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      The World Is Still Catching Up to the Music of Hector Berlioz

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      Hector Berlioz did not have the twilight of a great composer.In his memoirs, he described himself in his 60s as “past hopes, past illusions, past high thoughts and lofty conceptions.” His extraordinary but unusual music was unloved and unplayed; a widower two times over, he was lonely, and hated people more than ever. He wrote, with a shake of his fist at the sky: “I say hourly to Death, ‘When you will.’ Why does he delay?”He felt wronged by the public and his fellow composers, who even when they admired him didn’t know what to do with his music, or his personality. Wagner wrote that Berlioz didn’t trust anyone’s opinion, and seemed to enjoy isolation, dooming him to “remain forever incomplete and perhaps really shine only as a transient, marvelous exception.”Berlioz had faith that his time would come, though. By his estimate, things would pick up for him if he could just live to 140. He made it to 65.But he wasn’t wrong. After his death, in 1869, some of his works, like the “Symphonie Fantastique,” became firmly entrenched in the canon, and he is the subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival, which begins on Aug. 9. Still, two weeks’ worth of concerts and panel discussions, as well as a companion collection of essays, can only begin to capture the breadth of Berlioz’s artistry.There is Berlioz the composer, of course, but also Berlioz the critic, the conductor, the impresario, the philosopher and the literary author. A focus on his music alone is just as dizzying: Nearly every work defies conventional analysis and taxonomy, and must be approached on its own terms.His idiosyncratic music didn’t truly catch on until the mid-20th century, and even then fitfully. His operas remain too difficult to stage regularly, and many of his concert works are too strange to program or market to audiences. It feels as though we are still catching up to Berlioz’s pipe-dream visions of musical possibility.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Walter Arlen, Holocaust Refugee and Belated Composer, Is Dead at 103

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      After fleeing Vienna, he was a music critic and teacher before returning to composing in the 1980s. His memories of Nazi barbarism inspired his music.Walter Arlen, a Viennese musical prodigy who fled to the United States after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and became a music critic and a late-in-life composer of Holocaust and Jewish-exile remembrances in song, died on Sept. 3, 2023, in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 103. The death, in a hospital, was not widely reported at the time; Howard Myers, Mr. Arlen’s husband and sole survivor, confirmed it to The New York Times only recently. Mr. Arlen and Mr. Myers, longtime residents of Santa Monica, had been companions for 65 years and were married in 2008 after California’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of same-sex marriages.Even after eight decades, Mr. Arlen’s memories remained vivid — of his father being dragged off to a concentration camp; of his mother’s nervous breakdown and suicide; of his family’s home, business and bank accounts stolen by the Nazi authorities; and of witnessing the vicious murder of an older Jew by an SS guard.The scion of a prosperous Jewish family that had owned a department store in Vienna since 1890, Mr. Arlen, whose family name was Aptowitzer, was an 18-year-old high school student in 1938, nearing graduation with a brilliant musical future ahead, when German troops invaded and absorbed German-speaking Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich in what was known as the Anschluss.As waves of Nazi violence and property expropriations crushed Jewish life across Austria, the department store was seized and “Aryanized,” the family was evicted from its apartments on the top floor, and Walter’s father was sent to a series of concentration camps, ending at Buchenwald. Walter, his mother and his younger sister, Edith, took refuge in a pensione.Mr. Arlen and his sister, Edith Arlen-Wachtel, visited Vienna, their native city, in March 2008 for the first time since their family fled Nazi-occupied Austria.Christian Fürst/Picture-Alliance/DPA, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Ella Jenkins Revolutionized Children’s Music

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      Over seven decades, she brought a world of genres and ideas to songs for the young. On her centennial, what she would really like to do is perform again.When Ella Jenkins began recording young people’s music in the 1950s and ’60s, her albums featured tracks that many of that era’s parents and teachers would probably never have dreamed of playing for children: a love chant from North Africa. A Mexican hand-clapping song. A Maori Indian battle chant. And even “Another Man Done Gone,” an American chain-gang lament whose lyrics she changed, turning it into a freedom cry.“She found this way of introducing children to sometimes very difficult topics and material, but with a kind of gentleness,” said Gayle Wald, a professor of American studies at George Washington University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Jenkins. “She never lied to them. She certainly never talked down to them.”Jenkins’s unorthodox approach became a huge success: She is the best-selling individual artist in the history of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, surpassing even such stalwarts of the label as Woody Guthrie and her friend Pete Seeger. A champion of diversity long before the term became popular, Jenkins helped revolutionize music for the young, purposefully encouraging Black children.Jenkins at a Grammy ceremony where she received a special honor.R. Diamond/WireImageIn addition to introducing global material, which she often recorded with children’s choruses, she wrote original, interactive compositions like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” now part of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.“Before Ella, very few people actually composed for children,” Wald said in a video interview.You might think that Jenkins, who will celebrate her 100th birthday on Tuesday, would now want to relax and savor her many accolades, among them lifetime achievement awards from both the Grammys and ASCAP, the music licensing agency, as well as a designation as a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow. But in a brief telephone conversation from her home in an assisted-living center in Chicago, she seemed unconcerned with plans for her centenary in the city, which include a Tuesday morning celebration with young students from the Old Town School of Folk Music, and a showcase on Wednesday with performances by children from Kids on the Move Summer Camp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lincoln Center’s Rebranded Orchestra Settles Into Its Debut Season

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      Compared with previous seasons, recent concerts by the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center were refreshingly casual, but also more mixed.With a new name and a new music director, Lincoln Center’s summer orchestra is getting a fresh start this season. On the evidence of three concerts over the past week and a half, though, the newly minted Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center is turning its focus to an element that has always been there: the players themselves.Last year was the final summer of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which for 21 years had been led by the beloved Louis Langrée. The renamed ensemble’s music director, Jonathon Heyward, was a companionable host recently at the first concert of its season, which allowed audience members to vote on the pieces they’d like to hear. Between movements, Heyward called on a few players at their music stands to talk about their love of the composers. Some remarks seemed well-rehearsed, others extemporaneous. But all of them were sweet.There has been some worry about the organization’s legacy — that change represents a repudiation of the orchestra’s repertoire and mission. At his final concerts, Langrée himself pleaded with the audience to return and support the players.This year, the onstage conversations felt calculated to build a rapport between the players and the audience. Attendees were also invited to mingle with the musicians in the lobby of David Geffen Hall after each concert. All that talking had an interesting outcome: It left me more invested in individual musicians when they eventually played.Kazem Abdullah led a program that included Brahms’s Violin Concerto, with Benjamin Beilman as the soloist.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterAs in years past, each program was performed twice on consecutive nights. Avoiding heavy material, the concerts felt like a linen suit designed for comfort, ease and a touch of class on balmy days. There’s still substance, but it comes in the pleasing form of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schumann (a Heyward favorite), rather than the portentous, densely textured works of Mahler and Strauss.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An 18th-Century Phenom Arrives at Lincoln Center

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      The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Marianna Martines’s Symphony in C, a milestone for a composer whose music mostly fell silent after her death.The composer Marianna Martines grew up in Vienna when the city was teeming with towering figures in classical music. Haydn was her neighbor and teacher. Mozart sought her out as a duet partner.Born in 1744, Martines began her remarkable career at just 16. At 38, she became the first female composer programmed by the Society of Musicians, whose elite concert series also gave Beethoven his Viennese performance debut. But after her death, in 1812, Martines’s music mostly fell silent, a fate shared by so many female composers of her era.This week, though, the Summer for the City festival at Lincoln Center will perform Martines’s Symphony in C major (1770), a work composed decades before it was common for women to write orchestral music. The performances are a significant step in the reclamation of her music.“It was an easy decision to present this fantastic piece,” said Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. “The whole piece is filled with wonderful interplay within the strings and the wind parts.” The first movement, he added, “is light and spirited.”The pianist Sandra Mogensen found similar qualities in Martines’s piano music, calling it “sparkly, wonderful and vibrant.” She and her colleague Erica Sipes have played through all of Martines’s available keyboard works as part of Piano Music She Wrote, an online project they founded in 2020 to encourage performances of public domain piano music by women. Martines’s Piano Sonata in A major (1765) was one of the first pieces Sipes recorded. “It pulled me in,” she said. “Every movement has something different to say.”This past spring, Elizabeth Schauer, director of choral activities at the University of Arizona, led what was likely the first performance since Martines’s death of her Mass No. 3 (1761). When she wrote it, “she was only 17,” Schauer said. “My students and I found it astonishing and beautiful.” Schauer used a new score reconstructed by her student James Higgs from manuscripts. For Higgs, Martines’s style reflects her teachers and supporters in Vienna, who were Italian.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Did Flavor Flav Become a Hype Man for the U.S. Women’s Water Polo Team?

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      The rapper has become a self-appointed hype man and benefactor to the U.S. women’s team in Paris. He plans to keep the poolside party going into 2028.As the robed members of the U.S. women’s water polo team stood single file at the pool’s edge before their match against Italy at the Paris Olympics, the rapper Flavor Flav stood directly across from them, clapping while the announcer at the Aquatics Centre in St.-Denis, France, listed the American players’ names one by one. He made a heart gesture with his hands.For the rest of the match, he rarely sat. Wearing a personalized water polo cap and jersey and a dessert-plate-size clock on a chain around his neck — all of them red, white and blue — America’s newest (and perhaps most unlikely) water polo fan leaned nervously against a glass barrier and shouted encouragement.Whenever the United States scored, he raised his wrists — both were adorned with big-faced watches — and shouted gleefully. He does not care if the players cannot hear him, he said; he prefers that they focus on their assignments anyway.“They know deep down in their hearts and they know way in the back of their mind that Flav is right there for us,” he said in an interview at a hospitality venue in Paris after the game.In an Olympics in which Snoop Dogg has seemed ubiquitous, a women’s rugby player has recruited an N.F.L. superfan and Parisian fans have lost their minds, the relationship between a team of women’s water polo players and a 65-year-old rapper from Long Island might rank as just another curious pairing. Except it’s not: When it comes to water polo, Flavor Flav is quick to remind anyone, he is all in.The United States beat Italy, 10-3, in a group match on Wednesday. The team then beat France, 17-5, to close pool play with a 3-1 record.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Death-Driven ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at the Bayreuth Festival

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      Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s production of “Tristan und Isolde” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany is an excellently conducted puzzle of grim symbols.Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” is not a love story. It’s a death story.It’s an opera in which the central duet is an ecstatic, philosophical declaration of love through a pledge of mutual death. Tristan, his name itself rooted in sadness, welcomes his end as a release; the greatest act of devotion, for Isolde, would be to join him in a state of love transfigured.OK, maybe “Tristan” is both a love story and a death story.Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s new production, at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, emphasizes the death part more. (People in the country can stream it on BR Klassik.) He sets the opera in a purgatorial space and, instead of spiritual transformation, portrays a scarcely transcendent suicide, an act of self-destruction in service of love.It’s a bleak but still Romantic outlook, conveyed with stubborn opacity and a loose grip of the dramaturgy. A director’s vision, though, is just one reason to visit Bayreuth, the pilgrimage-like festival that Wagner founded nearly 150 years ago.This “Tristan” belongs, above all, to the conductor Semyon Bychkov. He previously led “Parsifal” at Bayreuth with shocking speed, but he did something like the opposite here: not necessarily stretching the score, but relishing key moments to guide the audience’s emotions as commandingly as Wagner intended. At times, the passion was tidal; at others, teeming with anticipation.(Bychkov is in good company. The festival has had its share of conductor missteps in recent years, but the evening before I saw “Tristan,” Simone Young led a masterly “Götterdämmerung”; elsewhere at Bayreuth, Pablo Heras-Casado is returning for “Parsifal”; Nathalie Stutzmann is picking up a “Tannhäuser” once botched by Valery Gergiev; and Oksana Lyniv continues her fiery “Der Fliegende Holländer.” With three female conductors out of five total, Bayreuth’s gender distribution is applaudably better than many in classical music and opera.)Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson’s production abstracts parts of a ruined ship that, by the third act, is broken up and scattered around the stage.Enrico Nawrath/Bayreuther FestspieleWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the Runaways’ Jackie Fox Made a Rock ’n’ Roll Board Game

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      The teenage bassist of the Runaways cut her music career short in 1977. Rather than retell her story, she’s reimagined it as a board game, Rock Hard: 1977.Jackie Fox grew up with a guitar in her hand. In 1975, when she was 15 years old, she was pulled off the dance floor at a Hollywood nightclub and recruited to join an all-girl teen rock band. The Runaways became a sensation and tossed Fox and her young bandmates into a turbulent industry that was also violent and sexist. In 1977, Fox quit the band. She never played music professionally again.Now, almost 50 years later, Fox has recast her experience in the form of a board game. In Rock Hard: 1977, Fox has shrunk the chaotic ’70s club scene to the size of a card table. She has written her own rules, anointed new kinds of rock stars and assumed control. Now she can play on her own terms — and win.“As soon as I decided I was going to design a game, I knew it was going to be about becoming a rock star,” Fox, 64, said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home earlier this week. “People have been asking me to ‘tell my story,’ and there are a lot of reasons why I don’t want to sit down and write a book.” After all the years she has spent living and reliving that experience, she wanted to reimagine it — to create a situation where she could have fun.From left: Joan Jett, Fox, Cherie Currie, Sandy West and Lita Ford of the Runaways onstage in 1976 at CBGBs.Richard E. Aaron/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn the game, you play one of 10 characters who are, much like Fox was, musicians on the verge of stardom in 1977. (They each have excellent hair.) As you roll the dice and pull cards, your rock hopeful hops around a board from day job to rehearsal studio, vying to achieve personal goals while growing your reputation and writing songs. Points are tallied on a board styled like an amp that turns up to 11.As your avatar works her way up from bar mitzvahs to arena stages, you navigate managers, journalists, D.J.s and fans. The game’s protagonists are largely not the white men who dominated the rock scene in the 1970s, but characters representing the diverse musicians who played in clubs and toiled in studios, angling for their shot. You can play as Yolanda Delacroix, an Afro-Cuban studio musician, or “Doc” Sapphire, the androgynous child of Indian immigrants, and the game play is tuned slightly to reflect their experiences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More