Music

Manfred Honeck led a program that teased at novelty, then settled into well-known works by Mendelssohn and Dvorak.It had to end at some point.For the past month, the New York Philharmonic has been an unexpected source of novelty: premieres, queer cabaret, the orchestra’s first performances of works by Eastman, Kodaly and Martinu. But last week, Strauss’s rare “Brentano-Lieder” was followed by the familiar creeping back in the form of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.And now comes a program (despite a brief opener from the underrated Erwin Schulhoff) of well-worn pieces by Mendelssohn and Dvorak that were most recently heard here in 2019 — which, with pandemic closures, might as well have been last year. Fortunately, there are few conductors as trustworthy in the standard repertory as Manfred Honeck, who led the Philharmonic on Thursday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center.The Czech-born Schulhoff crossed paths with the likes of Dvorak and Debussy before embarking on a promising career that was cut short: first by Nazi blacklisting, then by his death, at 48, in the Wülzberg concentration camp. His Five Pieces for String Quartet, from 1923, is a modern treatment of a Baroque suite, with each movement inspired by a specific dance style. The work’s chamber scale came to the Philharmonic transformed, in an arrangement for full orchestra by Honeck and Thomas Ille, who have also collaborated on symphonic assemblages from operas such as “Jenufa” and “Rusalka.”All arrangements are acts of translation, and here Schulhoff’s humor was lost along the way. With a massive sound from added brass and percussion at the start, this Five Pieces was less lightly playful and more Mahlerian — witty and ironic, but with martial heft. Once tinged with Debussian sonorities, the third-movement Czech dance was a dark memory of Dvorak. In the tango that followed, what was previously implied in rhythm became literal in exotic-Spain castanets, and the closing tarantella took itself too seriously.There is nothing inherently wrong with arrangements, an art form in themselves. But this take on Schulhoff felt like a missed opportunity. Among the lessons we have learned from the pandemic is that orchestral programming doesn’t need to be formulaic, that a string quartet can easily share the stage with a symphony. And Schulhoff — chronically underrepresented, especially on Philharmonic subscription concerts — would benefit from advocacy for music that is truly his.Ray Chen made his Philharmonic debut in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, which he took up with the spirit of a Romantic hero.Chris LeeMendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor is a common rite of passage for violinists, and on Thursday it was the vehicle for Ray Chen’s Philharmonic debut. Charismatic and expressive, he took up the work like a Romantic hero while Honeck maintained a modest, if indistinct, accompaniment in the orchestra. That would have left room for any soloist, but Chen rarely dipped below mezzo forte in volume, his force evident in the many bow hairs he broke during the performance.Chen’s full-bodied lyricism nevertheless made for beautifully contoured phrases in the violin’s highest, riskiest registers. The concerto calls for that often, but not always, and his interpretation, delivered as if with a sticky, heavy bow, rarely mined the contrasts of flowing melody and bouncing agility. Only in the sprinting theme of the finale did he at last find a lighter touch. More relaxed yet was the encore, his own fantasy-like arrangement of “Waltzing Matilda,” the unofficial national anthem of Australia, where he grew up.Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony clocked in longer here than in many other accounts. But Honeck’s reading was one that rewarded patience — the introduction making up in atmosphere what it lacked in drive. That was just the start of a thoroughly fresh performance, one in which loudness, for example, was never simply loud; it signified festivity or tumult, or both at once. His Adagio, begun with Brahmsian lushness, was unafraid of silence, revealing the holy in the pastoral. The finale had the feel of a dance suite, a subtle nod back to the Schulhoff, with Dvorak’s series of repeated phrases a journey from the lofty to the frisky and affectingly wistful.As guest conductors have passed through recently — with Herbert Blomstedt and Gustavo Dudamel on the way — the Philharmonic players have shown a promising malleability often missing from concerts with their music director, Jaap van Zweden, who leaves in 2024. And under the right baton, they can even be forgiven for putting on the classics. As they proved with Honeck, standard doesn’t have to mean stale.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

Tears for Fears are returning with their first new album in 18 years. The group is one of a number of veteran bands releasing fresh music after lengthy pauses.When Tears for Fears released their album “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending” in 2004, the English pop duo’s future, or lack thereof, seemed clear.“I thought that was the last hurrah,” the singer-guitarist Roland Orzabal said on a recent video call from a house he owns in Los Angeles. “I thought it was a beautiful way of putting a full-stop at the end of the sentence.”Tears for Fears had experienced a remarkably successful run in the 1980s, highlighted by worldwide hits including “Shout,” “Head Over Heels,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Sowing the Seeds of Love.” The group had already endured a nasty breakup in the early ’90s, after which Orzabal carried on under the Tears for Fears banner while his erstwhile bandmate, the singer-guitarist Curt Smith, made solo albums, both to diminished returns, before they patched up their differences.But in the music industry, there’s rarely a full-stop at the end of the sentence. While pop music is often a measure of the current moment, it has always been borne back ceaselessly into the past. Bands rarely break up; they go on hiatus. A successful career can outlive the performer that once powered it. Nothing, not even death, can stop the rumbling engine of commerce. Minting new hits and new stars is a gamble, but the past is the closest the music industry has to a sure thing.For a time, Tears for Fears participated, somewhat ambivalently, in this nostalgia industrial complex, playing their hits on periodic tours of casinos and wineries and the summer festival circuit. But while the life of what the industry calls a heritage act was enriching, it wasn’t that engaging.“We were getting a bit bored with it,” Smith said on a separate video call from his home in Southern California. “Us being a heritage act was never going to work because we need new material to keep us excited. Trying to find that new material was the hard part.”This was the particular jumping-off point for the protracted odyssey that would eventually yield the band’s first album in 18 years, “The Tipping Point,” due Friday. But this tension between commerce and art is hardly unusual for any artist with a catalog of past hits. Reconciling it often takes time.Tears for Fears released their most successful album, “Songs From the Big Chair,” in 1985.Brian Rasic/Getty ImagesTears for Fears is just one of a number of veteran acts that’s re-emerged as a recording entity in recent months after an extended period on the sidelines. Abba, Jethro Tull, Wet Wet Wet, the Temptations, the Boo Radleys and Men Without Hats all have also just released their first albums of new material in more than a decade, or are about to. For some, the pandemic likely played a role in their return. With touring shuttered for long stretches of the past two years, many artists were losing income. And with long stretches to sit around, songwriters, unsurprisingly, often write songs.Eddie Roeser, the guitarist-singer for the Chicago alt-rock trio Urge Overkill, who released its first studio album in 11 years, “Oui,” on Feb. 11, said, “the only gateway to playing together and having fun is working on new things.” Urge scored modest hits in the 1990s with “Sister Havana” and a cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” but Roeser was wary of becoming “a greatest hits machine. Anybody who does music professionally dreads going up and playing the one song people came to the show for.”In the 1980s, the English synth-pop duo Soft Cell often refused to play its biggest hit, “Tainted Love,” on tour. “We were so sick of it,” said David Ball, the group’s multi-instrumentalist. “Nostalgia Machine,” a song from “Happiness Not Included,” Soft Cell’s first album since 2002 (due in May), is a cheeky nod to the industry’s obsession with the past. “It’s really about the fact that everything is recycled and reused,” Ball said.He and the singer Marc Almond originally reconnected at the behest of Universal Records, to discuss a Soft Cell boxed set the company was releasing in 2018. The pair agreed to perform what was then billed as a “final” show at London’s 02 Arena that year.“I said to Marc, ‘Don’t say ‘final.’ Never put ‘final’ on anything,’” Ball said, laughing. “At that point, we didn’t foresee the pandemic. I think everybody had a lot of time to sit and contemplate, and he thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.’” The duo sent new tracks back and forth during Covid lockdowns in Britain, and made the entire album remotely.Advances in home recording also aided the Doobie Brothers, who released “Liberté,” their first album of new songs in 11 years, in October. “To get the whole band in there, it used to take weeks or even a couple of months to do an album,” the singer-guitarist Tom Johnston said. Now, “we could have an album done in a week and a half.”From left, the Doobie Brothers in the early 1970s: Patrick Simmons, Tiran Porter, John Hartman, Michael Hossack and Tom Johnston.Joan ChaseAnd the Doobies today, from left: Patrick Simmons, John McFee and Tom Johnston.Clay Patrick McBrideTears for Fears began working on new material more than six years ago and said they were steered by their then manager, the industry veteran Gary Gersh, into teaming with professional songwriters for a series of writing sessions. “They’d come up with this backing track that sounded like classic Tears for Fears,” Smith said. “But we’ve done that already. By the end, it was kind of depressing.”The pair powered through, and by 2016, had 12 finished tracks. They began negotiating with Universal, who already owned the rights to most of the band’s catalog, but the label suggested putting off releasing a new album and instead dropping a second greatest hits compilation — the first came out in 1992 — packaged with two new songs.“Universal said, ‘The Greatest Hits will put you back in the limelight, then we’ll go with the album!’” Orzabal said. But after the hits package was released, there was no deal in place obligating Universal to release the new album, and it wasn’t picked up.This created something of an existential crisis for the band. Orzabal wasn’t sure what to do with these new songs; Smith wanted nothing to do with them. “It all sounded like a bunch of vain attempts at a hit single,” Smith said. “I said, ‘If this is really what you want to do, you should, but I can’t be involved.’”Before Orzabal could decide his next move, the rest of his life cratered. His then-wife, Caroline, died after a long, debilitating bout with alcoholism and depression. In the wake of her death, Orzabal struggled with his own mental health, and spent time in and out of hospitals and rehabs.He wrote the new album’s title track about the harrowing experience of watching Caroline flit between life and death in a hospital bed. The song energized him, and a conversation was arranged with a record label to discuss releasing new Tears for Fears music. After the meeting, their manager quit.“He emailed us afterwards and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” Orzabal said. “He said we were a heritage act and that was it, and there was no point in putting out any album.” (Gersh, who is now the president of global touring and talent at AEG Presents, declined to comment.)“Us being a heritage act was never going to work because we need new material to keep us excited,” Smith said. “Trying to find that new material was the hard part.”Rob Verhorst/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn purely business terms, it’s hard for a veteran act to justify spending time and budget writing, recording and releasing new songs when the money is in touring, merch, and getting your old hits in films, TV shows, commercials or even TikToks.“Going into an album now is nothing like it used to be,” said the Doobies’ Johnston. “You don’t get the payback you used to. So, where it used to be, you’d do an album and tour to support the album, it’s now the other way around.”For veteran artists, live shows are less likely to drive significant sales or streams of new music than they are to boost the artist’s back catalog. Tears for Fears lived through that while promoting “Everybody Loves a Happy Ending,” which was frustrating, but as Smith noted, “It’s still our income.” The band’s past commercial success provides the luxury to make decisions solely on artistic merit. “The hardest thing with managers for us is them wrapping their heads around the fact that we don’t care that much if we’re hugely successful,” he added.Eventually, what cleared the path to a new album was returning to making music the way they had when they first met as teenagers. In early 2020, Orzabal and Smith got together and, with a pair of acoustic guitars, hashed out “No Small Thing,” the dramatic, swirling folk-rock epic that opens the new album.“It was just the two of us, prepandemic, no team of songwriters, no interfering record company, no manager, no animosity,” Orzabal said. They revisited material from the earlier sessions, eventually reworking a handful of those songs for “The Tipping Point,” which will be released by Concord Records, an independent label.“The best thing that happened to us,” Smith said, “was to be left alone.” More

On Monday, the company performs the much-revised masterpiece for the first time in its original language.For the first 80 or so years of its life, Verdi’s “Don Carlos” was a problem opera on the margins of the repertory. Audiences saw it only sporadically; almost everyone who wrote about it described an uneven “transitional” work, a troubled experiment on the eve of the composer’s final masterpieces: “Aida,” “Otello” and “Falstaff.”Today, this sprawling, packed epic — based on the tumults of 16th-century Spain under Philip II as filtered through two different plays — is part of every opera lover’s basic nutrition. The Metropolitan Opera has a lot to do with that: In 1950, Rudolf Bing made the bold choice to revive the work for the opening night of his first season as general manager. The Met was the first house in the world to make “Don Carlos” standard repertory.And yet the company has never performed its original words. That changes on Monday, when Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads a new David McVicar staging of the opera, sung at last to the French libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle. What took so long?The answer starts with the opera’s complex history. Paris, when Verdi went there in 1866 with his nearly finished score, was Europe’s cultural capital, and required the longest, grandest operas. Verdi — accustomed to writing three-hour works and now given the chance at a four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza — overshot the mark. The general rehearsal on Feb. 24, 1867, clocked in at five hours, 13 minutes.The general rehearsal for the premiere of “Don Carlos” in Paris in 1867 lasted more than five hours, forcing cuts to be made under pressure.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesBut performance start times were inflexible at 7:30 p.m., and the last trains for the suburbs left at 12:35 a.m. People needed time to get to the station. This meant a lot of cutting under pressure.One legacy of Napoleon’s civil service reforms: Parisian functionaries were trained never to throw away a piece of paper. So when scholars got serious about “Don Carlos” a century later, they could reconstruct that cut music from handwritten orchestra parts, draft librettos, rehearsal reports and the like. (Andrew Porter, the longtime music critic of The New Yorker, was the unofficial leader of this brigade.)Some of that music is significant and beautiful, and has been restored in some modern productions. But in his time, Verdi went in the opposite direction: cutting still more music, tweaking some of it and eventually producing a thorough (and much shorter) revision. The upshot: five or even more iterations of “Don Carlos” for performers to choose among today, and infinite chances for confusion in discussing them.Simplification may help: There are essentially two versions. The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I — set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois. The Met is including Act I, as it has done since 1979. For the other acts, it plans on a mixture: mostly the revisions of 1884, but with selected restorations from 1867. For instance, the opera is set to end with a quiet reprise of the monks’ chant, which was changed in 1884 to a fortissimo outburst.It has to be emphasized, because many still assume otherwise: All these versions are in French. There is no Italian version of “Don Carlos,” only an Italian translation, just as there was for “Carmen” or “Mignon” when those were done at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. In that era, the idea of opera as drama was taken seriously, and intelligibility was essential.Jussi Bjorling and Delia Rigal starred when the Met opened its 1950-51 season with a landmark production of the opera.Sedge LeBlang/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesThe only exception: Italians singing in Italian were heard everywhere, just as today American pop music is enjoyed worldwide in English. That’s why the Met opened its doors with Gounod’s “Faust” in Italian and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” had its London premiere in Italian. But why did “Don Carlos” hang on so long beyond those as a quasi-Italian work? Because it was not a hit in Paris, and vanished from the repertory there within two years. Verdi hoped to relaunch it with his revision, but it was not wanted; Paris had fallen in love with “Aida” in the meantime. At La Scala, “Don Carlos” was more successful. It stayed at the fringes of the Italian repertory, and spread exclusively from there.Translations, though necessary in a world that wanted to understand what was being sung, are never as good as original texts; it’s just too hard to find words that convey the right thought and fit the notes decently and elegantly. The “Don Carlos” translation (by Achille de Lauzières, supplemented by Angelo Zanardini for the 1884 revisions) has the further problem of sounding ornate and old-fashioned compared with the French.Porter used to make this point by juxtaposing Élisabeth’s reminiscence of Fontainebleau, “mon coeur est plein de votre image,” with Elisabetta’s “ver voi schiude il pensiero i vanni.” The French he translated as “my heart is full of your image”; the Italian, as something like “t’ward thee my thought unfurls its pinions.” An open-and-shut case for the superiority of the original.Or is it? The same type of comparison could make us prefer the French text of “La Traviata,” and nobody wants to hear that argument, because it wouldn’t be “the original.” What we see here is not so much the problem of translation as the fact that Italian libretto-writing in the 1860s still followed a highly inflected poetic code built over centuries, while French texts had become simpler and more straightforward — more modern, if you like. The translators could easily have written “pieno ho il cor dell’immagin vostra.” It fits the poetic meter, and is also faithful to the French; it just isn’t the way they wanted to write. (Yet.)Jonas Kaufmann sang Don Carlos when the Paris Opera performed the work in French in 2017.Agathe Poupeney/Paris Opera BalletAnd there is another undiscussed problem, having to do with the way meter shapes melody. The technical details would take too long to explain, but it’s obvious at a glance that the rhythms of “Grow old along with me” and “Do not go gentle into that good night” are not going to generate the same kind of tune. Verdi had a lifetime of experience imagining melodies for lines of seven, eight or 10 syllables — but not nine syllables, which traditional Italian poetry did not use, and French did.A very clear example comes in that somber chant of the monks, heard at the beginning of Act II and recalled in the last act. The instrumental statements make perfectly clear what Verdi thought the rhythm was, and the Italian translation — supplied in “ottonario” (eight-syllable) meter — allows it to be sung that way. But in the original French an extra syllable has to be tucked in, irregularly and somewhat awkwardly, in every second bar. The same problem affects the tenor aria, and again the translators provide the familiar verse-form from Verdi’s comfort zone, instead of the “novenario” he had to set in Paris.This, however, is devil’s advocacy. Yes, the opera is better overall in French — but it is a subtle superiority. It shows up not in obvious “gotcha” errors, but in the accumulation of many moments when the dramatic situation is precise in the original and fuzzy in the translation, where the phrases breathe naturally as Verdi wrote them and have to be rearranged or interrupted in Italian. It probably affects the singers more than the listeners, but the cumulative impact can be profound.An example: King Philip and the Grand Inquisitor are discussing, with exquisite caution, the inflammatory behavior of Philip’s son Carlos. What punishment for his rebellion? asks the priest. “Tout — ou rien,” replies the king: “all — or nothing.” In Italian, to preserve those three lonely notes, he answers instead “mezzo estrem” (“extreme measures”). He means the choice between putting his own son to death or allowing him to flee. God himself, observes the holy man, once chose the former.It is all chilling in either language. But the Italian is blunt, and the French is sharp. Multiply that by a hundred, and you have more than reason enough for the Met’s big change after a century of translation. It’s time.Will Crutchfield, the artistic director of Teatro Nuovo, has conducted “Don Carlos” in both Italian and French. More

His “Teen Beat” hit No. 4 in 1959, and more than 30 albums followed.Sandy Nelson, one of the few musicians in pop history to score Top 10 hits as a featured drummer, something he did early in a career that included more than 30 albums, died on Feb. 14 at a hospice center in Las Vegas. He was 83.His son, Joshua Nelson Straume, said the cause was complications of a stroke that Mr. Nelson had in 2017.Mr. Nelson was a session drummer in Los Angeles when, in 1959, he recorded “Teen Beat,” a propulsive instrumental whose dominating drum part was inspired by something he had heard at a strip club he visited with fellow musicians.“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”Mr. Nelson had played in the backing band for Art Laboe, a popular Los Angeles disc jockey who also had a small record label, Original Records, and Mr. Nelson took the song to him hoping that he’d press it. Instead, Mr. Laboe tested it on his radio show.“The little rascal, he played the actual acetate from the lathe,” Mr. Nelson recalled, “and he wasn’t going to press it up unless he got a few calls.”Mr. Laboe, he said, got three calls from impressed listeners, and that was enough: Mr. Laboe pressed the record. By October 1959 it had reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, a rare achievement for a drum-centered instrumental.Mr. Nelson scored again in 1961 with “Let There Be Drums,” which reached No. 7.Two years later, he was riding his motorcycle on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles when he collided with a school bus and was badly injured. Part of his right leg was amputated. But he returned to drumming, learning to play the bass with his left leg.“In the long run,” he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2017, “I developed a little better technique.”He recorded a string of instrumental albums with session players in the 1960s and ’70s with titles like “Boss Beat” (1965) and “Boogaloo Beat” (1968), many of them filled with covers of hits of the day that showcased his drumming. He was not proud of much of that work.“I think the worst version ever of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ was done by me,” Mr. Nelson told L.A. Weekly in 1985, “and, oddly enough, it was a big seller in the Philippines. I guess they like squeaky saxophones or something.”But among these covers were glimpses of his interest in explorations that foreshadowed electronic ambient music. “Boss Beat,” for instance, in addition to takes on “Louie, Louie” and other hits, included “Drums in a Sea Cave,” in which Mr. Nelson played along to the sound of ocean waves.He was still experimenting late in life. His friend and fellow musician Jack Evan Johnson said that Mr. Nelson was especially proud of “The Veebles,” a whimsical five-track concept album released on cassette in 2016 that had an extraterrestrial sound and theme.“It’s about a race of people from another planet,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996, when the long-gestating project was just beginning to take shape. “They’re gonna take over the Earth and make us do nothing but dance, sing and tell dumb jokes.”Sander Lloyd Nelson was born on Dec. 1, 1938, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Lloyd and Lydia Nelson. His father was a projectionist at Universal Studios.“My parents had these roaring parties with Glenn Miller records,” he told L.A. Weekly, “and the sound of those got to be like dope to me — I had to hear those records.”The drumming particularly interested him, and in high school he started playing.“I felt piano was too complicated and I’d have to take lessons and learn how to read music,” he said. “With drums, I could play instantly.”He said he once played in a band with a teenage guitarist named Phil Spector, who was later a famous and then infamous producer; Mr. Spector brought Mr. Nelson in to play drums on “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” a 1958 hit for Mr. Spector’s band the Teddy Bears.He also played on “Alley Oop,” a 1960 novelty hit for the Hollywood Argyles about a comic strip caveman, though not on drums. As Gary S. Paxton, who recorded the song with a group of studio musicians, told the story to The Chicago Sun-Times in 1997, Mr. Nelson was a last-minute addition.“We already had a drummer,” Mr. Paxton said, “so Nelson played garbage cans and did background screams.”Over the years other musicians have cited Mr. Nelson’s early records as an important influence; one was Steven Tyler, who started out as a drummer before finding fame as Aerosmith’s vocalist. In a 1997 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Mr. Tyler recalled trying to imitate one of Mr. Nelson’s riffs as a child.“I played that until I wore out my little rubber drum pad,” he said. “I wore out the first two Sandy Nelson albums.”Mr. Nelson acknowledged that he had not handled his early success well.“I spent most of the money on women and whiskey, and the rest I just wasted,” he told The Review-Journal. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Lisa Nelson.Mr. Nelson settled in Boulder City, Nev., in about 1987 and became a colorful local fixture, running a pirate radio station out of his house for about seven years before the FCC shut him down, Mr. Johnson said. And then there was the cave.Mr. Nelson had a lifelong fondness for underground spaces, and in Boulder City he set about digging his own cave in his backyard with a coffee can and pickax. The project took him 12 years.“I got a ‘cave tour’ once,” Mr. Johnson said by email, “and it was quite something, precarious even — dug down at a very steep angle into the hard desert soil, with no kind of support structure whatsoever and just enough room to scoot down into it for a ways until the room opened up at the bottom.”“He had an electric keyboard down there,” he added.Mr. Nelson told The Las Vegas Sun that he enjoyed relaxing in his backyard cave.“It’s a place to cool off,” he said.“I go in without my leg,” he added. “There’s more room.” More

The star maestro, scheduled to lead three high-profile Vienna Philharmonic concerts this week, will not appear after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic announced on Thursday that the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, a friend and prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, would no longer lead a series of concerts there this week amid growing international condemnation of Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.Mr. Gergiev, who had been slated to conduct the Philharmonic in three high-profile appearances at the hall beginning Friday evening, has come under growing scrutiny because of his support for Mr. Putin, whom he has known for three decades and has repeatedly defended.No reason was cited for his removal from the programs. But the extraordinary last-minute decision to replace a star maestro apparently over his ties to Mr. Putin — just days after the Philharmonic’s chairman insisted that Gergiev would be appearing as an artist, not a politician — reflected the rapidly intensifying global uproar over the invasion.While Mr. Gergiev has not spoken publicly about the unfolding attack, he has supported Mr. Putin’s past moves against Ukraine, and his appearance at Carnegie was expected to draw vocal protests. He was the target of similar demonstrations during previous appearances in New York amid criticism of Mr. Putin’s law banning “propaganda on nontraditional sexual relationships,” which was seen as an effort to suppress Russia’s gay rights movement, and his annexation of Crimea.Carnegie and the Philharmonic also said that the Russian pianist Denis Matsuev, who had been scheduled to perform with Mr. Gergiev and the orchestra on Friday, would not appear. Mr. Matsuev is also an associate of Mr. Putin; in 2014, he expressed support for the annexation of Crimea.Mr. Gergiev will be replaced for the three Carnegie concerts by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who on Monday leads a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is music director. A replacement for Mr. Matsuev was not immediately announced.Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic had defended Mr. Gergiev, but were under new pressure to reconsider after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Thursday.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesBoth Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic had previously defended Mr. Gergiev. But Mr. Putin’s declaration of the start of a “special military operation” in Ukraine on Thursday placed new pressure on the hall and orchestra to reconsider.Activists started a #CancelGergiev hashtag on Twitter and were circulating photos of Mr. Gergiev alongside Mr. Putin. The two have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure as the leader of the Kirov (later the Mariinsky) Theater there.In 2012, Mr. Gergiev appeared in a television ad for Mr. Putin’s third presidential campaign. In 2014, he signed a petition hailing the annexation of Crimea, after Russia’s Ministry of Culture called leading artists and intellectuals to suggest they endorse the move. Mr. Gergiev was quoted at the time by a state-run newspaper as saying, “Ukraine for us is an essential part of our cultural space, in which we were brought up and in which we have lived until now.”In 2016, Mr. Gergiev led a patriotic concert in the Syrian city of Palmyra, shortly after Russian airstrikes helped drive the Islamic State out of the city. On Russian television, the concert was spliced with videos of Islamic State atrocities, part of a propaganda effort to nurture pride in Russia’s military role abroad, including its support for the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Mr. Putin was shown thanking the musicians by video link from his vacation home on the Black Sea.In recent days Mr. Gergiev has also come under pressure in Europe, where he maintains a busy touring schedule. Officials in Milan said on Thursday that he should condemn the invasion or face the prospect of canceled engagements with the Teatro alla Scala, where he has been leading Tchaikovsky’s opera “Queen of Spades,” according to Italian media reports.The Vienna Philharmonic said as recently as a few days ago that Mr. Gergiev was a gifted artist and would take the podium for the Carnegie dates. “He’s going as a performer, not a politician,” Daniel Froschauer, the orchestra’s chairman, said in an interview on Sunday with The New York Times.Understand Russia’s Attack on UkraineCard 1 of 7What is at the root of this invasion? More

With two-for-one cocktails at the Met museum and two-for-one Broadway tickets, New York arts institutions are trying to lure back locals after a long, tough winter.The sounds of a small jazz combo filled the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art last Saturday evening. Warm candles lit the space. Over at the museum’s American Wing Café, Christa Chiao and Anna Lee Hirschi were sipping prosecco.It was the first weekend of “Date Night” at the Met, an initiative to lure local visitors back to the museum on Friday and Saturday evenings with two-for-one cocktails, gallery chats and free live music featuring New Orleans jazz bands, Renaissance ensembles and string quartets.The museum’s efforts to woo back visitors from the region comes as many New York cultural organizations worry not only about the pandemic-era decline in tourism, but also the continuing struggle to bring back local crowds. The Met is currently attracting 62 percent of the local visitors it did before the coronavirus pandemic, a change it attributes in part to the continuing prevalence of remote work.“In this new reality, where many outer borough residents are working virtually and do not have to come to Manhattan, it’s on us, on the cultural institutions, to be creative and proactive in finding ways to encourage local visitorship,” said Ken Weine, a spokesman for the museum.“The challenge that the Met faces,” he said, “is really no different than a midtown small business.”Anna Lee Hirschi, left, and Christa Chiao toasted each other with their two-for-one proseccos.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Met is far from the only arts institution trying to entice local visitors back with deals as the Omicron surge fades and the coronavirus outlook seems to be improving.Lincoln Center recently announced a new “Choose What You Pay” ticketing program for its American Songbook series at the Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, with a minimum ticket price of $5.00, and a suggested price of $35, in an effort to make its programing more accessible.The Museum of Modern Art announced this week that it would restart a program offering free admission to New York City residents on the first Friday of every month between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.And this year NYC & Company, the city’s tourism agency, extended NYC Broadway Week — during which theatergoers can get two-for-one tickets to most Broadway shows — for an additional two weeks, through February 27.Chris Heywood, a spokesman for NYC & Company, said that the move to extend Broadway Week deals was proving popular: As of mid-February, he said, the program’s website had already received more traffic than it did in 2020, before the pandemic closed Broadway.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics reviewed exhibits featuring the drawings of the French Revolution’s chief propagandist and new work by the sculptor Charles Ray.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.Winter is traditionally a down period for museums and the performing arts, arts officials note, and this season was made even tougher by lagging tourism and the disruption caused by the Omicron variant, which forced some arts institutions to retrench at the very moment the city was seeking to triumphantly bounce back.Now, with spring on the horizon, some arts groups say they hope to essentially restart the reopening that began in the fall. Deals, they hope, will help.The Met hopes that deals will lure back locals. It is currently attracting 62 percent of the local visitors it did before the pandemic.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Met, which already allows New York State residents to pay what they wish for admission, is trying to sweeten the deal. As it began its second “Date Night” last Saturday, the museum was busy and bustling, with a line out the door late into evening.As they sipped their proseccos and shared a box of dips and veggies that had been classified as a date-night special, Chiao, 28, of Harlem, and Hirschi, 29, of Washington, said it was their first time back inside a museum since before the pandemic began. They had not known about the “Date Night” promotion, but they were on a date and were happy to partake.“It feels like it’s time,” Chiao said. “It’s your own risk assessment. I think more about what I’m going to do — is this thing going to be worth it? I do think I’m going to try to go out and do more stuff.”Patrick Driscoll, 34, and Kathryn Savasuk, 33, of the Upper West Side, were also on a date at the Met, and said they were feeling increasingly at ease about going out. They had already taken advantage of the two-for-one Broadway tickets, having snagged tickets to “Company,” the revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical.“We’d be comfortable either way, but it’s definitely an enticement to go out, be active and get into the flow of going to these types of events again,” Driscoll said of the deals. And they plan to keep going to the theater even for those shows that do not offer the two-for-one deals: They already have tickets to see Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in the upcoming Broadway production of “Macbeth.”Back inside the Great Hall, Allan Shikh, 21, had his arms wrapped warmly around Ami Kulishov, 21, as the jazz band finished its first set. They, too, were unaware that their romantic evening had fallen on an official “Date Night.” They would have been there anyway.“We consider ourselves pretty artsy people,” Shikh said. “I don’t really need much enticing.” More

“SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum),” an album featuring three new players, was written after the death of the pianist’s mother in 2020.When Marta Sánchez’s mother died unexpectedly in late 2020, the pianist was at a loss. But Sánchez knew, almost instinctively, where she could process her grief: at the piano, pen and paper in hand, sounding out new music for her quintet.In the decade since she moved to New York from Madrid, the quintet has been Sánchez’s main creative outlet. And since the release of its strong 2015 debut, “Partenika,” it has made itself known as one of the most consistently satisfying bands in contemporary jazz — largely thanks to the well-ordered complexity and openhearted energy of Sánchez’s tunes, which blur the divide between lead melody and accompaniment, steady pulse and unruly drift.The group’s personnel rotates often, but the format has never shifted: a pair of saxophones out front, often in high contrast with one another; a bassist; a drummer; and the tension-raising technique of Sánchez’s piano.As a composer, she culls a lot of her inspiration from life experience, and no matter how technical her music gets, it retains an unpretentious, poignant appeal. (On “Partenika” the deftly sculpted tunes often had prosaic names, like “Patella Dislocation” — yes, inspired by a knee injury Sánchez suffered — or simply “Yayyyy.”) So it’s no surprise that the quintet’s fourth album, “SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum),” is both musically complex and emotionally direct, managing to convey the raw, implacable pain of loss.The quintet’s lineup has almost completely changed since its latest release, “El Rayo De Luz,” from 2019. The saxophonist Román Filiú — a Sánchez collaborator since before she moved to New York — is the only remaining original member, and even he has moved from alto to tenor, making way for the rising alto saxophonist Alex LoRe. The rhythm section is now filled out by two of the most in-demand players on the New York scene: the bassist Rashaan Carter and the drummer Allan Mednard.Quintets are a standard format in jazz; having two saxophones up front, less so. Sánchez’s group has some things in common with Quintessence, a two-sax quintet that the pianist and composer Michele Rosewoman has led, off and on, since the 1980s: an off-kilter, often funky pulse; interwoven saxophone melodies; a dynamic role for the piano, which can either add melodic counterpoint to the saxophones or throw clots of harmony into the mix. But Sánchez — who studied classical piano and composition at a conservatory in Spain — seems ultimately more interested in the chamber-jazz lineage of Lennie Tristano, whose combo in the 1960s featured the saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh out front.And there’s no getting around the living legacies of Carla Bley and Guillermo Klein, two pianist-composers who draw folk traditions together with jazz and pop formations, and whose influences loom over Sánchez’s writing. Klein, an Argentine-born big band leader famous for his interleaved, cyclical melodies, was a teacher and mentor to Sánchez in the 2000s, when he was living in Barcelona; she would travel from Madrid for lessons.Polyphonic group improvising was central to early New Orleans jazz, and the joy of hearing horn players trade and haggle over melodies has always been part of the tradition. In Sánchez’s group, it’s more often an element of the composition than of the improvisation — but the two aren’t always cleanly divided: A saxophone solo may give way to a finely stitched three-part melody, then open onto a rugged piano solo.Sánchez was already trending toward a darker, more occluded approach to harmony and melody (they’re often one and the same for her) before her mother passed away. And there’s evidence of that interest all over “SAAM,” not just on the tunes inspired by loss. It’s there on “December 11th,” named for the day she died, and on “The Eternal Stillness,” on which a tired yawn of lissome, high-pitched saxophone harmony leads to a restive, sparring exchange. But it’s also on “Dear Worthiness,” a plangent meditation on the many sources of self-doubt these days, and on “When Dreaming Is the Only,” the album’s fervid, charging final track, on which Sánchez ranges from low rumbles to high, tolling notes to screwy lines and chunky chords, feeding fuel into LoRe and Filiú’s tense saxophone interplay.As a listener, you may end up feeling both energized and overloaded by this music, caught between the desire to keep singing the crisp melodies swimming around your ears and the recognition that you really can’t do it alone.The exception is “Marivi,” the album’s centerpiece and the only track not to include the saxophonists. Instead it features the guitarist and vocalist Camila Meza, a longtime Sánchez collaborator, singing Sánchez’s plaintive melody and lyrics; the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire painting in light strokes behind her; and the synths artist Charlotte Greve adding faint textures.The words, in Spanish, are a bereaved soliloquy: One verse translates to “I had imagined that we would have many days/where you would tell me/the secrets of your past.” After Akinmusire takes a solo, Meza returns to the main theme, and he joins her in simple unison. This time, writing from inside a desire that will never be fulfilled, Sánchez has crafted a melody of great simplicity and beauty. When the album ends, it’s one thing you really can take with you.Marta Sánchez Quintet“SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum)”(Whirlwind Recordings) More

Matthew Polenzani, a Met Opera stalwart known more for sweetness than swagger, stars in a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos.”Matthew Polenzani wanted to make something clear: He just isn’t a powerhouse tenor like Mario Del Monaco or Franco Corelli, two 20th-century greats.“If you’re looking for an animal, Corellian or Del Monaconian sound — yeah, then you hired the wrong person,” Polenzani said in an interview at the Metropolitan Opera during a break in rehearsals for Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” in which he is singing the title role for the first time.“It’s completely valid to get swept away by that,” he added. “But that’s not who I am, and that’s OK. I do what I do.”What Polenzani, 53, does is bring warm, vibrant sound, keen intelligence, fine musicianship and subtle feeling for style to a wide range of repertory: lyric Mozart roles, florid bel canto star turns, fervent Verdi and Puccini characters, and some weightier challenges, like the protagonist of Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann.” He has been a Met mainstay since his 2001 breakthrough at the house singing Lindoro in Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri,” racking up hundreds of performances with the company, and next season he will star on opening night alongside Sondra Radvanovsky in the Met’s first production of Cherubini’s “Medea.”Some writers and opera fans find him lacking in that classic swaggering, charismatic, even animalistic tenorial tone and presence. “Though he has the vocal goods, he doesn’t have the requisite spark,” the critic Anne Midgette wrote when Polenzani sang Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” at the Met in 2012.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview that those who mistake Polenzani’s “lack of external flamboyance” for lack of presence miss the point.“Matthew has rock-solid artistry, and the most limpid, beautiful voice,” Gelb said.Polenzani in rehearsal for “Don Carlos,” which is being performed at the Met for the first time in its original five-act French version.Diana Markosian for The New York TimesBut it’s certainly true that the title role in “Don Carlos” — which is being performed, starting Monday, for the first time at the Met in its original five-act French version — is not usually sung by singers who describe themselves, as Polenzani does, as lyric tenors. So the expectations are enormous as Polenzani takes on Carlos, in perhaps the highest-profile production of his long Met career.In the interview, he admitted feeling pressure at tackling the daunting assignment — a complex character, loosely based on the historical 16th-century heir to the throne of Philip II of Spain.“I can honestly say I wouldn’t have minded singing it once somewhere else, without this spotlight,” Polenzani said, adding: “I’ve resisted setting myself in one category, though, because the breadth of my career has been wide in terms of the repertory I’ve sung. You can have a valid argument for any part you want to sing, if it’s in your soul.”And he praised his colleagues, including the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is conducting, as well as the orchestra and chorus; a cast that also includes Sonya Yoncheva, Étienne Dupuis, Jamie Barton and Eric Owens; and the production’s director, David McVicar, who will also stage “Medea” next season.At its 1867 premiere in Paris, the five-act “Don Carlos,” adapted from a play by Schiller, was deemed too long. Verdi reluctantly agreed, and oversaw a number of revisions, as well as an Italian translation as “Don Carlo.” For decades, in the most sweeping intervention, the work’s first act was often cut, and the four remaining acts usually given in Italian.In 2010 at the Met, Nézet-Séguin led the five-act version (in Italian). Ever since, he has been angling to present the French “Don Carlos” at the house. As the plans for this new staging formed, Nézet-Séguin thought of Polenzani for the title role, even though he had never sung it, in either language.“Matthew Polenzani is one of the greatest tenors of our time,” Nézet-Séguin wrote in an email. “Matthew was perfect for Don Carlos because it’s a role of infinite nuance and subtlety, with such a varied range of emotion and expression, which would play exactly to Matthew’s qualities.”In 2012, Polenzani opened the Met’s season as the humble Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn his youth Polenzani never imagined becoming an opera singer, let alone a star tenor at the Met. He grew up in Wilmette, Ill., the son of music-loving parents. (Rose Polenzani, his sister, is a folk singer and songwriter.) Polenzani appeared in some high school musicals and fronted a pickup band called Empty Pockets.He got a scholarship to Eastern Illinois University to study music education, aiming to teach high school. It was “a cornfield with a university in its center,” he said. “I was nowhere artistically.” A master class with the bass-baritone Alan Held, who sang often at the Met, got him thinking about opera. With the support of his teachers he entered the graduate program at the Yale School of Music, and took an extra year there.“It’s lucky I stayed,” he said: He met Rosa Maria Pascarella, a mezzo-soprano, who became his wife. He was accepted into the young artist program at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and from then on steadily progressed in a career that has included regular appearances with the world’s major houses.Since his Met debut in 1997 he has sung 41 roles there, though quite a few were smaller parts during his yeoman years. But Polenzani has been crucial in several significant new productions, starring as Tamino when Julie Taymor’s staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” was introduced in 2004, and as Alfredo when Willy Decker’s surreal take on Verdi’s “La Traviata” arrived at the house on New Year’s Eve in 2010. He starred in another New Year’s gala in 2012, the Met premiere of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.”A highlight came in 2017 when, in a revival of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s boldly stylized production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” Polenzani made the title role his own, blending virile heft with Mozartean elegance, and delivering a fearless account of the impassioned aria “Fuor del mar.”He now lives just north of New York City, in Pelham, with his wife and three sons, having survived tragedy: the loss, on Christmas Eve 2005, of their first child, Alessandra, who was 16 months old. For a long time after, Polenzani said, “trying to figure out why you have to get out of bed is the first battle.”“You are walking in a tunnel,” he said, “it’s endless black, and you can’t see your hand in front of your face.”Polenzani (in purple shirt) was acclaimed for his appearance as Nadir in Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow his family is thriving. One of the most charming moments of the Met’s At-Home Gala, early in the pandemic in April 2020, came when Polenzani, accompanying himself at the piano, sang a sweet-toned, wistful account of “Danny Boy.” At the end, you could hear his family cheering upstairs.“Don Carlos,” he said, comes at “a good time for me in my career. The part is not exactly heavier or more dramatic than others I’ve sung,” though, he added, “it’s certainly longer, especially in this version.”There is a “certain air of refinement to the French version,” he said, that suits him vocally. “It’s a little raucous, less raw, which is not to say less emotional — quite the opposite.”Also, he said, “The way we’re looking at it, Carlos is an antihero.” The crisis the character goes through begins in that often-cut first act, set in Fontainebleau, France, when Carlos meets the woman he is supposed to marry as part of a peace treaty: Elisabeth of Valois, the daughter of the French king. They quickly fall in love, but then word arrives that the Spanish king, Carlos’s father, has decided to marry her instead. Their vexed relationship energizes the tragic political epic that follows.“What we miss without the Fontainebleau act,” Polenzani said, “is the moment of falling in love,” adding, “If we don’t see them fall in love — and this is true of so many operas, like ‘Bohème’ and ‘Traviata’ — then we don’t care so much if it doesn’t work out in the end.”McVicar has emphasized Carlos’s similarities to Hamlet, and the emotional damage that has resulted from his broken relationship with Elisabeth and his unloving father. This nuanced take on the character is in keeping with Polenzani’s usual approach, in which he plumbs characters for their internal motivations and complexities.What most distinguishes his portrayals goes hand in hand with his modest yet superb vocal artistry: the earnestness and authenticity that he exudes onstage. Earnestness is difficult to learn or feign; it is a quality that a performer — or a person, for that matter — simply has.“I don’t think about it ever,” Polenzani said. “What I think about is trying to be as firmly in whichever character’s shoes I’m in.”“I work at being earnest in that way,” he added. “I want to be as honest as I can be.”This came through poignantly in the Met’s production of Bizet’s “Les Pêcheurs de Perles,” which opened at the Met on New Year’s Eve in 2015. As the humble fisherman Nadir, Polenzani sang the aria “Je crois entendre encore” like an enraptured young man recalling an impossible love.He shaped the gently rising phrases with sublime sadness and tender radiance, capping the final one with a ravishing pianissimo high C that few tenors — past or present — could match. Talk about stage presence and inhabiting the moment in opera: The ovation was tremendous. More