime collaborator with Bon Iver, goes for billowing bliss in “Sunshower.” His multitracked falsetto harmonizes with cascading guitars and saxophones as he surrenders to the unexplainable beauty of a deep connection: “I don’t know myself before I knew you,” he realizes. PARELESSam Gendel and Antonia Cytrynowicz, ‘Something Real’One afternoon in Los Angeles, the saxophonist, keyboardist and composer Sam Gendel improvised some songs with Antonia Cytrynowicz, the younger sister of his partner, the filmmaker Marcella Cytrynowicz; at the time Antonia was 11 years old. They haven’t played them before or since. Luckily they recorded them, and realized they were good enough to release as an album; “Live a Little” is due May 13. In “Something Real,” Gendel circled through an undulating, slightly gloomy four-chord keyboard pattern as Antonia mused about what she was hearing: “Never knowing, never feeling/Like a sound, that is nice,” she sang. “You’re nice and gentle.” But dissonant feedback wells up at the end, suggesting that safety is fragile. PARELESMyra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet, ‘For the Love of Fire and Water: II.’On “For the Love of Fire and Water,” the esteemed pianist and bandleader Myra Melford helms a new band featuring some of the most distinctive players in improvised music today: Ingrid Laubrock on saxophone, Tomeka Reid on cello, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Susie Ibarra on drums. On Track 2 of the 10-part suite, the quintet pulls itself forward with a mix of lethargy and restlessness, Halvorson and Laubrock — longtime musical intimates — carrying the nervy melody over Melford’s halting left-hand pattern, then improvising together in dyspeptic bursts. The tune itself is hard to keep track of, and the meter tough to count, but the stubbornness of the pulse and the resonance of the harmony may linger in your ear long after the track fades away. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO More

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      Exhibit at German History Museum Reckons With Wagner’s Legacy

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      A new exhibition at the country’s national history museum examines the strong feelings stirred by its most famous 19th-century composer.BERLIN — Few composers inspire such a mix of appreciation and disgust as Richard Wagner. Especially here in Germany — where Wagner’s work is understood as a combination of national cultural jewel and national political embarrassment — the composer’s work is laden with meaning and interpretation.Along with his music dramas, Wagner’s legacy includes his antisemitic and nationalist political writings, and the Nazi dictatorship celebrated his musical works as a symbol of the pure German culture they hoped to promote. Hitler was a regular at the Wagner festival at Bayreuth, where he was welcomed warmly by the composer’s descendants, and the regime used Wagner’s music in rallies and at official events.“You can’t have a naïve and beautiful production of a Wagner opera in Germany,” said Michael P. Steinberg, a cultural historian at Brown University who, along with Katherina J. Schneider, co-curated an upcoming exhibition on the composer at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. “It’s impossible.”That show, “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling,” opens April 9 and runs through September. The first exhibition dedicated to a composer at Germany’s national history museum, it explores the relationship between Wagner’s politics and his artistic output and influence.“If Wagner had only written his 3,000 pages of prose, he would be remembered as a kook, a second-rate maniacal thinker,” Steinberg said.Instead, Steinberg added, he is mostly remembered for the opus of music dramas that made him “without doubt the most transformational composer of the mid-19th century, without whom one cannot understand European art music after him.”Wagner was a “technician of emotions,” he said, who orchestrated collective experiences of feeling that embedded his ideas in his art. That means the music and the poisoned politics can’t be separated, Steinberg said. “The ideas come out on the stage in subliminal ways,” he added, “through worlds of feeling that are transmitted through music and text.”For this reason, he and Schneider have organized the show according to a series of emotions through which they argue the composer’s legacy can be understood: from the alienation Wagner felt as an 1840s revolutionary; to the sense of belonging as he began to be institutionally accepted; to the eros that characterizes the seductiveness of his work; and, finally, the disgust and loathing that animated the composer’s prejudices.These feelings, the curators argue, were “national” ones because the popularity of Wagner’s music helped embed them in the German national consciousness, especially after the unification of Germany in 1871.“During the Break,” a portrayal of the Richard Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth by Gustav Laska, 1894.Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth – Leihgabe der Oberfrankenstiftung, BayreuthTo support their case, they have assembled objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection, combined with video clips from performances and stagings, and interviews with notable Wagnerian artists.The curators also commissioned a new audio installation from Barrie Kosky, the director of the Komische Oper in Berlin, whose Jewishness is a major part of his artistic identity. He has spent the last few years pursuing what he calls a “public cultural exorcism” of his own Wagner demons, exploring the composer’s antisemitism through a series of acclaimed productions that culminated with an acclaimed staging of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at Bayreuth, which ended with the composer literally on trial.His point of departure for the installation, he said in an interview, was Wagner’s infamous essay “Jewishness in Music.” The essay, an antisemitic screed that argues Jewish composers could only imitate, and never truly create, also lingers on the composer’s visceral hatred for the Jewish “voice.” Arguing that art music arose from race-based folk cultures, Wagner describes Jewish folk music as a “sense-and-sound confounding gurgle, yodel, and cackle.”Kosky said he heard echoes of those hated sounds in the music for Wagner characters who embody antisemitic archetypes: the pedantic critic in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” for instance, or the gold-hungry dwarves in the “Ring” cycle.Kosky’s sound installation plays out in a small dark room at the museum. Visitors hear jumbled-together recordings of synagogue music, excerpts from old recordings featuring the “Jewish” Wagner characters and sentences from “Jewishness in Music,” read by a woman, in Yiddish. Kosky called the effect “deliberately nauseating.”The entrance to Barrie Kosky’s installation “Schwarzalbenreich” in a chapter of the exhibition called “Ekel“ (“Disgust”).Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerKosky said he would continue to direct the composer’s music dramas, even though there was antisemitism in them. Having completed his “exorcism,” he added, he felt personally and artistically free to approach the composer’s work from new perspectives.“It’s the combination of things: the music, text, and cultural specificity of what he is using that makes Wagner’s work, to me, so deeply problematic and fascinating,” Kosky said.Mark Berry, who leads the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has published widely on politics and religion in Wagner’s work, said Wagner had become something of a scapegoat in German attempts to come to terms with the country’s past. It was, he added, as if guilt about the murderous consequences of German antisemitism could be outsourced to one man who died long before the Nazis came to power.“Clearly there are romantic nationalist elements in Wagner’s thought,” he said, “as there were in just about any German artist of that time. If one looks at his theoretical writing, however, he is adamant that the time of national characteristics in art is over, that this is to be an age of artistic universalism.”Yes, Berry said, there were antisemitic tropes in Wagner’s music dramas, and antisemitic politics in his essays. But, he added, that doesn’t make the music itself antisemitic, and Wagner wasn’t the main conduit by which antisemitism became prominent in the German national mood, and the basis of genocidal state policy.Daniel Barenboim, one of the most prominent Jewish figures in classical music in Germany and the music director of the Berlin State Opera, has written that Wagner can hardly be held “accountable for Hitler’s use and abuse of his music and world views.” He declined to be interviewed, but in an article on his website, he describes Wagner as “a virulent anti-Semite of the worst kind whose statements are unforgivable.”The show features objects lent from collections across Europe, as well as artifacts from the Deutsches Historisches Museum’s own collection.Deutsches Historisches Museum; David von BeckerIn that article, Barenboim, who will conduct a new “Ring” in Berlin this October, asks: why allow Hitler to have the last word on Wagner when so many Jewish artists — singers, conductors, directors — have made careers from the composer’s work, and his work has inspired so many Jewish composers?That same essay opens with a meditation on the storm scene that opens Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” with Barenboim laying out the precise, almost mathematical structure through which Wagner sketches the feeling of being in a forest and a snowstorm, and the emotions of an alienated outsider on the run. The phrases swell and recede before an explosion in the winds and brass and an abrupt roll of the timpani. In the audience, your heart skips a beat. These are the techniques by which Wagner manipulates emotion — on the scale of a phrase, or a melody, or an opera, or a nation. More

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      For This Opera Director, a Lot Is Riding on a ‘Handmaid’s Tale’

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      For her English National Opera debut, the company’s new artistic leader, Annilese Miskimmon, has chosen a work she hopes can bring in a new audience.LONDON — Annilese Miskimmon, the British opera director, looked tired and frazzled when she appeared on a recent video call. She was taking a short break from rehearsing “The Handmaid’s Tale” — the first production at English National Opera she is directing since taking over its artistic leadership in the middle of the pandemic. Those rehearsals had not been running smoothly, Miskimmon said, and had been hit by a recent surge in coronavirus cases in England. For a few weeks, the production had been rehearsing partly online.“This is Zoom stress more than opera stress,” she added, with an awkward laugh. She had already canceled two nights of the run, which now consists of just four performances, from April 8 through Apr. 14.Miskimmon said she chose “The Handmaid’s Tale” for her English National Opera debut because the company was founded on the idea of “opera for everyone.” The novel it is based on, by Margaret Atwood, is well known here, and its popularity has only grown thanks to the recent TV adaptation. Both of these, and the opera, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, imagine a near future in which women are seen as little more than birthing machines. The story felt politically urgent, Miskimmon added. “Every day it’s getting more and more dangerous in some parts of the world to be a woman,” she said.A rehearsal for English National Opera’s produciton of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The production’s run, which begins April 8, has been cut to just four performances.English National OperaFor opera watchers, Miskimmon’s decision to start with a dystopia may seem appropriate. In recent years, English National Opera has been hit by crises both real and imagined. Those have included funding cuts and resignations, as well as complaints about a dwindling number of performances each season. To raise revenue, the company — which only performs in English — now rents out its West End home, the Coliseum, to musical productions each summer.Miskimmon’s 2019 appointment was a surprise. The announcement came shortly after the American director Daniel Kramer resigned as the opera’s artistic director, two weeks after announcing his second season. Kramer had a never held a senior position at an opera house before joining the company, and many critics felt he wasn’t up to the job.Hugh Canning, an opera critic for several British newspapers, said he was “puzzled” that Miskimmon had left a job running the well-funded Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo to take up the reins at English National Opera, also known as ENO. “Maybe she enjoys controversy,” he said.Others in Britain’s opera world agreed that Miskimmon had taken on a tough job. “Running any opera house is hard, but ENO is even harder,” said Gus Christie, the executive chairman of the Glyndebourne opera festival. As London’s “second” opera house, ENO was always competing for audiences with the much-better funded Royal Opera House, just a few blocks away, he added. (The British government gives the Royal Opera House about $32 million a year; ENO gets around half as much.)“If she can turn things around there, hats off to her,” Christie said.John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said that Miskimmon had gotten off to “a very good” start. During the coronavirus pandemic, she kept things at ENO moving when most British opera houses were shut, with a series of original ideas that raised the company’s profile. Those included a drive-in staging of Puccini’s “La Bohème” (featuring breakdancers and ice cream trucks), a made-for-TV performance of Mozart’s “Requiem” and a community outreach program in which ENO singers offered vocal lessons to people whose breathing had been affected by Covid.But most of the productions in Miskimmon’s first season had been planned before her arrival, including a staging of Wagner’s “Die Walküre” that will play at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2025. “A lot is riding on this ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’” Allison said. “It’s her first big calling card.”The opera opens in the year 2195, with a lecturer describing the horrors of the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy in which women have no rights and where “handmaids” are forced to bear children for the ruling class.Annemarie Woods, the production’s designer, said that the creative team had researched totalitarian systems and thought about how artifacts of those regimes and their atrocities were preserved. The Coliseum’s stage will look like an exhibition space, Woods said, with items of clothing — including around 50 of the handmaids’ famous red hooded cloaks — suspended and lit like items in a Holocaust museum. Other “exhibits” will include a chunk of a wall where handmaids are executed, displayed like segments of the Berlin Wall.Kate Lindsey, an American mezzo-soprano who plays Offred, the opera’s main character, said she was enjoying rehearsing with Miskimmon, who “made every effort for people to have a voice in the room artistically.”“That’s a real sign of a confident director, and a really, really confident leader,” Lindsey said.Miskimmon said she wanted to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesMiskimmon’s route to the heights of British opera is far from typical. Born in 1974, she grew up in Bangor, a small town outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the sectarian conflict that is known as “the Troubles.”She saw her first opera at 10 years old, when her father performed in an amateur production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in a church hall. It was a distinctly lo-fi production: Her father’s costume for the role of Papageno was “a flat cap and some pan pipes on a string around his neck,” Miskimmon said.Yet Miskimmon soon fell hard for the art form. As much as opera was an escape from the violence of the Troubles, part of its appeal was that it also somehow reflected them, she said: At the time, Northern Ireland was a place where people didn’t feel they had much control over their destiny, since they could “go out for an ordinary day’s work, and be blown up.” In opera, Miskimmon said, “the characters are relentlessly driven toward heaven and hell,” without much agency, either. It felt “a much more honest, artistic representation of life.”At Cambridge University, where she studied English literature, Miskimmon directed some student productions. But she never thought she would become a professional director, she said, until she was invited to assist the British director Graham Vick at Glyndebourne. After working on seven productions there, she landed a job as the artistic director of the Opera Theater Company, Ireland’s national touring opera, before eventually moving to the Danish National Opera in Aarhus, and, later, the Norwegian Opera and Ballet in Oslo.Andrew Mellor, an opera journalist who specializes in the Nordic countries, said that Miskimmon was successful in Denmark, with several innovative productions that became talking points. Her take on Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in Aarhus offered audiences two productions — one traditional, one contemporary — and began each night with a vote to decide which would be staged. Equally attention-grabbing was an opera Miskimmon commissioned there called “Brothers,” about Danish soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress after fighting in Afghanistan.Her time at Oslo was more “turbulent,” Mellor said. The Norwegian company’s music director, Karl-Heinz Steffens, left before Miskimmon even started, and she “had a fight with its ensemble system” when she wanted to use more guest singers, Mellor said. Amid the conflict, Miskimmon staged several acclaimed productions, including one of Britten’s “Billy Budd” that featured a huge submarine onstage.“She’s no shrinking violet, and when she has an idea she pursues it,” Mellor said.Miskimmon said her “memories of working in Oslo are not ones of turbulence,” and added that, in her opinion, it had been “a very positive working experience.”Whatever happened in Norway, Miskimmon’s experiences of dealing with tough situations will hold her in good stead for her role at ENO, especially given the challenges the company has ahead.At the end of March, the company canceled a production of Michael Tippet’s “King Priam” that had been set to run in the 2022-23 season. Ella Baker, an ENO spokeswoman, said in an email that this was “with financial prudence in mind,” given the ongoing impact of the pandemic.The company also faces perhaps more significant financial challenges. Over the past year, Britain’s government has focused on a program called “leveling up,” designed to boost the fortunes of areas outside London. Although “leveling up” includes all sectors of Britain’s economy, arts funding has been a particular focus. Government subsidies for London-based arts organizations like ENO are set to be cut by a total of 15 percent later this year, so more money can be spent elsewhere. The government has said that some organizations may lose their funding entirely.Allison, the Opera magazine editor, said some British lawmakers have “always had ENO in their sights,” because funding opera is thought to be bad at the ballot box. With the Royal Opera House more prominent, ENO had “always looked vulnerable,” he said.During the hourlong interview, Miskimmon did not seem concerned by that threat, insisting that ENO already had plans to present more work outside London. Since starting at the company, she said she had been discussing how to turn ENO into a “truly national company” that collaborates with regional opera companies to stage major productions.Miskimmon added that she had a favorite saying: “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” She had repeated the adage so many times at ENO, including in rehearsals for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” that people must be getting sick of it, she said. But it suited her vision for the company, she added.“It’s about art, and it’s about life,” Miskimmon said. “We’re prepared to take big steps forward, because that’s what opera needs.” More

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      Mira Calix, Iconoclastic Composer and Artist, Is Dead at 52

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      Her work spanned albums, public art installations, music for Shakespeare plays and touring with Radiohead.Mira Calix, a composer, producer and visual artist whose work encompassed electronic music, orchestral commissions, public art installations, theater scores, music videos and DJ sets, died on March 25 at her home and music and art studio in Bedford, England. She was 52.The death was confirmed by her partner, Andy Holden, who declined to specify the cause.“She pushed the boundaries between electronic music, classical music and art in a truly unique way,” her label, Warp Records, said in a statement.Ms. Calix’s projects included solo albums, collaborations and numerous singles, EPs, productions and remixes; music for the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s 2017 stagings of “Julius Caesar” and “Coriolanus,” and a 2003 piece, “Nunu,” that brought together the London Sinfonietta, Calix’s electronics and a cage of live cicadas and crickets, amplified and shown on video screens.She welcomed commissions to make public art.“I like trying to change somebody’s day,” she told the music and cultural website The Quietus in 2012. “I like people coming across something with no expectations. They don’t care who made it. They haven’t gone and bought a ticket, so it’s not about being reverential. People can just wander by.”Among her free installations were “Nothing Is Set in Stone,” an egg-shaped stone monolith in London that used sensors to respond to visitors’ motion with music. Another was “Passage,” a permanent installation in a train tunnel in Bath that was converted into a bicycle and pedestrian path with interactive lights and sounds. “Inside There Falls” was a hangar-size paper sculptural environment in Sydney, Australia, accompanied by music and dancers. And “Moving Museum 35” was a traveling sound installation on a city bus in Nanjing, China.Ms. Calix was the sound artist and composer of a 2018 team installation in the dry moat around the Tower of London to commemorate the centenary of Armistice Day.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Calix told students from Nanjing University of the Arts, who were working with her: “We are not trying to make things easy for our audience. We are trying to make things true.”Although her pieces often employed classical musicians and singers, Ms. Calix was not a traditionally schooled musician. She became a composer by working with computers and samplers. Her music often drew on the repetitions of Minimalism and dance music, on field recordings of rural and urban sounds, on trained and untrained voices, and on layered snippets and fragments.“I wanted to put air in electronic music,” she told Interview magazine in 2015. “I record the sounds of twigs, barks, and stones. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of combining the natural and the man-made. That juxtaposition is truly beautiful. The question of what is natural and unnatural is very open.”Although her music has often been described as experimental and avant-garde, she insisted that it spoke to ordinary listeners. In a 2012 video interview, she said: “People like the weird stuff. People like abstraction. People like magic, and those are the things that motivate me to make work.”Ms. Calix performing at the music venue Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 2002. “I wanted to put air in electronic music,” she said. Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesMira Calix (pronounced Mee-ra KAY-lix) was born Chantal Francesca Passamonte in Durban, South Africa, on Oct. 28, 1969, to Gabriele and Riccarda Passamonte. She studied photography but was an avid music fan, and with South Africa isolated by anti-apartheid sanctions, she moved to London in 1991 to have direct contact with its music scene. She got a job in a record shop, Ambient Soho; she booked clubs and parties, including events with a collective called Telepathic Fish; and she began working as a disc jockey.In 1993, after a job with the indie-rock label 4AD, Ms. Calix became the publicist at the also independent Warp Records, which specializes in electronic music. Meanwhile, she began constructing her own electronic music with an early Mac computer and a sampler.“The only thing that has really influenced what I do is lack of money,” she told Computer Music magazine in 2012. “I could never afford sample packs and expensive synths, so I looked for organic found sound instead. It’s funny, isn’t it? Being short of money limited the music I could make, but it also meant that I discovered my own sound.”Ms. Calix married Sean Booth, a fellow musician, in the late 1990s, and they separated in the mid-2000s. In addition to Mr. Holden, she is survived by her mother and her sister, Genevieve Passamonte.Executives at Warp Records heard her music and signed her to the label in 1996. She chose to record under the name Mira Calix after it “kind of appeared,” she told Red Bull Music Academy in 2003.“I wrote it down, and it looked good,” she added, “and I really like phonetics. It sounded really nice, and it sounded like a nice person.”The A-side of her first release, the 10-inch vinyl single “Ilanga,” was “Humba”; it ended with a looped vocal repeating, “Do the things that people say you cannot.”Ms. Calix in an undated photo. “I like to create the space in which the music exists and then you step into it,” she said.Warp RecordsHer recordings for Warp were adventurous and unpredictable. They could be noisily propulsive or meditative and ambient, sparse or densely packed, raucous or elegiac. She also toured as a disc jockey alongside groups including Radiohead, Autechre and Godspeed You Black Emperor!But her interests largely turned to multimedia works and site-specific installations, often in collaboration with scientists and visual artists. “I like to create the space in which the music exists, and then you step into it,” she told the website Spitfire Audio.“Chorus,” installed in Durham Cathedral in northern England in 2009, had speakers swinging on pendulums overhead, using customized software to control more than 2000 sound samples interacting with lights and movement. Her 2013 work “The Sun Is the Queen of Torches” grew out of a collaboration with a lab that created organic photovoltaic — light-sensitive, electricity-generating — materials. “Ode to the Future,” in 2018, was based on ultrasound images from pregnant volunteers.Her final album, “absent origin,” was released in 2021. It was a complex collage of her past and her ambitions. She drew from years of material she had saved on her hard drive: beats (including using her body for percussion), nature recordings, previous sessions with classical musicians, favorite songs and poetry, and preserved news footage, including CNN’s coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection.They all became material for song-length, sometimes danceable tracks holding messages of feminism and resistance: exploratory, playful and unpredictable.“The challenge in my work is to engage my audience emotionally, and music is an abstract art form,” Ms. Calix said in a 2013 TED Talk. “I can’t tell my audience how to feel. I need to coax them and guide them and hopefully draw them in.”Alex Traub More

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      Joseph Kalichstein, Pianist of Subtlety and Refinement, Dies at 76

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      An acclaimed exponent of Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, he was best known for his work as a member of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio.Joseph Kalichstein, an Israeli American pianist whose subtle, refined approach made him an exemplary chamber musician, especially as a member of the esteemed Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, died on March 31 in Manhattan. He was 76.His son Avi said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Across his career of more than 50 years, critics agreed that Mr. Kalichstein had an uncommon naturalness, whether in his earliest solo recitals or his later appearances on the chamber music circuit with his piano trio, in which he was joined by the violinist Jaime Laredo and the cellist Sharon Robinson.Mr. Kalichstein had a sense of line and timing that set him apart even as a young virtuoso. His Carnegie Hall debut “carried enough impact to remind one of Horowitz, and that is not a small thing to say,” Donal Henahan wrote in The New York Times in 1967, adding that although there was still some brash impetuosity to Mr. Kalichstein’s playing, he could already sustain “a long, poetic arc as only a born musician can.”That innate musicality made Mr. Kalichstein a stylish exponent of Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, whose solo, chamber and concertante works he recorded with an apt balance of delicacy and drive.Mr. Kalichstein’s credentials as a soloist were never in question after his 1969 victory in the prestigious Leventritt Competition, which led, among other appearances, to dates with the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra under the conductor (and Leventritt juror) George Szell. But he found particular admiration as a chamber musician.The venerable Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio came together by accident, after Mr. Kalichstein appeared as a late substitute for another elegant pianist, Rudolf Firkusny, in a program of Dvorak with his future partners — who were already husband and wife — and other musicians at the 92nd Street Y in 1976.Mr. Kalichstein in an undated photo. His credentials as a soloist were never in question after his 1969 victory in the prestigious Leventritt Competition, but he found particular admiration as a chamber musician.“In the end,” Mr. Kalichstein later recalled of that concert, “we all remarked how easy the performance was. We seemed to phrase together, breathe together, sing together. Sharon and Jaime came to me and said, ‘Maybe we should play together.’”Their official debut as a trio came in 1977, in unusually auspicious surroundings: the East Room of the White House, during the inauguration festivities for President Jimmy Carter, who hired them on the advice of the conductor Robert Shaw.From the start, the trio drew strong reviews for its poise and blend. Mr. Henahan suggested in 1978 that “while predictions as to its longevity and success would be pointless just yet,” the trio’s balance and evident good sense still brought to mind artists of the stature of the Guarneri String Quartet or, more to the point, the then-dominant Beaux Arts Trio.The Beaux Arts lasted 53 years in name, but its initial membership endured for little more than a decade. The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, arguably its successor in stature in concert halls if not on record, still had its original personnel at its last concert, in Phoenix on March 17 — 45 years after its debut.Joseph Chaim Kalichstein, later known as Yossi to his friends, was born on Jan. 15, 1946, in Tel Aviv, the third child of Yitzhak and Mali (Bendit) Kalichstein. Fervent Zionists, they had tried to settle in Palestine in the 1920s, returning to Poland only to flee the fate that befell much of the rest of their family in the Holocaust.Mr. Kalichstein played the piano from a young age and took lessons from Joshua Shor in Israel. He enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York in 1962, studying with Eduard Steuermann and Ilona Kabos. For his Carnegie Hall debut, he paid tribute with two works by Mr. Steuermann, a rarely heard Schoenberg acolyte who died in 1964.After graduating in 1967, Mr. Kalichstein received a master’s degree from Juilliard in 1969 and considered doctoral work before his solo career took off. Sponsored by the Young Concert Artists after 1967, he played Beethoven in one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, in 1968, broadcast on CBS.European as well as American performances followed. The Musical Times noted after Mr. Kalichstein’s European debut in 1970 that the impression he made in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto — with the London Symphony and André Previn — “was not of the extreme brilliance and confidence expected from a young virtuoso so much as thoughtful, sensitive musicianship.”Allan Kozinn of The New York Times in 1999 bracketed Mr. Kalichstein with pianists like Alfred Brendel and Richard Goode, as “a musician who searches beyond the dots on the page, recognizes the breadth of possibilities within a work and has the technique to give those possibilities life.”Mr. Kalichstein was by then primarily known as a chamber musician, above all for his work with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, with which he cultivated a style of polished ease.The trio recorded much of the core repertoire, including the complete Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms trios, as well as an exquisite set devoted to Ravel, for which Mr. Kalichstein contributed a moving account of the solo “Pavane Pour une Infante Défunte.” The trio commissioned works from such living composers as Arvo Pärt, André Previn and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, whose piano concerto Mr. Kalichstein recorded.Mr. Kalichstein consulted for the Kennedy Center after 1997 and was artistic director of its chamber music series until his death. He became a member of the piano faculty at Juilliard in 1983 and added a chair in chamber music studies in 2003.The pianist Emanuel Ax, a colleague at Juilliard, said in an interview that Mr. Kalichstein was “a remarkably direct and openhearted musician, in the best sense uncomplicated and natural.” He added that Mr. Kalichstein was a warm, witty teacher who did not impose his own views on his students, but “would think about the way someone was looking at a piece of music and try to help him or her attain the best possible of version of that.”In addition to his son Avi, Mr. Kalichstein is survived by his wife, Rowain (Schultz) Kalichstein; another son, Rafi; and three grandchildren.His wife had resolved to marry him before she had even met him, after being captivated by a recital he gave at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan in 1971. They were married later that year and were longtime residents of Maplewood, N.J., until moving to Rhode Island last year.In 1994, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times asked Mr. Kalichstein whether he and the other members of the trio enjoyed greater fame as individual soloists or as a collective.“It could very well be the trio,” he responded. “I certainly cannot complain if it’s one or the other. I hope people know me as someone with two different hats.”“I want to have that balance,” he added. “In fact, that is my ideal.” More