Music

Visa delays are causing tumult in the classical music industry, leading to a wave of cancellations just as live performances are finally returning.When the Seattle Symphony finally performed before a full audience last month for the first time in a year and half, something was missing: its music director, the Danish conductor Thomas Dausgaard, who could not get a visa to travel to the United States.The New York Philharmonic had to find a last-minute substitute this week for the esteemed Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who could not get a visa, either. The Metropolitan Opera had to replace two Russian singers in its production of “Boris Godunov.” And the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, a British chamber orchestra that has been regularly visiting the United States since 1980, had to abandon a 10-city tour.As the easing of coronavirus restrictions has allowed live performance to return, many cultural organizations are struggling with another problem: their inability to get artists into the United States because of a long backlog of visa applications at American embassies and consulates. The delays have hampered many industries, but they are particularly upending classical music, which relies on stars from all over the world to make a circuit of leading concert halls and opera houses.Many artists have been caught in the middle, forced to dip into savings to make up for lost concert fees and scrambling to fill their schedules.“It’s like training for the Olympic Games for four years and then at the last minute learning you cannot compete,” said Arthur Jussen, a Dutch pianist whose engagements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra were canceled this month because of what the orchestra described as “unprecedented delays” in getting his visa, just weeks after a 14-concert tour in China, with his brother Lucas, fell through. “It is a bitter pill to swallow.”The classical touring industry was one of the first sectors hit by the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, and now it may be one of the last to recover. Dozens of performances have been canceled in recent weeks in China, Australia, Japan and other countries with sweeping travel restrictions and quarantine rules. The pandemic has served to deepen concerns about the viability of global tours, which have long been considered an essential but expensive part of the classical music ecosystem.But some of the most acute problems are surfacing in the United States.While the Biden administration plans to lift a pandemic-era ban on travelers from 33 countries next month — allowing fully vaccinated visitors from the European Union, China, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, India and other countries — the backlog of visa applications remains a problem.Even in normal times, it can be difficult for visiting artists to obtain the visas they need to perform in the United States. Now they face even longer lines and staff shortages at American embassies and consulates around the world. The earliest available appointments for visa interviews in some cities are for next spring, months after some artists have scheduled performances.The government has allowed exceptions to the travel ban, which remains in effect until early November, for visitors who can prove their work is essential to the U.S. economy. But consulates have in recent weeks been flooded with such requests, adding to the pileup. And some fear the lifting of the travel ban could yield more visa requests — and more delays.Boston Symphony Orchestra with Lucas and Arthur Jussen in September 2019.Winslow TownsonThe State Department, in response to questions about the delays, said the pandemic had resulted in “profound reductions” in its ability to process visas. “As the global situation evolves, the department seeks ways to safely and efficiently process visa applications around the world,” the department said in a statement.In the United States, the visa woes are injecting uncertainty into a fall season that was already rife with challenges, including tepid ticket sales and the ongoing threat posed by the Delta variant.Arts groups are calling on the government to fast-track visas.“The overarching concern is that it would have a chilling effect on international cultural activity and everything it has to offer,” said Heather Noonan, vice president for advocacy at the League of American Orchestras. “When arts organizations can’t rely on the process to work, it makes it very expensive and somewhat risky.”The problems have dampened some of the reopening festivities. For months the Seattle Symphony had promoted the return of its music director, Mr. Dausgaard, who had been stuck abroad since March 2020, for its opening night gala. But he was forced to cancel at the last minute because of visa issues.Mr. Dausgaard, who is now on track to get his visa so he can travel next month, said that the restrictions had meant that he and the orchestra had missed opportunities to develop, including by performing new works together.“It is super painful to see ideas, not least those ideas connected to recordings or touring or something bigger than a single concert, go away,” he said. “The most painful part is the lack of contact with the musicians.”Even some of the industry’s biggest stars have been affected by the delays, including Lang Lang, the celebrated Chinese pianist, whose visa to enter the United States for concerts last month came through only at the last minute.In an interview, Mr. Lang said he hoped restrictions around the world would eventually be lifted so that touring could resume in force.“It is essential to show our audiences that concerts are back,” he said. “The world needs live music.”Outside the United States, the obstacles for touring artists are also formidable.China, once a bustling, lucrative market for touring, including for many American orchestras, has also remained closed to most foreigners, including performers.Wray Armstrong, who runs a music agency in Beijing, said many ensembles cannot afford the time and money spent on quarantines, even if they are able to get visas. “We just have to be patient until the rules change,” he said.China’s strict quarantine rules, which require isolation of up to three weeks for anyone entering the country, have had the effect of dissuading many Chinese artists from traveling. The composer and conductor Tan Dun has canceled nearly all appearances outside China since the start of the pandemic, delaying the premiere of several works, including “Requiem for Nature,” which he was to conduct in Amsterdam next month.Travel restrictions have added to pressures on many orchestras, which have traditionally depended on tours for branding and prestige. The pandemic has prompted many to cancel plans to travel overseas or to consider scaling back; some larger orchestras are considering sending smaller ensembles instead.Zubin Mehta, the renowned conductor, said it was important for American orchestras to maintain robust touring schedules so that they can develop and show off the strength of music in the United States internationally.“An orchestra always comes back from a major tour a better orchestra,” he said. “A great American orchestra playing in Berlin getting a standing ovation is a reflection on America.”For artists dealing with delays gaining entry to the United States, the experience has been trying.Stephen Stirling, principal horn for the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, said the ensemble’s fall tour would have helped him offset some of the thousands of dollars he has lost in fees when he was unable to perform during the pandemic.Mr. Stirling said it was jarring to be dealing with travel restrictions at a time when many cultural institutions are reopening across the world.“Most people’s business is picking up, but we’re still getting cancellations,” he said. “The sooner things can return to normal, the better. We’re desperate to tour again.” More

With a debuting pianist and conductor, a solo by Clara Schumann preceded works by her husband and Brahms.Hasn’t the New York Philharmonic been through enough? Closed for a year and a half by the pandemic, and exiled from its home for renovations during its return season, the orchestra is now at the mercy of visa delays.Caused by backlogs and staff shortages at embassies and consulates around the world, these delays are plaguing a classical field that depends on the easy travel of musicians from abroad. They kept the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes from coming here this week to play; and if one cancellation wasn’t enough, the planned conductor, Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director, also withdrew, because of a family medical emergency.But when the dust settled, this left an enjoyable double debut with the orchestra at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Thursday: the pianist Alessio Bax and the conductor Giancarlo Guerrero.There was a quiet milestone in the program, which was retained with the new performers. While Robert Schumann’s works are fixtures of the repertory, those of his wife, Clara, an accomplished composer and one of the great piano virtuosos of the 19th century, are decidedly not. So when Bax entered and began Clara Schumann’s brief but eloquently wistful Romance in A minor, it was the first time her music was being played for a Philharmonic subscription audience.Its subdued ending led, without pause, to the dramatic burst that begins another work in A minor: Robert Schumann’s war horse piano concerto. Bax, well known to New York audiences in chamber music over the past decade, started with a tone of pristine Classicism that swiftly dissolved into washes of dreamier mistiness, without ever losing clarity.With the strings often evocatively gauzy, wind solos slicing piquantly through the textures, he and Guerrero conveyed the work’s mercurial swerves of mood without affectation or exaggeration. The lyrical effusions of the second movement were answered with crisp changeability; the finale had a surreally martial undercurrent. The performance was suavely manic, as it should be.It was a progressive move, yes, to bring the Schumanns together. Next it would be wonderful to hear Clara’s piano concerto — also, as it happens, in A minor — from the Philharmonic; Isata Kanneh-Mason, among others, has recorded it to impressive effect.Critics often valorize concert programs that sprawl across time. But the Philharmonic did well to pair the Schumanns with their great friend Johannes Brahms for a tightly focused evening of works written in the 1840s and ’50s. And not one of his frequently played symphonies — the First comes to the Philharmonic next month — but the second of his earlier, rarer pair of serenades.Brahms wrote these works as he was still experimenting with composing for orchestra; revised in the mid-1870s, the score of the 30-minute Serenade No. 2 lacks violins, for a melancholy tinge to the general geniality. Guerrero — the music director of the Nashville Symphony and a grinning presence with expressive fingers and a shiny suit — led a subtly energetic performance, bringing out both the delicacy and the darkness in the third movement and the Schubertian wistfulness in the fourth.Vivid yet unexaggerated, just like in the Schumann concerto, the playing had the intimate warmth that the orchestra also brought to Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony in the same space a few weeks ago. It speaks to how successfully the Philharmonic is scaling down to the 1,200-seat Rose Theater, and to two auspicious debuts.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

Hear new tracks by serpentwithfeet, Blackstarkids, Stromae 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 [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Adele, ‘Easy on Me’Six years have passed since Adele released “25,” her diamond-certified third studio album. In that time, just about everything in the music business has changed: Streaming is firmly the default distribution option, sing-rapping and pop-punk are the most popular stylistic frameworks and TikTok has essentially stripped down songcraft for parts.But no one’s told Adele, who was a nuclear-class warhead vocalist then, and remains one now, and whose approach to making music hasn’t changed at all. “Easy on Me” is the first single from “30,” her fourth studio album, which will be released next month. It was shaped, she’s said, by the tumult in her personal life. Adele is a singer whose most joyous songs are laden with the same damp melancholy as her most wounded ones.Her true gift, though, is restraint — knowing just how patiently to dole out her voice, hovering over each syllable as if slowly laying cinder blocks, methodically robbing her targets of air. That’s captured in the song’s opening lines: “There ain’t no gold in this river/That I’ve been washing my hands in forever,” a straightforward record of a baptism that turns to drowning. Abetted by a piano, she continues apace, detailing a relationship to which she gave all, until she didn’t. It is a deft and almost soothing dismissal, made even more tense by the feeling that even at her most pointed, she’s holding a little something back. JON CARAMANICAFinneas, ‘Love Is Pain’For once, Finneas matches the glum, whispery insights of his sister, Billie Eilish, in a song that recognizes where real life falls short of romantic fantasy. It’s from his debut album, “Optimist,” released on Friday. Over plain piano chords, he sings about moments like “That hollow feeling in your chest/as you both wordlessly undress after a fight,” without any easy consolation. JON PARELESserpentwithfeet, ‘Down Nuh River’“Down Nuh River” is equal parts down-home and cryptic. It’s rooted in the task-oriented rhythms of work song and playground chant: “Go go go go on swim on down nuh river now/oh you tryna get me in trouble now.” The beat syncopates an octave-hopping bass line against a muffled thump and one-handed piano chords. But it’s not so simple: serpentwithfeet — Josiah Wise — keeps shifting and multiplying his layers of vocals and effects, hinting at hallucinations and revelations if someone will “swim to the deepest part/that’s where all the wishes are.” PARELESStromae, ‘Santé’Breaking an uncharacteristically long public silence, the Belgian songwriter, singer, rapper and producer Stromae (Paul van Haver) has reappeared with “Santé,” which celebrates everyday people — Rosa, Albert, Celine, Arlette — doing their jobs. The track feels electro-Andean, matching the strumming of a small guitar to one of Stromae’s irresistible whistling synthesizer hooks. PARELESJuls featuring Fireboy DML, ‘Intentionally’Juls’s beats possess a textured softness, like a satin slip dress. And frankly, that’s probably what you should be wearing when listening to “Intentionally,” a new track from the British-Ghanian producer and Fireboy DML. “Just love me intentionally/I don’t want no temporary,” purrs the Nigerian vocalist. The song, from Juls’s first studio album, is sweet, simple desire, a lilting promise of mutuality and tenderness. ISABELIA HERRERANikara Warren, ‘Run Ricky’“Run Ricky” is the lead single from “Black Wall Street,” the debut album from the young vibraphonist Nikara Warren. The track shows off her skills as an instrumentalist, bandleader and rapper, starting with an insinuating bass line from Parker McAllister and some light boom-bap from David Frazier Jr. on drums. Horns, keyboards, guitar and Warren’s vibraphone fill in around them, and she rattles off a rap about Ricky, a young Black artist felled by violence. “Damn Ricky, you should’ve done the impossible,” she says as the verse closes. But this doesn’t bring the tune to its climax; the group continues for another three minutes, Hailey Niswanger’s tenor saxophone and Stephen Fowler’s trumpet stay melded as the groove shifts, inflected with funk and then rock and then Afro-Cuban clave. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODos Santos, ‘Alma Cósmica’Like a spaghetti western from the ’60s, Dos Santos’s “Alma Cósmica” is a burst of narrative mystery. “¿Adónde voy? ¿De dónde soy?” wonders bandleader Alex Chavez. We may not know where he’s going or where he’s from, but the production keeps us going: a twanging guitar and an insistent shaker curl together, twisting into mutant chicha. HERRERAWalker Hayes, ‘U Gurl’Walker Hayes’s country hit “Fancy Like” is an advertisement masquerading as a song that has been now fully repurposed as an advertisement. It is a happenstance smash, and also lightly craven — lightly because Hayes never fully commits to the bit; at times he seems to be singing a parody of advertising jingles. He’s a little wry, but not so much that it derails the pitch. That tenor is deployed, too, on Hayes’s new single, “U Gurl,” a kind of faint caricature of hypermasculine country talk-singing: “So the way you walk is suggestive/strip-mall-town impressive/Girl, I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you exit.” It’s familiar text, delivered with a mildly arched eyebrow. And it’s effective — a “can you believe I’m doing this?” scorcher to follow the “can you believe we got away with that?” smash. CARAMANICABlackstarkids, ‘Piss Drunk Kids’#dreampop #hiphop #Y2K #Tumblr #skaterat #shoegaze #kawaii #emo. CARAMANICAEels, ‘Good Night on Earth’A fuzz-toned guitar riff and a snappy beat carry “Good Night on Earth,” a quintessential Eels song: hoarse, succinct, dry-eyed and well aware of life’s ironies. PARELESCamilo and Evaluna Montaner, ‘Índigo’The cheerfully, even relentlessly wholesome Colombian songwriter Camilo and his wife (as of 2020), Evaluna Montaner, have copiously documented their romance on social media as well as in songs. “Índigo” continues to merge those content streams in a breezy, hand-clapping, yacht-rock duet, all strumming guitars and close harmonies, that exults in amorous bliss — “I won without playing the lottery,” they sing — as the video flaunts a positive pregnancy test and a baby bump. PARELESEdward Simon, ‘Country’Not a note goes to waste in the translucent playing of Edward Simon, a Venezuelan pianist who is now the longest-serving member of the esteemed SFJAZZ Collective. He recorded “Solo Live” in Oakland, during a 2019 concert at the Piedmont Piano Company, on his 50th birthday. On “Country,” the album’s lone original, a rolling melody over a repeated pattern of farseeing chords gives way to a long, looping improvisation that culminates in chunky, rhythmic cross-talk between Simon’s left and right hands. RUSSONELLO More

Few composers have broader stylistic reach. But on a new album, “A Prayer for Lester Bowie,” he makes it all cohere.It’s not a big mystery why David Sanford’s energetic, well-crafted music has stayed mostly under the radar for the last three decades. “He’s not a self-promoter,” said the conductor Gil Rose, who brought out the first album devoted to Sanford’s orchestral music two years ago.Sanford, 58, cheerfully concedes the point. “Yes, you have to be able to market, which I’m atrocious at,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m trying to get better, well into my 50s.”As Rose put it, “He’s interested in his music, but he’s not going to beat anyone’s door down about it.”The irony is that Sanford’s work often has door-blasting power. Yet whether he’s writing for a chamber ensemble, a big band or an orchestra, his wildness never tips into indiscipline.Take “Alchemy,” the opening track on Sanford’s 2007 album “Live at the Knitting Factory,” played by his big band, which was known at the time as the Pittsburgh Collective. Merely the first minute balances a lot.There’s bebop-influenced brass writing to start things off. But other sections aren’t really swinging; instead, they suggest the blunt attack of American Minimalism. A broader swing feel is activated when the reed section kicks in, bringing with it the audible influence of Charles Mingus’s bands. Then the pulse drops away and we spend a few seconds in a Schoenberg-inflected harmonic world.It’s jazz — though there hasn’t yet been a sustained solo. It’s clearly in the contemporary classical tradition — though there’s also room for improvisation. (A scorching sax feature begins in the second minute.) Like the title promises, it’s a work of alchemy, in the tradition of composer-performers like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell.Growing up in a musical family in Pittsburgh, his mother a church organist and his father a sometime professional singer, Sanford discovered a love for big band around the same time he picked up the trombone. A 1991 Guggenheim fellowship led to some of the earliest compositions of his that have been recorded: “Chamber Concerto No. 3” and “Prayer: In Memoriam Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” both from 1992. Lodestars like Mingus and Sly and the Family Stone stayed with him through his student years, which culminated in a masters and doctorate from Princeton in the late 1990s.Most tunes on “Knitting Factory” date from a batch of material that Sanford composed around 2003, when he had his first sabbatical from a full-time teaching job at Mount Holyoke College. He also received the Rome Prize during that period, which gave him, he recalled, the “time to just basically do anything that I wanted.”Shortly after “Knitting Factory” was released, I heard Sanford conduct this band at the Miller Theater at Columbia University. I was convinced he was ready for a breakout. That never quite happened. But the moment may be here once again.That Sanford is finally doing better with the marketing thing is reflected by a name change for his long-running band. It’s now billed, sensibly enough, as the David Sanford Big Band on its sophomore release, “A Prayer for Lester Bowie,” released last month on the Greenleaf imprint. (The title composition is by Hugh Ragin, a veteran trumpeter with long ties to Sanford, as well as to Braxton and Mitchell.)On pieces like the compact yet multilayered “popit,” you can hear how Sanford might appeal to jazz, punk and contemporary classical listeners in equal measure. “Woman in Shadows” once again suggests the influence of Mingus, as well as of film noir scores.

A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordAnother track, “subtraf,” reflects some of his more recent enthusiasms, including modernist European composers like Fausto Romitelli and Helmut Lachenmann. Like other Sanford pieces, it has a guitar fuzzbox kick that recalls electric-era Miles Davis. (Sanford’s dissertation at Princeton included an essay on Davis’s album “Agharta.”)Of Lachenmann’s “Mouvement,” which helped inspire “subtraf,” Sanford said: “It’s a larger chamber orchestra piece. And the use of colors there, I thought, OK, this is a different direction I was really kind of loving.”“I knew it would work as a format for improvisation,” he added.

A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordHis musical knowledge and tool kit is about as broad as it gets. Other composers might bend your ear about the guitarist Pete Cosey, most famous for his work with Davis; Mingus’s somewhat obscure “Three Worlds of Drums,” which Sanford described as one of his three favorite pieces; and Lachenmann’s “Mouvement.” But few others can make those all influences cohere in the same piece.Discussing “Scherzo Grosso,” his early cello concerto for Matt Haimovitz, which exists in versions for his big band as well as traditional orchestra, Sanford remembers “quoting the living daylights out of stuff,” in the manner of bebop titans and Luciano Berio.“Back then,” Sanford said, “I kind of wanted to be Robert Rauschenberg.” But now he’s moved on to subtler forms of mixology.Jon Nelson, a trumpeter in the Meridian Arts Ensemble who also played on “Knitting Factory,” has had an opportunity to observe Sanford’s writing for chamber orchestra as well as for big band. Describing Sanford’s aesthetic as “a 360-degree universe,” Nelson added that “David’s music sounds like nothing else, yet when you hear it, memories of music you’ve heard in your life are triggered.”Haimovitz, another longtime collaborator, said by email: “I always wondered how is it that a composer who synthesizes Arnold Schoenberg, John Coltrane, Sergei Prokofiev, Charles Mingus, Jimi Hendrix and Wilco — and those are merely some of the less esoteric references — never sounds like he’s appropriating anyone else’s music.” (Haimovitz said that his own best guess involves Sanford’s “generously open ears, and a true genius.”)Of his recording of Sanford’s “Black Noise” — one of my favorite recordings of 2019 — Rose, the conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, said: “It’s not the longest CD we ever produced. But impact per minute, it’s maybe one of the strongest ones that we’ve done.”Rose added that he would love more big orchestral pieces from Sanford, who has plans for a piano concerto, among other potential projects. But Sanford added that, as a father of two and a professor with a full teaching load, “I definitely can’t write any more music than I’m writing.”That’s where greater name recognition might help, along with some more commissioning orchestras, and perhaps another sabbatical. In the meantime, Rose is willing to wait on Sanford, in part because this composer can justify the material in every bar of a piece.“Everything has a place and is there for a reason, and he can tell you why, too,” Rose said. “He’s thought through everything at the highest detailed level, but it sounds spontaneous. That’s rare.” More

For 43 years he was a steadying force with the ensemble as he helped it become one of the world’s most esteemed.Raymond Gniewek, the concertmaster for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for 43 years and a quiet but vital force in elevating that ensemble to a new level of renown, died on Oct. 1 in Naples, Fla. He was 89.His daughter Susan Law said the cause was complications of cancer.Mr. Gniewek (pronounced NYEH-vik), a violinist whose solos invariably drew acclaim, was just 25 in 1957 when he was named the orchestra’s concertmaster. He had two obstacles to overcome.In a genre, opera, with a heavily European heritage, he was only the second American-born musician to hold the job at the Met. And he was the youngest member of the orchestra when he was made concertmaster, whose duties include advising musicians with much more tenure and experience.He managed to make it work.“I sort of waded my way through things, wasn’t too arrogant, and the musicians were very supportive,” he told The New York Times in 2000 in an interview occasioned by his retirement.The concertmaster, the leader of the violin section, is most visible in tuning up the orchestra before a concert, but is more crucially a conduit between the conductor and the rest of the players, helping to bring about the interpretation the conductor wants. That often means mastering a particular passage or effect, then demonstrating to fellow violinists the bowing technique or fingering needed to achieve it.“It’s my job to make technical translations of the desired sound,” Mr. Gniewek said in the 2000 interview. “And you have to show, not tell, because the same words can mean different things to different people.”Another part of the job is to ensure stability and continuity, especially important in an orchestra like the Met Opera’s that is often led by guest conductors. As the Berklee College of Music describes the job on its careers page, “While conductors may come and go — with differing styles and approaches — the concertmaster provides the orchestra with consistent and technically oriented leadership.”Mr. Gniewek found that being concertmaster could mean being an alarm clock. There is Met lore about a German conductor who would fall asleep during the dialogue of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz”; Mr. Gniewek would awaken him with a subtle, “Jetzt, maestro” (“Now, maestro”).Mr. Gniewek was credited with helping to raise the ensemble’s game considerably. When he was first named to the post, the orchestra was workmanlike at best. By the early 1990s it was playing concerts, making acclaimed recordings and being compared to the world’s great orchestras.“It plays with astonishing precision, nuance and insight,” Katrine Ames wrote of the Met Orchestra in Newsweek in 1991, adding, “Fifteen years ago that orchestra was little more than adequate: it gave some fine performances (usually Verdi) and some dismal ones (usually Mozart). To hear it was largely to ignore it.”Much of that improvement was credited to James Levine, who became the Met’s principal conductor in the 1973-74 season and was soon named its music director. But insiders knew that Mr. Gniewek was vital to executing Mr. Levine’s vision, something Mr. Levine himself acknowledged when Mr. Gniewek retired.“The single luckiest thing to happen to me since I have been at the Met,” he said, “is that Ray Gniewek was the concertmaster.”“I sort of waded my way through things, wasn’t too arrogant, and the musicians were very supportive,” Mr. Gniewek said of how he navigated becoming concertmaster in his mid-20s, when he was the youngest member of the orchestra.Raymond Arthur Gniewek was born on Nov. 13, 1931, in East Meadow, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Jacenta, was a tradesman and barber who also played violin, and his mother, Leocadia (Kurowska) Gniewek, was a church organist and homemaker.After graduating from Hempstead High School, he attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., becoming a member of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra while an undergraduate. He graduated in 1953. In 1955, he was named concertmaster of the Rochester Civic Orchestra and assistant concertmaster of the Rochester Philharmonic.He had been Met concertmaster for almost a decade — and for some 1,700 performances — when he made his New York City recital debut in 1966 at Town Hall. Richard D. Freed, reviewing that performance in The Times, could barely contain his enthusiasm.“Mr. Gniewek has everything that could be wanted in a violinist — impeccable intonation, a technique so secure that he is free to concentrate on problems of interpretation and a pronounced flair for particular style,” he wrote.Early in his tenure, in 1958, Mr. Gniewek had to take the baton when the conductor Fausto Cleva fell ill during a performance of “Manon Lescaut.” That might have been a fantasy fulfilled for some concertmasters with conducting aspirations, but not for Mr. Gniewek.“I’d rather play,” he told The Times in the 2000 interview. “I have strong feelings about sound, the actual act of playing of the instrument. It’s what I do best.”Mr. Gniewek moved to Florida after retiring and lived in Naples at his death. His first marriage, to Doris Scott in the 1950s, ended in divorce, as did his marriage in 1960 to Lolita San Miguel. In addition to his daughter, who is from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, the soprano Judith Blegen; a sister, Cecilia Brauer, who is also a musician; a stepson, Thomas Singher; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter from his first marriage, Davi Loren, died in May.In 2000, in Met Orchestra concerts that were to be among Mr. Gniewek’s last, Mr. Levine gave him a rare honor by having him stand out in front at the program’s end to play Massenet’s Meditation from “Thais,” as an encore. When he did so at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Willa J. Conrad of The Star-Ledger of Newark wrote, “It was pure eloquence and grace, and as tribute to a particular musician’s legacy to a normally invisible orchestra, provided a particularly poignant close.”When he did the same at Carnegie Hall two nights later, the ovation — from the orchestra as well as the audience — stretched past the five-minute mark, lasting longer than the solo itself. More

The 25-year-old Los Angeles musician’s debut album, “Juno,” is a collage of sounds, emotions and cultural detritus filtered through her own unique energy.LOS ANGELES — Remi Wolf rolled up to an indoor trampoline park in Van Nuys on an August afternoon feeling frazzled. She’d been busy all day, making bugged-out visuals for her songs and prepping for tour. Then the traffic coming from the Eastside of Los Angeles was bad. So, so bad.She’d be ready to sit and talk by the vending machines in a minute, but first she needed to bounce.Wolf took off her light-purple Crocs and pulled on the regulation orange grip socks, which managed to complement her mishmashed look: a recently resurrected Urban Outfitters top she got in high school and a promo cap for a record label she’s not even signed to over her pile of brown curls. At 25 years old, Wolf was at least a decade older than almost everyone else ricocheting across the field of trampolines. Then she hit two forward somersaults.On Friday, Wolf will release her debut album, “Juno.” It’s a collection of nerves, anxieties and self-recriminations set to ebullient melodies and unbound sonic collages. “Juno” was largely written and recorded during the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic. While many artists burrowed into the aesthetics of quiet during this era of isolation, Wolf turned the tumultuous emotions pent-up inside of her into hypercolored explosions.“It’s not mellow at all, but it is very introspective,” she said. “I have a lot of energy. As a person, I can just go and go and go until I crash. And then I’m, like, depressed, or whatever.”As the nebulously defined genre of bedroom pop breaks out beyond the barriers of the bedrooms it was once made in, Wolf has emerged as one of its most engaging talents, bolstered by an unconventional charisma and a powerful voice. “Remi is always pushing what it means to be pop and what it means to be a pop star — not even deprecating it, but just being able to laugh and think about pop music in a totally different way,” said Lizzy Szabo, a senior editor at Spotify who oversees Lorem, the influential, Gen Z-targeted playlist that has become part of Wolf’s dominion.A onetime competitive skier, Wolf took the dedication she once brought to the sport to her music.Emily Monforte for The New York TimesLike many people her age, Wolf has a keen ability to slurp up the often doofy flotsam of the recent past and make it seem far cooler than it was in the first place. That manifests itself in her love of hot-pink novelty trucker hats and candy-raver eye makeup, but it also applies to her taste in music. During a recent sold-out show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, Wolf covered MGMT’s “Electric Feel,” Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” and a portion of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” all with a relatively straight face.She’s found unlikely inspiration in the Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, one of the most maligned (if possibly misunderstood) lyricists to make it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She calls him “my king” (with more emphatic language) and even named one of the best songs on “Juno” after him. Like Kiedis’s, many of Wolf’s lyrics seem entirely free associative as she references an orgy at Five Guys and a plane flight to Mars.“I just follow these little wormholes in my head,” she said. “I just like to go down whatever imagery I think is describing how I’m feeling.”Despite how nonsensical the lyrics may seem when isolated, to Wolf there is an internal logic behind all of them. Well, most of them. She knows exactly what she means in her song “Grumpy Old Man” when she says she’s got “feelings in my feelings” and “violets on my violence,” but admits that she came up with the line about having “boobies on my booty” just because those words are fun to sing.Earlier this year, Wolf released “We Love Dogs!,” a compilation of remixes of her earlier songs. It included interpretations from known genre twisters like Nile Rodgers and Panda Bear, but also a version of “Photo ID,” her most streamed song, featuring the ascendant star Dominic Fike, who’s become a friend. “A lot of people have their style figured out or maybe a general sound,” Fike said. “She has something special in how she puts together her songs. I feel like Remi is a real singer. Every once in a while they come around, and she’s one of those.”Despite being raised in the largely flat and snowless Bay Area city of Palo Alto, Wolf began training as a downhill ski racer at 8 years old. She spent weekends staying at a cheap hotel in Truckee, a town near Lake Tahoe. She went to the Junior Olympics twice. “I was bouncing between different friends all the time, so nothing ever felt safe,” she said. “I became very independent and very insular in my own being.”When she was 16, Wolf quit competing and threw herself into music with the same resolute mind-set that’s required of athletes. “Once I stopped skiing, I was like, ‘OK, I need something else to do just as intensely and just as hard,’” she said. She started a duo with her friend Chloe Zilliac called, naturally, Remi and Chloe. At 17, Wolf tried out for “American Idol” and got invited to Hollywood, but her experience there didn’t last long.While participating in an after-school music program, a teacher teamed her up with another one of his pupils, a young multi-instrumentalist named Jared Solomon. He had them play “Valerie” by Amy Winehouse, with her singing and him on guitar. “We were instantly like, ‘Whoa, you’re really good,’” Wolf said.Solomon joined Remi and Chloe’s backup band, and they’d rehearse in his garage twice a week before he left to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. When Wolf graduated from the U.S.C. Thornton School of Music a few years later, Solomon reached out to see if he could crash at her place while passing through Los Angeles as his friend’s tour D.J. The two hadn’t really talked in five years; he ended up staying for a week. They experimented on a few songs together in that span, including “Sauce,” a slinky jam that remains one of Wolf’s most popular tracks.“I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth,” Wolf said of life after getting sober. “Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”Emily Monforte for The New York TimesAt the time, she had been trying to break into the music industry as a songwriter. “I was on a bunch of Adderall and I was psychotic at that point,” Wolf recalled. “Then he came through, then we did our thing and then we were like, holy [expletive]!”Solomon became and remains Wolf’s closest musical collaborator. “We’re just so locked in to each other’s energy, especially musically,” Wolf said. “It’s hard for people to penetrate that.” Wolf produced most of the songs on “Juno” with him (he uses the name Solomonophonic), though more established figures including Kenny Beats and Ethan Gruska contributed to a few songs on the album, too. Solomon also plays in her live band, towering over Wolf in a Pantera T-shirt with cutoff sleeves.The earliest work that Wolf put out often leaned toward jazzy soul — which she attributes to her love of major and minor seventh chords — but with “Juno” she widened the scope. While Erykah Badu remains a constant influence, during the album’s making she listened to artists like Jack White, Beck, Sheryl Crow and Michelle Branch. “I’m kind of a rock singer,” Wolf said. “That’s what I started singing, and then I moved more into soulier stuff. But I’m a belter. I love screaming.”A significant moment in Wolf’s personal life also had a major impact on “Juno”: she entered rehab during the summer of 2020, a change that was at least three years in the making. Before, Wolf said, she frequently drank to the point of blacking out. While she said she was usually able to function in her daily life, she had started getting into huge fights with family, friends and collaborators.“I did it for myself obviously, but I did it for my career,” she said of her sobriety. “There was just something in me being like, ‘Don’t destroy this. Don’t destroy your life.’”Drinking left Wolf feeling awful all the time. Her sobriety revitalized her energy and excitement, but it also forced her to confront all kinds of emotional issues that she didn’t make space for with her goal-oriented approach. “So much came up that I didn’t even know existed,” she said. “I didn’t even know what growing as a human was. I knew obviously people were like, I’m growing, blah blah blah. Now I’m like, life is about growth. Which never occurred to me. It’s so insane.”When the interview was over, Wolf returned to the trampolines. She took a few flying leaps onto a gigantic inflatable pillow before deciding to grab a final ride on the zip line. She climbed the steps to the top of the platform, listened to a safety spiel from the attendant and then turned around to give a thumbs up to the security camera mounted on the wall. And then, she was off. More

The trilogy of “The Damned,” “Death in Venice” and “Ludwig” is whole again, in editions that freshly reveal their conflicted queerness.The revered Italian director Luchino Visconti was openly gay yet devoutly Catholic, ostensibly Communist yet unyieldingly aristocratic. In short, he embodied contradictions that haunt many of his films, in which criticism can sometimes be confused with reverence, or obsessive detail with tasteless excess.Nowhere is this more evident, to sometimes frustrating and other times awe-inspiring effect, than in his so-called German trilogy of “The Damned” (1969), “Death in Venice” (1971) and “Ludwig” (1973). These films are hard to love and not as widely adored as his earlier masterpieces, like “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard,” but they are a culmination of his preoccupations and paradoxes: Visconti at his most operatic, confessionally queer and questioning of the present through meticulous reconstructions of the past.In this triptych, that past is the history of Germany, recounted in what amounts to an autopsy that traces the apocalyptic 1930s back to the Romantic 19th century. And now, with the Criterion Collection’s recent release of “The Damned,” the three films are all available again, in new restorations that not only improve picture and sound quality, but also hew more closely to Visconti’s controversial intent.His earlier films — even his first, “Ossessione,” from 1943 — hint at a queer sensibility; and he had already begun to develop ever-lavish, operatic set pieces with historical sweep, such as in “Senso” and “The Leopard.” But with “The Damned,” Visconti embarked on a series of films that quietly wrestled with his own conflicted feelings about sexuality and class, and at the same time illustrated the twilight of the monarchy, of the aristocracy and, eventually, of Germany itself.But in reverse: He begins at the end, as if the trilogy were a whodunit, influenced throughout by Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner. (Not for nothing is the Italian title of “The Damned” “La Caduta degli Dei” — “Twilight of the Gods,” the same name given to the finale of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.) The gods here are the members of the von Essenbeck family, industrialists whose decline simultaneously paves the way for World War II.They are introduced — after a credits sequence of brassy melodrama and imagery reminiscent of Wagner’s fiery Nibelheim, where the ruinous gold ring is forged — in 1933 during a birthday party for the patriarch at their ornate and expansive family home, first shown through the eyes of the lower-class people who make it run.Berger as Martin von Essenbeck, a villainously ambitious young man scheming to rule his family’s business in “The Damned.”The Criterion CollectionBetween the scenery and the sounds of Bach wafting from a distant room, an older way of German life is established, then followed by a drag performance in which a grandson, the young Martin (Helmut Berger, Visconti’s lover), channels Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” much to the family’s disgust. But he is interrupted by the announcement that the Reichstag is burning. Selfishly and obliviously, he continues until he is again cut off. “They could have chosen a better day to burn the Reichstag, right, Grandfather?” he responds.That grandfather is murdered the same evening, and what follows is a “Macbeth”-like melodrama of opportunism, murderous scheming and sexual deviancy; Martin, though coded as gay, also molests young girls and, in the film’s appalling climax, rapes his mother into a catatonic state. By the end, the von Essenbeck company’s leadership falls to Martin, who is all too ready to cooperate with the Nazi regime, while his mother and her lover marry then take cyanide together — a scene that recalls the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.But among those horrors is a sequence that ended up censored and is presented in its original form in the Criterion release: a dreamy and homoerotic recounting of the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s purge of the paramilitary brownshirts. At a Bavarian lake hotel, they pass an orgiastic evening of folk songs, beer and increasing nudity before retreating to rooms for gay sex, but only deep into the night — as if they were Wagner’s lovers Tristan and Isolde. Indeed, the camera cuts to one of the von Essenbecks, Konstantin, barking through that opera’s “Liebestod” (“love-death”) at a piano. When they are all massacred in the morning, a member of the SS remarks “Alles tot,” or “all dead,” a line that also appears in the final scene of “Tristan.”A kind of liebestod ends “Death in Venice” (also available from Criterion), an adaptation of Mann’s novella that makes more literal its forbidden desire. Visconti changed the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), from a writer to a composer resembling Mahler. That composer’s Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony is the film’s musical soul: “Death in Venice” is virtually a silent movie, an opera of facial expressions by Aschenbach and coy returned looks from the boy he obsesses over as beauty personified, Tadzio. (He’s played by Bjorn Andresen, a Swedish teenager handpicked by Visconti in a disturbing audition shown in the recent documentary “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World”).Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice,” an opera in facial expressions set to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.The Criterion Collection“Death in Venice” both satirizes and relishes upper-class Venetian tourism of the early 20th century, with a patient camera that settles, uncomfortably if nauseatingly, on an overdecorated hotel and its overdressed guests. Yet sequences there also carry a trace of elegy for a world soon to be erased by World War I, the kind of nostalgia of Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel.”Aschenbach’s desire, like all homosexuality in the German trilogy, is doomed. In something of an operatic mad scene, he visits a barber who dyes his hair, powders him with ghost-white makeup and rouges his cheeks. His unrestrained passion compels him to follow Tadzio to his death, of cholera, as he watches the boy from his lounge chair on the beach, black dye streaming down his cheek in the heat. But it’s an ecstatic death, that of Isolde, unconsummated yet transfigured.Wagner’s influence on “Ludwig” is even more explicit. He is a character in this sprawling psychodrama-as-biography about King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Helmut Berger again) — a movie presented in various cuts over the years, and in the restoration released a few years ago by Arrow Academy more complete than ever, running over four hours. The imagery of night versus day in “Tristan” also runs through the reign of Ludwig, who made that opera possible while also bankrolling Wagner’s spendthrift habits and extravagant ambition.Ludwig appears to behave with childish petulance — hiding, after Wagner is expelled from Munich, in a dark room with a toy that projects rotating stars on the ceiling to a music-box rendition of the “Song to the Evening Star” from “Tannhäuser.” But he is more like Tristan, hiding in the world of night from what is expected of him in reality: monarchical duties, the expectation to marry.Visconti’s film is primarily nocturnal, or shot in rooms with closed curtains and, in one case, an artificial grotto inspired by the “Tannhäuser” Venusberg. Instrumental arrangements from that opera follow Ludwig, like Mahler with Aschenbach, until the music fades, tellingly, after the death of his beloved Wagner.The king becomes increasingly isolated, eating from a table in his bedroom that is raised and lowered through the floor so he doesn’t have to see his staff members, even though they are also the outlet for his gay longing. In a scene that echoes “The Damned,” Ludwig’s men gather for folk-fueled debauchery inside a hut modeled on the “Ring.”Again, the sequence is long: elegiac, immersive and ultimately tragic. It is in scenes like this that Visconti is at his most brazenly queer. But he also relegates gay desire to that realm of night, and inextricably links it to Romanticism and decadence — the same kind that, the three films’ autopsy shows, put Germany on its inevitable path to destruction. More

The singer’s long-awaited return will start this week, with the release of a single, “Easy on Me,” followed by a new album on Nov. 19, she announced on Wednesday.Almost six years to the day since the release of her previous blockbuster album, Adele will make her long-awaited return to the music industry with a new album on Nov. 19, she announced Wednesday on social media.Titled “30,” in line with her previous LPs “19,” “21” and “25” — for the ages Adele was while writing them — the singer, now 33, said in a statement that the album came out of “the most turbulent period of my life.”In 2019, Adele filed for divorce from her husband of two years, the charity executive Simon Konecki. The couple have a young son.“I’ve learned a lot of blistering home truths about myself along the way,” Adele wrote in her announcement.She compared the music to “that friend who, no matter what, checked in on me even though I’d stopped checking in with them because I’d become so consumed by my own grief,” adding: “I’ve painstakingly rebuilt my house and my heart since then and this album narrates it.”“30” will be preceded on Thursday night — midnight in the United Kingdom — by a single, “Easy on Me,” produced by Greg Kurstin, who collaborated with the singer on “Hello,” the chart-topping lead song from “25,” in 2015.Described in a recent Vogue cover story as a “a gut-wrenching plea of a piano ballad,” “Easy on Me” was previewed by Adele on Instagram on Saturday, and features the lyrics:“Go easy on me, babyI was still a childDidn’t get the chance toFeel the world around me.”Yet even as Adele’s new music is widely expected to be among the most commercially successful of the year, based on her track record of world-beating sales, the singer is also managing expectations as she re-enters a changed business.“There isn’t a bombastic ‘Hello,’” she told Vogue. “But I don’t want another song like that. That song catapulted me in fame to another level that I don’t want to happen again.”The track debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for 10 weeks. But streaming — which now accounts for 84 percent of recorded music revenue in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — was still catching on. When “25” was released, on Nov. 20, 2015, it was not made available on services like Spotify and Apple Music until seven months later, instead relying on traditional sales.That resulted in a record-breaking 3.38 million albums sold in the United States during its first week — nearly a million more than the next-highest-selling release in the Nielsen/SoundScan era. (The company, now MRC Data, began tracking point-of-sale data in 1991.)The album “25” has since been certified 11-times platinum and won six Grammys in 2017, making Adele the first artist ever to sweep the top three categories — record of the year, song of the year and album of the year — on two separate occasions. (She did the same in 2012, with “21.”)Unlike Adele’s previous releases, “30” is expected to be available on streaming services upon release, although Vogue reported that the singer was “adamant that it come out in tangible form,” on CDs and vinyl, as well.According to reports, the new album will feature collaborations with the producers and songwriters Max Martin and Shellback, who worked on the previous Adele single “Send My Love (to Your New Lover)”; the singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. (“When We Were Young,” from 2015); the producer Inflo; and the composer and producer Ludwig Goransson, known for his work with Childish Gambino and on films like “Black Panther.”“I was so fragile when I was writing it that I wanted to work only with a few people,” Adele said in her Vogue interview, citing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as a “very big reference.”And while the singer’s divorce helped to inspire the album, it is not the only subject, she said. “It was more me divorcing myself,” Adele explained, invoking “self-destruction,” “self-reflection” and “self-redemption.”In recent years, the singer has also taken to working out two or three times a day, leading to significant weight loss (“I realized that when I was working out, I didn’t have any anxiety”); hosted “Saturday Night Live” as a nonmusical guest; and entered into a relationship with LeBron James’s agent Rich Paul (“I know what I want”).“I’ve shed many layers but also wrapped myself in new ones,” Adele wrote in her statement on Wednesday, “discovered genuinely useful and wholesome mentalities to lead with, and I feel like I’ve finally found my feeling again. I’d go as far as to say I’ve never felt more peaceful in my life.” More