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    Inside the Shed’s Sonic Sphere

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    A hanging concert hall at the Shed in Manhattan purports to offer something “experimental, experiential and communal.” Our critic climbs the stairs.“Whoa,” a man near me said as the curtains swept open.He, I and a couple of hundred other people had been waiting in a large room at the Shed, the arts center at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Portentous, woozy background music was playing, as if an alien encounter was imminent.Then those curtains parted, and a much larger room was revealed: the Shed’s vast McCourt space, in which a sphere, 65 feet in diameter and pocked like Swiss cheese, had been suspended from the faraway ceiling and bathed in red light.This arresting — indeed, “whoa”-inducing — sight was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a concert hall design by the brilliant, peerlessly loopy composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), who inspired Germany to build the first one for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan.Stockhausen, an impresario of electroacoustic experimentation and far-out notions like a string quartet playing inside a helicopter, imagined the audiences for his “Kugelauditorium” sitting on a sound-permeable level within the sphere, so that speakers could be placed under, as well as around and over, them.During the six months that the Osaka exposition was open, hundreds of thousands of people came and heard taped music adapted for the in-the-round playback possibilities, as well as live performances. Then, for the next half century, the idea lay dormant; Carnegie Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein remained intact, having not been replaced by giant spheres.Enter, a few years ago, a team led by Ed Cooke (whose biography calls him “a multidisciplinary explorer of consciousness”), the sound designer Merijn Royaards and Nicholas Christie, the project’s engineering director.They have built Sonic Spheres in France, Britain, Mexico and the United States. Each time, like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” the contraption has grown. The Shed iteration, open through the end of July, is the first to hang in midair, at a cost of more than $2 million.As in Osaka, some of the presentations offer taped music; some, live. On Saturday, I climbed the many steps to the sphere’s entrance and reclined, like everyone else, in a comfortable hammock-like seat, listening to the seductively sullen 2009 debut album by the British band the xx. Forty-five minutes after that was over, the pianist Igor Levit appeared in person to perform, for a fresh audience, Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari,” from 1986.Colors and configurations of lights on the fabric skin of the Sphere tended to shift with the music’s beat as Levit performed.James Estrin/The New York TimesLights, in colors and configurations that tended to shift with the music’s beat, played on the fabric skin of this big Wiffle ball. But for an audience that could be seeing the high-definition stadium shows of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift this summer, the visuals were blurry, rudimentary stuff; this was the aspect of the presentation that felt most trapped in 1970.And the audio experience that emerged from the 124 speakers was unremarkable at best. The xx remix did nicely separate the bass, coming up palpably but not too heavily out of the bottom of the sphere, from the voices around and above. To no compelling end, though, and the album’s whispery intimacy was supersized into a much blander grandeur.The situation was more distressing for Levit. While the spare, spacious chords of “Palais de Mari” registered more or less cleanly, with only slight fuzz, the sound was muddy for the Bach chorale he played as a prelude; it was the perennial challenge of amplifying acoustic instruments, times 124. And the jittery lighting, a collaboration between Levit and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, could hardly have been more uncomprehending of Feldman’s glacial austerity.For all the souped-up spiffiness of the Sonic Sphere, the programming on Saturday felt like a retread of artists who were more interesting when Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, presented them during his stint at the Park Avenue Armory uptown.There, in 2014, the xx did a celebrated (live) residency in front of only a few dozen people per show. Levit, the following year, played Bach as part of an ornate concentration exercise orchestrated by Marina Abramovic. (Will he, now a fixture of New York’s more unconventional spaces, end up hanging upside-down at the piano once the Perelman Performing Arts Center opens this fall?)Those Armory shows were more memorable than either Shed set. Both of them on Saturday were under 40 minutes, but I found myself getting antsy well before time was up. Perhaps the audiences at Burning Man, the techno-hippie hedonist bonanza in the Nevada desert where a Sonic Sphere was built last year, were more engrossed, experiencing it on harder drugs than the Coke Zero I’d had with dinner.Sober, none of the music was more interesting, effective, illuminated or illuminating in this space than it would have been elsewhere. It was clear that the main point was that first reveal, as the curtains opened and everyone’s phones came out, ready to post images of something big and glamorous on social media.So, millions of dollars for Instagram bait — but fine, if its creators didn’t also hype it as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.” I felt, in fact, more distant from my fellow audience members in the Sonic Sphere, even the ones reclining next to me, than I have at most any traditional concert hall.In this, the sphere is of a piece with the other current offering at the Shed: a weird virtual-reality simulacrum of a solo piano concert by the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March.The Sonic Sphere was billed as “an unlimited instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.”James Estrin/The New York TimesEmpathy? Communal experience? No, the hologram-like specter of Sakamoto was more vivid and substantial than the other people watching with me, who, while I wore the VR glasses, faded into transparent ghostliness.The wall text in the holding room for the Sonic Sphere acknowledges that technology can isolate us from each other, but adds that mustn’t necessarily be the case: “We need it to delight and inspire us, not just passively, but in ways that provoke action.”But, as with so much ambitious, empty-headed, underwhelming, ultimately depressing tech, the action that’s provoked by this expensive spectacle is merely a passing moment of “whoa.” More

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      Review: ‘Fragments’ Proposes a New Kind of Cello Recital

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      Alisa Weilerstein brought her new project, a mix tape of new works and movements from Bach’s cello suites, to Zankel Hall.Alisa Weilerstein, a cellist of explosive emotional energy, gave the New York premiere of her new project, “Fragments,” at Zankel Hall on Saturday. I was there, but she wouldn’t want me to tell you exactly what happened.Journalists have been asked to include a spoiler alert if they plan to reveal the concert’s program — which I will do, so consider yourself warned.“Fragments” is a new, multiyear series in which Weilerstein plans to pair each of Bach’s six cello suites with new works she commissioned for the project in general, but not for any suite in particular.Weilerstein and her director, Elkhanah Pulitzer, are aiming to rethink how artists connect with their audiences by reconfiguring the traditional concert format, which they feel has gotten, if not quite stale, predictable. An element of surprise — and the abandonment of preconceived notions — is critical to their concept.Gone are the usual program notes, intermission, encores and set lists. On Saturday, an evening built around Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G, ushers handed out playbills that listed composers’ names but not their biographies, inspirations or influences. Left out, as well, were the pieces’ titles and the order in which they would be played.In fact, whole works would be broken up, scrambled out of order and integrated with the other pieces. The purpose, Weilerstein told The New York Times recently, came from a desire to foster “an appreciation for being in one communal space.” In that sense, the format was a success: Audience members, untethered from any explanation that could ground them, focused intently on Weilerstein and the kaleidoscope of sound emanating from the stage.The program wasn’t entirely random. Weilerstein’s unconventional means yielded a conventional arc, with a gradual start, fiery middle and contemplative end. The first selection came from Joan Tower, who contributed a single, unified, untitled piece instead of a work that could be split up and dispersed across the program: A long-held note, something of an invitation, gave way to harmony-driven momentum. The first movement of Reinaldo Moya’s “Guayoyo Sketches,” a tribute to Venezuelan coffee culture, came next. Its dusty pizzicato tremolo had the predawn rustle of someone waking up and shuffling to the kitchen to prepare the morning’s brew before the household had awakened. Without a title or program notes, though, a listener couldn’t so easily have connected Moya’s evocation with any personal experience.At times the concert felt like a TikTok-ified recital: a stream of strongly linked bits of content, broken down into parts and divorced from their original context, that came and went in brief, entertaining flashes without pause or time for reflection.Weilerstein sat on a powder-blue stool in the middle of the stage surrounded by 13 blocks resembling variously sized portions of a wall with picture molding. The scenic designer, Seth Reiser, made Weilerstein a room of her own by breaking down a wall and reassembling the scattered pieces into a circular shape that, in its own way, felt complete — fragments forming a new whole.The most compelling stretch of music came toward the end, when Weilerstein used the private wistfulness of the Bach suite’s Gigue — a quality that plenty of other players have found in it — to pivot toward a sequence of introspective pieces. The broad opening chords of Gili Schwarzman’s “Preludium” — a stand-alone piece like Tower’s — found strength in patience, and Bach’s Sarabande, already the suite’s most pensive music, felt utterly transformed in its murmuring solitude. Wrapping up the section, the ghostly harmonics of the second movement of Allison Loggins-Hull’s “Chasing Balance” and the whispered echoes of Chen Yi’s “Mountain Tune” seemed to emerge from the distant place of the Sarabande.It all was a tour de force, but those Bach movements took on a scratchy tone, coming as they did after the furious, screeching assertiveness of the third movement of Loggins-Hull’s piece and the bumblebee flight of Yi’s “Spin Dance.” And when Bach’s bouncy Courante followed that section’s extended contemplations, it sounded a little slick — a puzzle piece that had been smoothed out to fit a place where it didn’t belong.Each composer was assigned a specific color in Reiser’s lighting design, and that one bit of signposting flooded the walls as Weilerstein played — teal for Loggins-Hull, red-orange for Moya, a palate-cleansing white for Bach, and so on.But with so much randomness and manufactured confusion, I wonder whether future installments in the “Fragments” series would benefit from yet a different structure. Perhaps each Bach movement could introduce a whole work by a single composer, to give its ideas room to breathe.The program’s final piece, a greatest hit saved for last, was Bach’s Prelude, the suite’s first movement. It felt as though the preceding 60 minutes had been building to this pure, epiphanic point, turning an ending into another beginning.As concertgoers left Zankel, they were handed a set list so that they could piece together what they had seen and heard. But the catharsis of the Prelude, the comfort of its familiarity, rendered in a beautifully slender tone, made any explanation unnecessary.FragmentsPerformed on Saturday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them

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      Alisa Weilerstein’s latest project is a series of staged solo recitals that weave Bach’s cello suites with newly commissioned works.When the cellist Alisa Weilerstein found herself cooped up with her family at the start of the pandemic, her first instinct, like that of so many classical musicians, was to find some way — any way — to communicate.She joined the artists who found solace on social media, streaming a movement of Bach’s cello suites each day, for 36 days in a row. “I just want to have a kind of outpouring of music, of thoughts, and everything else,” she told The New York Times then. “Right now all I really want to do is give.”It didn’t last. Come that November, Weilerstein had put her cello away, and she was taking long walks on the beaches near her home in San Diego instead of practicing. When she finally forced herself to play again, she found herself staring out of the window, wondering what her field might look like when, or if, performers returned to the stage.“To everyone’s credit, I think, everyone is wrestling with this issue,” Weilerstein said in a recent interview from Toronto. “We all had a lot of time to think about what it means to really connect with an audience, what it means to connect with each other, and an appreciation for being in one communal space.”If Weilerstein’s response was a common one to a common crisis, the result of her reflections shines with uncommon ambition, so much so that it is hard to think of many soloists of a similar stature who would dare to bring anything like it to the stage.Meet “Fragments,” a project whose first installment — of six — Weilerstein will perform at Zankel Hall on April 1. Certain aspects of it may be familiar. She will be there, playing solo. She will perform a Bach suite in its entirety, and she will play it with her typical, heartfelt passion. She will offer new music: quite a lot of it, selected from works by 27 composers she has commissioned.Weilerstein at the “Fragments” premiere in Toronto.Lisa SakulenskyBut this project is intended to reimagine what a cello recital can be, to challenge some of the conventions that Weilerstein thinks might inhibit a listener’s immediate response to the music, and to add layers of theatricality to the arguably staid traditions of the concert hall, in an acceptance that a musician is, after all, performing on a stage.So each of the six programs, which Weilerstein will offer over the next few seasons, will have a dramaturgical element: Hanako Yamaguchi, the former, longtime director of music programming at Lincoln Center, is her artistic adviser, and her production team includes the director Elkhanah Pulitzer, the set and lighting designer Seth Reiser, and the costumer Carlos J. Soto. There will be limited program notes in advance, little to guide listeners except their ears and eyes through a collagelike narrative arc assembled from musical fragments.“There’s a lot of things that classical music does uniquely well, and it’s important to preserve those things,” Weilerstein said. “I do think, though, that we clearly have a problem, that we are not connecting with enough people, and that we are relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.So “Fragments” is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly passé genre of “response” programming, in which composers are commissioned to write works on the dispiriting condition that they must speak to a piece by the masters of the past. Having scoured the internet to survey the new-music scene, and consulted with past collaborators including Osvaldo Golijov and Matthias Pintscher, Weilerstein invited 28 composers to participate. The 27 who agreed — including Tania León, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon and Daniel Kidane — make up a roster that is remarkably diverse demographically and stylistically, but almost all of them asked if they should write with specific reference to Bach, Weilerstein recalled. She left the choice up to them.“Some did,” she said, “and some very much did not.”Caroline Shaw, whose “Microfictions” for Weilerstein is the second volume in a run of collected miniatures that she has also written for the Miró Quartet and the New York Philharmonic, said that her piece is not an explicit response to Bach, but that his influence was surely present in it.“Fragments” is an attempt to fix a problem, Weilerstein said of “relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”Evelyn Freja for The New York Times“I live with his music all the time, I love it deeply,” Shaw said, adding that the second book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” has been her “soundtrack” for the past year. “It’s very hard to write anything for solo cello and not have some subconscious relationship to Bach.”Weilerstein did set some rules. She asked that the new pieces be about 10 minutes long, and that they come in two or three fragments that she could intersperse with other scores without violating the meaning of the music. Bach was not available for consultation, but she is subjecting his suites to the same treatment.“There was a temptation to write something really virtuosic, really out there, really avant-garde,” said Reinaldo Moya, one of the more junior composers in Weilerstein’s group, “because you’re not going to have the chance to work with a soloist of that caliber every time. At least I don’t.”Free to write what he wanted, Moya drew on the personal ties that he has to Weilerstein through the conductor Rafael Payare, her husband. Earlier in their careers, Moya and Payare both played in the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, a country that has such an addiction to caffeine that it has a precise linguistic taxonomy for coffee and its functions. Moya’s fragments depict an early-morning brew, an after-lunch pick-me-up and a sludgy cup needed for staying up late.“It felt a little bit — all right, it felt a lot risky to give her a piece about coffee like that,” Moya said. “But I wanted to go with my gut, and relate my work to something that might connect with her on that level, not a technical or a composer-y level.”WEILERSTEIN HAS NEVER had the reputation of being a new-music specialist, but she has given her fair share of premieres, and few of her colleagues on the international circuit can list anything so bold as her recording of Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto on their discographies. She has evidently thought hard about how contemporary composers can be given a fairer chance to break through to audiences, especially to those people for whom contemporary art, say, is an easier ask.“There are myriad reasons, of course,” Weilerstein said, exploring the apparent divergence in the fields, “but there is one very fundamental thing, which is, you walk into an exhibition, you see the painting or you see the work of art before anything, and it can hit you right where it needs to hit — and then you can find out all the context around it. With contemporary music, there’s so much context put around it even before we’ve heard anything.”For that reason, the lack of program notes — before the lights go dark, the audience will be given only the most basic information about the project, and the names of the composers they will hear — is a core part of “Fragments,” and a sign, its creators said, that, for all the deliberate, thoughtful artifice, the focus is on the music.“To shed the Rorschach inclination towards finding meaning in the program before hearing the music was a really important piece of the puzzle,” Pulitzer said. “How many of us do that, where we look at the bio, we’re making assumptions about gender, race, nationality, compositional precedent, who where their teachers, and when were they born?”The aim, she added, is to strip as much of that presumptive meaning as possible away, so that listeners can follow Weilerstein’s attempts to create new meaning in her musical quilts, and “dare to embark on this journey of not knowing, and allow it to be OK.”For Shaw, that was part of the attraction of “Fragments,” beyond the obvious appeal of writing for a soloist whose visible commitment expresses such a clear love of music.“Going to hear a concert and not looking at what’s on the program and not knowing what comes next — those have been some of my deepest and most revealing listening experiences,” Shaw said. “There’s also something beautiful and important about presenting different composers side by side, and behind a curtain, so that you’re not focusing on their name, or whether or not they’re Bach.”The staging does offer some hints about the music, as if to hold the listener’s hand. Reiser’s set stays constant, a deconstructed theater arrayed so that it evokes soloists’ constant struggles to create “a room of one’s own” as they travel the world’s halls, Pulitzer said, and at the same time “reawakens the spaces for the people who are familiar with them.” Each composer has a specific lighting color, to give a sense of which fragments combine to make wholes.There may be people, Weilerstein admits, who are put off by even a modest staging, or by her tinkering with performance traditions. For her though, “Fragments” is an attempt to make the concert hall more of a place of adventure again, and less of a dead end.“It’s like the E.M. Forster phrase, ‘only connect,’” Weilerstein explained. “This is the philosophy behind the project, fundamentally: connecting the pieces, connecting the voices of our time together, connecting the familiar and the new, connecting this music with the audience without the barrier of so much contextualization, categorization, bias, all of these things.”“And connecting,” she added, “our contemporary world with the concert format. This is what it’s about for me.” More

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      Carnegie Hall Announces Its 2023-24 Season

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      We choose highlights from events featuring Mitsuko Uchida and Franz Welser-Möst as Perspectives artists, and the composer Tania León in residence.The threats facing democracy will be a central focus of Carnegie Hall’s coming season, the presenter announced on Tuesday, with a festival devoted to the flourishing cultural scene in Germany between the two world wars.From January to May, Carnegie will host “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice,” an exploration of creative expression during the fragile democracy in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The festival will feature ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s performing works by composers of the time, including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.“We’re seeing the challenges to democracy more and more clearly, and it’s all the more reason we have to treasure it,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “We want people to ask questions and contemplate why democracy matters, and what the threats are in our day.”The 2023-24 season, which begins in October, will feature some 170 performances, beginning with two concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its outgoing music director, Riccardo Muti. The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the conductor Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, will each organize a series of Perspectives concerts.The composer Tania León, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2021, will lead a season-long residency; in January, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will offer the New York premiere of a new piece by her.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Here are a dozen highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZEnglish Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, Oct. 25You can safely bet on a few things whenever the conductor John Eliot Gardiner comes to town: agile, historically informed performance; obsessively precise articulation; and virtually ideal readings of beloved repertoire. In early 2020, he led his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in just about as good a Beethoven symphony cycle as you could imagine. And now he brings the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir to Carnegie for Bach’s Mass in B minor and, on Oct. 26, Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.” JOSHUA BARONEThe mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre will appear at Weill Recital Hall with the lutenist Thomas Dunford.Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLea Desandre and Thomas Dunford, Nov. 2These two artists — Desandre, a clarinet-mellow mezzo-soprano who can burst with bright agility, and Dunford, an eloquent lutenist — are among the brightest lights of a young generation of early-music specialists. They join in Weill Recital Hall, ideally intimate for this repertory, for “Lettera Amorosa,” a program of love-focused Baroque works by Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and Handel, alongside names like Tarquinio Merula (his songs exquisite) and Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (a specialist in music for lute). ZACHARY WOOLFEAmerican Composers Orchestra, Nov. 9This essential organization has brought music by George Lewis to Carnegie’s various spaces before — the most notable instance being his Virtual Concerto (for a “computer-driven” piano soloist) back in 2004. The orchestra will continue its productive relationship with the composer to perform one of his latest orchestral works. No title for the piece is available yet; the same goes for a few other new works on the bill (including those from the likes of Guillermo Klein and Augusta Read Thomas). We do have one title: “Out of whose womb came the ice,” by the up-and-coming composer Nina C. Young, whose premiere was co-commissioned by Carnegie. SETH COLTER WALLSStaatskapelle Berlin, Nov. 30When the Staatskapelle Berlin and its longtime music director, Daniel Barenboim, last appeared at Carnegie, in 2017, it was an epic nine-performance stand that paired Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies. A lot has happened since then; most recently, in January, Barenboim stepped down from the orchestra’s podium because of health problems. So their return will be poignant: just two nights, and the four symphonies of Brahms, a composer Barenboim performed as a pianist in this space in 1962. ZACHARY WOOLFEEnglish Concert, Dec. 10The British soprano Lucy Crowe’s expertise and imagination in Baroque music gives her the freedom to turn da capo arias into feats of feeling. That exhilarating sense of spontaneity uplifted the English Concert’s performance of Handel’s “Serse” at Carnegie last year, and it will be exciting to hear Crowe apply her gifts to more dramatic material when she takes the title role in “Rodelinda.” OUSSAMA ZAHRThe pianist Daniil Trifonov will appear on Carnegie’s main stage to perform Beethoven’s mighty “Hammerklavier” Sonata.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesDaniil Trifonov, Dec. 12Arguably the mightiest of the under-40 generation of superstar pianists meets the mightiest of repertoire in this recital, as Daniil Trifonov takes on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata. It’s a banner year for youngish soloists in ambitious repertoire, in fact: Vikingur Olafsson plays the “Goldberg” Variations (Feb. 7); Beatrice Rana does the Liszt Sonata (Feb. 28); and Seong-Jin Cho journeys through the second book of the same composer’s “Années de Pèlerinage” (May 17). DAVID ALLENMet Orchestra, Feb. 1Yannick Nézet-Séguin has decided not to share next season. Rather than engage a guest conductor, he helms all three of the Met Orchestra’s concerts himself, embracing opportunities to bask in the tonal floodgates of Lise Davidsen’s soprano in Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder” and, later, the heavenliness of Lisette Oropesa’s Mozart arias (June 11), and the intense standoff of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with Elina Garanca and Christian Van Horn (June 14). OUSSAMA ZAHRYunchan Lim, Feb. 21This precociously mature pianist, still in his teens, played Liszt’s deliriously difficult “Transcendental Études” on the way to becoming the youngest-ever winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition last year. He’ll reprise the Liszt as part of his recital introduction on Carnegie’s main stage. By this point, another pianist, the spectacularly creative Igor Levit, needs no introduction at this point to this hall’s audience; on Jan. 20, he’ll play two symphony transcriptions (Liszt’s of Beethoven’s Third and Ronald Stevenson’s of Mahler’s 10th) alongside Hindemith’s Suite “1922,” raucous and very Roaring Twenties. ZACHARY WOOLFEVienna Philharmonic, March 1Most of the five concerts in Welser-Möst’s Perspectives series — Jan. 20 and 21 with the Cleveland Orchestra, March 1-3 with Vienna — are emblematic of his thoughtful, idiosyncratic, ultimately endearing approach to programming, but the March 1 performance looks especially constructive, full of connections and contrasts to draw: Hindemith’s Konzertmusik for Wind Orchestra, Strauss’s Symphonic Fantasy from “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra and, as if to bid farewell to a whole world of music, Ravel’s “La Valse.” DAVID ALLENJason Moran will return to Carnegie with a tribute to the pioneering jazz musician James Reese Europe.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesJason Moran, March 9In addition to being an elite improvising pianist, Jason Moran is a keen programmer; his Carnegie survey of Black American music from the Great Migration was a well-attended success. You can all but bank on the same when Moran brings his latest concert concept to Zankel Hall. This time, the focus will be on the music of the early 20th-century American original James Reese Europe. You might expect some of the same expert arrangements heard on Moran’s latest album, “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield.” But prepare also for some surprises; this restless innovator rarely does anything the same way twice. SETH COLTER WALLSEnsemble Modern, April 12Much of the festival “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice” is more confusing than informative. This period in history produced so much excellent and overlooked music; why are we seeing Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler (among other head-scratchers)? At least there are engagements like that of Ensemble Modern, which will perform works including a lithe but still barbed smaller arrangement of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” led by HK Gruber, one of our greatest living Weill interpreters. The group returns April 13 as part of León’s residency, playing her “Indígena” and “Rítmicas” alongside pieces by Conlon Nancarrow and others. JOSHUA BARONEDanish String Quartet, April 18A highlight of Carnegie’s spring months in recent seasons has been the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project, which juxtaposes Schubert quartets with premieres. Coming this April: a new work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir. And, for the fourth installment next year, the group is adding the cellist Johannes Rostamo to perform Schubert’s endlessly moving, even sublime String Quintet in C, paired with a commission from Thomas Adès. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      Review: Mitsuko Uchida Revisits Beethoven’s Final Sonatas

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      One of our wisest pianists appeared at Carnegie Hall with some of the wisest music written for her instrument.One thing die-hard classical music fans like to do during a concert’s intermission is compare notes — about the performance at hand, about what else has been going on around town and about what’s coming up.It was during one of those conversations recently that I asked a friend whether he was planning to see the pianist Mitsuko Uchida’s recital of late Beethoven sonatas at Carnegie Hall. He said no, he didn’t need to hear her in that repertoire.Understandable, to a point. She has toured this music before, and recorded it, marvelously, in 2006. But Uchida, 74, is an artist who returns to the familiar, especially the works of Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, as part of a lifelong argument for the benefits of repeated examination. “The great composers always change,” she once said in an interview. “And as you change, they change.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.At Carnegie on Friday, in her recital of Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas, Uchida did behave like a different artist from the one who recorded these works nearly two decades ago. I don’t believe that age is inherently necessary or helpful in music — Igor Levit had a handle on Beethoven’s late style in his 20s — but what was reflected onstage was the unaffected wisdom and clarity that comes with decades of interpretive rigor and commitment.Uchida’s recording of these pieces is insistently lyrical, borderline Schubertian. The sonatas were, in her reading at the time, intimate, private musings that were made public but didn’t seem as if they needed to be. On Friday, however, her sound was often comparatively bright and extreme — the sforzandos true explosions, the pianissimos exquisitely soft-spoken. Each sonata unfurled with improvisatory freedom, absolutely alive, its heart showing more than its head. Yet because of Uchida’s technique, her pedalwork and precision, the scores were also transparently multidimensional. You could hear, with awe-inspiring ease, every line threaded through the fugue of the Op. 110’s finale. Then and now, her playing was persuasive; Beethoven’s music can withstand, even demand, both approaches.In her Op. 109, the Sonata No. 30 in E, the lilting vivace opening crested and fell in force — more a wave than a ripple, but, in its alluringly long line, still beating from the same source. This work, and the two others on the program, can be difficult to voice, to tease a melody from tangled rhythms and tricky fingerings; on Friday, Uchida lent just the right amount of weight to each finger to emphasize the counterpoint, revealing the architecture of the score, without distracting from the singing melodies it supports.At times, particularly in the Op. 110 Sonata in A flat, her sound approached that of lieder by Schubert, who seemed to trade places with Bach as the arioso alternated with an intricate, three-part fugue. In Uchida’s hands, that finale — in Beethovenian fashion, a journey from profound despair to euphoric heights — achieved a kind of holy grandeur.She reached even higher in her account of the Op. 111 in C minor. In the closing Arietta — after the straightforward theme and the initial variations on it, including one that famously swings like a glimpse of music’s jazzier future — with a lot of score left to go, she seemed to depart from everything that had come before. Her trills twinkling, her playing more personal than performative, she followed Beethoven’s leap to the cosmos and remained with him to the whispered final measure.Afterward, Uchida repeatedly returned to the stage to bow but never to encore; how could she? In her trademark way, every time she faced the audience she looked a bit surprised, then grateful — as if, after sharing all she had, she was the one who should be thanking us.Mitsuko UchidaPerformed on Friday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. Uchida returns there for a master class on Wednesday and a concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra on March 9. More

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      Finishing Bach’s Organ Music, With Help From 118 Composers

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      A new project completes Bach’s plans for his kaleidoscopic “Orgelbüchlein,” with a 21st-century touch.One of the most enduring mysteries that Johann Sebastian Bach left for us comes in the form of his “Orgelbüchlein,” a collection of chorale preludes for organ.From autograph manuscripts that detail titles of the chorales, it’s clear that Bach planned to compose 164 of them, spread throughout the Christian liturgical year. But he wrote only 46 such pieces, leaving 118 mysteriously untouched.A completely satisfactory explanation doesn’t exist. But a 15-year project to finish what Bach began — from a decidedly 21st-century perspective — is nearing its conclusion: The whole collection recently premiered in Britain, and Edition Peters will soon publish the sheet music in full.“The project is nothing if not kaleidoscopic,” said William Whitehead, who curated the new collection. “It’s eclectic in capital letters.”Where pianists who play Bach’s music have “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” organists have the “Orgelbüchlein” — German for “Little Organ Book,” which consists of the chorale preludes BWV 599-644. Today, the “Orgelbüchlein,” as close as Bach ever came to a full hymnal, is a cornerstone of the organ repertory.As a teaching manual and a compositional model, “the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ has influenced composers ever since Bach taught the music to his pupils,” said Russell Stinson, an emeritus professor of music at Lyon College and the author of a monograph on the collection. “Certain works from Johannes Brahms’s ‘Eleven Chorale Preludes for Organ’ (Op. 122) unmistakably bear the stamp of Bach’s ‘Orgelbüchlein.’”The exercise of taking a single-verse chorale melody and turning it into a brief, often elaborate prelude, was followed by composers including Robert Schumann, Max Reger and Anton Webern. Evidence exists of a setting of Bach’s “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort” by Webern from 1906, at the prompting of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg.Whitehead’s own “Orgelbüchlein” project was inspired by a 17-year-old student of his who wrote an “Orgelbüchlein”-style chorale prelude on the English carol “Of the Father’s Heart Begotten” about 15 years ago.Bach planned to write 164 chorale preludes for the collection but completed only 46.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesThe title page of Bach’s “Orgelbüchlein” from the collection of the Berlin State Library.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images“I remember listening to it thinking: If this 17-year-old kid can do this, why can’t we get the cream of European composers to put their minds to this task, and see if we can fill in all these tantalizing gaps?” Whitehead said. The finished collection features a host of eminent composers, representing a range of aesthetics: Gerald Barry, John Rutter, Louis Andriessen, Thea Musgrave and Kalevi Aho all respond to the same brief. So did the American musician Nico Muhly.The collection started as a collaboration between the organ and composition departments of Trinity College London, where Whitehead was teaching at the time. After getting a few established composers on board (Giles Swayne and Judith Bingham were early supporters), it became clear to Whitehead that the project was worth seeing through completely.That started what Whitehead called an “archaeological expedition” — searching for the hymns and plainchants Bach intended to set but that have since disappeared or gone out of fashion. The research also involved consulting multiple existing editions of Bach’s “Orgelbüchlein,” to which Whitehead and the project’s academic adviser, John Scott Whiteley, have contributed a new discovery: a single held note, added to the tenor voice in the penultimate bar of “Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten” (BWV 642), that is currently omitted from modern editions.Whitehead organized thousands of notes contributed by 118 composers, all of which are separated into themed volumes. (The third, “Catechism, Penitence and Communion,” was released at the end of September.) Coming up with an assignment for contributors was difficult; leaving it at “something modern in your own style that reflects the ethos of the ‘Orgelbüchlein’” seemed too sparse, Whitehead said.The key to success, Whitehead said, was to find “a single idea pursued to the ultimate degree.” He added, “Many composers manifestly told me they found it a very difficult task indeed.”Whitehead also sought contributions from figures outside the world of contemporary composition: figures like Andreas Fischer and John Butt, who are more commonly associated with research or performance. A variety of responses followed accordingly. Andrew Keeling’s chorale, for example, took inspiration from reggae; James O’Donnell contributed a deft Brahms imitation; the baritone and composer Roderick Williams chose to reflect the quotidian in what Whitehead described as a “wonky tango.”From a decidedly 21st-century perspective, the finished collection features a host of eminent composers, representing a range of aesthetics.Julian Guidera“Contributing as a composer to a project such as this is so hugely intimidating,” Williams, who set “Ich weiss ein Blümlein hübsch und fein,” said in an email. He added, “There was never any point in trying to replicate Bach’s invention, his contrapuntal skill or the theological profundity of his response. So I chose a different tack; comparing our digital 21st century to Bach’s age suggested a response from me that reflects some of today’s values (or lack thereof).”Whitehead has been less daunted, and wears the implications of completing Bach lightly. “Once you’ve taken the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ out of the church setting, why not recreate the ethos in a secular way or jocular way?” he said. “Nearly all of the pieces are in a musical style Bach wouldn’t immediately recognize, so, there’s a kind of distancing ‘ab initio’ in the project.”For others, like the composer Roxanna Panufnik, who contributed a setting of Severus Gastorius’s melody “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan,” the project was an opportunity to bring her closer to Bach. “For me, he is the master,” she said in an email. “His music always, without fail, instills a feeling that all is well in the world, and I feel his harmonic language is more Romantic than that of the Romantics.”Whitehead made a similar point when he said that “the ‘Orgelbüchlein’ pieces are dense technical exercises on one level, but are poetic explorations of symbolism, too — if you’ve defined ‘affekt’ in the rather general way, that it’s a mood picture.” Panufnik’s approach was to avoid close study of the text in favor of her own independent harmonization of the set chorale, one of a number of varied responses to Whitehead’s hope of creating what he described as a “unified sense of ‘affekt.’”Finding emotional unity across over a hundred composers was always going to be impossible, but contributors seemed buoyed by that fact. “Anything that brings our wonderfully and stylistically diverse composer community together is a good thing,” Panufnik said, adding, “I feel we should all be collaborating on projects more often.” More

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      Review: A ‘St. Matthew Passion’ Balances Grandeur and Calm

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      Bernard Labadie led the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and three choirs, in Bach’s sprawling, meditative masterpiece.Of Bach’s two surviving Passions, “St. John” is the more fiery, dramatic and troubling. “St. Matthew” is something like its wise and contemplative sibling.And that’s how the “St. Matthew Passion” came across on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, with Bernard Labadie leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, along with three choirs and a half-dozen soloists. That is the battery of musical forces required for Bach’s Lenten masterpiece, which over nearly three hours recounts the death and resurrection of Jesus, with reflective asides in the form of chorales, recitatives and da capo arias.Bach’s score begins as if its volume were being carefully turned up. Here, it was more like a radio dial finding a station, with the orchestra unsteady before settling into flowing momentum. Under Labadie’s baton, the music was unwaveringly measured but balanced; its flashes of grandeur didn’t need to be overstated to land powerfully. From the start: The opening calmly built toward what the conductor John Eliot Gardiner has called an aural analogue to an “altarpiece by Veronese or Tintoretto” — immersive, its elements gaining sweep from their interplay.The Orchestra of St. Luke’s played with qualities of historically informed performance but not a wholesale devotion to it in the strings’ lightly gliding bows, judicious ornamentation and the use of largely modern instruments. Split into two groups, it also had two concertmasters: Krista Bennion Feeney, a violinist with a gift for elegant phrasing, and Benjamin Bowman (who has the same role with the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra), impressively agile and clear. Stephen Taylor’s humane oboe took on the character of a vocal soloist, and Mélisande Corriveau’s viola da gamba had crisp, authoritative articulation befitting her prominent placement at center stage.But the performance’s stars may have been the choirs: La Chapelle de Québec and the Handel and Haydn Society Chorus, and the boys of the St. Thomas Choir aloft in the first ring of boxes, all virtually without fault in trickily woven polyphony and memorable even in passing moments like the jolting vigor of “Sind Blitze, sind Donner.”Julian Prégardien, center, as the Evangelist, a role he sang with a raconteur’s conviction and excitement.Richard TermineAs the Evangelist, the tenor Julian Prégardien (inheriting a role from his father, Christoph) recounted Matthew’s story with conviction and excitement; tellingly, he was the only soloist not singing with a score in hand. Expressive, with a soft and sympathetic upper range, he was also at times less steady and assured at full voice — unable to match the quaking turmoil of “Und siehe da” following Jesus’s death.Jesus was sung by the bass-baritone Philippe Sly with stoic fatalism, his smooth warmth rending for its tragic dignity in lines like “Du sagest’s,” then shattering in its resigned agony at his final words, “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani?”Joshua Blue, a tenor stepping in for the ill Andrew Staples, had a consistent brightness — much like his fellow soloist, the soprano Carolyn Sampson, who after warming up bounded through runs with skillful control and enunciation. The young countertenor Hugh Cutting was on less sure footing in similar passages, in which his intonation was unreliable compared with smoother legato melodies. Those were where he shined and showed the most promise: Cutting possesses penetrating strength and a lushness that doesn’t come easily to his voice type. His instrument might not be fully formed, but his “Erbarme dich” was.Another standout was Matthew Brook, who during Part I was chameleonic in arias attached to Judas and Peter but in Part II took a solemn turn: first in “Komm, suß Kreuz,” then in “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,” which he sang soothingly, with the rocking phrases of a lullaby.That aria was all the more moving for how unforced its sentiment was. The “St. Matthew Passion” is more meditation than melodrama, and this reading carried that belief to the final measure — its dissonance barely held, the slightest tension resolving with the grace of the restfulness it’s meant to reflect.Orchestra of St. Luke’sPerformed at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Making Room for Bach in Mozart’s Hometown

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      The Salzburg Festival’s idiosyncratic survey is focused on the timelessness and humanity of Bach’s secular works.SALZBURG, Austria — “For me the Chaconne is one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music that I know,” the composer Johannes Brahms once wrote about the famous final movement of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin.“On a single stave and for a small instrument, the man creates a whole world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings,” he continued in an 1877 letter to the pianist and composer Clara Schumann.In 1926, the Chaconne became the very first work by Bach to be heard at the Salzburg Festival, in a performance by the violinist Johann Koncz. This summer, the piece was performed once again in the first of six musical programs devoted to the towering German composer.For the second consecutive year, and against formidable odds, the Salzburg Festival, one of classical music’s most important events, forged ahead despite the pandemic. Last summer’s offerings were greatly reduced; this year, the festival has come roaring back with a full program of over 100 events, including operas and concerts of every stripe.Prominent in the concert lineup is “Heavenwards — Time With Bach,” an idiosyncratic survey of the German composer in a festival that usually takes a greater interest in Salzburg’s favorite son, Mozart, and the works of Richard Strauss, who was among the event’s founders.The choice to go back to Bach’s music this summer, during the second of two installments that mark the festival’s centenary year, was in part a response to the coronavirus pandemic. According to Florian Wiegand, the Salzburg Festival’s director of concerts and media, “Bach provides us with an unbreakable order in his music, with a clear structure and direction” to counter the loss of balance during these unsettled times.The festival usually reserves the intimate format of the “Time With” series for 20th-century and contemporary figures, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Gérard Grisey and, earlier this month, the American composer Morton Feldman.“Now we’re focusing not on a contemporary composer, but on an entirely timeless composer,” Mr. Wiegand said, adding that “Bach’s music is permeated with deep humanity” perhaps more than any other artist’s body of work.Considering how vast and varied Bach’s output was — he is among the most prolific of all composers — there would have been infinite ways to construct the series.Speaking from a terrace above the festival complex, which abuts the Mönchsberg, a mountain on the edge of Salzburg’s Altstadt, or old town, Mr. Wiegand said the festival chose to sidestep the composer’s best-known sacred works, including his Masses and Passions, many of which have been performed during past installments. (The most recent program of Bach’s music at Salzburg was a 2018 concert of the B minor Mass.)Thomas Zehetmair performing at this year’s Salzburg Festival. In 1997 he made his festival debut at the age of 15.Marco Borrelli/SFInstead, the performances that make up the 2021 Bach program run the gamut from solo recitals to symphony concerts and even a dance production.“In this series we wanted to focus on Bach’s music that is not liturgically bound,” he explained, adding that even the secular works can provide solace during this “challenging and sometimes resigned situation for all of us.” Once the festival’s artistic leadership had settled on Bach, they reached out to leading musicians and artists to find out which works they considered most meaningful right now.The central production in “Heavenwards” is “In the Midst of Life,” a modern dance performance developed by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker around the Six Cello Suites. Performances are scheduled for Aug. 20 and 21 at the SZENE Salzburg, an event space in a former cinema.The dance-concert, which was first performed in Germany in 2017 and traveled to New York last year, features one of today’s leading Bach interpreters, the French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras. As he makes his way through the seminal and virtuosic cycle, Ms. De Keersmaeker and four members of her company, Rosas, dance around Mr. Queyras and his instrument, creating an intimate dialogue between music and movement.With the exception of this Wednesday’s concert — the Six Brandenburg Concertos performed by Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, a leading period instrument ensemble — all of the “Heavenwards” programs aim for intimacy.A pair of recitals find master pianists of different generations confronting Bach’s keyboard works. Earlier this week, the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff, 67, plunged into the complete partitas; in the final concert of the series, on Aug. 23, the Russian prodigy Daniil Trifonov, 30, will dedicate himself to “The Art of Fugue,” a work left incomplete at the time of Bach’s death.Mr. Trifonov performed the hourlong cycle at Alice Tully Hall in March 2020 in one of New York’s final concerts before lockdown. Reviewing the performance in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini wrote that Mr. Trifonov “played with a focus and concentration that radiated throughout the hall. The performances abounded in scintillating grace, wondrous shadings, even touches of impetuousness.”For his Salzburg appearance, Mr. Trifonov will start the program with Brahms’s left-handed arrangement of the Chaconne from the D minor Partita.At the end of July, the Chaconne also featured in the opening concert of “Heavenwards”: a recital by the Austrian violinist Thomas Zehetmair performing the complete sonatas and partitas, which are considered the pinnacle of the solo violin repertoire. Alone on the stage of the Great Hall of the Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation, where Mr. Koncz played 95 years ago, Mr. Zehetmair held the audience transfixed during the performance, which ran three and a half hours (with two intermissions).Of the musicians featured in the series, perhaps none has as deep a history with both this city and its signature musical event as Mr. Zehetmair, a Salzburg native who has been a familiar face at the festival since his 1977 debut here, at the age of 15.“It is ambitious,” he admitted in an interview before the concert. He had recorded the cycles twice but never before performed them in full in a single evening. “It’s quite a challenge for the audience as well,” he added.“The cycles are so fantastic in their whole conception,” he said, noting that he was excited about playing them in the order they appear in the catalog of Bach’s work. For instance, he said he relished the opportunity to finish the concert with the light and buoyant Partita No. 3 in E major.“It’s so wonderful to have a lighter end after the whole concentration of artistic and intellectual challenges,” he said. “The audience can go out on the street with a light feeling.”“There has never been a series dedicated to Bach like this,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director, said in a video introduction to the festival program, which runs through Aug. 30. By showcasing Bach during Salzburg’s anniversary, “Heavenwards” allows the festival to “connect to the original inspiration behind everything musical,” he continued.“It takes us straight to heaven even though they are earthly works,” Mr. Hinterhäuser said. In his words, one can hear an echo of a dictum by the 20th-century composer Mauricio Kagel. “It could well be that not all musicians believe in God,” he famously said, “but they all believe in Bach.” More

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      In ‘Bach & Sons,’ a Composer Stares Down Death

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      The new play at the Bridge Theater in London and two other productions on the city’s stages examine characters facing the end.LONDON — Few actors could stare down mortality better than Simon Russell Beale in “Bach & Sons,” a problematic new play at the Bridge Theater that benefits from a piercing central performance. Telling of the often testy relationship between the composer Johann Sebastian Bach and two of his 20 children, both sons who were musicians as well, the writer Nina Raine has come up with a research-heavy play that could be described as “Amadeus” lite. Like that play, Peter Shaffer’s celebrated take on Mozart, “Bach & Sons” features extended discussions of the nature of mediocrity, and also leans toward the scatological. Amid an expletive-heavy script, one character makes a passing reference to “a turd in the tureen.”Nicholas Hytner’s production boasts an evocative design from Vicki Mortimer, with cascading keyboards hanging above the stage; as in “Amadeus,” the dialogue often cuts off to make way for excerpts from the composer’s output. Beale with Racheal Ofori as Anna Magdalena Wilcke in another scene from “Bach & Sons.” Manuel HarlanOver time, Bach Sr. loses his sight and cedes ground to his son Carl (a vivid Samuel Blenkin), whom the father derides as musically “efficient” — a decided slight from a visionary who likes his art messier and more inspiring. Yet all Carl wants is simply to be loved. (Another son, Wilhelm, is played by Douggie McMeekin as an artistic prodigy doomed to failure.)The family chat consists largely of extolling the power of music, when you can’t help but feel that, really, they would have gotten on with making it. A climactic discourse on dissonance reminded me of Georges Seurat’s quest for harmony in the musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” to cite a more moving depiction of the creative process than “Bach & Sons,” with its boilerplate pronouncements about the value of art. Even so, Beale commands attention as the aging and worn Bach fades away. The composer’s canon, we’re told, can be characterized as a meditation on “the variety of grief,” and Beale communicates a man who has lived that grief himself: The actor cuts against the sentimentality of the writing to catch directly at the heart. “You can’t go on living and living and living,” says a character at the start of Nick Payne’s “Constellations” — and so it’s not altogether surprising when this 70-minute play turns toward confronting death in its second half.Payne’s one-act two-hander was first seen at the Royal Court in 2012 before transferring to the West End and then Broadway. The elegant staging from the director Michael Longhurst is now being revived at the Vaudeville Theater through Sept. 12, with the designer Tom Scutt’s buoyant cloudscape of balloons intact.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in Nick Payne‘s “Constellations,” directed by Michael Longhurst at the Vaudeville Theater.Marc BrennerThis time, there are four casts rotating across the run, and London theatergoers have so far had the opportunity to see two of them. (Among those still to come is a gay coupling that will feature the TV and stage name Russell Tovey.) The changing players reveal wildly contrasting takes on a tricky if accessible text in which events, large and small, are replayed with different outcomes, in accordance with Payne’s interest in the existence of a “multiverse.” That notion of alternate worlds coexisting alongside ours fuels a play that explores the infinite variability of life’s every moment, except the final one, which is always death.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker, the oldest duo of the four, are also the more actorly of the two seen so far: You feel Wanamaker, especially, standing outside her character, Marianne, a Cambridge brainiac who holds forth on quantum mechanics and string theory. The parts don’t feel like a natural fit for either performer, though Capaldi, a onetime Doctor Who on TV, compensates with an abundance of charm. A much younger company brings together Sheila Atim (who won an Olivier for her role in “Girl From the North Country”) and Ivanno Jeremiah, who have a visceral connection onstage. Jeremiah is immediately likable as Roland, a beekeeper who meets Marianne at a barbecue and engages with her in a strange conversation about licking your elbow — to be honest, such exchanges work much better with the younger cast. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in “Constellations.”Marc BrennerAnd when Marianne confronts her possibly foreshortened life, the astonishing Atim communicates the gravitas of the situation even as Payne’s play makes clear that her fate can be rewritten with a happier ending in a parallel universe. These two are so good that, on a fourth viewing of the play, I felt as if I were seeing “Constellations” afresh: Atim and Jeremiah replay familiar material so it seems new — a virtue in a play that makes so much of repetition.If “Constellations” is late in raising the specter that its leading woman will die too soon, we know from the start that this is what will happen to the heroine of “Last Easter,” the 2004 play by Bryony Lavery at the intimate Orange Tree Theater through Aug. 7. (The show will be livestreamed on the theater’s website on July 22 and 23.) The director Tinuke Craig’s nimble production finds surprising levels of comedy in this story of June (the excellent Naana Agyei-Ampadu), a lighting designer with terminal cancer who goes on a pilgrimage with three friends to Lourdes, France, because — well, why not? Maybe a miracle will happen.June, it seems, is especially fond of the painter Caravaggio, and the first act veers away from anything maudlin toward lessons in art history one minute, a jaunty snatch or two from the song “Easter Parade” the next. The tone is unexpectedly breezy, and the camaraderie between June and her pals, also theater practitioners, is nicely done. These friendships keep June’s spirits buoyant, even as her body starts to let her down.From left, Naana Agyei-Ampadu, Jodie Jacobs and Peter Caulfield in Bryony Lavery’s “Last Easter,” directed by Tinuke Craig at the Orange Tree Theater.Helen MurrayYet after the intermission, as June’s condition worsens, the writing turns more self-conscious. June’s devoted buddy Gash (Peter Caulfield) twice calls out “cliché alert,” and several events are described as “undramatic,” an unusual choice of adjective for a dramatist. (The quartet also includes the character of a heavy-drinking actress who soon wears out her welcome, both as written and performed.)The imminence of death seems to defy this gifted writer, who goes for the sort of deathbed scene that has been seen onstage and in movies many times over. Whatever the reason for “Last Easter’s” prosaic closing scenes, they share with “Constellations” a sense that mortality comes best in good company.Bach & Sons. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Sept. 11.Constellations. Directed by Michael Longhurst. Vaudeville Theater, through Sept. 12.Last Easter. Directed by Tinuke Craig. Orange Tree Theater, through Aug. 7. More