Beethoven, Ludwig van

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    Review: The Great Emerson String Quartet Takes Its Final Bow

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    A pillar of chamber music for nearly a half-century, the Emerson players bid farewell with Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s String Quintet.Farewell to the Emerson String Quartet, a group that has beaten at the heart of chamber music in the United States, and far beyond, for almost half a century.More than two years after the essential string quartet of its era announced that it had decided to retire, its players took their final bows on Sunday before an Alice Tully Hall audience that paid them the best tribute any musician can hope to receive: listening, and listening well.The time was right, and the place was, too. It was on a Sunday in 1981 that the Emerson made its breakthrough on that very stage, playing all six Bartok quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour-plus sitting. The host of Sunday’s concert, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, is the institution for which the Emerson served as quartet in residence from 1982 to 1989, and for which its cellist David Finckel left the ensemble in 2013 to co-direct.Finckel’s departure permitted his successor, Paul Watkins, to spend a decade with the violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer to his right, and Lawrence Dutton, the violist, to his left. Even at the end, as Finckel rejoined the group for one last performance of the Schubert String Quintet, Watkins looked as if he could barely believe his luck.Who would feel any differently? For if Sunday’s concert was a reminder of anything, it was that the Emerson String Quartet was never just a string quartet. It was an establishment, a touchstone, a catalyst. Entire generations of listeners grew up with its recordings, or made one of the hundred and more concerts it undertook each year, with famous collegiality, a habitual date in their diaries. As early as 1984, George Tsontakis had composed it a piece called “Emerson,” as if it already owned the genre; Sarah Kirkland Snider, the last living composer whose music it played, has written that, to her, the Emerson catalog had appeared to be “the definitive interpretation of all the great string quartets in history.”From left, Drucker, Setzer, Watkins and Dutton in the concert’s first half.Da Ping LuoWas the Emerson the Emerson to the end? Close enough. “We were afraid of going on too long,” Setzer said recently, and Sunday suggested that he, Drucker and Dutton have stopped at the timeliest of moments, without cause for regret. Watkins, a soloist and a conductor before he took his chance, still has half his career ahead of him. There were speeches on Sunday, quiet notes of pathos, even a joke or two, but nothing really to get in the way of the music, which is as it should be. The Schubert received a heartfelt performance of inimitable focus, and before it came Beethoven’s Opus 130, with the “Grosse Fuge” duly included as its finale. It was exactly the valediction that one would have hoped for.It was also touching. Nobody could pretend that Sunday saw the Emerson reclaim the heights from which it conquered chamber music, though it was hardly far-off. If its most celebrated predecessors, the Juilliard after World War II and the Guarneri later on, were responsible for a boom in American quartet playing, then it was the Emerson’s part to demonstrate how accomplished a quartet could become. Surely it was not a coincidence that Setzer, who once told The New York Times that “when things aren’t together in the quartet, it sets off a real alarm,” was the son of two violinists in George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra, and taught by two of its concertmasters.It did not take the Emerson long to set the formidable technical standards that we take for granted among chamber musicians today. “After five minutes of playing,” the critic Bernard Holland wrote of that Bartok concert in 1981, “one began to assume perfection. There were no disappointments.” There are none to be heard, either, in the Emerson’s recorded legacy, which, with all its vitality and its security, Deutsche Grammophon ensured defined the sound of a quartet in the digital age. Hearing them now is to be confronted with persistent excellence, an enduring commitment to quality that any musician would be proud of.If there was ever a justified criticism of the Emerson, it was that its playing was too responsible, too objective, too bland. That was not the case at its passing. Rarely can this ensemble have shaped Schubert’s melodies with such humanity and poignancy, or given such a raw, intense account of the Beethoven fugue. The Cavatina, the delicate emotional core of the Opus 130, will resound in the memory as little short of heartbreaking, and for all the right reasons: As its song faltered on the first violin, it seemed to be embraced, as if the other instruments were helping it through.Farewell, then, to the Emerson. But not to what made it great.Emerson String QuartetPerformed on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra Gets Ambitious at Carnegie Hall

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      After decades away, the musicians, led by Kent Nagano, were back in the United States to perform works by Sean Shepherd, along with Beethoven and Brahms.“Go big or go home” must have been the rallying cry for the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra’s debut at Carnegie Hall Saturday night. The last time this group appeared in the United States was more than 50 years ago, in 1967. So for this program, the Hamburg musicians, led by the conductor Kent Nagano, went large-scale ambitious, performing the world premiere of the American composer Sean Shepherd’s t12- movement “An Einem Klaren Tag — On a Clear Day” for cello, choruses and orchestra.Here, that ambition demanded the participation of no fewer than five choruses culled from both Germany and New York: the Audi Jugendchorakademie (a youth chorus sponsored by the car manufacturer); Alsterspatzen (the children and youth choir of the Hamburg State Opera); the Dresdner Kreuzchor (a boys’ choir that dates back to the 13th century); the Young ClassX ensemble (a youth choir from Hamburg); and the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. By my count, more than 200 instrumentalists and singers were jammed onto the Carnegie stage, plus Nagano and the soloist Jan Vogler on cello, for the nearly hourlong work.The concert began with the music of a Hamburg native: Johannes Brahms. The orchestra performed his brief, sonically luminous and emotionally ambiguous “Schicksalslied” (Song of Destiny) with the Audi singers. Written in three movements with an ancient Greek-inspired text by Friedrich Hölderlin, “Schicksalslied” descends from radiant joyfulness into dark despair before resolving into something akin to solace. Nagano, deeply mindful of shape and phrasing, coaxed the strings into producing a warm glow that seemed to be lit from within.Nagano and the orchestra continued that careful, deeply intentional sculpting of rhythm, articulation and dynamics in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. In a work full of lithe charm, the Hamburg musicians, who also serve as the orchestra of the Hamburg State Opera, were able to showcase a more exuberantly playful side of their collective personality. After all, this is a symphony in which Beethoven, for all his callbacks to the structure and style of Haydn and Mozart, takes a radical tack: the Eighth lacks a slow movement, and dances at its own singular pace. Even with that whimsical spirit, the musicians created each moment with great deliberation.That pinpoint precision subsided in the sweep of Shepherd’s massive and earnest piece. Mostly using poetry by the German writer Ulla Hahn, Shepherd calls “On a Clear Day” both “a plea for compassion toward our fellow human” and an outcry against environmental calamity. Despite Vogler’s presence, it’s not a concerto per se; rather, Shepherd used the cello more as an actor who steps into a variety of roles to present occasional plaintive and virtuosic soliloquies against a colossal backdrop: here, a melancholic companion for the singers, trading a melody back and forth; there, channeling the spirit of a beleaguered Mother Earth.Shepherd has a fantastic gift for orchestral color; for example, in the sixth movement, he juxtaposes a rapturous, lyrical passage for solo cello with winds, brass, harp, piano and percussion — including glockenspiel and sleigh bells — to glittering, mysterious effect. The piece is so expansive in both size and scope, however, that it sometimes felt like Nagano was less a conductor than the captain of a giant cruise ship, wrestling his oversized vessel into a modest port. The even keel at which he had led the Brahms and Beethoven had vanished.Hamburg Philharmonic State OrchestraPerformed on Saturday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org. More

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      DNA From Beethoven’s Hair Unlocks Medical and Family Secrets

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      It was March 1827 and Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favor: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance?The parade of mourners continued after Beethoven’s death at age 56, even after doctors performed a gruesome craniotomy, looking at the folds in Beethoven’s brain and removing his ear bones in a vain attempt to understand why the revered composer lost his hearing.Within three days of Beethoven’s death, not a single strand of hair was left on his head.Ever since, a cottage industry has aimed to understand Beethoven’s illnesses and the cause of his death.Now, an analysis of strands of his hair has upended long held beliefs about his health. The report provides an explanation for his debilitating ailments and even his death, while also raising new questions about his genealogical origins and hinting at a dark family secret.The paper, by an international group of researchers, was published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology.It offers additional surprises: A famous lock of hair — the subject of a book and a documentary — was not Beethoven’s. It was from an Ashkenazi Jewish woman.The study also found that Beethoven did not have lead poisoning, as had been widely believed. Nor was he a Black man, as some had proposed.And a Flemish family in Belgium — who share the last name van Beethoven and had proudly claimed to be related — had no genetic ties to him.Researchers not associated with the study found it convincing.It was “a very serious and well-executed study,” said Andaine Seguin-Orlando, an expert in ancient DNA at the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, in France.The detective work to solve the mysteries of Beethoven’s illness began on Dec. 1, 1994, when a lock of hair said to be Beethoven’s was auctioned by Sotheby’s. Four members of the American Beethoven Society, a private group that collects and preserves material related to the composer, purchased it for $7,300. They proudly displayed it at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California.But was it really Beethoven’s hair?The Hiller lock, which the study found did not come from Beethoven but a woman, with its inscription by its former owner, Paul Hiller.William Meredith/Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, San Jose State UniversityThe story was that it was clipped by Ferdinand Hiller, a 15-year-old composer and ardent acolyte who visited Beethoven four times before he died.On the day after Beethoven died, Hiller clipped a lock of his hair. He gave it to his son decades later as a birthday gift. It was kept in a locket.The locket with its strands of hair was the subject of a best-selling book, “Beethoven’s Hair,” by Russell Martin, published in 2000, and made into a documentary film in 2005.An analysis of the hair at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois found lead levels as high as 100 times normal.In 2007, authors of a paper in The Beethoven Journal, a scholarly journal published by San Jose State, speculated that the composer might have been inadvertently poisoned by medicine, wine, or eating and drinking utensils.That was where matters stood until 2014 when Tristan Begg, then a masters student studying archaeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, realized that science had advanced enough for DNA analysis using locks of Beethoven’s hair.“It seemed worth a shot,” said Mr. Begg, now a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University.William Meredith, a Beethoven scholar, began searching for other locks of Beethoven’s hair, buying them with financial support from the American Beethoven Society, at private sales and auctions. He borrowed two more from a university and a museum. He ended up with eight locks, including the hairs from Ferdinand Hiller.First, the researchers tested the Hiller lock. Because it turned out to be from a woman, it was not — could not be — Beethoven’s. The analysis also showed that the woman had genes found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations.Dr. Meredith speculates that the authentic hair from Beethoven was destroyed and replaced with strands from Sophie Lion, the wife of Ferdinand Hiller’s son Paul. She was Jewish.Lab work on the Moscheles lock at the University of Tübingen in Germany.Susanna SabinAs for the other seven locks, one was inauthentic, five had identical DNA and one could not be tested. The five locks with identical DNA were of different provenances and two had impeccable chains of custody, which gave the researchers confidence that they were hair from Beethoven.Ed Green, an expert in ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved with the study, agreed.“The fact that they have so many independent locks of hair, with different histories, that all match one another is compelling evidence that this is bona fide DNA from Beethoven,” he said.When the group had the DNA sequence from Beethoven’s hair, they tried to answer longstanding questions about his health. For instance, why might he have died from cirrhosis of the liver?He drank, but not to excess, said Theodore Albrecht, a professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio. Based on his study of texts left by the composer, he described what is known of Beethoven’s imbibing habits in an email.“In none of these activities did Beethoven exceed the line of consumption that would make him an ‘alcoholic,’ as we would commonly define it today,” he wrote.Beethoven’s hair provided a clue: He had DNA variants that made him genetically predisposed to liver disease. In addition, his hair contained traces of hepatitis B DNA, indicating an infection with this virus, which can destroy a person’s liver.But how did Beethoven get infected? Hepatitis B is spread through sex and shared needles, and during childbirth.Beethoven did not use intravenous drugs, Dr. Meredith said. He never married, although he was romantically interested in several women. He also wrote a letter — although he never sent it — to his “immortal Beloved,” whose identity has been the subject of much scholarly intrigue. Details of his sex life remain unknown.The Stumpff lock, from which Beethoven’s whole genome was sequenced, with an inscription by its former owner Patrick Stirling.Kevin BrownArthur Kocher, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and one of the new study’s co-authors, offered another possible explanation for his infection: The composer could have been infected with hepatitis B during childbirth. The virus is commonly spread this way, he said, and infected babies can end up with a chronic infection that lasts a lifetime. In about a quarter of people, chronic infection will eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer.“It could ultimately lead someone to die of liver failure,” he said.The study also revealed that Beethoven was not genetically related to others in his family line. His Y chromosome DNA differed from that of a group of five people with the same last name — van Beethoven — living in Belgium today and who, according to archival records, share a 16th-century ancestor with the composer. That indicates there must have been an out-of-wedlock affair in Beethoven’s direct paternal line. But where?Maarten Larmuseau, a co-author of the new study who is a professor of genetic genealogy at the University of Leuven in Belgium, suspects that Ludwig van Beethoven’s father was born to the composer’s grandmother with a man other than his grandfather. There are no baptismal records for Beethoven’s father, and his grandmother was known to have been an alcoholic. Beethoven’s grandfather and father had a difficult relationship. These factors, Dr. Larmuseau said, are possible signs of an extramarital child.Beethoven had his own difficulties with his father, Dr. Meredith said. And while his grandfather, a noted court musician in his day, died when Beethoven was very young, he honored him and kept his portrait with him until the day he died.Dr. Meredith added that when rumors circulated that Beethoven was actually the illegitimate son of Friedrich Wilhelm II or even Frederick the Great, Beethoven never refuted them.The researchers had hoped their study of Beethoven’s hair might explain some of the composer’s agonizing health problems. But it did not provide definitive answers.The composer suffered from terrible digestive problems, with abdominal pain and prolonged bouts of diarrhea. The DNA analysis did not point to a cause, although it pretty much ruled out two proposed reasons: celiac disease and ulcerative colitis. And it made a third hypothesis — irritable bowel syndrome — unlikely.Hepatitis B could have been the culprit, Dr. Kocher said, although it is impossible to know for sure.The DNA analysis also offered no explanation for Beethoven’s hearing loss, which started in his mid-20s and resulted in deafness in the last decade of his life.An 1827 lithograph of Beethoven on his deathbed by Josef Danhauser, after his own drawing.Josef Danhauser, via Beethoven-Haus BonnThe researchers took pains to discuss their results in advance with those directly affected by their research.On the evening of March 15, Dr. Larmuseau met with the five people in Belgium whose last name is van Beethoven and who provided DNA for the study.He started right out with the bad news: They are not genetically related to Ludwig van Beethoven.They were shocked.“They didn’t know how to react,” Dr. Larmuseau said. “Every day they are remembered by their special surname. Every day they say their name and people say, ‘Are you related to Ludwig van Beethoven?’”That relationship, Dr. Larmuseau said, “is part of their identity.”And now it is gone.The study’s findings that the Hiller lock was from a Jewish woman stunned Mr. Martin, author of “Beethoven’s Hair.”“Wow, who would have imagined it,” he said. Now, he added, he wants to find descendants of Sophie Lion, the wife of Paul Hiller, to see if the hair was hers. And he’d like to find out if she had lead poisoning.For Dr. Meredith, the project has been an amazing adventure.“The whole complex story is astonishing to me.” he said. “And I’ve been part of it since 1994. One finding just leads to another unexpected finding.” More

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      Singing, and Signing, Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ in Los Angeles

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theater are working on an innovative production conceived for both hearing and deaf operagoers.LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign-language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.Indi Robinson and Gregor Lopes, deaf actors, rehearse a scene from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (singing and signing), and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that usually just accommodates an orchestra.“We are creating the dance of the double-cast,” said Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is portrayed by both a singer and an actor. “We have been conceiving ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we want to create to create an opera for a deaf audience as well. From the first bar of the opera.”For the actors, who are accustomed to performing in musicals including “Spring Awakening,” which has been part of Deaf West’s repertory, adapting to a more operatic style has been something of an adjustment.“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor playing Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene where he took Leonore to the dungeon to see her husband (husbands: a singer and an actor) sleeping on the floor. “I have never done anything like this before.”Josh Castille, a deaf performance artist acting the role of Florestan, left, worked with the director, Alberto Arvelo, center, and Ian Koziara, the tenor singing the role of Florestan.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and one that few of them know, so lip-reading is not an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the florid, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature for opera singers used to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with signs, the big moments when a singer sends a single note soaring through the hall.“Oh gosh — it is stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor portraying Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to get a job in the jail where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held, in the hopes of saving him.“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held that long,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to understand because I don’t hear. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience will understand me and understand why I’m holding this out, because it’s not natural to the language to hold a sign that long.”This production of “Fidelio” is opening less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Troy Kotsur, who used to be member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for best supporting actor, the first deaf man to be so honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of “CODA.” (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview they had seen the movie three times.)This production is steeped in classical music history, since Beethoven experienced hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others,” the composer and musician wrote in 1802 in an anguished letter addressed to his brothers that came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.)María Inmaculada Velásquez Echeverria, the artistic director of White Hands Choir.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThat history intrigued Dudamel as he was arranging a 250th anniversary celebration of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how to make the opera be part of these two worlds — the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.And it is what drew Deaf West to this project; its members considered what Beethoven faced writing and conducting while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.“Maybe he did it through feeling the vibrations of the music?” Kurs said. “I don’t know Beethoven’s exact process, but there’s a similarity to how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in my entire life, but I think that I understand it.”There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about Beethoven’s level of hearing at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to the substantially revised version of 1814. By 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. By 1818, he began carrying pads of paper for people to write down what they were saying to him. While he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate because he was wildly creative throughout his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University, who has written extensively about Beethoven.Jan Swafford, a Beethoven biographer, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “He would not have lost pitch as much as color,” he said of its onset.In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production was to be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. After the tour through Europe was canceled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time working with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the renowned Los Angeles-based theater.Dudamel is familiar with the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the music director for the Paris Opera. But this week, he will also be leading the deaf and hard-of-hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel, left, worked with members of the opera’s cast and chorus at a recent rehearsal.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDudamel told Kurs he had to some extent been prepared for this because of his work at the podium, especially as someone who conducts orchestras all over the world, with players who speak many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain overly verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)“In a way, a conductor needs to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You cannot say anything. You can only show them.”Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir as her husband led it in rehearsal.The aspirations of this performance will be signaled from first notes of the overture.The Venezuelan choir will use choreography and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture which opens the opera: The other day, it was wide smiles and hands raised to the air in a representation of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is especially optimistic,” Arvelo, the director said. “In such a dark story, the overture starts with this moment in major tones. We were like: How can we transmit this with images?”During the spoken stretches of the opera, the audience will hear nothing: the actors will communicate the dialogue in sign language, which will be translated on supertitles cast above the stage.The production will last for three nights.“I think it’s going to be a mixed audience,” said Chad Smith, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be a lot of the L.A. Phil audience who are coming to hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works from the canon.”Smith added that the hope was to also have people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are in the space for “perhaps the first time.”The experience has proved to be as powerful for the opera singers as for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart to Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he had ever witnessed.“People want to see themselves onstage,” he said. “For once in my life, I’m going to be someone’s voice and they’re going to be my action. He is my body and my action and my intent and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing audience. We are one entity — Rocco. He is attached to me, as much as I am attached to him.” More

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      Metropolitan Opera’s Concert Honors Ukraine

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      A concert to benefit relief efforts featured a young Ukrainian singer, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and the Met’s prima donna of the moment.Vladyslav Buialskyi stood center stage at the Metropolitan Opera, his hand on his heart, and sang the national anthem of his country, Ukraine.That was on Feb. 28, when the house reopened after a month off from performing and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a few days old. The company’s chorus and orchestra joined Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, in a message of solidarity with him and his suffering people.Exactly two weeks later, on Monday, Buialskyi, a 24-year-old bass-baritone from the besieged port city of Berdyansk, stood center stage once more, his hand again on his heart, and sang the anthem with the orchestra and chorus.This time it wasn’t a prelude to Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” but the start of “A Concert for Ukraine,” an event hastily organized by the Met to benefit relief efforts in that country and broadcast there and around the world.Banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched across the travertine exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights. Another flag hung above the stage; a few in the audience brought their own to unfurl from the balconies. Seated in the guest of honor position in the center of the parterre, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded to an ovation at the start by raising his arms and making resolute V-for-victory signs.The Ukrainian bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, was featured in a performance of Ukraine’s national anthem.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag hung above the Met’s chorus and its orchestra, led by the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesIt has been a trying time for the Met, which broke with Anna Netrebko, its reigning diva, over her unwillingness to speak against the war and distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.But the conflict has also given the company — still bruised by labor battles despite remarkable success staying open during the Omicron wave — a sense of unity and moral purpose. Who would have predicted a few months ago that the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, broadly reviled within the ranks for imposing a long unpaid furlough on many employees during the pandemic, would get applause from some in the orchestra as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music”?His remarks had a martial tinge, saying that the Met’s work could be “weaponized against oppression.” But much of the concert, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, was consoling, with favorites like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, here fevered and unsentimental, and “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” with its chorus of exiles longing for their homeland, “so beautiful and lost.” Most powerful was Valentin Silvestrov’s delicate, modest a cappella “Prayer for the Ukraine,” written in 2014 amid the Maidan protests against Russian influence.The soprano Lise Davidsen, the company’s prima donna of the moment, sang Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesRichard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” wasn’t quite on message, with its autumnal vision of accepting death’s imminence. But it provided a vehicle for the Met’s prima donna of the moment: the young soprano Lise Davidsen, currently starring in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”At opening night of “Ariadne” two weeks ago, Davidsen kept inundating the theater, seeming intent on proving just how much vibrating sound can flow out of her. It was thrilling, and a little much. At the performance of the opera on Saturday afternoon, she seemed consciously trying to restrain herself — even a bit tentative, fumbling a phrase in her opening aria and only gradually building to a true compromise of power and nuance.On Monday, Davidsen again seemed to be finding her way. Her high notes in the first of the “Four Last Songs,” “Frühling,” had a steely edge rather than soaring freedom; in “September,” she sounded muted in lower registers; and in “Beim Schlafengehen,” her phrasing was stiff. But she began “Im Abendrot” with a soft cloud of tone and proceeded with unforced radiance to an ending that felt light and hopeful.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Olga Smirnova. More

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      Review: A Recital Brings Together Two Schubert Masters

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      The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore subtly threaded a program of Beethoven songs and Schubert’s “Schwanengesang.”It’s difficult to avoid superlatives when writing about Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Padmore.Especially when it comes to Schubert. Among pianists, Uchida is our reigning interpreter of his music — returning to it repeatedly, revealing ever more layers of mystery, wit and aching beauty. And Padmore, his tenor sound delicate and direct, with an unforced undercurrent of sadness, can feel like the incarnation of this composer’s style.As a pairing, Uchida and Padmore are wellsprings of wisdom and sensitivity, a truly equal partnership. The performances that result from their deep study of these scores are unpretentious master classes in the art of letting music speak for itself.Yet they have never recorded any Schubert together. (Padmore has released albums of this repertory with Paul Lewis and Kristian Bezuidenhout; Uchida, with Ian Bostridge.) So it was a gift to hear them in recital at Zankel Hall on Sunday in the posthumous collection “Schwanengesang” and Beethoven songs, including the pioneering cycle “An die ferne Geliebte,” all studies in extreme longing.Apart from “An die ferne Geliebte,” Beethoven’s lieder are chronically overlooked next to his towering achievements in the symphony, sonata and string quartet. But his songs are fascinating and unwieldy: shifting with little predictability among folk melody, recitative and concert aria virtuosity, sometimes from verse to verse. With their voice-forward writing, they put the most strain of the recital on Padmore, who can fill an opera house but scaled his sound back to Zankel’s intimacy, with flashes of full power all the more effective for their judiciousness.There were rattling contrasts even in the first song of the program: the Op. 94 setting, Beethoven’s second, of “An die Hoffnung” (“To Hope”), which starts with a recitative-like questioning of God’s existence before launching into lyrical lines that showcase the fine softness of Padmore’s upper range, and a radiant climax. “Resignation,” which followed, had the Schubertian spareness to which his voice is best suited; simpler still was “Abendlied unterm gestirnten Himmel” (“Evening Song Beneath the Starry Sky”), its closing chords of childlike purity played by Uchida as if a private prayer.“An die ferne Geliebte” (“To the Distant Beloved”) is often regarded as the first song cycle: six brief text settings, flowing without pause, in a precursor to longer Schubert masterpieces like “Die schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise.” Throughout, Uchida and Padmore behaved like a single instrument; so thorough was their shared vision that they almost never cued or acknowledged each other, even for rubato stretchings of the line or for abrupt changes in tempo.As in the account of “Schwanengesang” (“Swan Song”) that followed, Padmore’s sound was remarkable most for its balance of clarity and character. Similar to Uchida, his performances are compelling — without the theatricality of, for example, Bostridge, who tends to serve Schubert with a side of self-immolation.“Schwanengesang” wouldn’t benefit from histrionics, anyway; a loose collection of Schubert’s final songs, it lacks the through line of his cycles, packing their intensity into discrete pieces that demand discrete interpretations. If one trait united them here, though, it was restraint. The famous “Ständchen” (“Serenade”), for example, has an expressive style that invites schmaltz, but also maintains a chilly distance in its articulation — a tension borne out in Padmore’s wide vocal contours and Uchida’s staccato, choked off like a series of declarations repeatedly withheld.Schubert verges on tone painting in some of the collection’s later songs; Uchida responded with pedal work that, in “Die Stadt” (“The Town”), allowed the rumbling low notes to evoke a dense fog occasionally penetrated by a mysterious run in the right hand, like an image coming in and out of focus. In “Der Doppelgänger” — one of Schubert’s most terrifying songs — she sustained dissonances, letting their uneasiness warp and linger under Padmore’s stark melody.The frighteningly open chords of “Der Doppelgänger” recall those of “Der Leiermann” at the end of “Winterreise,” but “Schwanengesang” concludes in an entirely different mood: “Die Taubenpost” (“Carrier Pigeon”), a comparatively sunny setting of text by Johann Gabriel Seidl. That pigeon, the narrator reveals, is named “die Sehnsucht,” or Longing.Speaking from the stage earlier in the recital, Padmore reflected on that word. He tallied its appearances in the Schubert and Beethoven songs, as a noun and a verb, and noted that it figures in the finales of both “An die ferne Geliebte” and “Schwanengesang.”Yet “Die Taubenpost” also ends by describing the bird as “the messenger of faithfulness.” Longing can be painful, yes; this recital’s poems suggested as much. But Uchida and Padmore also made a subtle argument that it can also be — with a clue in the first song’s cry of “O Hoffnung!” — hopeful.Mitsuko Uchida and Mark PadmorePerformed on Sunday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Conductor Is the Star

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      In a program without soloist vehicles, the focus was on Herbert Blomstedt, a 94-year-old elder statesman of classical music.It’s probably safe to say that Herbert Blomstedt will not be the New York Philharmonic’s next music director.When Jaap van Zweden leaves the orchestra in spring 2024, Blomstedt will be nearly 96. Who would want to take on the burden of an orchestra at that age? Which is not to say that he couldn’t: Blomstedt maintains a dauntingly busy schedule, with a varied repertory of long, heavy lifts that includes Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony — named, fittingly, “The Inextinguishable.”On Thursday at Alice Tully Hall, he paired the Nielsen with another symphonic testament to what that composer would call “the spirit of life”: Beethoven’s Fifth. In a time when each guest conductor’s appearance at the Philharmonic — and the orchestra is in a six-week stretch of them — feels like an audition, there was a certain relief, even joy, in hearing a concert purely for its own sake.Beethoven demonstrated through his music, though, that alongside joy is a duty to face and engage with political reality. In recent days, cultural institutions around the world have been forced to confront their relationships with artists who have ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, following his invasion of Ukraine.With reckoning has come solidarity. The Metropolitan Opera opened Monday’s performance with the Ukrainian national anthem, and on Thursday, Blomstedt led the Philharmonic in a grand treatment of it. Gestures like this are rousing reminders that we can never truly separate art and politics, but are they enough? Imagine if, in addition to a program insert dedicating the concert “to the strength, courage and resilience of those resisting Russia’s invasion,” the Philharmonic had offered a vehicle for aid to Ukraine.Otherwise the statement comes and goes, as it did on Thursday. The audience and musicians, who had been standing for the anthem, took their seats, and, with little pause, Blomstedt gave the downbeat for the Nielsen — a choice made all the more jarring because the Fourth opens as if in media res. From that moment, in a program of just two symphonies and no star soloist, the focus was on Blomstedt.He might bristle at that. Famously modest, he wields authority at the podium with minimal means, leading symphonic accounts that are notable less for what they say than what they don’t. “The Inextinguishable,” written in the shadow of World War I and reflecting it in dueling timpani sets, can easily be milked for drama. But Blomstedt follows the score closely, faithfully, with the trust that it will speak for itself.This approach occasionally leaves me wanting more — accustomed as I am to the bloated grandeur of stereotypical 20th-century performance practice or the leaner, speedier sound of historically informed styles — but it is most often clarifying. Blomstedt’s reading of the Nielsen, controlled but unmannered, was one of sublime balance. The second movement’s wind choir interlude had the gentle movement and harmony of a morning walk among trees and bird song. Later, there was a shock in the starkness of strings bowed heavily in unison. The finale built slowly, and seemed to end as openly as the symphony had begun: the closing measure’s crescendo not a sweep so much as a shine with lingering radiance.In the Nielsen, the Philharmonic players were willing partners in their guest’s vision. Yet old habits emerged in the Beethoven. It’s a work, Blomstedt wryly noted in a recent interview, that he has been hearing for nearly a century. But this orchestra has been playing it much longer — since its first concert, in 1842 — and most recently has been trained to give it a hellfire treatment under van Zweden’s baton.For the most part, though, Blomstedt kept its force in check, in an interpretation free from excess. He never made too much of a fermata — especially in the famous four-note opening motif — and subtly rejected notions of fate knocking at the door, relishing instead the symphony’s exploration of motivic obsession. If this is a work often described as a journey from darkness to light, Blomstedt embraced life-affirming optimism from the start; passages suggesting adversity were met with insistent dignity.It would be easy to link this concert to current events. Indeed, that program insert encouraged the audience to do so, with a paragraph about the music’s “tribute to the fortitude of the human spirit in the face of the fiercest adversity.” But part of Beethoven’s enduring appeal is his triumph in making the personal universal, and that’s what Blomstedt’s conducting reflected: the ability of music, at its best, to speak to any time or place.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      A Conductor Brings Nearly a Century of Experience to Beethoven

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      Herbert Blomstedt, 94 and leading the New York Philharmonic this week, discusses the famous opening of the Fifth Symphony.Herbert Blomstedt just keeps on going. The Illinois-born, Swedish conductor is 94, and he maintains a schedule that musicians half his age might blanch at.At the start of February, Blomstedt was in San Francisco, where he was the music director from 1985 to 1995. A week later, Cleveland. Then Boston, conducting Mozart and a new edition of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony that is dedicated to Blomstedt himself. Next week, he repeats that program in Chicago.This week, Blomstedt leads the New York Philharmonic in two symphonies that testify to the strength of the human will: Nielsen’s Fourth and Beethoven’s Fifth.Blomstedt’s service to Scandinavian music has long been lauded, and his recordings of works by Berwald, Nielsen, Sibelius and Stenhammar still repay repeated listening. If his Beethoven has been a little less prominent, that is only because its virtues are not of the flashy or radical kind.Although slightly different in tempos and textures as a result of Blomstedt’s adoption of the new editions of Beethoven’s scores that came out in the 1990s, both symphony cycles he has recorded — with the Staatskapelle Dresden from 1975 to 1980 and the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Germany, from 2014 to 2017 — remain beacons of good taste, with a distinctive spiritual power shining through the music. In both sets, that’s particularly true of the Fifth, which may be less brutally violent than under other conductors but has a merciful empathy to its relative restraint.Asked to choose a page from the Fifth’s score, Blomstedt went for the first, which announces the four-note motif that dominates the symphony’s passage from darkness to light. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The opening page of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, whose first four notes make up one of the most famous motifs in all of music.Bärenreiter-Verlag, KasselThis is probably the most famous opening in all of music. But is it deceptively difficult to conduct?It’s very difficult. We are all haunted by this saying of Anton Schindler’s, that fate is knocking on the door. Of course, we cannot knock on the door so fast, so it becomes [singing slowly] “baaam-baaam-baaam baaaaaam.” That’s obviously not what Beethoven wanted. On the top of the page it says “Allegro con brio.” If the first bar is like that, it’s not con brio at all; it’s allegro comodo or allegro pesante or something like that.It’s also strange that there are no staccato dots there. Some of my colleagues are very conscientious; they play it [singing smoothly] “duhduhduh duhhh” because there are no dots. So that’s also another subject that can get heated.The new Bärenreiter score now has a metronome mark, in parentheses, because he wrote the marking some years later. The marking is quite shocking for those who were used to listening to Wilhelm Furtwängler or his followers, who are about twice as slow.Then, the second fermata is longer than the first one, tied over to an extra bar. The question is, why is that? So, there are many things to discuss.What are you aiming for yourself, then?The first point about the tempo is that in earlier editions of the symphonies, there were no metronome marks, so that authorized slow tempos. Of course, there were books; you could go to the musicological literature in the library and find out. Now, it is right at the top of the page, even if it is in parentheses. It’s part of the composition. And that makes a difference.When I was young — and it’s almost a hundred years ago now — the attitude toward the scores of Classical composers was much more casual than it is today. It cannot go so far that we are put in a straitjacket; that does not help the music very much. We know that Beethoven was himself very differentiated in tempos. He might start in one tempo, and after a few bars there was another tempo. Schindler reports on this; in that case, he’s quite a reliable source.Before I started conducting, I was a musicologist, so I’m trained to think like this. I’m sure Beethoven wanted the tempo as it stands. I heard so many crazy theories about what he meant with this. Some say that his metronome was going too slow, but I don’t believe that, because you can check the metronome by looking at your watch. Since the new editions have come, I’m convinced that he meant the metronome markings as they stand.Of course, I’m not alone in that. With a couple of exceptions, I think the markings are ideal. You just have to change yourself and not do what you find from tradition. You had heard Furtwängler or Bruno Walter do it, so that must be right. No, it is not right. The right thing is what he wrote.What we think Beethoven actually wanted has changed dramatically over the course of your career, with new research and shifting tastes. How do you reconcile that?That’s normal. I don’t have to apologize for that. My first ideals were what I heard Furtwängler do. I heard him many times, in rehearsal and in concerts. It shaped my musical world; it was magic. But, little by little, I discovered that there are other ways to interpret Beethoven’s music that are at least equally motivated in what he wrote.It’s not easy for a conductor, or any musician who has the task of interpreting this music, to get onto Beethoven’s wavelength, because you have so many memories, so many ideas about the music from what you have heard. You have to free yourself of that if you are looking forward. It requires that you change your mind, but I think that is what we must do. Once you are accustomed to that, you discover new expressions in the music that perhaps were not so evident a hundred years ago.What about the fermata over the last of the four notes in the motif?From a musicological standpoint, the fermata shows that the tempo does not exist anymore. What really says how long a fermata is, in this case, is how long the bow is. When the bow is at the end, you have to stop, unless you want to do two bows, which some people do. I think that misses the point, because to hold the fermata with a single down bow requires great control of muscles. If you do two, you don’t have to have that tension in your arm; it’s too easy.Why do you think Beethoven remains such an obsession for so many of us?One could write a whole book about that, but one thing to me is characteristic. We know that Beethoven was a sufferer, but he never expresses his suffering in his music, like Mahler does. You can hear it in every bar of Mahler — I’m suffering, I’m suffering, I’m suffering — and it’s wonderful, the way he does it.Beethoven was another type of person. He doesn’t put his emotions on display, and that makes it more objective. It can represent the suffering of everyone, not only his, but mine, the suffering of the whole society. The suffering of today, in Ukraine for instance. It could symbolize anything. That helps it to outlive the personal situation of the composer, or the personal situation of the interpreter. It’s something that we go through, as humans. More

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      Review: Beethoven Returns for the Age of Black Lives Matter

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      Heartbeat Opera’s powerful take on “Fidelio,” as an indictment of mass incarceration, has been revived and revised for a post-2020 world.Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” is hardly a fixed text. He wrote several possible overtures for it and reworked the score substantially over the course of a decade. But its meaning never changed: the heroism to be found in devotion, love and freedom in the face of injustice.In 2018, the daring and imaginative Heartbeat Opera — an enterprise that, while small and still young, has already contributed more to opera’s vitality than most major American companies — took the malleable history of “Fidelio” one step further, adapting the work as a moving indictment of mass incarceration.That production has now been revised for a revival that opened at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last weekend, ahead of a tour that continues through the end of the month. Already inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this “Fidelio” is now permeated with it, and the adaptation is even more powerful.Bannister, left, as Stan, an imprisoned Black Lives Matter activist, and Griffin as Leah, his wife, who plots to free him.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesIn Beethoven’s original singspiel — a music theater form in which sung numbers are set up by spoken scenes — a woman named Leonore disguises herself as a man, Fidelio, to infiltrate the prison where her husband, Florestan, is being held for political reasons. She aims to free him from execution while exposing the crimes of his captor, Pizarro.Ethan Heard, a founder of Heartbeat, adapted “Fidelio” for the company and collaborated with the playwright Marcus Scott on the new book. Their revision tells the story of a Black Lives Matter activist named Stan — sung by Curtis Bannister, a tenor of impressive stamina — who has been imprisoned for nearly a year, and whose wife, Leah, given an affectingly agonized lower range by the soprano Kelly Griffin, is at a breaking point as she struggles to free him.She gets a job as a guard at the prison; her strategy to reach Stan in solitary confinement (much as in Beethoven’s original) is to ingratiate herself with a senior guard (here Roc, sung with both charm and dramatic complexity by the bass-baritone Derrell Acon) and court his daughter (here Marcy, smooth-voiced yet strong in the soprano Victoria Lawal’s portrayal). In this telling, there is no need for the cross-dressing: Marcy and Leah are both queer. And, crucially, all of these characters are Black, a fact that looms before guiding the awakenings of Marcy and her father as they face their complicity in a racist system that, Leah says, is designed to punish “people whose only mistake was being poor and Black.”Corey McKern, who plays a Trump-like Pizarro, with Acon, a senior prison guard.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe spoken text is in English throughout, while the arias remain in their original German — a testament to the timelessness of Beethoven, though the production’s surtitles take some liberties with the translation. (As an excuse for briefly letting the prisoners out into the sun, Roc sings that it’s the king’s name day, but the titles say that it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day.)Radically transformed, too, is the score, arranged by Daniel Schlosberg for two pianos, two horns, two cellos and percussion, with the multitasking (and nearly scene-stealing) Schlosberg onstage, conducting from the keyboard. Expressive cellos reveal the characters’ thoughts, and the horns add an aura of muscularity and honor. The most substantial interventions are in the percussion, with drum hits deployed to dramatic effect and a whiplike slap adding terror to Pizarro’s murder-plotting “Ha, welch’ ein Augenblick.”The soprano Victoria Lawal as Marcy, who awakens to her complicity in a racist system of mass incarceration.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNot all the changes from 2018 were necessary, or wise. Starting with the venue: This production originated in a black box space at Baruch Performing Arts Center, which fit the chamber scale of the music and emphasized the cinder-block claustrophobia of Reid Thompson’s set. At the Met, the show floats on an expansive stage and struggles with poor acoustics.And the text has lost some of its grace, with pandering references to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and President Donald J. Trump’s infamous call for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” A casualty of these lapses is the baritone Corey McKern’s Pizarro, who is something of a Trump stand-in, a caricature among nuanced, human characters.You could almost forgive that at “O welche Lust,” the famous prisoners’ chorus, still the emotional high point of the production and now a coup de théâtre. For the stirring number, Leah unlocks a chest — a metaphor for the prison gates — to release a white screen, on which a video is projected, featuring 100 incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles. The camera often lingers on individual faces, to an effect not unlike that of Barry Jenkins’s filmmaking, the way his sustained close-ups invite intimacy and, above all, sympathy.A hundred incarcerated singers and 70 volunteers from six prison ensembles, recorded and projected onstage, sing the famous prisoners’ chorus “O welche Lust.”Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFor curious audience members, Heartbeat has shared letters from some of the participants. They range from endearing — Michael “Black” Powell II’s “German was hard!!” — to profound, such as this from Douglass Elliott: “Most of us are victims of our circumstances who when faced with adversities chose the wrong direction with our actions. This choir makes us feel that ‘normal’ feeling for a short time every week. We are accepted as humans, not looked at as numbers.”Beethoven’s triumphant finale could have been an insult to the contemporary reality Heartbeat’s production aims to conjure. So after Stan is freed and Pizarro defeated, Leah awakes at the same desk where, in the opening, she has had a frustrating phone call with a lawyer. This twist, that it was all a dream, is of course a tired trope, but what follows isn’t.After a moment of despair — her happiness felt so real — she stands, steps to a spotlight at center stage and holds up her phone, assuming the pose of her husband’s activism, with which the production began. An ambivalent closing scene, it is an honest reflection of our time: of the mixed successes of Black Lives Matter, yes, and of the only possible way forward.FidelioPerformed at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Manhattan, and touring through Feb. 27; heartbeatopera.org. More