Bryan, Courtney (Composer)

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    Courtney Bryan’s Music Brings It All Together

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    A recent recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, this pianist and composer fuses different styles for a sound that is entirely her own.The name Courtney Bryan is not one that you’ll currently find on many recordings. Aside from two independently released, jazz-tilting albums from 2007 and 2010, precious little of this pianist and composer’s finely woven, adventurous music is available to hear widely.But you can expect that to change, beyond live performances including the premiere of Bryan’s chamber work “DREAMING (Freedom Sounds),” presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Merkin Hall on Wednesday. She also recently signed with the influential music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, whose biography of her online includes the promise of a third recording: “Sounds of Freedom.”Bryan, 41, who was born in New Orleans and received a MacArthur “genius” grant earlier this month, has been making her mark since earning her doctorate in composition from Columbia University in 2014. Symphony orchestras, chamber musicians, vocal groups and jazz performers have all been drawn to her sound. Last spring, the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song,” with text by the stage director Tazewell Thompson and hints of post-bop jazz harmony, displayed her place among the most exciting voices in contemporary American music.In a phone interview, Bryan said that before she started her Ph.D. program, “I had the separate thing of doing ‘classical’ here, ‘jazz’ here,” while also working as an organist at the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark.From left, Leslie B. Dunner, Tazewell Thompson, Ryan Speedo Green and Bryan at the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song” last spring.Chris LeeBut at Columbia, her composition teacher — the eminent composer, trombonist and computer-music pioneer George E. Lewis — encouraged her to put everything together. “He helped me dream bigger,” Bryan said.And Lewis also helped introduce her to other like-minded students, including the musicologist Matthew D. Morrison, who said that his forthcoming book “Blacksound” is “heavily informed by our conversations, our conspiring — trying to figure out how to get certain ideas of what Black music is out into the world.”Lewis recalled Bryan’s “unassuming brilliance,” a quality evident even at the admissions stage, in which “bombast” and “blowing your own horn” are the norm. Once she started, she altered the culture of the program, Lewis said. The school’s composition seminars had a reputation for treating people poorly: “you know, the idea that somehow sharpening one’s critique was confused with being mean to people.”One day, Lewis added, “Courtney stood up and said, ‘We just can’t continue to treat people this way.’ And everyone just looked at her; she hadn’t said very much, to this point. She’s a person who has that deep spiritual reservoir. And she changed a lot of people.”Their relationship continues today: Lewis leads the International Contemporary Ensemble, and he programmed Bryan at Merkin as part of “Composing While Black: Volume One” — which has ties to his latest book, a volume of critical essays that he edited with Harald Kisiedu.The inclusion of Bryan on this bill reflects Lewis’s appreciation for her direct approach to political commentary. “Courtney was one of the people who, early on, put Black Lives Matter on the classical music table,” he said. Yet, he added, in her works “there’s no one dogma. It’s not conventionally tonal; it’s not conventionally atonal. The orchestration is lush — but spare in some ways.”She brings eclectic references to bear in “DREAMING,” which incorporates text from a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and other legal opinions. To hear the gospel and jazz elements, Lewis said, “you have to go through the looking glass with her,” and the results are what he called “strange resonances.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”In an archived La Jolla Symphony performance of “Yet Unheard,” a 2016 piece that incorporates poetry by Sharan Strange and commemorates the life of Sandra Bland (a Black woman who was found hanged in a Texas jail cell in 2015 after she was arrested during a traffic stop), you can hear Bryan’s talent for transfiguring trends in experimental orchestration, as well as gospel tradition. Similarly, a recently filmed performance of “Sanctum” (2015) by the London Sinfonietta illustrates the score’s braiding of influences including the sermons of Pastor Shirley Caesar, marching band percussion and the rhythmic exultations of street protests.Bryan’s religious side is likewise front and center in her Requiem, in which she sets Greek and Latin text from the Mass as well as selections, in English, from Ecclesiastes and Psalm 23. That work was performed on video during the lockdown portion of the pandemic by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble.The mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher, a member of Quince, said that Bryan’s use of extended technique — including whispering and chanting — was not “super intense or aggressive” compared with other contemporary music. But, she added, it was Bryan’s way of fusing those elements with more traditional chamber writing that was responsible for its distinctiveness: “Usually someone will only do an only-extended techniques piece. Or only a tonal, written-notes-on-a-page piece, and not combine them in interesting ways.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” George E. Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBryan’s recent piano concerto, “House of Pianos,” bustles with references to jazz-piano history, including boogie-woogie and Harlem stride. It also contains approaches to harmony that she learned in lessons from the towering New Orleans pedagogue Ellis Marsalis, and traces of music that she examined in a master’s degree program at Rutgers, where she studied with the jazz pianist Stanley Cowell. “New Orleans Concerto,” by her former teacher Roger Dickerson, also informs the work.“It’s my way to pay tribute to a lot of pianists who’ve inspired me — but also a challenge for me as a pianist and composer,” Bryan said of the concerto. For its premiere at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra last May, she performed the solo part.More of her pianistic prowess can be found on those early recordings. For Morrison, the musicologist, one exemplary moment comes during a rendition of “City Called Heaven,” from Bryan’s first album, “Quest for Freedom.”

    Quest for Freedom by Courtney Bryan“She takes this spiritual and she really transforms it,” he said, professing himself “obsessed” with its experimental rhythmic touches and its “Chopinesque” figurations. The first time he heard it, Morrison thought: “Oh my goodness, who does this so seamlessly? And it was Courtney.” More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Departs From Business as Usual

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      “The March to Liberation” offers a rarity that should be more regular: a world premiere, a symphony and an oratorio, all by Black composers.Gustavo Dudamel, recently named, to cheers, as the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, will arrive to lead the orchestra officially in 2026. But the time before then shouldn’t be thought of something to be endured or, at worst, a slog.Just look to the Philharmonic’s program this week — titled “The March to Liberation” and conducted by Leslie B. Dunner — which on Thursday had a streak of urgency and plenty of orchestral splendor.A world premiere from Courtney Bryan, “Gathering Song,” with text by Tazewell Thompson, opened the show; William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2 followed; and, after intermission, a 45-minute, oratorio-style work by the veteran composer Adolphus Hailstork, “Done Made My Vow, A Ceremony.” Squint at this sequence — a premiere from an up-and-comer, a venerable half-hour symphony, a dramatic finish — and you could almost see the outlines of a typical subscription concert.Yet an all-Black roster of composers is hardly business as usual at a mainstream institution like the Philharmonic. William Grant Still’s 1937 symphony, subtitled “Song of a New Race,” is the kind of chestnut we should be hearing American orchestras playing regularly. But his music remains a rarity. Hailstork is also too infrequently heard, despite a prolific, half-century career.A program like this ought to be big news on its own. But the Philharmonic amped up the proceedings by inviting the video artist Rasean Davonté Johnson to create a visual accompaniment for each work, multimedia playing in parallel with the music. (Thompson, the librettist for Bryan’s premiere, was credited as the show’s director.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This was tastefully done, but I tended to feel that the music didn’t need the help. From the outset, Bryan’s work proved thrilling in its polish and expressive range. In its early going, triumphal writing for brass was tugged at — and moodily complicated — by descending string motifs that traipsed across unpredictable intervals. It had the calmly challenging poise of the composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who died on Thursday at 89.Thompson’s text is voiced by a griot character, on Thursday the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, who calls out to the audience and initiates the piece’s titular sense of gathering. The lines unfurl in short lines, which Bryan paces generously in the music. Green relished every morsel, with a bright sound in his higher range and burnished roundness in lower-slung passages. (He is soon to be heard in Terence Blanchard’s “Champion” at the Metropolitan Opera, so his performance here was also something of a promising preview.)Later in the Bryan, there are fillips of Afro-Cuban rhythm and moments of thick orchestral modernism, as well as traces of stentorian, post-Minimalist American opera. But the score does not come off as a stylistic grab bag. Though prismatic, it feels carefully woven as it touches on gospel and jazz traditions as well as contemporary idioms.In Still’s Second Symphony, the Philharmonic strings in particular seemed to savor the down-home, pastoral airs of the first movement — even as flutes (one doubling on piccolo) executed their oscillations and divebombing phrases with terrific energy and articulation. Dunner sagaciously managed the call-and-response qualities of the score, though his suave, controlled reading also seemed to glide past stray bursts of piquant personality in Still’s writing.Toward the end of the second movement, Still alternates between brief flecks of lush, 40s-style Hollywood romance and noir. When Neeme Järvi recorded this work with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he played up those contrasts, whereas Dunner seemed to sand off the contrastive edges with the Philharmonic. But because I’ve heard this music in person so rarely, I’m of the mind to say: Let a thousand interpretations bloom.During Hailstork’s piece — structured as a Black American history lesson given by a character named Toil — I felt that some sparer moments were less than ideally balanced in the auditorium. Given that Toil is an amplified speaking part, those questions of balance could have something to do with the orchestra finding its acoustic footing inside the recently retrofitted Geffen Hall. Yet the climatic moments, during which the New York Philharmonic Chorus navigated the Hailstork’s setting of various psalms, came across as grandly cosmic.So forget the Philharmonic’s distant future for now. This program only runs through Saturday, and who knows how long it will be before New Yorkers can hear the music of these three composers again on the same evening?New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      A Requiem, Derailed by the Pandemic, Arrives When It’s Needed Most

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      Courtney Bryan’s Requiem, premiering Thursday after its original date was canceled last year, now follows a time of loss and upheaval.You’ve probably heard a story like this before. Courtney Bryan’s Requiem was set to premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in late March 2020. In a time of incalculable loss, her music became part of another kind of casualty: the sounds that vanished from stages around the world.Like many premieres originally planned for the past year, Bryan’s Requiem, written for the vocal quartet Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony, was stranded in limbo. But through the orchestra’s turn to online programming and a season-ending series organized by Missy Mazzoli, its composer in residence, the piece was given a new date this week, when the latest episode of CSO Sessions lands on the streaming platform CSOtv.Maybe it’s actually more fitting that the Requiem be released now, as the United States emerges from its worst days of the pandemic — over 600,000 deaths later — and the country celebrates its first federally recognized Juneteenth, a year after the emotional, nationwide peak of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd.“I think about the loss in my own life, but I know that a lot of people have had a lot of losses during this time, due to Covid and other situations,” Bryan said in a recent interview. “So I’m really happy that this is the actual premiere.”Bryan, who is based in and from New Orleans, is a composer and performer who deals in collaboration, with an open ear to traditions like jazz and gospel — and, occasionally, to topics around racial justice like Black Lives Matter. In “Sanctum” (2015), she wove live orchestral playing in with sounds including the voices of demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo. Her oratorio “Yet Unheard” (2016) commemorated the life of Sandra Bland.Edwin Outwater leads the Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the premiere performance of Bryan’s Requiem, now streaming.Todd RosenbergHer Requiem was meant to be more abstract — haunted by contemporary tragedies, perhaps, but not explicitly tied to any one in particular. It draws from a broad range of inspirations, including death rituals from the Anglican Church, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” Neoshamanism’s death rite known as the “great death spiral” and New Orleans jazz funerals, as well as text from the Bible and the traditional Catholic Mass.Its five movements — Bryan associates that number with life — begin with a gentle, a cappella harmony built from elemental “mmm” sounds before each of the four voices of the Quince singers begins to follow a unique line, with detours into half-sung Sprechstimme and percussive sibilance. The other instruments don’t enter until about seven and a half minutes in, when the clarinet and brasses offer a chorale-like interlude, mournful and dignified.The Requiem is primarily a showcase for the Quince singers. They follow that instrumental passage with repetitions of the word “listen,” in different ways: The score instructs one to exclaim, and the others to plead, chant on pitch and whisper. A bass drum resounds, signaling the start of a dirge that includes a duet of simultaneous yet lonely melodies from the clarinet and trombone. By the end, after sadly beautiful word painting with the “Kyrie eleison” text and a clarinet solo of upward runs, Bryan arrives at a finale that is less restful and resolved than a traditional Requiem’s, but more cyclical, closing with the “mmm” vocalise that started the piece.Bryan talked more about the work and its inspirations in the interview. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Was this commission specifically for a Requiem, or was that your choice?It actually goes back to when I met Quince. I was really taken not only with their music and their voices, but also how they talked about music and the things that they cared about. We bonded, and then a year after that — about four years ago — we were talking, and I told them I would like to write an a cappella Requiem.I grew up in an Anglican church and was deciding between the Catholic Mass and the Anglican Mass, and thinking of writing a Requiem, but in my own style. As I got into it, I started reading about different dying rituals from traditions around the world, how people approach funerals and the celebration of life. Then I took a pause, because it got really big. There was a lot to learn, and it was changing the way I approached it — and because we didn’t have a specific deadline, I stepped down.Later, I heard from Missy Mazzoli about a commission at the Chicago Symphony, and I knew that Quince was on the program. So I changed it. The first section is still a cappella, but then I added instruments.Even with more musicians, it’s still far from the scale of something like Verdi’s Requiem.It was already going to be chamber size. But yeah, I ended up going kind of minimal with the way I used the instruments. I checked out classic Requiems, definitely Verdi’s and Mozart’s, and the feeling I got — or even just from reading the Catholic Mass — was this feeling of rising up against death. It feels like there’s a battle or a triumph, and I found that I was most interested in thinking about death and the cyclical nature of life and death, and more, kind of, an acceptance. So all my text was Christian, but it’s my perspective on the Requiem.I was about to say, there’s a tension at the end of your piece, between triumphant language like “Death will be no more” and music that’s more unsettled and mysterious.It felt like a natural ending because it’s a life cycle; it wasn’t a triumph or an arrival point. And with the text, “The first things have passed away,” I thought it was something that was not an ending or a beginning.Performed by the Quince Ensemble with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Edwin Outwater, conductor.When you were exploring traditions of mourning, what did you find yourself attracted to, conceptually and artistically?The one that hit home the most is just thinking about New Orleans — the idea of the celebration of life and the jazz funeral. There’s the walking of the casket from the church to the burial ground, but there’s a whole ceremony in a jazz funeral that starts with the dirge, and then it goes up-tempo to a celebration of life. So that was a major influence on the instruments that I chose: the brass band or the New Orleans ensemble. I wasn’t trying to replicate the style, necessarily, but there are little symbolic things.What do you make of the context of this Requiem’s premiere, as opposed to spring last year?I know some commissions come in response to this historic thing, and you have your own take, but this was something that I just wanted to do. That’s why it’s interesting that it took its own time and that the actual premiere is after this really profound time of loss. I find these kinds of things mysterious, how they happen. So, I hear it differently. It sort of came out of some of the work I was already doing, where I was writing music about police brutality. I wouldn’t say this piece is about that; it was a chance for me to go in deeper into these ideas about life and death.Quince asked, in the middle of the rougher parts of the pandemic, how I would feel if they just recorded the first, a cappella part and put it online for people — just something to share. The folks at the Chicago Symphony were very supportive of that, so we did. It felt good to have something like that to offer, and I feel the same way as it is being offered now. I hope it will be healing to people.RequiemStreaming at cso.org/tv. More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in June

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      The Met Orchestra’s return, an opera from Paris and a Philip Glass circus work are among the highlights.With in-person performances just beginning to return in many places, here are 10 highlights of the online music content coming in June. (Times listed are Eastern.)Dallas Symphony Orchestra/Met OrchestraAvailable through June 4; dallassymphony.org.One of the most dramatic musical coups of the pandemic came a month ago, when players from the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra — which went unpaid for nearly a year — traveled to Texas to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony. It was a reunion with Fabio Luisi, who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years and is now the music director in Dallas. The filmed result is fresh, vivid and cumulatively quite moving. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Circus Days and Nights’June 1 at noon; malmoopera.se; there are several more livestreamed performances through June 13.Circus juggling was one of the highlights of Phelim McDermott’s recent staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Akhnaten.” Might that have given Glass a new idea? Whether it’s coincidence or not, his latest stage work — a collaboration with the librettist David Henry Hwang and the circus director Tilde Bjorfors — is being advertised as a “never-before-seen fusion of circus and opera,” streamed live from the Malmo Opera in Sweden. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Desert In’June 3 at noon; operabox.tv; available indefinitely.Filmed opera continues to take pandemic-prompted steps forward, including this pivot to episodic narrative. Available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv platform, “Desert In” is an eight-part mini-series in which a married couple runs what is described as “a mysterious motor lodge where guests pay to be reunited with lost loves.” (The episodes, projected to last between 10 and 20 minutes each, will roll out on a weekly basis, two at a time.) The rotating creative team is promising, with composers like Nathalie Joachim and Nico Muhly taking turns writing episodes, for a cast that includes the star mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. SETH COLTER WALLSDetroit Symphony OrchestraJune 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m.; dso.org; available through June 17 and 18.Kent Nagano, an insightful and dynamic conductor, is presenting two 45-minute programs with the Detroit Symphony — both of which, in characteristic Nagano style, offer intriguing pairings of old and new. On June 3 he leads Toshio Hosokawa’s Percussion Intermezzo from “Stilles Meer,” an opera written in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, alongside Schubert’s ebullient Fifth Symphony. The next day he pairs Britten’s “Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury” with Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Britten,” before concluding with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, with the elegant pianist Gilles Vonsattel as soloist. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAdam Barnett-Hart of the Escher String Quartet, which livestreams a program of Bartok and Sibelius on June 10.Ian Douglas for The New York TimesEscher String QuartetJune 10 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through June 17.Scheduled for December of last year, before the pandemic intervened, the exciting Escher String Quartet performs live from the Rose Studio under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The program opens with Bartok’s final quartet, first performed in 1941 and a work that arrestingly combines aching grief — his mother died and World War II was grimly unfolding — with teeming intensity. The concert ends with Sibelius’s unconventional and engrossing “Voces Intimae” in five movements, written in 1909. It’s the “kind of thing,” Sibelius wrote of this work, that “brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death.” ANTHONY TOMMASINIKronos FestivalJune 11 at 10 p.m.; kronosquartet.org; available through Aug. 31.Global in scope, this is the first of three meaty streamed programs which, together with some ancillary offerings and films, make up this intriguing festival of new work presented by the Kronos Quartet and its creative foundation. The premieres include music by Nicole Lizée, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mahsa Vahdat; other pieces are by Clint Mansell, Jlin and Pete Seeger (his sadly ever-relevant “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Le Soulier de Satin’June 14; chezsoi.operadeparis.fr; available indefinitely.As the summer sun invites you outside, the last thing you may want is to stare at a screen for over six hours. But if you have the patience — or if a rainy day keeps you indoors — set aside time for the Paris Opera’s latest premiere: the third in its cycle of works inspired by French literature, as well as Marc-André Dalbavie’s third opera. It’s an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s sprawling drama “Le Soulier de Satin” (“The Satin Slipper”) — in preview clips rich with misty orchestration and long melodies — directed by Stanislas Nordey, conducted by its composer and starring the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and the mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux. JOSHUA BARONE‘Terra Nova’June 17 at 7:30 p.m.; 5bmf.org; available through Dec. 31.Those passing by the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch at Grand Army Plaza on a hot recent Saturday afternoon could experience an unexpectedly sophisticated new song cycle musing on the tangled history of exploration and colonization. Written by the bookish performer-composer collective Oracle Hysterical and played with the quartet Hub New Music, the sometimes propulsive, sometimes sultry music was superb when Majel Connery was airily singing, and foundered only in two long, talky sections at the end. It will be released for streaming in a version filmed at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island. ZACHARY WOOLFETo close her time as composer in residence at the Chicago Symphony, Missy Mazzoli has planned two streaming concerts.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCSO SessionsJune 24 at 12:01 a.m.; cso.org/tv; available through July 23.Missy Mazzoli closes her tenure as the Chicago Symphony’s composer in residence with two rich streaming programs of new and recent music. This, the second of the concerts, includes the premiere of Courtney Bryan’s “Requiem,” which draws on different mourning traditions and is scored for vocal quartet, winds, brass and percussion; there are also works by Gilda Lyons, David Reminick and Tomeka Reid on offer. (The first program, which goes online June 10, is no slouch, either, featuring pieces by Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith and Mazzoli herself.) ZACHARY WOOLFEPhilharmonia OrchestraJune 24 and 25 at 2:30 p.m.; philharmonia.co.uk; available until Sept. 16 and 17.One of the great partnerships in music — the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra in London — ends in June with Salonen’s final concerts as principal conductor. (Rest assured, the group seems in good hands with his successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali.) Both programs are meaty affairs: one beginning with Beethoven’s First Symphony and ending with Sibelius’s Seventh, bookends to Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman) and Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments”; and the other surveying Bach through the eyes of 20th-century artists, along with the premiere of Salonen’s “Fog,” adapted for orchestra, and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida the tantalizing soloist. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in March

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeWatch: ‘WandaVision’Travel: More SustainablyFreeze: Homemade TreatsCheck Out: Podcasters’ Favorite PodcastsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story10 Classical Concerts to Stream in MarchMitsuko Uchida, the Louisiana Philharmonic and a performance organized by Teju Cole are among the highlights.The pianist Mitsuko Uchida will stream a Schubert program this month through Cal Performances.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesFeb. 25, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETAs the live performing arts continue to struggle through the coronavirus pandemic, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in March. (Times listed are Eastern.)‘Die Tote Stadt’Feb. 28 at 1 p.m.; operavision.eu; available through March 28.Korngold’s breakthrough opera has not been well served on DVD. Some productions emphasize the plot’s salaciousness at the expense of its musical beauty. For others, the problem is the reverse. If anyone can achieve the delicate balance of the two elements, it’s the experienced director Robert Carsen, whose production of the rapturous, late Romantic score — a precursor to Korngold’s influential Hollywood work — appeared at the Komische Oper in Berlin in 2018, and is streaming now. The soprano Sara Jakubiak stars, and has made something of a specialty of Korngold in recent years, including appearing in another recent Berlin staging, at the Deutsche Oper, of “Das Wunder der Heliane.” SETH COLTER WALLSTeju Cole and Orchestra of St. Luke’sMarch 3 at 6:30 p.m.; oslmusic.org; available until March 10.This ensemble, which has responded robustly and creatively to the constraints of streamed performance, begins a new words-and-music series, “Sounds and Stories,” with a program organized by the writer Teju Cole and hosted by the actor David Hyde Pierce. Cole will read selections from his work alongside visual elements and pieces by an eclectic array of composers: Caroline Shaw, Yvette Janine Jackson, Henryk Gorecki, Unsuk Chin, Kaija Saariaho and Hildegard von Bingen. Oh, and Beethoven. ZACHARY WOOLFEAnthony McGill will collaborate with the Catalyst Quartet on a performance presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAnthony McGillMarch 9 at 7 p.m.; Facebook and YouTube; available indefinitely.“Cadence: The Sounds of Justice, the Sounds of a Movement,” presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been organized by Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet and the latest winner of the Avery Fisher Prize. Inspired by the Great Migration and works in the museum’s collection, McGill is joined by the Catalyst Quartet, with whom he collaborated on the group’s album “Uncovered, Vol. 1: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.” They will play Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet in F sharp minor alongside Kerry James Marshall’s 2014 painting “Untitled (Studio),” and a premiere by Richard Danielpour, in front of Philip Guston’s “Stationary Figure” (1973). Closing the concert will be Adolphus Hailstork’s solo “Three Smiles for Tracey,” juxtaposed with Joel Shapiro’s sculpture “Untitled” (2000-01). JOSHUA BARONESteven BanksMarch 10 at 7:30 p.m.; Facebook and YouTube; available indefinitely.This adventurous saxophonist and composer presents his debut recital for the organization Young Concert Artists, which named him the winner of its prestigious international auditions competition in 2019. The program, with the pianist Xak Bjerken, includes premieres by Carlos Simon and Saad Haddad and Banks’s own new work “Come As You Are.” He will also perform Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F (with members of the Zorá Quartet) and Schumann’s “Fantasiestücke” for Clarinet and Piano — both arranged for saxophone. And why not? The sax, after all, is a latter-day cousin of both those instruments. ANTHONY TOMMASINILouisiana Philharmonic OrchestraMarch 12 at 8 p.m.; lpomusic.com; available through September.There are two Copland works on this program: “Appalachian Spring” and the Clarinet Concerto. But the bigger news is the performance of Courtney Bryan’s violin concerto “Syzygy,” featuring Jennifer Koh as soloist. The Louisiana players have a longstanding connection with Bryan’s music; having performed her orchestral work “Rejoice,” they’ve also named this composer-pianist a “creative partner.” So they may well have a feel for her take on Americana, which often includes elements of spirituals and the blues. (Bryan’s “Blessed,” a commission for Opera Philadelphia’s online channel, is also streaming from Feb. 26.) SETH COLTER WALLSThe mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey performs Kurt Weill at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesKate LindseyMarch 14 at 2 p.m.; teatroallascala.org, as well as YouTube and Facebook; available through March 21.One of my favorite albums in recent years has been “Thousands of Miles,” a program mostly of Kurt Weill songs performed by the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and the pianist Baptiste Trotignon with cabaret-like cool; Lindsey brings to these works both the radiant lyricism of Teresa Stratas and the raw Sprechstimme of Lotte Lenya, two iconic Weill interpreters. That album is the basis for this recital with Trotignon at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where Lindsey will also appear in March for a double bill of Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “Mahagonny-Songspiel,” conducted by Riccardo Chailly and streaming on RaiPlay on March 18. JOSHUA BARONEMitsuko UchidaMarch 18 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; available through June 16.For Mitsuko Uchida, Schubert’s piano works have been a lifelong work in progress, which is why, years after she recorded the bulk of them, they are still well worth hearing anew — lately, in online recitals. From Wigmore Hall in London she recently streamed the Sonata in C (D. 840) for the Cleveland Orchestra. Next is this program for Cal Performances, featuring the forlorn yet tender Impromptu in A flat (D. 935); the famous Impromptu in C minor (D. 899), with its spare, enigmatic opening march embellished through chords and variations; and the Sonata in G (D. 894), a font of serenity that’s as good a spiritual balm as anything right now. JOSHUA BARONESarah CahillMarch 20 at 10:30 p.m.; YouTube; available indefinitely.A champion of American music and living composers, this pianist is also known as host of the popular program Revolutions Per Minutes on KALW in San Francisco. This recital, presented by the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, Calif., is a celebration of the 19th Amendment, and includes works by female composers from the 18th century to the present day, among them Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds and Vitezslava Kapralova. ANTHONY TOMMASINICaramoor will stream a recital by the bass-baritone Dashon Burton, left.Credit…Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesDashon BurtonMarch 21 at 3 p.m.; caramoor.org; available until March 23.Known as a member of the contemporary vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth as much as for trumpeting performances in Handel’s “Messiah,” this burnished-tone bass-baritone appears in recital with the pianist David Fung under the auspices of Caramoor. The program includes Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” as well as spirituals and works by Dowland, Margaret Bonds, Florence Price and William Bolcom. ZACHARY WOOLFELouisville OrchestraMarch 27 at 7:30 p.m.; louisvilleorchestra.vhx.tv; available until May 23.The exuberance of this ensemble and its young music director, Teddy Abrams, is captured in its name for its streaming series: Louisville Orchestra Virtual Edition, or LOVE. Installments explore Classical and folk styles, and, on March 27, the legacy of Black traditions. Abrams conducts from the keyboard in Ravel’s jazz-influenced Piano Concerto in G, and the local rapper, activist, teacher and Louisville Metro Council member Jecorey Arthur performs. ZACHARY WOOLFEAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More