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      Retooling ‘La Bohème’ for Pandemic Performances

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      Opera has been forced to forgo its love of packed stages, large orchestras and sold-out crowds, for now.LONDON — It’s an evening of drinking and revelry at Café Momus. A group of young men chatter away as a femme fatale tries to get their attention, jumping on tables and tossing undergarments. But the night spot is not as crowded as usual. There are few waiters in attendance, and by the windows in the back three patrons dine alone.It is Act II of a pared-down production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Royal Opera House. In light of pandemic restrictions, the orchestra has 47 players, down from the usual 74. The act opens with only 18 of 60 chorus members onstage, the rest singing from the wings, and 10 (not 20) children onstage. There are four, not 10, waiters in the cafe.“The cafe scene feels less ‘bustling belle epoque cafe’ and more ‘lonely-hearts establishment’ at the moment, simply because there’s a limited number of people that we can have in the Cafe Momus,” Oliver Mears, the house’s director of opera, said a few days before the June 19 premiere. “It’s just adapting to the circumstances that we were faced with.”Andrew Macnair as Parpignol, with members of the Royal Opera Chorus, in a scene from Act II. Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera HouseMr. Mears said opera is an art form that breaks every social-distancing rule, relying on “crammed pits,” large and dense onstage crowds, moments of intimacy between performers, singing (which can spread viral particles) and a sellout audience. “All of these things really work against us,” he said.“If you were someone who hated opera and you wanted to devise a disease that hit opera particularly hard, then you’d probably come up with something rather like Covid,” he added.The global coronavirus outbreak has had a drastic effect on the performing arts, and opera, which is expensive, has suffered hugely. Many of Europe’s major houses have received government help — in addition to annual taxpayer-funded grants — to avoid insolvency.The Royal Opera House, which was closed for 14 months, received a government loan of 21.7 million pounds (about $29 million) in December, part of a recovery package for arts organizations. The house attracts an average of 650,000 people a year and presents films and screenings in Britain and in 42 countries around the world.Last October, it sold a 1971 David Hockney portrait of its former general administrator, David Webster, for £12.8 million (about $18 million). But even that was not enough to avoid cuts, and 218 staff members were let go.The Royal Opera decided to sell a David Hockney portrait of its former general administrator, David Webster, for £12.8 million to help make up for losses. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA, via ShutterstockSince the house reopened on May 17, it has been operating at roughly a third of capacity to ensure socially distanced seating — just over 800 spectators, down from 2,225, Mr. Mears said. He described the mood in-house as “enthusiasm tempered with caution.” (Pandemic restrictions are in place until at least July 19.)The Paris Opera, which also incorporates a world-renowned ballet company, has faced similar threats in the pandemic. In an interview, Alexander Neef, its director, said the opera house had received €41 million (about $47 million) in aid for 2020, leaving it with a €4 million deficit.This year, the Paris Opera is due to receive another €15 million in state aid, he said, to help offset a projected annual loss of €45 million.“Everybody’s exhausted from more than a year of crisis,” Mr. Neef said. The Paris Opera reopened May 19, and since early June has required all audience members to show a “pass sanitaire” (health pass) proving vaccination, a negative test or one proving post-Covid immunity.There was “great appetite when we reopened,” he said on June 22, but “it’s been a little bit flat now,” whether because of the health pass requirement or the good weather and the reopening of cafe terraces.“There’s still a lack of perspective as to how this can actually come to an end,” he said. The hope was that by the fall, “we will be back to whatever this new normal will be. But there’s no guarantee for that right now. We don’t have visibility.”Opera houses in the United States, which depend mainly on private philanthropy and ticket sales for survival, are suffering even more. The Metropolitan Opera in New York, which plans to reopen in September, announced on its website that it had lost $150 million in earned revenue because of the pandemic.Ms. de Niese said pandemic restrictions meant having “to do all of our rehearsals with a mask on, and that is a killer.”Tristram Kenton/Royal Opera HouseFor the cast members of “La Bohème,” which ends live performances on Tuesday but can be streamed online through July 25, the pandemic has only compounded the art form’s challenges.Danielle de Niese, who plays Musetta, the femme fatale, said in an interview during rehearsals that without a pandemic it was hard enough to do “the drunken tabletop thing” — having to hop from one tabletop to another in a long, heavy gown while singing at the top of her lungs. The coronavirus, she said, also meant having “to do all of our rehearsals with a mask on, and that is a killer.”“It is incredibly challenging to sing into a material mask,” she said. “It basically kills your sound, and it feels like you’re singing into a pillow.”Ms. de Niese, a soprano, pulled out her special opera-singer mask: a protruding face covering with an extra wire that ensured it wouldn’t “go up my nostrils” at each breath. Masks were worn throughout the rehearsal period, she said, and instead of the “natural camaraderie between colleagues” and between acts, performers had to sit on strictly distanced chairs.Ms. de Niese said she was concerned about “singers who are just starting to get into it, who aren’t yet making the big bucks,” and who, struggling financially during the pandemic, had to take “a job packing boxes at Amazon.”“We need to make sure that the next generation will still put their skin in the game,” she said.The Royal Opera’s next big show is directed by Mr. Mears himself: a new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” opening in the fall. In its favor during a pandemic? It doesn’t have a chorus, he pointed out.Despite the prolonged shutdown and logistical and financial headaches, Mr. Mears said there was a silver lining to the difficulty: a regained appreciation for opera.“We always thought that this was something that would always exist, and now I think there’s a tremendous sense of gratitude for the work that we are able to make,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever take opera for granted again, and that can only be a good thing.” More

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      A Reigning Opera Composer Writes of Trauma and ‘Innocence’

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      Kaija Saariaho’s labyrinthine work, premiering in France after a pandemic delay, is the most anticipated new opera of the year.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Susanna Malkki wanted more.“Can you make the crescendo even bigger here?” she asked the London Symphony Orchestra as she conducted it in a recent rehearsal here. “Don’t be afraid to go beyond the mezzo-piano on the page.”They played the passage again, and this time the music swelled to a shock, one of many in the most anticipated new opera of the year: Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premieres Saturday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Commissioned by a host of major houses, it will travel in the coming years to the Finnish and Dutch national operas, the Royal Opera in London, San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Nearly a decade in the making, and nearly thwarted by the pandemic, “Innocence” is taut yet immense: a labyrinth of mystery and memory navigated at a breakneck pace, with the forces of a full orchestra, a chorus and a cast of 13.Its plot, so contemporary you could imagine reading about it in tomorrow’s newspaper, recalls Saariaho’s 2006 opera “Adriana Mater” — and is light years from her most famous stage work, the ethereally seductive “L’Amour de Loin” (2000), set in medieval times. Like both of those, along with her comparatively intimate, Noh-inspired “Only the Sound Remains,” from 2015, it has the makings of a singular contribution to the art form, on a scale rarely seen in new operas.From left, the singer Fiona McGown, the composer Kaija Saariaho and the conductor Susanna Malkki.Jean-Louis Fernandez“I have a long career in commissioning,” Pierre Audi, the Aix Festival’s director, said in an interview. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It’s difficult to summarize “Innocence,” and its creative team has been intentionally secretive about the plot, which reveals itself like a fuzzy image that gradually comes into focus. The action alternates between a present-day wedding and a long-ago tragedy at an international school, with surprising connections between the two becoming an exploration of trauma and its permeating effects.The core of the opera is its multilingual libretto, by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen with translations by Aleksi Barrière, Saariaho’s son and occasional collaborator. The text’s use of different languages — including German, French, English, Greek, Finnish, Spanish and Czech — prompted Saariaho to employ similarly varied vocal techniques, such as folk, Sprechstimme and lyrical, rhythmic speech. (The cast includes a mixture of singers and actors.)Some of the languages were new to Saariaho, and required time to learn the contours of their words and the cadences of their sentences. One role was written specifically with the Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena in mind, for example; before setting to work, Saariaho met with Kozena in Paris to record her speaking.“Analyzing the languages I don’t speak was fascinating, but that’s why it took so long to compose this piece,” Saariaho, who spent several years developing “Innocence” and the better part of four years writing it, said before a rehearsal.During that time, a team came together. Saariaho asked Malkki — one of the world’s leading interpreters of her music, and the dedicatee of this year’s orchestral work “Vista” — to be the conductor.“It was very important for her to know early on who would be doing it,” Malkki, who led “L’Amour de Loin” at the Met when it arrived there and conducted the premiere of the 2006 oratorio “La Passion de Simone,” recalled. “Which of course I felt was an incredible gesture of trust.”A rehearsal for the production, whose action takes place mostly within a rotating building-size set piece.Jean-Louis FernandezMore recently, Saariaho was introduced through Audi to the director Simon Stone, and felt that his temperament was “very well suited” to the opera. In a promotional interview for the festival, Stone spoke about the work’s “beautiful exploration of the scars that we carry with us and the need to reopen wounds so we can heal them properly.”“It’s got,” he added, “a kind of Chekhovian empathy for its characters.”The premiere was planned for last year, but was canceled during the pandemic’s spring surge. By summer, however, the virus’s spread had ebbed enough for the creative team and cast — though not the chorus or orchestra — to rehearse the opera in something of a bubble residency. The work was more or less staged, and the music was prepared as much as it could be with only a piano.“In some ways we were all disappointed,” Kozena said. “But any time you rehearse something, then leave it and come back, it grows and you digest it better. It was a complete luxury for us to rehearse in peace and really just explore it.”Audi referred to that period as “a stroke of luck.” Some premieres originally planned for the past year have been stranded, but “Innocence” was in a position to return as soon as possible. The previous work on it even allowed Stone to be double booked for the 2021 festival, directing “Innocence” and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” with relatively little friction. Crucially, Audi said, Saariaho’s opera will now be able to travel without further delay.Simon Stone, left, on floor, rehearsing his production, which is running at the same time as his Aix staging of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”Jean-Louis FernandezOn a recent evening, Stone was able to attend only the first half of a rehearsal for “Innocence,” stopping by Kozena’s dressing room on the way out for a quick note but otherwise looking visibly pleased and saying, “It really is a good show.”“We couldn’t see him very much this year,” Kozena said after he left. But the most pressing work, she added, was musical anyway. She had originally learned the opera with a piano reduction, which inevitably lacked the layered textures of Saariaho’s score.“So now it’s a challenge,” she said. “Hearing the full orchestra, it’s like, ‘Where’s my note?’”A single note can be hard to find in Saariaho’s dense score — a sound world haunted by a ghostly chorus and spectral flourishes that vanish as suddenly as they arrive. Like many of her works, the music is never truly at rest and keeps organically changing shape, with subtly specific characterizations for each role and a fluidity that matches the libretto’s interwoven timelines and perspectives.“I don’t know why or how, but I kept coming back in my mind to ‘The Last Supper’ of Leonardo da Vinci,” Saariaho said. “I was thinking about how all of these 13 people have their own story and their own motivations, and how we all experience every moment differently. We all pay attention to different things. This became a kind of idée fixe for me.”The characters have their own musical signifiers — which means, Malkki said, that “in the beginning, there’s a lot to take in, but then that is the element which makes it very understandable.”Despite the score’s overall density, Kozena has found the vocal writing comfortable. Saariaho, she said, “really understands voices”: “She lets you express yourself, with colors and melody that gives you space to really concentrate on the music and let it be in your body. Only then can you give emotions that are really deep.”With the orchestra finally in the pit, Malkki said, she has continued to make new discoveries. And the more time she spends with “Innocence,” the more she is convinced that it represents the future of opera.“It’s not escapism,” she said. “It’s a work that actually helps us better understand the world that we live in. These are huge themes, bringing all these different destinies together and showing how we have to live together in reconciliation. And that coexistence is there in the music.” More

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      Taylor Swift Rejoins Her ‘Folklore’ Crew, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Brent Faiyaz featuring Drake, J. Balvin and Skrillex, Chicano Batman 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.Big Red Machine featuring Taylor Swift, ‘Renegade’Big Red Machine is the project of Aaron Dessner — the guitarist in the National who was a producer on Taylor Swift’s “Folklore,” “Evermore” and her remake of “Fearless” — and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), who wrote and sang “Exile,” a high-angst duet with Swift on “Folklore.” Swift sings two songs on the Big Red Machine album due Aug. 27, and regardless of the billing, she dominates “Renegade” with her melodic sense and personality: terse, symmetrical phrases carrying a coolheaded assessment of a failing partner, as she fends off attempts to “let all your damage damage me/and carry your baggage up my street.” The Big Red Machine aspect is in the production details — multilayered drones, tendrils of electric and acoustic guitar, Vernon’s distant backing vocals — but “Renegade” would fit easily on a Swift album. JON PARELESBrent Faiyaz featuring Drake, ‘Wasting Time’The way Brent Faiyaz approaches his verses over the lush, vintage-minded Neptunes production of “Wasting Time” is airy and a little fleeting, as if he’s so absorbed in his pitch to a potential lover that he can’t quite bring himself to stick close to the beat. “If you got time to waste, waste it with me,” Faiyaz pleads, almost pulling back from the request, casting his line while averting his heart. But there’s surety in the layered chorus — a Neptunes standard — and the thumping bass line, and then in the guest verse from Drake, which strikes a sour note about what it means to give of yourself and get crickets back: “Fluent in passive aggression, that’s why you actin’ dismissive/Hearing me out for once would require you actually listen.” JON CARAMANICAJ. Balvin and Skrillex, ‘In da Getto’Credit where credit is due: The lion’s share of the block-party spirit in this song, which is perfectly designed to be blasted all summer, comes from the beat, organ hook and female vocals that the producers Skrillex and Tainy got by sampling “In De Ghetto” by David Morales and the Bad Yard Club featuring Crystal Waters and Delta, from 1994. They built on their acknowledged source, grabbing and crisping up the best moments and tossing in some sirens, while Balvin’s gruff rapping stokes the festivities. But the foundation was already there. PARELESDe Schuurman, ‘Nu Ga Je Dansen’In the late ’80s, DJ Moortje, a selector from the Dutch Antillean island of Curaçao, mistakenly played a dancehall track at the wrong speed during his set at a club in The Hague. The result was a breakneck, squeaky-voiced sound called “bubbling,” a style that would veer into a thousand new directions over the next couple of decades. A new release from the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes is a reminder of the movement’s innovation. “Bubbling Inside” compiles previously unreleased tracks from De Schuurman, a staple of the scene a decade ago. Its standout, “Nu Ga Je Dansen” (“Now You’re Gonna Dance”), is a two-and-a-half minute club rampage. The first 30 seconds recall a late ’90s rave — all sirens and unhinged ferocity. But before long, a flood of kick drums arrives, beckoning everyone to the dance floor. ISABELIA HERRERAChicano Batman, ‘Dark Star’The musical DNA of Chicano Batman is rich with references to bygone eras: the trippy deliria of psych soul, the political ambitions of Brazilian tropicália and the concept-driven idiosyncrasies of prog-rock, among others. But the Los Angeles band has never been interested in mere nostalgia, as it reminds us on “Dark Star.” The song is arranged like a puzzle: a jagged, layered bass line (à la Madlib) clashes with serrated guitar lines, while laid-back vocals glide over the production. In the chorus, the lead singer Bardo Martinez’s voice blooms into what feels like sunny psychedelia. But blink for a second and you’ll miss the ominous undercurrent of the track: The “Dark Star” at hand is not a celestial being, but America — a somber place contending with the legacies of racial violence that still drive its everyday reality. HERRERATi Gonzi, ‘Kudzana Dzana’Tinashe Gonzara, the 28-year-old Zimbabwean rapper and singer who performs as Ti Gonzi, has been recording prolifically since 2009 and winning music awards in Zimbabwe. He has already put out an album this year, “Sendiri Two.” But his newer singles have concentrated on melody as much rapping. “Kudzana Dzana” (“Hundreds and Hundreds”) stacks up vocal harmonies over a teasing, flexible three-against-two groove of percussion and guitar picking that hints at Shona mbira (thumb-piano) traditions but also lets an electric guitar wail. “Life is a journey,” announces one of the few lyrics in English. PARELESTarrus Riley, ‘Heartbreak Anniversary’Giveon’s “Heartbreak Anniversary” is almost incomparably inconsolable. That it’s become the soundtrack for a TikTok dance trend borders on the lunatic. But perhaps that unlikely juxtaposition set the table for this cover, by the reggae star Tarrus Riley, which neatly leavens its angst. Over undulating, swinging production by Kareem Burrell and Dean Fraser, Riley sings not like a man mopping himself up off the floor, but rather one smoothly sauntering to safety. CARAMANICASarah Proctor, ‘Worse’“I know that it hurts/I know I’m going to make it a little bit worse,” Sarah Proctor tells the lover she betrayed. Piano chords toll and vocal harmonies swirl around her, making her sound reverent and contrite — except that she’s not apologizing. She’s breaking up. PARELESSquirrel Flower, ‘Iowa 146’Ella Williams, the songwriter behind the indie-rock of Squirrel Flower, doesn’t shy away from whisper-to-shout full-band crescendos on her band’s new album, “Planet (i).” But “Iowa 146” sticks with the whisper, accompanied by folky picking and all sorts of sustained near-phantom sounds, as she sings about the romance of sharing a guitar. PARELES More

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      Mimi Stern-Wolfe, Presenter of Socially Conscious Concerts, Dies at 84

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      The range of programs she staged on the Lower East Side and in nearby neighborhoods included an annual concert devoted to composers lost to AIDS.Mimi Stern-Wolfe, a pianist and conductor who specialized in music programs with a social-justice or political theme, most notably an annual concert that featured music of composers lost to AIDS, died on June 21 at a care center in Manhattan. She was 84.Her daughter, Laura Wolfe, said the cause was complications of a series of strokes.In the late 1970s Ms. Stern-Wolfe, a fixture on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for most of her adult life, founded Downtown Music Productions, which in the years since has presented a wide range of programs, including performances by and for children, eclectic shows by the Downtown Chamber and Opera Players, and concerts featuring works by women, music of the Holocaust and more. Ms. Stern-Wolfe played and conducted at many of the performances, often leading from the piano bench.In 1990, moved by the death of her friend Eric Benson, a tenor claimed by AIDS in 1988, Ms. Stern-Wolfe started the Benson AIDS Series, concerts held almost every year since then to, in the words of her organization’s website, “promote the work of gifted composers and musicians who are fighting H.I.V./AIDS and to preserve the creative legacy of those who have already died.”In the early years, with the disease still defying treatment, the concerts were charged with emotion; the audience included people who were visibly sick, emaciated and weeping as the music was played. In later years, she viewed the concerts more as a way to keep the music alive and to convey to a younger generation the trauma of those early years of the epidemic.Rohan Spong, a documentary filmmaker, captured the preparation for the 2010 concert in “All the Way Through Evening,” a film released in 2012.“Mimi felt passionately that the wider community remember the talented music composers affected by H.I.V./AIDS in the early years of the pandemic,” Mr. Spong said by email, “many of whom were felled at young ages, and whom she had known personally.”“As she did with so many other issues,” he added, “she was able to synthesize her humanist values with her love of music and her dedication to her community.” The music she presented, he said, “seemed to cross space and time, communicating the beauty of these men’s lives and the tragedy of their deaths with an immediacy that was felt by audiences over two decades later.”Miriam Stern was born on May 27, 1937, in Brooklyn. Her father, Bernard, was a pharmacist, and her mother, Emma, was a homemaker. She grew up in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens and in the Rockaways. Her parents were both immigrants — her mother, she said, had come from Chernobyl, in Soviet Ukraine — and they kept a lively household, which had an effect on young Mimi.“They were not activists; they were sympathizers,” she said in a 2015 interview with the nonprofit group Labor Arts, which named her a recipient of the Clara Lemlich Award for social activism that year. “They were Jewish immigrant sympathizers and had friends who were both Zionists and Communists, and they all used to come to birthday parties and stuff, and argue. A lot. And I remember being kind of fascinated by that when I was a child.”By age 6 she was taking piano lessons. She graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in 1954, earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Queens College in 1958 and received a master’s degree in music and piano performance at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1961. She lived and studied in Paris for a time before settling on the Lower East Side.She had two passions, as she put it: classical music and “my political proclivities.” But she found that they rarely overlapped; people who were passionate about the causes she cared about didn’t generally have much use for classical music.“What I wanted to do with my music was to find a way to synthesize my political ideas and my music,” she said.Ms. Stern-Wolfe in her apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2013. Most of the concerts she presented took place in that neighborhood or nearby. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesAnd so she organized concerts like “War and Pieces,” featuring music highlighting the consequences of war. She presented concerts devoted to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes and Harriet Tubman. After the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations of 2011, she organized a concert of protest songs.Other programs were more whimsical, like a 1987 concert titled “Notes From the Underground: Music as Satire.” And then there was “A Toast to the Steins,” with music by Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein and a poem by Gertrude Stein set to music.Ms. Stern-Wolfe’s marriage to Robert Wolfe in 1961 ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter, a singer-songwriter and child of that marriage, she is survived by her partner of 30 years, the poet Ilsa Gilbert, and a grandson.Although Ms. Stern-Wolfe performed in many places, most of her productions were staged on the Lower East Side or in surrounding neighborhoods, by choice. She wanted to make classical music and other forms accessible to the people who were her neighbors.“I didn’t want to go to the Upper West Side every time I went to a concert,” she said in a 2006 interview, “so I made a vow to bring the music down here. If I’d lived uptown, life would’ve been very different. Perhaps I’d have a job with City Opera.” More

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      Louis Andriessen, Lionized Composer With Radical Roots, Dies at 82

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      After challenging the Dutch musical establishment as a young man, he went on to write a series of large and loud symphonic works that grappled with big ideas.Louis Andriessen, who as a young iconoclast disrupted the Dutch classical music scene before becoming one of Europe’s most important postwar composers with a series of large-scale, often brash works, died on Thursday in Weesp, the Netherlands. He was 82. His death, at his home near Amsterdam in a specialized village for people with dementia, was announced by his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Andriessen’s musical influences included Stravinsky, bebop and American minimalism, different styles that he often presented in gleeful confrontation. His music was a unique blend of American sounds and European forms, the composer Michael Gordon said in a phone interview.“These pieces are really constructed like big symphonic works, but using the materials of the vernacular,” he said. “The music was the bridge between European formalism and an almost hipster riffing on American jazz and minimalism.”In the latter part of his career Mr. Andriessen created monumental pieces that probed big ideas. “De Tijd,” meaning time in Dutch, took on that subject. “De Staat,” set to the text of Plato’s “Republic,” was about political organization. “De Materie” (“On Matter”) began with a 17th-century treatise on shipbuilding and ended with excerpts from Marie Curie’s diaries.He collaborated with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway on a movie, “M is for Man, Music, Mozart” (1991), and two operas, “ROSA The Death of a Composer” (1994) and “Writing to Vermeer” (1999). In his book “The Art of Stealing Time,” Mr. Andriessen wrote that in Mr. Greenaway’s films, “I recognize something of my own work, namely the combination of intellectual material and vulgar directness.”The opera director Pierre Audi said that each of Mr. Andriessen’s works for the stage “could fly away into fantasy and extreme freedom of structure, with collages of different musical idioms.”“But what characterized them all,” he added, “was an inner architecture. He managed to build operas like cathedrals.”Mr. Andriessen’s early career was fueled by Marxist ideals and the desire to upend traditional practices in classical music. He founded two ensembles in the 1970s. De Volharding (Perseverance) consisted of players who were equally versed in improvised and experimental music, with the idea of giving them greater influence over the musical material they performed. Hoketus, which disbanded in 1987, was named after a medieval technique that splits a single musical line among multiple players.Mr. Andriessen used that technique in “Symphony for Open Strings” (1978), in which musical phrases are painstakingly pieced together from single notes. The players use only open strings, meaning that their left hands, which change the notes on the fingerboard, are rendered useless. It is a way to handicap the very instruments that in traditional symphonic writing receive almost all the expressive material.Mr. Andriessen in 2018 after a performance of his “Symphony for Open Strings” by the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room. The orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, is at left.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn later decades he accepted commissions from major orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, which gave the premiere of his tone poem “Agamemnon” in 2018 during its two-week festival devoted to Mr. Andriessen.In large-scale works his sound was typically strident and bold. His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Most of all, he liked it loud.Mr. Gordon recalled a rehearsal of one of Mr. Andriessen’s orchestral works at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony in Lenox, Mass., in 1994. Mr. Andriessen felt that the piece had come out sounding too polite. The musicians said they had trouble finding the notes.“I would rather you play the wrong note very loud then the right note very soft,” Mr. Andriessen responded.Louis Andriessen was born on June 6, 1939, into a Roman Catholic family in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His father, Hendrik Franciscus Andriessen, was a composer and organist who became the director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. His mother, Johanna Justina Anschütz, was a pianist. Louis was the youngest of six children, all of whom were musical. (Two brothers also became composers.)From 1956-1962 he studied composition, music theory and piano at the conservatory, then traveled to both Milan and Berlin for advanced studies with Luciano Berio. While studying in The Hague he met the guitarist Jeanette Yanikian who became his partner. They married in 1996, and she died in 2008. Mr. Andriessen is survived by his second wife, the violinist Monica Germino, whom he married in 2012 and for whom he wrote several works. Beginning in 1966, Mr. Andriessen and a group of fellow Dutch musicians pushed for Amsterdam’s storied Concertgebouw Orchestra to engage more vigorously with contemporary music. In 1969, they led what became known as the Nutcracker Action, when activists sabotaged a Concertgebouw performance with frog-shaped metal clickers. That year he collaborated on an opera, “Reconstructie” (“Reconstruction”), which decries American imperialism as it pulls together various styles, including pop, jazz, Mozart pastiche and a speaking chorus. A weeklong run of sold-out performances of the work forced the Dutch culture minister to defend the spending of taxpayer money to finance what was called anti-American agitprop.From 1972 to 1976 Mr. Andriessen composed “De Staat,” a work that would come to define his combination of intellectual rigor and brash sonic exuberance. In “De Tijd,” he played with the listener’s perception of time by manipulating repetition and silence. The frantic, clanging “De Snelheid” (“Velocity”), composed in the early 1980s, investigated the perception of speed and its relationship to harmony.In 1985 he completed “De Stijl,” a Mondrian-inspired piece that would become part of the massive stage work “De Materie,” which sets scientific, historical and mystical texts to a powerful score teeming with sonic hues. Reviewing a 2016 production at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan directed by Heiner Goebbels, which featured a flock of live sheep, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times described it as “colorful, exciting and, during reflective episodes, raptly beautiful.”Mr. Andriessen with the Philharmonic in 2018 after a performance of his “Agamamnon.” His signature orchestration combined beefed-up woodwind and brass along with keyboards, electric guitars and clanging percussion.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAs Mr. Andriessen’s fame grew, the classical establishment he had once heckled embraced him. Beginning in 1978 he taught composition at the Royal Conservatory. Yale University invited him in 1987 to lecture on theory and composition. The arts faculty of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands appointed him professor in 2004. He held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall during the 2009-10 season.Among other honors, he won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Composition in 2011, for “La Commedia,” a polyglot romp through hell anchored in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and the 2016 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music.One of his last major works, “Theater of the World,” centering on the Jesuit philosopher Athanasius Kircher, received its premiere in Los Angeles in 2016. The music blends children’s songs, Serialism and baroque influences into what The Guardian called a “superb, surreal journey.”Having developed dementia, Mr. Andriessen moved to the village in Weesp for people with memory loss last year. The village, called Hogeweyk, has multiple pianos, and Mr. Andriessen would improvise on them for hours. More

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      Company Set to Manage Britney Spears’s Estate Asks to Withdraw

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      Bessemer Trust, a professional wealth management firm, said in its filing that it had not known of Ms. Spears’s objection to the conservatorship that governs her life.The wealth management firm that was set to take over as the co-conservator of Britney Spears’s estate, alongside her father, has requested to resign from the arrangement, according to a document filed in court on Thursday, throwing her conservatorship into greater turmoil.Bessemer Trust, a professional wealth management firm that manages more than $100 billion in assets, said in a court filing that it wanted to resign “due to changed circumstances,” citing Ms. Spears’s recent public criticisms of the conservatorship.The firm said in its filing that it had been told that Ms. Spears’s conservatorship was voluntary and that she had consented to the company acting as co-conservator. But in a court hearing on June 23, Ms. Spears excoriated the conservatorship and demanded that it end.“As a result of the conservatee’s testimony at the June 23 hearing, however, Petitioner has become aware that the Conservatee objects to the continuance of her Conservatorship and desires to terminate the conservatorship,” the firm said in the court filing. “Petitioner has heard the Conservatee and respects her wishes.”If the judge approves Bessemer’s request to resign, it is unclear if Ms. Spears’s father will serve as the sole conservator of the singer’s nearly $60 million estate.For 13 years, Ms. Spears has lived under a system that restricts her control over her life and finances. She called the conservatorship “abusive” last week at the hearing, and pleaded with the court to let her out of the arrangement without a medical evaluation.Her court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, has not yet filed a formal request to terminate the conservatorship with the court.Ms. Spears’s father and others involved in the conservatorship have defended the arrangement and said that it rescued her from a low point, and that she could move to end it whenever she wanted. But confidential court records obtained by The New York Times showed how Ms. Spears, 39, has objected to the conservatorship for years.In a quirk of the conservatorship system, Ms. Spears has to pay for lawyers on both sides, including those arguing against her wishes in court.Last fall, Mr. Ingham had requested that the singer’s father, James P. Spears, be suspended as conservator of the estate immediately, claiming Ms. Spears was “afraid of her father,” but the judge declined that request.Bessemer Trust was approved by the court at that time to be added as co-conservator of the estate. But the firm said in its court filing on Thursday that it was still “not currently authorized to act” and had not taken any action as co-conservator or received any of the assets of Ms. Spears’s estate, nor had it taken any fees.Mr. Spears was appointed co-conservator of Ms. Spears’s estate in early 2008, alongside a lawyer, Andrew Wallet. Mr. Wallet, who in a 2018 court filing described the conservatorship as a “hybrid business model,” resigned in 2019.The high-profile court battle over Ms. Spears’s case has put heightened public attention on the conservatorship, or guardianship, system. On Thursday, Time reported that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey were calling for greater federal scrutiny of the system. More

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      Britney Spears’s Father Calls for Inquiry Into Singer’s Control Claims

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      A week after the singer’s impassioned courtroom speech, the man who has long overseen her conservatorship called for an investigation into her claims that she had been abused under it.James P. Spears, the father of Britney Spears and the man who has long had a leading role in overseeing his daughter’s affairs, on Tuesday called for an investigation into the singer’s claims last week that she had been abused under her conservatorship, including being made to perform and take medication against her will.The court filings on behalf of Mr. Spears followed the singer’s first detailed public statement in 13 years about the complex legal arrangement that oversees her personal care and finances, in which she called for an end to the conservatorship without having to undergo a mental evaluation.In her remarks at the hearing on June 23, which were broadcast in the courtroom and streamed online, Ms. Spears placed the blame for how she said she had been treated on her management team, caretakers and family, mentioning her father specifically.Now, lawyers for Mr. Spears have requested an evidentiary hearing and called into question the actions of both Ms. Spears’s current personal conservator and court-appointed lawyer, writing that “it is critical that the Court confirm whether or not Ms. Spears’s testimony was accurate in order to determine what corrective actions, if any, need to be taken.”The filings, made late Tuesday in Los Angeles and obtained by The New York Times, continued: “It is also imperative for the proper functioning of conservatorship proceedings before this Court that all parties be provided a full and fair opportunity to respond to allegations and claims asserted against them.”James P. Spears, known as Jamie, currently oversees his daughter’s finances. He temporarily stepped down as a conservator of her person in 2019.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe two-pronged conservatorship managing Ms. Spears’s personal life and estate was first approved by a Los Angeles probate court in 2008, when Ms. Spears’s father filed to gain control of the singer’s business and well-being amid concerns about her mental health and potential substance abuse. The arrangement is typically reserved for people who cannot care for themselves, though Ms. Spears went on to work and perform widely in the years that followed.Mr. Spears currently oversees the singer’s finances, alongside a corporate fiduciary that Ms. Spears requested join the arrangement last year. Her personal conservator, Jodi Montgomery, took over on an ongoing temporary basis from her father in September 2019, after Mr. Spears stepped down, citing health problems.But Ms. Spears’s recent statement, along with confidential court records obtained by The New York Times, revealed that in private, Ms. Spears had consistently pushed to end the conservatorship, calling it “too, too much,” according to a court investigator’s report in 2016, and adding that she was “sick of being taken advantage of.”In court last week, Ms. Spears called the setup abusive, comparing it to sex trafficking and describing being forced to tour, undergo psychiatric evaluations and take medication in 2019, before her father relinquished his role as her personal conservator.She also said she could not remove her birth control device despite wanting to get married and have more children. Ms. Spears singled out her father as “the one who approved all of it.”In a second filing on Tuesday, lawyers for Mr. Spears denied the characterization that he was in command, arguing that Ms. Montgomery had been “fully in charge of Ms. Spears’s day-to-day personal care and medical treatment” since September 2019, despite some of Ms. Spears’s claims predating Ms. Montgomery’s appointment.“Mr. Spears is simply not involved in any decisions related to Ms. Spears’s personal care or medical or reproductive issues,” his lawyers wrote. “Mr. Spears is unable to hear and address his daughter’s concerns directly because he has been cut off from communicating with her.”They added that Mr. Spears had no intention of returning as his daughter’s personal conservator, but said he was “concerned about the management and care of his daughter.”Lauriann Wright, a lawyer for Ms. Montgomery, said in a statement on Wednesday that as personal conservator, Ms. Montgomery had “been a tireless advocate for Britney and for her well-being,” with “one primary goal — to assist and encourage Britney in her path to no longer needing a conservatorship of the person.”Ms. Wright pointed to Ms. Montgomery’s role as a “a neutral decision-maker when there are complex family dynamics” and said Ms. Spears’s “choice to marry and to start a family have never been impacted by the conservatorship while Ms. Montgomery has been conservator of the person.”She added that Ms. Montgomery looked forward to “setting forth a path for termination of the conservatorship.”Lawyers for Mr. Spears also raised concerns about the role of Ms. Spears’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, who was assigned to the case in 2008, when the singer was deemed incapable of choosing her own representation.In the documents, Mr. Spears’s lawyers questioned whether an earlier move to make Ms. Montgomery’s role permanent reflected the singer’s wishes, or if she was aware of it at all, noting that “Ms. Spears neither signed nor verified” the petition to appoint her personal conservator, which was instead signed by Mr. Ingham.They cited Mr. Ingham’s previous claim that Ms. Spears had been found in 2014 to lack the capacity to consent to medical treatment, and noted, “there was no such finding, and there is no such order.” This, too, requires investigation at a subsequent hearing, the lawyers wrote.In calling for an investigation, Mr. Spears’s lawyers said: “Either the allegations will be shown to be true, in which case corrective action must be taken, or they will be shown to be false, in which case the conservatorship can continue its course. It is not acceptable for Conservators or the Court to do nothing in response to Ms. Spears’ testimony.”Earlier, Ms. Spears had expressed concerns about her father’s level of control over her, according to the investigator’s report from 2016. She cited her inability to make friends or date without her father’s approval; the limits of her $2,000 per week allowance, despite her success as a performer; and the fear and “very harsh” consequences that she said came with any infractions under the conservatorship, according to the investigator’s account.At the time, the probate investigator in the case concluded that the conservatorship remained in Ms. Spears’s best interests based on her complex finances, susceptibility to outside influence and “intermittent” drug issues, according to the report. But it also called for “a pathway to independence and the eventual termination of the conservatorship.”Ms. Spears said in court last week that she had been unaware that she could file to end the conservatorship. “I’m sorry for my ignorance, but I honestly didn’t know that,” she said. More

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      Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson Set for Central Park ‘Homecoming’

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      Paul Simon will also perform at this summer’s concert on the Great Lawn as part of a weeklong celebration of the city’s reopening.Bruce Springsteen! Jennifer Hudson! Paul Simon!Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday announced the first batch of headliners for the city’s planned “homecoming concert” in Central Park this summer, which is being booked with the 89-year-old music producer Clive Davis.During a video news conference, de Blasio confirmed that those three artists would be part of the show, which is planned for the park’s Great Lawn as part of a weeklong celebration of the city’s reopening.“This is going to be one of the greatest Central Park concerts in history,” de Blasio said. “This is something for the ages.”But many details have yet to be announced, including the event’s date. When de Blasio first revealed plans for the show, three weeks ago, it was provisionally set for Aug. 21. But in his comments on Thursday the mayor gave no date and said that there were still “a lot more details to come” about the event.Gossip about Springsteen’s involvement has been circulating through the entertainment world for weeks, and seemed uncertain once the singer announced the return of his show “Springsteen on Broadway,” which reopened Saturday and will run through Sept. 4. But while his show is running on some Saturdays, an Aug. 21 performance is conspicuously absent from the posted schedule.“He is beloved in New York City in an extraordinary way,” de Blasio said of Springsteen, “even though he happens to come from Jersey — no one’s perfect.”At the Central Park show, Springsteen is expected to perform a duet with Patti Smith, according to a person briefed on the plans. The mayor did not mention Smith’s involvement in his announcement, and a representative of the singer declined to comment.The performers announced so far have long been associated with Davis, whose career as a top music executive began in the late 1960s when he took over Columbia Records. He signed Springsteen to Columbia in 1972, and worked with Simon & Garfunkel and Simon as a solo artist during his years at that label. Later, he signed Hudson — who had been a contestant on “American Idol” — to J Records. More