Botstein, Leon

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    Review: Grand Opera Makes a Comeback With ‘Le Prophète’

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    Meyerbeer, one of the 19th century’s most popular composers, is out of fashion today. But his work is receiving a rare revival at Bard College.Giacomo Meyerbeer was the toast of Paris in the 19th century. Nowadays, when he’s mentioned at all, he’s the object of backhanded compliments.“The man may not have been a genius, but he was a craftsman,” the critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times when one of Meyerbeer’s grand operas, “Le Prophète,” came to the Metropolitan Opera in 1977.Long on spectacle and long on length, “Le Prophète” has five acts with ballets and choruses galore; a coronation scene; and a grand finale in which an entire palace goes up in flames and kills, well, everyone. Based on a historical event, it tells the story of an Anabaptist uprising in 16th-century Germany led by Jean of Leiden, who is declared a prophet and king. The world premiere is remembered for its coups de théâtre, which included ice-skating (indicated with roller skates) and a sunrise (the first use of electricity on the Paris Opera stage).The notion of Meyerbeer’s exploitation of the public’s taste for dazzle persists. To give you an idea of how severely he has fallen out of fashion, the Met performed three — yes, three — of his operas in its first six months of operation in 1883-84, and hasn’t staged any of them since 1979.Fortunately, there are opera die-hards like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, who has a penchant for reappraisal. He mounted a persuasive argument for “Le Prophète” at the Fisher Center at Bard College on Friday. Because of modest resources, the spotlight was less on the staging and more on an often-overlooked element of Meyerbeer’s art: his fantastic instincts for vocal writing.For nearly all of Act IV, the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Feinstein held the stage as Fidès, the pious mother of the false prophet Jean (John) and the opera’s richest role. Mad with anguish and thinking her son dead, Feinstein’s Fidès stitches together an unforced, just-hefty-enough sound from a mellow bottom to a ringing top in writing that was vocally gracious and terrifically exciting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams

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      This year’s Bard Music Festival explores the work and context of a composer who strove to make art “an expression of the whole life of the community.”Perhaps more music festivals should open with a singalong.At the start of the first concert of the Bard Music Festival on Friday, at the Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a thronging audience was, shall we say, encouraged to join the Bard Festival Chorale in a rendition of “Come Down, O Love Divine,” one of the hymns that Ralph Vaughan Williams set as part of his efforts to enliven the music of Anglican worship. The tune, named “Down Ampney” after the Gloucestershire village in which this English composer was born in 1872, is simple, elegant and, as it turns out, satisfying to warble your way through.That was, largely, the point. Vaughan Williams and His World, the 33rd Bard festival, argued during its first weekend that he was a composer who intended his art to be of use, who saw his search for beauty through music as a collective and communal act, who wrote not only for himself, but also for his time, his place, his countrymen.“The composer must not shut himself up and think about art,” he wrote in 1912. “He must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.”But does this music have anything to say now? After all, even some of Vaughan Williams’s staunchest advocates feared for the future of his music while he was still alive. “The human as well as esthetic aspects of Vaughan Williams’ art, and its nearer relation to contemporaneous society” than that of Sibelius, might age it more quickly, the New York Times critic Olin Downes critic predicted four years before the composer’s death in 1958.Some of Vaughan Williams’s works do still speak today, above all the remarkable triptych of symphonies through which he seemed, despite his protests to the contrary, to encase the carnage of his era in sound: the biting, terrifying Fourth, a sour reminder of the Great War that had its premiere in 1935; the uneasy, bleak Sixth, finished in 1948 and an immediate sensation; the desperate yearning of the wartime Fifth, his insistent declaration that a better world was still possible. While others may think of the Fifth as naïve, I find it almost Brahmsian in its consolation and sincerity.But as Vaughan Williams’s supporters often point out, he composed in such a range of forms and styles that even if one of his scores falters at the ear, there is a decent chance that another will break through. Don’t like the Vaughan Williams of “The Lark Ascending”? Try Vaughan Williams the urbane Neo-Classicist, or Vaughan Williams the mordant modernist — or so the argument goes.Danny Driver, left, and Piers Lane were the soloists in Vaughan Williams’s two-piano revision of his Piano Concerto in C.Matt DineFor the conductor Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and one of the festival’s leaders, sustaining eclectic listening is practically a reason for living. And the Bard Music Festival excels at that. Not only does this year’s iteration argue for Vaughan Williams himself, but with the assistance of a phalanx of academics led by two scholars in residence, Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, it laudably brings to life a musical culture that normally receives no attention outside Britain, and precious little even there.It was particularly heartening to see programmed alongside Vaughan Williams the music of, among others, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Clarinet Quintet astonished in a fine performance by Todd Palmer and the Ariel Quartet. These composers, long excluded in the name of prejudice, are featured matter-of-factly, as if they had always appeared on concert bills.If anything, Vaughan Williams got a little lost in the bravura breadth of the programming on the first weekend, though he is less likely to after the second, which will feature an exceedingly rare production of his Falstaff opera, “Sir John in Love,” the “Sinfonia Antartica” and the Symphony No. 8, as well as a smattering of works for smaller ensembles. Of the six concerts I heard, one surveyed the popular music of Vaughan Williams’s time, with which he appeared to have barely a tenuous connection, while two were dedicated to his scores alone.Three other performances roamed the contexts in which he worked, and they were outstanding, an ideal fusion of intellectual insight and musical integrity. The first, introduced by the musicologist Eric Saylor, sketched out the dominance of Brahms in turn-of-the-century British composition, through Parry, Stanford, Bruch and the like; another, with winking commentary from Adams, looked at art songs. The third investigated the fraught relationship between Britain and France at either side of World War I, focusing on the influence of Ravel on Vaughan Williams during their lessons in 1907 and ’08. As the tenor Nicholas Phan, the pianist Piers Lane and the Ariel Quartet showed with a cutting “On Wenlock Edge,” a cycle of Housman poems that Vaughan Williams completed in 1909, the Englishman was no copycat, but he learned much from Ravel about how to refine a mood.Young artists excelled in all these concerts, not least the pianist Michael Stephen Brown, whose poised refinement made an early student piece by Smyth, her Sarabande in D minor, sound like a mature masterpiece. The players of The Orchestra Now, a training ensemble at Bard, played creditably in the two concerts that they contributed to as well.But in those, alas, the old Botstein dilemma came to the fore. The conductor bows to nobody in his zeal for neglected art, nor in the taste for intellectual provocation that was amply on show in remarks here, but he can lack the insight and technique that would allow the overlooked truly to shine.Such was most detrimentally the case in a program that tried to present Vaughan Williams as an experimentalist, through three works from the late 1920s and early 1930s: “Job,” the terse “masque for dancing” (that is, ballet) that was inspired by the illustrations of William Blake; the unwieldy, postwar revision for two pianos of the awkward Piano Concerto in C, valiantly tackled by Lane and Danny Driver; and the Fourth Symphony. The readings were competent, to be sure, but not specific enough in their details, especially in the Fourth, which plodded along rather than piercing the air. The edge that makes these works so bold was blunted, the intellectual argument softened.But Vaughan Williams, at least, still had something to say. More

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      At 20, an Upstate Arts Haven Keeps Breaking New Ground

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      On a recent Saturday night, a group of young people were gathered in this bucolic hamlet in the Hudson Valley, building a campfire of sorts. There were no matches or flames, but there were lanterns, chirping crickets, fir trees swirled with haze and, at one point, a zombie attack.The ersatz campfire was onstage, at the final evening performance of “Illinois,” a dance-theater piece based on Sufjan Stevens’s beloved 2005 indie-pop concept album. Directed by the star choreographer Justin Peck, the show drew a sold-out crowd of arts-minded weekenders and curious Stevens fans to commune inside the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.Since opening 20 years ago, the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary and sometimes hard to describe hits.It’s here that Daniel Fish’s radically reimagined “Oklahoma!” took shape before its unlikely run to Broadway (and a Tony Award for best musical revival), and here that the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets” (praised in The New York Times as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century”) was sparked by a random breakfast conversation.Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive. “Just approaching an artist and saying, ‘Let’s do something together,’ is the thing that excites me most in the world,” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGiven the personnel involved, “Illinois,” which will move to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in January, would seem to have the makings of a popular hit. But for Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, it furthers the same exploratory mission as everything else the center does.“All of these projects are research, which is why they belong in a college,” he said. “What these artists are doing is investigating something, experimenting, creating something in a new way.”These are tenuous times for the performing arts, including in the Hudson Valley, where several independent institutions have curtailed programming or shuttered entirely. But the Fisher Center, nestled in a college long known as a bastion of the humanities, is making big plans.In October, it will break ground on a $42 million studio building designed by Maya Lin. And it just received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work of Tania El Khoury, an artist in residence and director of the school’s recently founded Center for Human Rights and the Arts.Gehry’s building, with its explosion of stainless steel whorls, is something of a symbol of the center’s discipline-scrambling programming. Each year, the center is home to full-scale productions of rarely performed operas (like Saint-Saëns’s “Henry VIII,” which opens on July 21) and theatrical world premieres (like Elevator Repair Service’s “Ulysses,” coming in September).The center has also hosted a live-art biennial, development workshops for Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo’s “Only an Octave Apart” and, during the pandemic shutdown, a streaming serial production of “Chapter & Verse,” Meshell Ndegeocello’s musical performance inspired by James Baldwin.Justin Peck, left, in rehearsal with Ahmad Simmons, a dancer in “Illinois.” Peck’s dance-theater piece is based on the 2005 indie-pop album by Sufjan Stevens.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesFrom left, Simmons, Tilly Evans-Krueger and Jonathan Fahoury. “I wanted to build a spaceship for all these dance artists to blast off in,” Peck said of “Illinois.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesAs for “Illinois,” presented as part of the annual SummerScape festival, even those closest to it are hard-pressed to categorize it. Aaron Mattocks, the Fisher Center’s chief operating officer, called it a “genre blur.”For Peck, who came to the center with the idea about two years ago, it’s “a spaceship for all these dance astronauts to blast off in.”“I was looking for a place to go that felt somewhat quiet but also exciting, and a place that had felt willing to take risks on something like this,” Peck said.The Fisher Center opened in 2003 as a multifunctional performing arts center that would be home to the college’s teaching programs as well as the Bard Music Festival, allowing it to mount full-scale operas.The center has always presented theater and dance, too. But with Lester’s arrival in 2012, it has expanded its commissioning of original, contemporary-minded work.“What Gideon has done is brought to it a fantastic originality and an eye and ear for things that need doing, and then inspiring artists to do it,” Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, said.Jenny Gersten, a producer and the interim artistic director at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, credited the Fisher Center with fare that is “distinctively downtown-on-the-Hudson.”“Lots of theaters outside of New York City can develop work,” she said, “but Bard is one of the few who chooses to dig into experimentation of form and bold artistic dares.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesErik Tanner for The New York TimesLester, 50, grew up in London, in the period when the director Sam Mendes and the theater company Complicité were emerging. (He also admits to memorizing all the lyrics of “The Phantom of the Opera.”)But his own brief directorial career had a shaky start. At Oxford, he and another student persuaded the playwright Peter Shaffer to let them mount a production of Shaffer’s “Yonadab,” which hadn’t been performed since its disastrously reviewed 1985 premiere at the National Theater.About 15 minutes into the Oxford opening, there was a general power cut, and the play stopped. But the assembled London critics reviewed it anyway, noting, Lester recalled, that the play “hadn’t improved much.”“I was completely freaked out and thought, ‘This is too much pressure, I don’t think I can direct,’” he said.Instead, he enrolled in the dramaturgy program at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., even if — like many in theater — he was a bit hazy on what exactly dramaturgy was.A rendering of a planned new studio building designed by Maya Lin.Maya Lin Studio with Bialosky + Partners“Basically, I just learned what dramaturgy was by sitting in the room with directors,” he said, by “making mistakes and giving notes and being told to shut up.”Lester became the theater’s resident dramaturg under Robert Brustein and later, under Robert Woodruff, its associate artistic director. Asked about highlights, he mentioned working with artists like the Dutch-Syrian director Ola Mafaalani (“Wings of Desire”) and the Polish director Krystian Lupa, whom he approached after seeing his 11-hour production of “Sleepwalkers” at the Edinburgh Festival.Lupa’s “Three Sisters” at the A.R.T. was “amazing,” if not “particularly liked,” Lester recalled with a wry laugh. “But I got to be in rehearsal with him and see how he worked.”At Bard, Lester has shepherded an impressive series of audience pleasers. But when talking about him — and Caleb Hammons, the director of artistic planning and producing — collaborators use words like “artist centered” and “artist forward.”“They’re unusually good at being adaptive to what different artists need,” said Daniel Fish, whose “Most Happy in Concert” also originated at Bard.Tanowitz, the choreographer, first met Lester in 2015, when he invited her to do a repertory show. Afterward, over breakfast, he asked about the title of one dance, which included a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”Damon Daunno and Amber Gray in Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” in 2015. The production went to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for best revival.Cory WeaverDancers in the 2018 premiere of Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets,” which grew out of a conversation Tanowitz and Lester had over breakfast.Maria BaranovaThey talked about the poem for a while, and then she went to the bathroom. When she got back, he asked, “Why don’t you make a dance of ‘Four Quartets’?”“That’s classic Gideon,” Tanowitz said. “He thinks big. He has chutzpah. Part of it was a dare, so I said yes, thinking in my mind, ‘This will never happen.’”He introduced her to collaborators including the actor Kathleen Chalfant, who narrated the piece; the painter Brice Marden, whose paintings inspired the scenic design; and the composer Kaija Saariaho. (The Fisher Center has also taken over the administration of Tanowitz’s company.)But for all Lester’s skills as a connector, Tanowitz said, mostly he “dares you to be yourself.”El Khoury, who is Lebanese, first met Lester in 2017, at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, where he invited her to breakfast. “In classic Gideon fashion, he proposed all these things,” she recalled.She wasn’t sure how seriously to take any of them. But then he popped up again a few months later, at the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston.She came to Bard in 2019, as guest curator of the third Fisher Center biennial. During a long drive to New Hampshire, she and Lester had a rambling conversation that led to the creation a year later of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, which is part of the Open Society University Network.“It’s a huge responsibility to bring in an artist from a totally different environment and give her a lot of space and funding and trust,” El Khoury said.The most recent biennial addressed the politics of land and food. It culminated in May with a four-day festival that included El Khoury’s “Memory of Birds,” an interactive sound installation that invited visitors to lie in cocoon-like structures at the base of a row of maple trees.“I love it that the last piece we commissioned was Tania’s, which could be experienced by seven people at a time,” Lester said. “And now we’re doing ‘Illinois’ for almost 900.”The Fisher Center, nestled in a college known for the humanities, is expanding at a time when many performing arts institutions are struggling.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesPeck, the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, said he had been thinking for almost a decade about creating something based on Stevens’s album, which he fell in love with as a teenager.“It’s a real full-circle moment, getting to engage with this album of a generation,” he said.“Illinois,” which came to the Fisher Center with commercial producers attached, is the most expensive non-opera production it has done, with a budget of about $1.2 million. (“Oklahoma!,” Lester said, cost about $450,000.)The show, whose narrative was developed by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”), has no dialogue, just the lyrics of the songs, which are orchestrated by Timo Andres and performed and sung by a 13-piece band.The 12 dancers include some who Peck worked with on the 2018 Broadway revival of “Carousel” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”“I wanted to create a vehicle for today’s generation of dance artists who are working in theater and storytelling,” he said, “to tell a story using their language, which is their movement.”Critics were not invited — they will be at the show’s Chicago run — but at the final evening performance, the audience whooped and applauded after most songs. After the tap-inflected “Jacksonville,” featuring a rapturously received turn by Jennifer Florentino, Lester and Drury fist-bumped.The show, Lester said, is “full of joy.” And part of that feeling, for him, is the white-knuckle uncertainty that comes with every project.“The joy of it,” he said, “is not knowing whether something’s going to work.” More

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      Review: Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now Unearth Rarities

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      Leon Botstein brought his ensemble The Orchestra Now to Carnegie Hall for a sparsely attended program of neglected works written in the 1930s.At orchestral concerts, it’s unusual for conductors to make an appearance before the players have even had a chance to tune their instruments. But at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, Leon Botstein took a moment to thank the audience.“Practically no one knows these pieces,” he said — referring to the program of 1930s rarities performed that evening by The Orchestra Now, his ensemble of conservatory all-stars — “and the fact that anybody came out on a nice May day is a miracle.”A miracle, yes, but a modest one.That night, the New York Philharmonic had “limited availability” for its concert of extremely standard fare — Mozart’s “Turkish” violin concerto, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. And, across the street from Carnegie’s stage door, the line for a starry, sold-out run of “Into the Woods” snaked hundreds of feet from the entrance to New York City Center.At Carnegie, though, there was a good deal of red throughout the cream-and-gold auditorium: patches and entire rows of empty seats. Botstein has made a career of unearthing the ignored treasures of classical music — a noble, essential effort. But Thursday’s concert was a dispiriting reminder of how difficult that work really is; programming gets you only so far in a culture where Mozart and Beethoven, in any weather, continue to have the upper hand.Of course not everything Botstein selects can be on par with familiar classics. Some are more curiosity than masterpiece, but regardless, he and The Orchestra Now give them high-level readings — as good an argument for them as you can imagine. And on Thursday, he presented four works that are not likely to become repertory staples any time soon, but that are nevertheless worthy of performance.All were written in the second half of the 1930s, a period that gave us music as varied as Berg’s Violin Concerto and “Lulu,” Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Varèse’s “Density 21.5” and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” Botstein’s programming was similarly wide-ranging, with the first half sampling composers of the Americas — William Grant Still and Carlos Chávez — and the second shifting to Europe, with Witold Lutoslawski and Karl Amadeus Hartmann.Still was prolific but remains best known for his “Afro-American Symphony,” from 1931. Here he was represented by the later, smaller “Dismal Swamp,” a tone poem for piano and orchestra based on text by Verna Arvey (his wife and collaborator, including on the opera “Highway 1, U.S.A.”). A portrait of an escape from slavery to freedom, it is atmospheric yet taut; at the start, both static and dramatic.Frank Corliss, as the soloist, was skillfully cautious, evoking the scene’s tension with quiet, trudging phrases, at one point amid an eerie fog of harmonics in the surrounding strings. Anachronistic blues passages — in wind solos and muted brass — felt like a glimpse of a future that seemed within reach by the ending, a lush climax that finds beauty, and a kind of joyous promise, in an otherwise dreary landscape.The revelation of the night may have been Chávez’s Piano Concerto, a three-movement work that functions more like one in two parts: a long first section of mercurial episodes, and another that grows from virtually nothing to a finale of brassy, enormous sound. Excitingly unpredictable — in its development, but also in its rhythms and sonorities — it provided a restless workout for the soloist, Gilles Vonsattel, who was coolly capable throughout, including as a sensitive partner during a long duet with the harpist Taylor Ann Fleshman in the second movement.After intermission came Lutoslawski’s early “Symphonic Variations,” which are set off by a brief, simple theme stated by a flute over pizzicato strings. Between dizzying runs in the winds, and intrusive dark textures in the cellos and basses, it can be difficult to tell where one variation ends and another begins — so difficult, there isn’t consensus on how many there are. Easier to track, and more enjoyable to take in, is the short work’s journey from Neo-Classical austerity to unruly grandeur.The joy, though, didn’t last for long. To close the program, Botstein offered Hartmann’s First Symphony, “Versuch eines Requiems” (translated in the program as “Essay for a Requiem,” though more powerful might be something like “Attempt at a Requiem”). A five-movement collection of Walt Whitman settings — sung by the mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel between performances in “Lucia di Lammermoor” at the Metropolitan Opera — it is a pained denunciation of war whose premiere in 1948 was long delayed by Hartmann’s status as a degenerate artist in Nazi Germany.Beginning with martial percussion and dissonance, the symphony’s baseline is horror. Working from a low tessitura, Nansteel was often a rich-bodied but chilling presence, hardly melodic and, by the finale, delivering Whitman’s “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing” with heightened, ghostly speech. That movement ends with a crescendo conjuring gunfire but stops abruptly, leaving behind a suspended chord like tinnitus.Conceived on the cusp of one oppressive regime invading its neighbor, and played now as a similar act of war unfolds, Hartmann’s symphony is a cry against conflict, a warning from the past — but, on Thursday, one that could reach only the few who were there to hear it.The Orchestra NowPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: An Orchestra Manages to Capture That Ellington Swing

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      At Carnegie Hall, the American Symphony Orchestra and Leon Botstein made a case for Duke Ellington works still rarely heard from classical ensembles.What should America’s major orchestras do with the genius of Duke Ellington? Should they program his music in pops concerts, or on their main classical series?And when they play him, which of the messy labyrinth of editions of his symphonic pieces should they use? Will they need to hire ringers from the jazz world to take on solo parts?Many big ensembles dodge Ellington entirely, or marginalize him: The New York Philharmonic, for example, tends to play his works at community events or Young People’s Concerts, but only occasionally as part of its subscription season.Even if Ellington’s legacy hasn’t really suffered for this, given his extensive catalog of recordings and worthy interpretations by jazz groups past and present, there’s still ambiguity about how his orchestral music — a body of work he created alongside his compositions for jazz band — should sound and be presented.So give the conductor Leon Botstein and his American Symphony Orchestra credit for bravery as he and his players offered a concert of Ellington at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.The program wasn’t much of a surprise: essentially a mix of selections from the 1960s album “The Symphonic Ellington” and pieces from the conductor and arranger Maurice Peress’s later recording with the American Composers Orchestra. (While Ellington’s best music fulfills his own ambitions of being “beyond category,” the Peress arrangements can sound more syrupy, with a mid-20th-century “pops” orchestral sound.)But in a smart move, Botstein also engaged the pianist Marcus Roberts’s trio for the second half, which gave the evening a sense of occasion — and, at times, fresh insight.Was it faultless, judged next to recordings that included Ellington as a participant? No, though that’s a high bar. The performance of the first movement of “Black, Brown and Beige” (in Peress’s arrangement) was full-throated but not ideally balanced — the strings sodden in a way that dampened the blues feeling, particularly during the rousing, complex finish.I remain convinced that orchestras should learn and play something closer to the original version of “Beige” that Ellington premiered with his leaner orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1943. (This notion isn’t so far-fetched at a time when conservatory graduates move between jazz and classical styles with greater ease than ever before.)A similarly string-heavy ensemble at first threatened to bog down Thursday’s performance of “Harlem” (in Peress’s arrangement with Luther Henderson). But midway through, some graceful descending patterns in the winds aided soulful, delicate interplay between a pair of exposed clarinets. Later, when the strings came back in force, they enhanced the glow, instead of washing out the color.It was a turning point for the concert, which got stronger as it went on. Before intermission, the take on “Night Creature” — once again in Peress’s arrangement — exuded brassy confidence. (A recording of Ellington’s 1955 premiere of the piece at Carnegie, with the Symphony of the Air Orchestra, can be found online.)Russell also joined, from left, the drummer Jason Marsalis, the bassist Rodney Jordan and the pianist Marcus Roberts for a set of Ellington songs without orchestra.Matt DineAfter intermission, Roberts, the pianist, took the stage with the bassist Rodney Jordan and the drummer Jason Marsalis. The trio played a short, vivacious set of Ellington tunes — without orchestra but with the vocalist Catherine Russell, who had been already heard with the American Symphony in a somewhat muted take on “Satin Doll.”Speaking from the stage, Roberts encouraged the audience to listen to the music as though it were written “last week.” A tempo-switching take on “Mood Indigo” brought that point home nicely. Russell was properly featured during the set; her improvisatory exclamations at the close of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (if It Ain’t Got that Swing)” inspired a mighty, deserving ovation.When the orchestra returned to join Roberts’s trio, it seemed swept up by the energy. Crucially, both “New World A-Comin’” (arranged by Peress) and “Three Black Kings” (completed by Mercer Ellington and arranged by Henderson) featured new piano solos arranged by Roberts. His playing — often denser than Ellington’s own — helped to establish a new way of hearing this music, outside its creator’s looming shadow. The drumming by Marsalis was likewise individual in character, particularly during “Three Black Kings.” (At one point, he made a simple-sounding pattern progressively complex in its syncopations, until he stirred the crowd to applause.)The commitment from Botstein and his players was gratifying. And as usual with this conductor, there was a pedagogical aspect to the proceedings. A question hung in the air: Why is Ellington still a relative symphonic rarity?In some places, he’s not. One of the best streaming concerts I have seen during the pandemic came from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which played a joyous version of Ellington’s “Night Creature” (David Berger’s transcription) on a program that also featured music by Copland and Gabriella Smith and a premiere by Christopher Cerrone. I also have fond memories of a Schoenberg Ensemble album that featured John Adams conducting Ellington’s spellbinding, through-composed “The Tattooed Bride” alongside his own “Scratchband.”So putting Ellington into his proper place, at the heart of the American classical music canon, can be done successfully. Other groups coming to Carnegie would do well to remember that.American Symphony OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: An Orchestra Offers a Novel View of Music History

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      At Carnegie Hall, Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now took an always-needed step in uncovering overlooked American classical music.Pity the 19th-century American composer, toiling away in the shadow of Beethoven in search of a homegrown sound, only to be overshadowed by yet another European: Antonin Dvorak, whose “New World” Symphony is played far more often than anything from the New World that preceded it.Visiting the United States in the 1890s, Dvorak prophesied a future of American classical music founded on Black and Indigenous melodies. To an extent, that came true in the 20th century, but orchestras tended to overlook composers of color in favor of white, male ones — some of whom would come to be seen as national heroes, while their lesser-known compatriots would rely (and continue to rely) on passionate champions.And Europeans still haunted concert programming — a product, the historian Joseph Horowitz has asserted, of a cultural shift in American classical music from a focus on composers to performers that, fueled by the rise of radio broadcasts and recordings, calcified the repertoire of our largest cultural institutions.I’m being reductive, but the broad truth of this is that the myopic approach of much orchestral programming today — Eurocentric, with living composers rarely given the same pride of place as a Beethoven or Mahler — is nothing new.Then there are artists like Leon Botstein, an indispensable advocate of the unfairly ignored, who brought his ensemble The Orchestra Now to Carnegie Hall on Thursday for an evening of works that, despite covering a range of nearly 150 years, felt as fresh as a batch of premieres.Botstein belongs to a class of conductors and artistic directors — including Horowitz, as well as Gil Rose of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ashleigh Gordon and Anthony R. Green of Castle of Our Skins, and more — who bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to their programming. They operate on such a small scale, they can hardly reverse the course of American classical music history; but each concert, each recording, is an essential step in a better direction.Leon Botstein, left, led the program, which included a new concerto by Scott Wheeler for the violinist Gil Shaham.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesOn Thursday, Botstein and The Orchestra Now, a capable and game group of young musicians, took the latest of those steps with Julia Perry’s “Stabat Mater,” written in 1951, early in that composer’s short life; Scott Wheeler’s new violin concerto, “Birds of America,” featuring Gil Shaham; and George Frederick Bristow’s Fourth Symphony, “Arcadian,” from 1872.Perry’s work, an episodic setting of the classic Latin text that has inspired composers for centuries, seems to rise from the depths, awakening slowly with the sounds of gravelly cellos that eventually give away to the brightness of a solo violin and the entrance of the vocalist: here, the mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter, who navigated her part’s surprising turns and plunges with smooth and characterful ease.The score, like many American works from the mid-20th century, strikes a balance of dissonance and tonality. With a brief running time and modest scale, it is nonetheless dense, with thick textures emerging from its all-string ensemble and an affecting ambivalence in the final section of instrumental darkness and vocal ecstasy.Wheeler’s likable concerto, which the orchestra premiered last weekend at the Fisher Center at Bard College, has elements of timelessness — its lyricism akin to that of Barber and Korngold’s famous violin concertos — but also postmodernism, with snippets of classics like Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.”Despite the avian title, Wheeler doesn’t emulate birdsong as Messiaen famously did, but he does take inspiration from the calls of distinct voices, with brief, repeated phrases attached to specific instruments — such as the whistling runs from a piccolo and flute that open the piece.Shaham, one of our sunniest violinists, entered accordingly with a singing melody on his highest string, and brought abundant warmth throughout. But he was also grippingly virtuosic in tricky, Sarasate-like passages of lyrical double-stops and left-hand pizzicato. In the finale, he engaged in a musical Simon Says, knocking on the back of his instrument and cuing the second violins to do the same, then setting up col legno tapping in the violas and high-pitched bird calls in the first violins. By the end, the winds joined in to evoke a wondrously bustling aviary.The evening ended with a rare reading of George Frederick Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesWithout an intermission, Botstein continued with Bristow’s burly symphony, one of those works that is more heard about than actually heard. But when it premiered, in the midst of 19th-century debates about the direction of American classical music — documented, with an analysis of the “Arcadian,” in the musicologist Douglas W. Shadle’s revelatory 2015 book “Orchestrating the Nation” — it enjoyed the rare success of repeated programming.And on Thursday, you could hear why. With late-Romantic grandeur and American inspiration, the “Arcadian,” played at Carnegie in a new edition by Kyle Gann, charts an imagined journey westward with a changing musical landscape; a serene pause that conjures communal entertainment with a quote from Tallis’s “Evening Hymn”; a troublingly naïve and chauvinistic “Indian War Dance” that’s more of a European danse macabre; and a festive celebration upon arrival.As a document of history, it is an embodiment, ripe for interrogation, of Manifest Destiny’s sins. But as music, Bristow’s score holds its own alongside European Romanticism while transparently aiming for a new, more distinct path. He was hardly alone in this effort. There was a moment when New York’s concert halls resounded with 19th-century American symphonies. It’s time they did again.The Orchestra NowPerformed Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: To a Rare King Arthur Opera, Bard Says ‘Welcome Back’

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      Superb singers and a clear production make a strong case for Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard “Le Roi Arthus.”ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — It took just two words over the loudspeakers for the audience at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on Sunday evening to break into vigorous applause: “Welcome back.”Welcome back, indeed, to Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard opera “Le Roi Arthus,” being presented as part of Bard’s SummerScape festival. And welcome back to many in the audience, for whom being in a theater for live opera with a full orchestra and chorus, after such a long deprivation, was truly something to cheer.“Le Roi Arthus,” based on the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, proved a powerful work for this fraught, polarized moment in American life. It is the story of an idealistic ruler who fails to bring about the era of enlightenment he strives for, but whose principles will endure, as an angelic chorus assures him at the end of an often ravishing score. The production is the latest project in the conductor Leon Botstein’s long campaign to break classical music from its fixation on repertory staples and call attention to neglected works.This remarkable opera, first performed in Brussels in 1903, four years after its composer’s death in a cycling accident at 44, is especially deserving. Chausson, who also wrote the libretto, labored on it for almost a decade — not because he was stuck, but because he wanted to get it right. He did. The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective. And Botstein, leading the American Symphony Orchestra, an impressive cast and the excellent Bard Festival Chorale, made a compelling case for the piece. (How has it languished when many lesser scores by French composers of Chausson’s era — especially, for me, Massenet — keep returning to international stages?)The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective.Maria BaranovaThe influence of Wagner, especially “Tristan und Isolde,” looms over “Le Roi Arthus.” Chausson was a Wagner devotee, no question: For his honeymoon in 1883, he took his wife to the Bayreuth Festival to see “Parsifal.” As he worked on “Arthus,” Chausson exchanged letters with his friend Debussy, who had a love-hate relationship with Wagner. In one letter Chausson wrote that the similarity of subject matter between his opera and “Tristan” — both concerning overpowering feelings of love that lead to betrayals of marriage and duty — would not matter to him if he “could only successfully de-Wagnerize myself.”Wagnerian strands run through the music, even hints of motifs from “Tristan” and the so-called “Tristan” chord. Yet the score also comes across as beholden to the French heritage Chausson was born into, especially Franck and Massenet. His use of thick chromatic harmonies is less dark and elusive, more ludic and radiant, than Wagner’s writing. The score is rich with lyrical stretches that almost break into song.The orchestral prelude teems, at first, with swashbuckling music that suggests the triumphant battle the king’s forces have just waged over the invading Saxons. We meet Arthur, with his wife, Guinevere, at his side, presiding over a celebratory gathering of his court. The baritone Norman Garrett, in elegant robes and gold crown, looked and sounded splendid as Arthur. His voice, deep-set but capable of lightness in its high range, easily conveyed authority and dignity. Yet even in his opening monologue he plumbed the music for hints of the king’s vulnerability.The opera’s illicit lovers, Lancelot (Matthew White) and Guinevere (Sasha Cooke), are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.Maria BaranovaWhen the king singles out the valiant knight Lancelot (the ardent tenor Matthew White) as a “true victor,” the other knights mutter their resentments, especially the menacing Mordred (Justin Austin, a youthful baritone). In this telling of the story, Lancelot and Guinevere are already deeply consumed by illicit love. As the queen, the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke brings gleaming sound and a touch of self-destructive volatility to her singing. Unlike Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, this couple is fully aware that they are betraying their king and their oaths. But, as Guinevere sings, “love is the only law.”The singers brought dedication to an important project, learning these demanding roles for this production. Botstein’s enthusiasm for a score he has long championed came through — sometimes too much. In bringing out the brassy richness and intensity of the music, he sometimes let the orchestra overpower the singers. Still, he brought urgent pacing and color to this nearly three-hour score.The opera ends with a series of death scenes, one for each of the principal characters — a dramatically risky move that Chausson handles deftly. In a daringly slow, mesmerizing monologue, Guinevere strangles herself with her own long hair. Lancelot, having offered no defense in a battle with former comrades who are avenging their king, comes back to the castle mortally wounded, living long enough to ask Arthur’s forgiveness in anguished yet noble phrasesThe shaken Arthur, seeking death, is greeted by a group of heavenly maidens who offer to take him away — not to death, but to eternal sleep. Chausson turned this sequence into a shimmering, harmonically lush double chorus, performed here by choristers in celestial white robes. “Your name may perish,” they tell Arthur, but “your ideas are immortal.”Let’s hope this production helps Chausson’s opera thrive as well.Le Roi ArthusThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. Also streamed at that website on July 28. More

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      A King Arthur Rarity Is an Apt Way to Return to the Opera

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      Ernest Chausson’s “Le Roi Arthus,” with its fragile promise of renewal, is coming to the Bard SummerScape festival.In the third act of Ernest Chausson’s opera “Le Roi Arthus” (“King Arthur”), Guinevere asks Lancelot, “United in love, united in sin, will we also be joined in death?”The tangled Arthurian love triangle is familiar from “The Once and Future King,” “Camelot” and the works of Sir Thomas Malory. But here the question, set to longing sighs in the orchestra, immediately evokes another complicated 19th-century operatic romance: Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”Chausson’s only opera, which is being given a rare staging at the Bard SummerScape festival starting on Sunday, never fully escapes the shadow of “Tristan.”But in “Le Roi Arthus,” he also managed to find his own path. A contemporary of Henri Duparc and Gabriel Fauré, Chausson (1855-99) is today best known for his “Poème” for violin and orchestra. Born to wealth, he composed slowly and carefully. “Arthus,” which he wrote over the course of almost a decade in the 1880s and ’90s, didn’t premiere until 1903, years after he died in a cycling accident. By the turn of the 20th century, the work already seemed dated, and it has only occasionally been performed since.“It’s unbelievably beautiful,” Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and the production’s conductor, said in an interview. “And not only beautiful, but grammatically very smartly put together.”Chausson, like many composers of the late 19th century, labored in the shadow of Wagner. But in his only opera, he did carve out his own path.Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesLike many composers of his time, Chausson labored under the anxious influence — what he called the “ardent and despotic inspiration” — of Wagner. “If you’re going to be influenced by someone, Wagner is as good as you can get,” Botstein said. “But it is terribly obvious that it’s not by Wagner; there is very French chromaticism and a French melodic sensibility.”Chausson was well aware of the threat of merely rewriting “Tristan.” His friend Claude Debussy wrote to him in 1893 with concerns that part of Debussy’s own opera then in progress, “Pelléas et Mélisande,” “resembled the duet of Mr. So-and-So” — meaning Wagner. Later, after reviewing a draft of “Le Roi Arthus,” Debussy wrote to Chausson, “We would gain, it seems to me, by taking the opposite course.”Chausson’s score does occasionally sound like Wagner, notably in a brief, portentous appearance by Merlin. But he also made conscious decisions to distance himself from the master: He tends to avoid characteristically Wagnerian dense orchestration and that composer’s shifting thickets of leitmotifs — bits of music representing characters or concepts.As was Wagner’s practice, Chausson wrote his own libretto, and repeatedly edited it — especially after his colleague Duparc sent him a 51-page critique singling out the opera’s similarities to “Tristan.” By its final form, unlike in Wagner’s opera, Lancelot and Guinevere’s illicit affair is already in progress at the start of the opera, and they are fully in command of their own fates — not, as in “Tristan,” under the spell of a love potion. And Lancelot, crucially, experiences a crisis of conscience unlike any faced by Wagner’s hero.Chausson makes his mythic figures into fallible, conflicted humans. Arthur (at Bard, the baritone Norman Garrett) struggles with the loss of his marriage and of his most trusted confidant. The extended duets for Lancelot (the tenor Matthew White) and Guinevere (the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke) explore earthly questions of trust, loyalty and love — far from Wagner’s weightily philosophical, Schopenhauerian mists.Louisa Proske, the production’s director, sees this as one of the opera’s strengths. “This love is organic, it’s genuine, and it’s human,” she said in an interview. “And it’s very modern, in the sense that Chausson is really interested in the impasse between the two lovers and how the arguments on each side keep playing out.”Writing about “Le Roi Arthus,” the musicologist Steven Huebner has pointed out that Guinevere can be seen as a typical fin-de-siècle operatic seductress, her chromaticism aligned with Carmen before her and Salome after — “driven by sensuality, a threat to virility.”But Proske disagrees. “She’s not a femme fatale who splits up the good work of the men,” she said. “She is a woman who is fighting for a love that she deeply believes is sublime, and the highest good in this world. There’s so much substance in what she says and expresses musically.”Proske’s staging mixes images from different cultures, both ancient and modern. She said that the abstract set and timeless costumes — including new heraldry for Arthur’s knights — “create a tension between the past and the future.”“They’re not historically accurate,” she added of the designs. “They express an imaginary idea of Europe. I really love that it’s, at the same time, an action movie as it has knights and kings and queens. It has this kind of grand, epic scale that is really fun to put onstage. And at the same time, it’s deeply an opera of ideas.”The work depicts Arthur’s Round Table at its twilight. “The Round Table,” Proske said, “which Arthur devotes his life to, stands for or embodies an idea of good governance and good kingship, which is not quite the same as democracy.”The political context will come to the fore in Bard’s presentation of what is perhaps the opera’s most distinctive sequence: its ending, in which a boat arrives to carry Arthur away. Five offstage sopranos and what the score describes as an “invisible chorus” call to him to “come with us beyond the stars” for a “deep, endless sleep.” (Morgan Le Fay and Avalon go unmentioned.) This all comes after two protracted death scenes for Lancelot and Guinevere, who strangles herself with her own hair.The Bard production will bring that invisible chorus onstage. “Arthur and the heroic, charismatic autocratic nobility essentially disintegrate and recede into the heavens,” Botstein said. “The people come onstage. They represent the future. There’s a symbolic vision of the possibilities of democracy.”Proske also sees the ending as an image of recurrence: “It’s the situation of a political leader at the end of his life. It is a complete failure because the project has failed. The gift that the chorus brings to Arthur is to say that it hasn’t failed, because in the future, it will recur, your thought will live on and take shape in different periods of history, and people will pick up what you left us.”Such a fragile promise of renewal and rebirth is perhaps an apt way to return to the opera house after the coronavirus pandemic. “I think this is a really exciting piece to come back with, because at heart, it actually thinks about the necessity of collective storytelling,” Proske said. “I hope that the audience will feel part of that collective at the end and will take home something that will stay with them.” More