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      Edita Gruberova, Dazzling Soprano With Emotional Power, Dies at 74

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      A Slovak coloratura, she was a fixture at the opera houses of Vienna and Munich, artfully balancing technical brilliance with deep expression.Edita Gruberova, a Slovak soprano who enchanted audiences with gleaming, vibrant and technically dazzling singing over a 50-year career, becoming a leading exponent of the coloratura soprano repertory, died on Monday in Zurich. She was 74.The cause was a head injury from a fall in her home, said Markus Thiel, a music journalist and her biographer.Ms. Gruberova, whose career was mainly in Europe, was a true coloratura soprano. She had a high, light and agile voice that was easily capable of dispatching embellished runs, all manner of trills and leaps to shimmering top notes.She excelled in the roles associated with her voice type, especially in the early 19th-century bel canto operas of Bellini (Elvira in “I Puritani” and Giulietta in “I Capuleti e i Montecchi”), Donizetti (the title role in “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Elizabeth I in “Roberto Devereux”) and Rossini (notably Rosina in “Il Barbieri di Siviglia”).Reviewing her 1989 performance as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera, the critic Martin Mayer wrote in Opera magazine that Ms. Gruberova “trills without thinking about it,” could “sing very softly and still project into the house,” and “soars over ensemble and orchestra in the great third-act finale.” Many opera devotees considered her a successor to the formidable Joan Sutherland.Ms. Gruberova knew that opera fans were often swept up in the sheer pyrotechnics of a coloratura soprano’s singing. That was the easy part, she said in an interview recorded at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1986, where she was starring in “Lucia di Lammermoor.” The hard part was conveying emotion through the technical feats.This, she said, “is what people want to hear from me, or what they hear from me and like.” Even a coloratura’s high notes, including a big final high note in an aria, “must also be the expression from emotions,” she said. It must “say something” and not be “for display.”Reviewing that 1986 “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Chicago for The Christian Science Monitor, Thor Eckert Jr. wrote that Ms. Gruberova had given “an astonishing demonstration of her art.”“The level of poise, of sheer vocal mastery, of musical and dramatic insight” were unmatched on the vocal scene of the time, he said. Her performance of the Mad Scene, he added, was “a study in the communicative power of histrionic simplicity.”Yet there were dissenters on this occasion, including John von Rhein, the critic for The Chicago Tribune, who wrote that she had treated the scene as if it were “merely a florid showpiece.”To her many admirers, however, Ms. Gruberova artfully balanced technical execution and emotional expression, a quality described in a 2015 Opera News article by the soprano Lauren Flanigan. Ms. Flanigan was an understudy to Ms. Gruberova in the title role of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” in Barcelona in 1992.In that troubled queen’s first aria during the run, Ms Gruberova “was by turns girlish and direct, vulnerable and overbearing,” Ms. Flanigan wrote, adding, “Her voice was compelling me to pay attention and listen.”Ms. Gruberova in 1970. A teacher arranged for her to audition the previous year at the Vienna State Opera without the knowledge of Czechoslovakia’s Communist authorities.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesEdita Gruberova was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (in what is now Slovakia), the only child of a German father, Gustav Gruber, and a Hungarian mother, Etela Gruberova. Her father, a laborer, was a volatile man who drank to excess and was imprisoned for anti-Communist activities when Ms. Gruberova was a child. Her mother, who worked on a collective farm, a vineyard, had a pleasant singing voice and encouraged her gifted daughter’s singing in school choirs and local ensembles.Ms. Gruberova attended the Bratislava Conservatory and continued her studies at the city’s Academy of Performing Arts. While still in training, Ms. Gruberova performed with the Lucnica folk ensemble and appeared with the Slovak National Theater. She once played Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady.”She made her official debut in 1968, in Bratislava, as Rosina in “Il Barbiere di Siviglia.” That same year she won a voice competition in Toulouse, France, and the acclaim led to appearances with an opera ensemble in the central Slovakian city of Banska Bystrica.Her teacher at the conservatory, Maria Medvecka, arranged for Ms. Gruberova to audition for the Vienna State Opera in 1969. She did so secretly so that the Czech authorities would not find out.An engagement there as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” followed in 1970 and brought her considerable attention. That year she emigrated to the West. She would go on to give more than 700 performances with the Vienna State Opera, the last a farewell gala concert in 2018. She became a mainstay as well of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.Mozart’s Queen of the Night was also her role in a highly praised debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in England in 1973 as well as in her Met debut in 1977. A breakthrough came in 1976 when Ms. Gruberova sang Zerbinetta in a new production of Strauss’s “Ariadne aux Naxos” in Vienna, with Karl Böhm conducting.The reviews were sensational, especially for her brilliant rendering of Zerbinetta’s long showpiece aria, when the character, a coquettish member of a comedy troupe, tries to persuade the heartsick Ariadne to forget the godly lover who has abandoned her and look to other men.The eminent Böhm, who had worked closely with the composer, famously commented at the time, “My God, if only Strauss had heard your Zerbinetta!”Performing primarily in Europe, Ms. Gruberova made only 24 appearances with the Met through 1996, including performances as Verdi’s Violetta (another of her trademark roles), Donizetti’s Lucia and Bellini’s Elvira.In 1970, she married Stefan Klimo, a musicologist and choir master. The marriage ended in divorce in 1983. She is survived by two daughters, Barbara and Klaudia Klimo, and three grandchildren. From 1983 to 2005 she was in a relationship with Friedrich Haider, an Austrian conductor and pianist.Ms. Gruberova leaves a large discography of recordings, including classic accounts of operas by Strauss, Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi, and albums of arias and songs. She appeared in several films of operas, most notably two directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: Verdi’s “Rigoletto” in 1982, singing Gilda to Luciano Pavarotti’s Duke of Mantua, with Ingvar Wixell in the title role, and Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 1988, singing Fiordiligi.Ms. Gruberova’s last performance in opera was as Elizabeth I in Donizetti’s “Roberto Devereux” in Munich in 2019.In 1979, while singing Zerbinetta at the Met, she was briefly interviewed for the afternoon radio broadcast and made comments about the role that seemed pertinent to her own character.“I don’t see her as a soubrette but as a young lady who has lived, you could say, with quite a past,” Ms. Gruberova said. “But she does not take anything too seriously, because she can laugh it off. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word melancholy.” More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber Brings the Music of the Night Back to ‘Phantom’

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      After a long pandemic pause, “The Phantom of the Opera” is returning to Broadway with some help from its creator.“The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show in Broadway history, resumes performances Friday.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAndrew Lloyd Webber looked pleased.He was standing over the large orchestra pit of his musical “The Phantom of the Opera” at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, hearing the instrumental “Entr’Acte” from the top after a half-hour of detail work — more emphatic delivery here, more passionate lyricism there. He held his hands at his hips, a contented smile on his face.“That’s great, much better,” he said after the ensemble finished. “It just needs to be played like it’s on the edge, all the time.”Lloyd Webber, the composer of some of the most famous musicals of the past five decades — in a wide stylistic range from the radio-ready rock of “Jesus Christ Superstar” to the maddening tunefulness of “Cats” and the lush Romanticism of “Phantom” — was in town from Britain to prepare for the reopening on Friday of the longest-running show in Broadway history.Andrew Lloyd Webber visited the musical to rehearse the pit orchestra with its conductor, Kristen Blodgette.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesVisits from composers are rarely afforded to musicals as settled in as “Phantom,” which opened at the Majestic in 1988. But because the pandemic kept it shuttered for over a year and a half, its return is more like a revival; the production’s tech has been spruced up during the pause, and the cast and orchestra were rehearsing the material as if it were new.And that’s exactly how Lloyd Webber wanted it to sound, he told the musicians during rehearsal on Thursday, by way of some personal history.“I remember when I was a boy I managed to get a ticket to the Zeffirelli production of ‘Tosca’ at the Royal Opera House,” Lloyd Webber said, recalling how he had always heard that Puccini’s melodrama was a potboiler not worth the price of admission. Yet Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director with an extravagantly cinematic sensibility, “decided that he would shake up the cobwebs.”On Thursday, Lloyd Webber also worked on the duet “All I Ask of You” with Meghan Picerno and John Riddle, the show’s current Christine and Raoul.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“What I just remember is, Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas that night, in the second act, made an impression on me that I’ll never forget,” he continued. “It was just extraordinary, because the critics were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is actually the greatest score.’ I’m not trying to say this is the same thing, but it’s just that we have to approach everything now as if it’s the very, very, very first time.”“Phantom” may not be Puccini, but its score — thick and lavishly orchestrated — shares more with opera than most Broadway musicals. It calls for an unusually large ensemble of nearly 30 players, about a third of whom have been with the show since 1988. “Today I don’t think we would be able to do that,” Lloyd Webber said during an interview between rehearsals. “I think everybody’s forgotten what a real orchestra can sound like.”During the pandemic shutdown, Lloyd Webber was one of theater’s fiercest and most outspoken advocates.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGiven that size, Lloyd Webber was particular about amplification on Thursday, preferring to let the instruments sound as acoustic as possible. But the orchestra needed to give more to make it work; virtually all of his notes to the conductor, the associate musical supervisor Kristen Blodgette, were about adding emphasis to a score that is already brazenly emphatic.“You can make a little more of that phrase,” he said at one point; at others: “We want the audience in our grip,” “It’s just a little undernourished” and “I think that can really come up a bit, I would treat it as appassionata.”He was joined by David Caddick, the production musical supervisor, who wanted for more of the same, asking the strings to “play into the shape of the melody” during a section of the “Entr’Acte” based on the soaring duet “All I Ask of You,” and reminding them to “make every melody sing out.”The “Phantom” orchestra is unusually large, consisting of nearly 30 players.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesWhen some of the cast later came onstage — to rehearse the operatic set piece “Prima Donna” and “All I Ask of You” — Lloyd Webber at times seemed to be channeling Hal Prince, the show’s legendary director, who died in 2019, guiding the singers in their understanding and delivery of lyrics on a level as small as single words. “I’m one of the only ones left who was here on the ground floor,” Lloyd Webber later said. (The choreographer, Gillian Lynne, died in 2018.) “But I was very close to Hal on this.”In the scene leading up to “Prima Donna,” for example, he welcomed more joy and comedy. He told Craig Bennett, who plays Monsieur Firmin: “It’s great fun if you can say ‘To hell with Gluck and Handel, have a scandal’ — it’s the inner rhyme, isn’t it? That’s the game, savoring every moment because there are some good lines there.”And to Meghan Picerno and John Riddle, the show’s current Christine and Raoul, he said while running through “All I Ask of You”: “I think that what we’re perhaps not getting is that they’re like teenagers in love. It needs to be more earnest. Say ‘One love, one lifetime’ as if you really mean it. Just run with it. The more of that there is here, the more of an antidote it will be to what comes in the second act.”A poster for the show outside the theater. “I do always love to hear it,” Lloyd Webber said of the “Phantom” score.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAgain, this is uncommon; such attention from a composer is more likely to be given to a new show, such as Lloyd Webber’s latest, “Cinderella,” which opened in London this summer after a series of pandemic delays. During that time — and throughout the shutdown — he was one of theater’s fiercest and most outspokenly frustrated advocates. And when “Cinderella” at last debuted in the West End, its opening night was also a milestone for being that musical’s first performance for a full-capacity audience.It’s an ordeal that could make for a chapter of the awaited sequel to his memoir, “Unmasked,” which follows his life and work only until “Phantom.” “Oh, I’m not writing that,” he said in the interview between rehearsals, adding with a puckish grin: “There’s too much I know. I’d rather write another show, and get ‘Cinderella’ here.”But first, he had “Phantom” to open the next day. And a rehearsal to return to. As he stood up from a lobby chair to walk back into the house, he said, “I do always love to hear it.” More

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      Bernard Haitink, Perhaps the Wisest Conductor of Them All

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      The unflashy maestro, who died on Thursday, gave orchestras a sound with integrity, weight and gravity, without heaviness.What I can still feel today, almost in my skin, is the warmth. It was July 20, 2009, at the Royal Albert Hall in London; I sat behind the orchestra, all the better to see the conductor.Bernard Haitink had led the London Symphony Orchestra through the first three movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I can’t remember much about them, to be honest, though I’m confident that the portrayal of their carnage, ironies and fear was sure. All memory of that melted in the generosity of the embrace that followed.If a D flat chord can be decent, can be understanding, then the one Haitink drew that evening from the orchestra’s strings near the start of Mahler’s concluding Adagio, the composer’s farewell to life, was that and more.Haitink lay something close to a benediction on that benighted music, and through it on us, as if to say that everything would be all right, that we could accept calmly what was to come. Never had I heard such resolve, such serenity in the face of death as Haitink found in that movement; it sang with empathy, and it seemed to sing the truth.Under no conductor did music so often sound so right as it did under Bernard Haitink, who died on Thursday at 92.You went to a Haitink concert fully aware of what to expect, only for those expectations usually to be surpassed. Whether it was in Brahms or Bruckner, Beethoven or Mahler, at his best, and especially in his later years, Haitink was able to make music emerge as if it was entirely uninterpreted — without it becoming anonymous. Haitink’s conducting was personal, even as it felt impersonal.Plenty of artists say that they want to get out of the way of the music, that they want to let it speak for itself. The claim is always illusory, for the transfiguration of notes on a page into sound in a hall demands that choices be made. But Haitink made the illusion seem real.Other men would have made that talent at conveying naturalness into something doctrinaire, would have rooted it in a claim to be extending some grand tradition, or in a declared attachment to the letter of the score. But Haitink was not obviously an heir to the literalism of Arturo Toscanini, and certainly not to the uncanny subjectivity of Wilhelm Furtwängler or the eccentricities of Willem Mengelberg, the conductor he grew up hearing at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, where he was chief conductor from 1961 to 1988.What Haitink did have was a sound. David Alberman, the chair and principal second violin of the London Symphony, wrote that Haitink had an “unmistakable ability to change the sound of an orchestra with his mere presence,” an ability that even the musicians who adored him could hardly explain.The sound was not flashy, nor did it seem as if it were applied from the outside. It imbued what the ensembles he led already possessed with a deeper integrity, a weight, a gravity, that was nonetheless rarely portentous or heavy. Indeed, in the French repertoire in which he excelled, that careful seriousness of purpose drew a clarity, a beguiling transparency.Haitink offered no insistent interventions in the roiling aesthetic debates of the decades after World War II. Even when he began to move with the times, he arrived at a style that was characteristic for its lack of fuss, as in the leaner Beethoven of the last of his three cycles of the symphonies, in which the influence of the historically informed performance movement was plain, but subtly so.“I have no message to the world,” he told The New York Times in 2002. When pressed, he would deny knowing much about what he was doing; a book of reflections was entitled “Conducting Is a Mystery.” (His master classes suggested otherwise.)This was not the norm among conductors of a domineering, publicity-seeking age, but then again, Haitink eschewed stardom. “I’m not a conductor type,” he frankly told The Times in 1976.Whether it was because of the deprivation of his childhood in occupied, impoverished Amsterdam, or for reasons deeper to his psychology, he was shy, quiet, humble. He came to say little in rehearsals, but he did not need to. Conducting with his eyes and brow, a lean of the head here and a hint of a smile there, he steadily refined his technique down to stabs of time beaten firmly, the left hand offering an utterly exact emphasis when necessary.Haitink could be usefully obstinate amid administrative problems, as when he confronted financial and other difficulties at the Concertgebouw and, most dramatically, at the Royal Opera House in London in the late 1990s, near the end of a tenure that ran from 1987 to 2002. But it is hard to think of another conductor who would have been as willing, at the height of his powers in the 2000s, to take posts he knew were only temporary at ensembles as distinguished as the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as they searched for new leaders.If there was little of the ego about Haitink, there still remained sufficient pride that he made over 450 recordings. Some of them are unnecessarily duplicative, some oddly ill conceived or a tad staid. Many are to be returned to like old, knowing friends.Much of his attention was put to Mahler and Bruckner, the latter’s Seventh being his trademark, the work with which he retired in 2019. Neither his gorgeous 1978 account with the Concertgebouw, nor his marginally more monumental repeat with Chicago in 2007, should be missed.Introductions to his Beethoven and Wagner, his Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, his Bartok and his Stravinsky remain easily available, but his best work can take some searching: an amazingly convincing set of Liszt’s symphonic poems; a Vaughan Williams survey in which the lows are desperately low but the highs are exceptionally high; Mahler symphonies taped live at a series of Christmases in Amsterdam; cleareyed, sensitive Mozart operas with forces from Glyndebourne, where he was music director for a decade; Ravel, as glistening with the Concertgebouw as with the Boston Symphony Orchestra later on; radio broadcasts that go as far as Henze, Takemitsu and Ligeti; a Strauss “Alpine Symphony” of rare humanity; a Brahms cycle from Boston that unfolds with unforced, unforgettable patience.It was in Brahms that I last heard him, in his final run with the Boston Symphony in 2018, an account of the Second Symphony that, I wrote then, had “nothing wistful or valedictory about it,” just that “familiar, staunch certainty.” It was scrappy, but it glowed with the same warmth as the Mahler I had heard a decade before in London — with that same sanity and wisdom.Apt, for the conductor who might well have been the wisest of them all. 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      Lana Del Rey’s Sisterly Solidarity, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Miranda Lambert, Summer Walker, My Morning Jacket 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.Lana Del Rey, ‘Blue Banisters’“Blue Banisters,” out Friday, is the ever-prolific Lana Del Rey’s second album released this year, and its melodically roving title track feels like a kind of spiritual sequel to “Dance Till We Die” from her previous record, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” Del Rey’s music has recently become populated with a kind of coterie of female first names, giving many of her songs an insular yet invitingly chummy atmosphere. If “Dance Till We Die” was a kind of matriarchal communion with some of her musical heroes (“I’m covering Joni and dancing with Joan/Stevie’s calling on the telephone”), “Blue Banisters” finds her getting by with a little help from her less famous friends. This vaporous, searching piano ballad ponders a choice between settling down into conventional, wifely femininity and living a more restless and solitary artist’s life: “Most men don’t want a woman with a legacy,” Del Rey sings, quoting her friend Jenny’s poolside musings. By the end of the song, though, she’s eked out a third option, neither in love nor alone, surrounded by “all my sisters” who come together to paint her banisters a different hue than the one her ex once preferred. For all the criticism Del Rey bore early in her career for conjuring the loneliness of embodying a male fantasy, it’s been fascinating to watch her music gradually turn into a space warmed by romantic friendship and female solidarity. LINDSAY ZOLADZMiranda Lambert, ‘If I Was a Cowboy’Beyoncé famously mused “If I Were a Boy”; Miranda Lambert is now giving a similar song-length thought exercise a countrified twist. “If I Was a Cowboy” — Lambert’s first solo single since her eclectic, Grammy-winning 2019 album “Wildcard” — finds her in a breezy, laid-back register, as opposed to her more fiery fare. But the song’s outlaw attitude and clever gender commentary give “If I Was a Cowboy” a casually rebellious spirit. “So mamas, if your daughters grow up to be cowboys,” Lambert sings on the smirking bridge, “ … so what?” ZOLADZMy Morning Jacket, ‘Lucky to Be Alive’The seventh track on My Morning Jacket’s new album — its first in six years, and ninth overall — is an especially succinct encapsulation of two things the Louisville band has always been able to do well. The first half of the song is all effortlessly playful, carnivalesque pop (with the frontman Jim James hamming up his growly delivery of the word “aliiiiive”). Halfway through, though, “Lucky to Be Alive” transforms into the sort of psychedelic, Laser-Floyd jam session that suggests why MMJ has built a reputation as a stellar live band. Put the two sides together and you get the song’s — and perhaps the band’s — overall mantra: Always look on the bright side of the moon. ZOLADZAlex Lahey, ‘Spike the Punch’Here’s a potent blast of sweetly spring-wound power-pop, courtesy of the underrated Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lahey. If you’ve ever thrown a party at which the guests have lingered a little too long, this one’s for you and your beloved: “Spike the punch and get everyone sent home, so in the end it’s you and me dancing all alone.” ZOLADZSnail Mail, ‘Ben Franklin’The enticing second single from Snail Mail’s upcoming album, “Valentine,” finds Lindsey Jordan growling and vamping atop a slinky bass line. “I never should have hurt you,” she sings in a low register, “I’ve got the devil in me.” Jordan’s just as winningly charismatic in the music video: Come to see her channel VMA-snake-era Britney Spears as a yellow python slithers across her shoulders; stay to watch her share an ice cream cone with a puppy. ZOLADZSummer Walker featuring JT from City Girls, ‘Ex for a Reason’If the title suggests a kiss-off directed at a past boyfriend, think again: “Ex for a Reason” turns out to be a sharp-tongued warning to a current man’s stubbornly lingering former flame — consider it a kind of R-rated “The Boy Is Mine.” Summer Walker spits venom in a deliciously incongruous, laid-back croon (“Tonight I’ll end it all/spin the block two, three times, make sure all the cancer’s gone”), before JT from City Girls steps in to land the fatal blow, with gusto. ZOLADZÁlvaro Díaz featuring Rauw Alejandro, ‘Problemón’There are plenty of entanglement anthems in reggaeton, but the Puerto Rican singers Álvaro Díaz and Rauw Alejandro are masters of perreo desire. For their latest collaboration, “Problemón,” the pair tackle a tricky situation: a partner lied about being single, and now a romance has to be kept under wraps. Díaz and Alejandro put melody front and center on a track that spotlights the contours of their addictive pop. It’s an easy addition to sad girl reggaeton playlists. ISABELIA HERRERASam Wilkes, ‘One Theme’The bassist and producer Sam Wilkes has been gaining popularity among both jazz fans and beat-heads thanks to a series of woozy analog-tape recordings with the saxophonist Sam Gendel. On Friday, Wilkes released an album of his own, “One Theme and Subsequent Improvisation,” which flows from an equally viscid vein. He went into the studio with two drummer friends to record a lengthy improvisation, then picked apart and edited that recording, and had two keyboardists subsequently lay their own improvisations over it. The end product is a magnetic album that revolves around, and often spins out far away from, the harmonized bass figure that opens the album’s opening track, “One Theme.” Across 33 minutes, Wilkes can sometimes call up minimalist voyagers like William Basinski or even Éliane Radigue, or he can wind up in post-rock territory — especially when the twin drummers take the wheel. (Gendel also released a single this week, a wholesale reworking of Laurie Anderson’s “Sweaters,” from her hit experimental album from 1982, “Big Science.”) GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJlin, ‘Embryo’“Embryo,” from the producer Jlin, is pure electronic calisthenics. A buzzing synth flutters through the track like a nettlesome fly in your ear as a high-intensity workout session commences with overblown bass, thumping drums and four-on-the-floor rhythms that flicker in and out of focus. Before you know it, the whole thing is over, and your heart will need some recovery time. HERRERAAnimal Collective, ‘Prester John’The first offering from Animal Collective’s forthcoming album “Time Skiffs” (which will be out in February 2022) is surprisingly bass-heavy, a gently hypnotic groove that unfolds across a pleasantly unhurried six-and-a-half minutes. As far as Animal Collective songs go, it’s relatively tame — devoid of its signature freak-out shrieks and sounding more like a cross between the Beach Boys and Grizzly Bear, as the quartet’s voices join in stirring harmony. Still, it feels like a natural step in the indie stalwarts’ gradual evolution, the sound of a band once so fascinated with childlike awe acquiescing to their own version of maturity. ZOLADZKazemde George, ‘This Spring’For the young, Brooklyn-based tenor saxophonist Kazemde George, to insist doesn’t necessarily mean raising the volume or pushing idiosyncrasy. His debut album — titled “I Insist” in a reference to jazz’s protest tradition, and to Max Roach specifically — is mostly about laying a claim to the straight-ahead jazz mantle. With a brisk swing feel and a set of suspenseful chord changes that only half-resolve, “This Spring” is one of 10 original compositions on the record, but it also would’ve been at home on an album from a young saxophonist 30 years ago, during jazz’s Neo-Classicist revival. Throughout, what George insists upon most — from himself and his bandmates — is clarity: Melody is never sacrificed to flair or crossfire, even as the momentum builds. RUSSONELLO More

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      Review: An Espionage Opera Remains Enigmatic and Urgent

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      Robert Ashley’s “eL/Aficionado” is receiving a rare revival that is a testament to its vitality.You can’t help but feel some sympathy for the protagonist of Robert Ashley’s opera “eL/Aficionado” when she says, “The meaning of the scene is impossible to describe, if one looks for meaning in the ordinary sense.”It’s an evergreen sentiment when it comes to Ashley’s idiosyncratic and innovative works, atmospheric enigmas that stretch everyday spoken language to its extremes by elongating it and emphasizing its contours — elevating the ordinary to something, well, operatic.An avant-gardist who worked closely with a recurring set of collaborators to realize his vision — which generally involved a deceptively simple harmonic foundation under deceptively simple vocal technique — his work is difficult to revive, especially following his death in 2014.But in recent years his operas have begun to pass to a new generation, through the invaluable efforts of Mimi Johnson, his widow, and Tom Hamilton, a longtime colleague. The latest revival — of “eL/Aficionado,” from the early 1990s — opened Thursday at Roulette in Brooklyn; it joins its fellow presentations since his death in offering a testament to the work’s enduring vitality. (A new “eL/Aficionado” recording is also out from Johnson’s label, Lovely Music.)Ostensibly an espionage thriller told through the fragmented biography of an operative known only as the Agent, “eL/Aficionado” is the second installment in the tetralogy “Now Eleanor’s Idea.” But it stands alone as a subtle evocation of 20th-century politics and the paranoia of the Cold War. Like much of Ashley’s work, however, it defies simple description, with Dada-esque digressions and casual turns toward the cosmic.In the most explicit departure from the opera’s initial run and recording, the Agent, a role written for the baritone Thomas Buckner, is in this revival recast as a mezzo-soprano. Kayleigh Butcher, a contemporary music veteran making her Ashley debut, performs the part with technical assurance and commanding interpretive depth.Kayleigh Butcher (front, with McCorkle) plays the Agent, the opera’s protagonist and a role originally written for a baritone.Wolf DanielAs the Agent, she — a pronoun change that now extends through the libretto — recounts her career to a trio of interrogators (all of whom wear suits and sunglasses, with one, the most senior of the bunch, seated apart and elevated on a platform upstage). Butcher performs the closest thing to traditional singing, full-voiced and vibrato-rich — though crucially unassuming, never rising to true grandeur but nonetheless building tension through language: an emphasized syllable or a single letter deployed to dramatic effect.Over the opera’s 72 minutes, the interrogation becomes increasingly unreliable. It could be real; it might not be. There are clues, perhaps, in the surreally minimalistic set — by David Moodey, after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994 — which consists of just the Agent’s and interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently and mysteriously. There are also suggestions in the libretto of dreams and analysis, and the slippery nature of memory. Nothing, it seems, is certain.The Agent’s tale moves with alluring and hypnotic momentum — at 72 beats per minute, to be exact, a common pace in Ashley’s music. The electronic score (designed and mixed live by Hamilton, the production’s music director) might seem a bit dated, its dreamy synths consistent with the era of “Twin Peaks” or “The X-Files.” But consider how Ashley’s influence, long pervasive in the work of artists like Laurie Anderson, reaches operas of today, such as “Sun & Sea,” which with a similar soundscape won the top prize at the Venice Biennale and is currently selling out on tour.The minimalistic set by David Moodey (after Jacqueline Humbert’s designs from 1994) consists of the Agent’s and her interrogators’ desks, along with two Ionic columns and a free-standing window whose curtains blow gently.Wolf DanielAnd like “Sun & Sea,” a disarmingly relaxed collection of dispatches from a world in climate crisis, “eL/Aficionado” operates on different registers. Personal ads, recited throughout, are peppered with comedy; the cast comes together as a chorus for manic real estate advertisements. These asides might mean everything, or nothing at all.Personals, with their economical writing, are by their nature poetic, and rise to the operatic in the rhythmic and lyrical speech of the junior interrogators. As one of them, Bonnie Lander relishes the percussiveness of “Passion for Piero, Palladio, Puccini, pasta”; the other, Paul Pinto, gets his turn with the staccato phrasing of “Successful. Super-smart. Sensuous. Sensitive. Cuddly. Affectionate.”The senior interrogator (Brian McCorkle) also blurs the line between speaking and singing, prolonging phrases and, later, pre-empting the Agent’s lines with identical ones, whispered as if fed to her. He provides a preamble for each scene, beginning with “My Brother Called.” (“He is not my brother in the ordinary sense,” the Agent explains. “It is a word we use in the department. It means someone you can count on.”) Subsequent set pieces recount tests and assignments, with interjections of the bizarre and unbelievable — things that the Agent is told to take to her grave.For patient listeners, there are revelations. Those ads, it turns out, are code. “The person described as ‘sought’ is the same person in a different code,” we are told. “I believe it is a kind of confirmation, both for the listener — whoever that was — and for the speaker. A double-check against the memory.”But it’s possible that this code was just another test for the Agent, who, disenchanted, left “the department” at some point before the interrogation. “Most of what happened makes no sense to me,” she admits in the penultimate scene.Jaded and distrustful, she gave up on looking for meaning long ago and suggests the interrogators do the same. That is what pervasive uncertainty does to the mind — a life of never knowing what is a test and what an assignment, what is code and what is simply language.This deeply unsettled feeling might have been endemic during the Cold War. But it has never really left us. Confusion to the point of exasperated resignation, we’ve seen, can be weaponized to influence elections. It can turn a public health crisis into a deadly mess. With “eL/Aficionado,” Ashley achieved what opera — or all art, for that matter — is at its most vital: urgent and, for better and worse, timeless.eL/AficionadoThrough Saturday at Roulette, Brooklyn; roulette.org. More

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      Li Yundi Is Detained in China on Suspicion of Prostitution

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      Li Yundi, a famous performer, was accused of soliciting a woman, state news outlets said. Officials often use such accusations against their enemies.A prominent Chinese pianist, Li Yundi, has been detained on prostitution suspicion in Beijing, state-run news outlets in China reported on Thursday.Mr. Li, 39, who had gained celebrity in China as a performer and a reality television personality, was accused of soliciting a 29-year-old woman, according to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party.The authorities in Beijing did not provide many details of the incident, saying in a statement that a 39-year-old man with the last name Li had acknowledged wrongdoing and had been detained “in accordance with the law.”In an apparent reference to Mr. Li’s case, the Beijing authorities later posted a photo of piano keys alongside the text: “The world is not simply black and white, but one must distinguish between black and white. It must never be mistaken.”The Chinese government often uses accusations of prostitution to intimidate political enemies, and it was unclear why Mr. Li had been singled out and what punishment he might face. Mr. Li and his representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Reports of Mr. Li’s detention quickly became one of the most widely discussed topics on the Chinese internet, with hundreds of thousands of people weighing in. Many expressed shock at the detention of Mr. Li, who rose to fame after becoming one of the youngest people to win the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2000, when he was 18.“He has accumulated popularity for many years, and now it has been ruined after 20 or 30 years of hard work,” wrote one user on Weibo, a Twitterlike Chinese site.Under China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has taken a tough line on artists and has led efforts to “purify” the country’s cultural environment, often in pursuit of political goals. The authorities have in recent months tried to rein in China’s raucous celebrity culture, warning about the perils of celebrity worship and fan clubs.Mr. Li, who has more than 20 million followers on Weibo, is a regular guest on the annual Lunar New Year gala on Chinese television, which is watched by hundreds of millions of people. This year, he performed “I Love You China,” a patriotic song.He rose to fame as a pianist and in the West is sometimes called only by his given name, Yundi. But in China he has become known more recently for his work on reality shows, including “Call Me By Fire,” in which male celebrities compete to form a performance group. Several episodes of the show were removed from the Chinese internet on Thursday after news of Mr. Li’s detention spread.Chinese commentators pointed to the case as an example of a lack of ethics among artists.“No matter how skilled he is, he will not be able to convey his sadness through performance once his image is damaged,” People’s Daily wrote in a social media post. “There can only be a future by advocating morality and abiding by the law.”The Chinese government has a history of using charges of prostitution to sideline political enemies, and experts said Mr. Li’s detention should be looked at critically.Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University law professor who specializes in the Chinese legal system, said the lack of transparency about his case was troubling.“Can one be confident that the facts alleged are true?” Professor Cohen said. “Prostitution is such a time-honored Communist Party claim against political opponents that one has to be suspicious of this case.”Claire Fu More

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      Bernard Haitink, Conductor Who Let Music Speak for Itself, Dies at 92

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      Mr. Haitink, who was closely identified with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, drew direct, unaffected interpretations of symphonic works and opera.Bernard Haitink, an unaffected maestro who led Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for 27 years and was known for presenting powerful readings of the symphonies of Mahler, Bruckner and Beethoven conducting orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 92. His death was announced by his management agency, Askonas Holt.Along with the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink had long associations in Britain with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Glyndebourne Festival. He was also a prolific recording artist, putting on disc the complete symphonies of nearly a dozen canonical composers — sometimes twice.Mr. Haitink let the music emerge from the orchestra, often transcendently, without imposing a heavy-handed interpretation that a star conductor might.His self-effacing nature was noticed early on.He was “not one of the glamour boys on the podium,” Harold C. Schonberg, the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, wrote in January 1975 after Mr. Haitink’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7.“He does not dance, he does not patronize the best tailor on the Continent,” Mr. Schonberg continued. “But he is a dedicated musician, always on top of the music, getting exactly what he wants from his players.”Reviewing his performance of the same symphony with the Philharmonic in 2011, the critic Steve Smith wrote in The Times: “Some conductors strive for mysticism in late Bruckner; Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself, with results that can approach the supernatural and often did here.”Mr. Haitink was so humble as a young man that he almost missed out on his first big break. The Concertgebouw had asked him in 1956 to replace an indisposed Carlo Maria Giulini for a performance of Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor. But he initially turned down the opportunity, despite having conducted the work many times. He said he didn’t feel ready.But he changed his mind, the concert was a success, and so began his long collaboration with the Concertgebouw. He became a regular guest conductor, was appointed co-chief conductor in 1961 and then chief conductor in 1963.Mr. Haitink began conducting opera in the 1960s and made his debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1972, leading Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio.” He was music director of the Glyndebourne Opera from 1977 to 1988 and of the Royal Opera from 1987 to 2002.In an opera world where increasingly outlandish stagings were becoming the fashion, Mr. Haitink had a strategy when required to conduct a production he didn’t like. “One closes one’s eyes and lives in the music,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Guardian.That strategy seemed to have worked at Covent Garden for a mid-1990s staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle by Richard Jones, in which Brünnhilde wore a body-stocking with a skeleton print and a gym skirt, and the Rhinemaidens sported latex nude-body suits.The critic Rupert Christiansen wrote in The Spectator that the “sketchiness” of the staging “was cruelly shown up by the contrasting finish and maturity of the musical aspects of the performance.”“I have never heard Bernard Haitink conduct anything better than this Götterdämmerung,” he added. “In its combination of fluency and subtlety with blazing grandeur, it was consummate.”In addition to the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink held conductorships of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle. He also regularly led the Vienna Philharmonic, and in 2006 he was hired as principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.“These things are never planned, but things just happen to me — I’m not a chess player,” he told the Guardian, regarding the Chicago appointment.His reputation for being unassuming trailed him throughout his career. In 1967, Time magazine described him as “a short, quiet man who likes to take long bird-watching rambles in the woods,” and pointed out that “in a profession where flamboyance and arrogance are often the hallmarks of talent, the diffident Haitink is an anomaly.” A New York Times article in 1976 carried the headline “Why Doesn’t Bernard Haitink Act Like a Superstar?”Mr. Haitink’s colleagues lauded his modesty, integrity and musicianship when he was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. The pianist Murray Perahia, who recorded the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mr. Haitink and the Concertgebouw, praised him as being “dedicated to a real collaboration: neither dictating an interpretation, nor slavishly following — but a natural give and take.”But Mr. Haitink did not shy away from taking a stand when he thought it necessary. In 1982, he threatened to “never set foot on a Dutch stage again” after learning that the Dutch government planned to reduce the Concertgebouw’s subsidy, a move that might have led to the firing of some two dozen orchestral musicians. The cuts were eventually avoided. And in 1998 he resigned from the Royal Opera in London to protest a yearlong closing that was to take effect in January 1999 after a period of artistic and financial tumult. He rescinded his resignation shortly afterward, however.Mr. Haitink frequently gave master classes. In an event held at the Royal College of Music in London, he wryly advised a class of young conductors not to criticize the orchestra musicians since any flaws might be as much the mistake of the conductor as of the players.“You are there to give them confidence even if things aren’t going perfectly,” he said.“Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself,” a critic once wrote, “with results that can approach the supernatural.” He conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., in 2006.Michael Lutch for The New York TimesBernard Haitink was born on March 4, 1929, into a well-off family in Amsterdam. His father, Willem Haitink, was a civil servant, and his mother, Anna Clara Verschaffelt, worked for the French cultural organization Alliance Française. Neither were musicians. The family lived under Nazi occupation during World War II, and Willem was imprisoned for three months in a concentration camp.Mr. Haitink referred to his youth as his “lazy days.”“I wasn’t stupid,” he explained, “but I just wasn’t there. Half the time we were taught under our desks because of air raids. But even when things became normal, I wasn’t interested. Maybe this is why now, when I am over 70, that people always ask me why I work so hard.”He began playing the violin at age 9 and later studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He joined the second violin section of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra but was insecure about his abilities as a violinist. After taking a conducting course, he was appointed conductor of the orchestra in 1955 at age 26.Mr. Haitink, who once said that “every conductor, including myself, has a sell-by date,” officially retired during his 90th year after an acclaimed farewell tour of European summer festivals. Reviewing his concert with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall in London on that tour, the critic Erica Jeal wrote that the “last word had to be from Bruckner.”“Haitink, as ever, emphasized beauty over structure,” she wrote, “yet did not allow the music’s sense of shape to slacken for a moment.”His extensive recordings include, for the Philips label, the complete symphonies of Bruckner, Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Schumann; the complete symphonies of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, for EMI; the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, for Decca; the complete Debussy orchestral works, also for Philips; and Beethoven and Brahms symphony cycles for the London Symphony Orchestra’s LSO Live label.Mr. Haitink was married four times and had several children and grandchildren. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.In 2011, in another interview with The Guardian, Mr. Haitink mused on the strange life of a conductor. “I have been doing this job for 50 years,” he said. “And, you know, it is a profession and it is not a profession. It’s very obscure sometimes. What makes a good conductor? What is this thing about charisma? I’m still wondering after all these years.” More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, Contemporary Is King for a Week

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      Music by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams was conducted by Dalia Stasevska, in her debut with the orchestra.You could hear a tantalizing possible future for the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday evening at Alice Tully Hall — as well as some of the orchestra’s present difficulties. The program at Tully, one of the Philharmonic’s bases as David Geffen Hall is renovated this season, featured three contemporary works. One was by the safely canonized John Adams, the other two by names newer to Philharmonic audiences: Missy Mazzoli and Anthony Davis.Not that either of the two is really unknown. Both have been tapped for premieres at the Metropolitan Opera in the coming years — for Davis, the belated Met debut of his “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from the 1980s, and for Mazzoli, a new adaptation of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” But until this week, neither had been played on a Philharmonic subscription program.Their works landed with persuasive panache on Wednesday, aided by powerful but never overly brash conducting by Dalia Stasevska, also making her Philharmonic debut. But there were some problems with the overall sound. The sonic glare of Tully, generally a home for chamber music rather than larger-scale contemporary symphonic repertory, sometimes worked against the haunted sensuality of Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres),” written in 2013 and revised three years later.Stasevska fostered warmth whenever possible, shaping the 12-minute piece’s transfers of elegantly gloomy melodic ornaments from section to section of the ensemble with care and relish. And when a small army of harmonicas gently peeked out from behind the work’s often mournful textures, they glimmered delicately. Stasevska also found moments to collaborate with the bright harshness of Tully’s acoustic, allowing herself a leap and a stomp on the podium during one transition between a string glissando and a full-orchestra blast. Call it fighting the hall to a draw.Davis’s 25-minute, four-movement clarinet concerto “You Have the Right to Remain Silent,” written in 2006 and revised in 2011, fared more unevenly. The superbly varied work was inspired by a time that Davis, who is Black, was pulled over by the police while driving in Boston in the 1970s. Amid the dense music, he sometimes asks the players to recite portions of the Miranda warning. (On a recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, this is done in a deadened Sprechstimme.)On Wednesday, the Philharmonic did well by the concerto’s debt to Charles Mingus in passages of gravelly extended technique and others of deceptively breezy swing — and, as with Mingus, at the intersection of the two.But the initial vocalization of the Miranda text wasn’t quite crisp enough, slightly deflating the dramatic stakes. And the frenetic cello figures that followed lacked the tight ensemble necessary to suggest the first movement’s title: “Interrogation.”Yet the soloist, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, excelled in the grave material for contra-alto clarinet in the second movement, “Loss,” while his sound turned more arid amid more assaultive music in the third movement, “Incarceration.” The sly final movement, “The Dance of the Other,” felt the most inspired. There’s a satirical edge to this music, but in lingering, affecting phrases McGill also evoked a fully sincere yearning to travel from the grimness of interrogation, loss and incarceration.With its febrile mixture of influences from Minimalism, Hindemith’s pellucid peculiarity and classic cartoons, Adams’s 22-minute Chamber Symphony for 15 musicians, from 1992 — which the Philharmonic has played just once before, in 2000 — needs subtlety as well as brio. On Wednesday the middle movement, “Aria With Walking Bass,” was more plodding than witty. But an energetic “Roadrunner” finale was a saving grace. (And McGill deserves plaudits for playing the fiendish piece right after the Davis concerto, and without any intermission.)Philharmonic audiences will get more Adams soon, and in more welcoming acoustics, when the orchestra plays his Saxophone Concerto at Carnegie Hall in January. But here’s hoping we also hear more of Davis’s music; how about his piano concerto “Wayang V,” with its composer as soloist? And more Mazzoli, too. Hopefully both will be frequent presences once the Philharmonic returns to Geffen Hall next season. Refreshed acoustics do only so much; Davis and Mazzoli can be part of a refreshed repertoire.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More