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      In New York, Masks Will Not Be Required at the Opera or Ballet

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      Many arts groups, worried about alienating older patrons, have maintained strict rules. Now “the time has come to move on,” one leader said.Masks are no longer required in New York City schools, gyms, taxis and most theaters. But a night at the opera or the ballet still involves putting on a proper face covering.That will soon change. Several of the city’s leading performing arts organizations — including the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and New York City Ballet — announced on Monday that masks would now be optional, citing demands from audience members and a recent decline in coronavirus cases.“The time has come to move on,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview.The Met, Carnegie Hall and the Philharmonic will end mask requirements on Oct. 24, along with Film at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. The David H. Koch Theater, home to City Ballet, will follow on Nov. 1. Two venues on the Lincoln Center campus, the Mitzi E. Newhouse and Claire Tow theaters, will maintain their mandates.The decision is a milestone for classical, dance and opera institutions, which had been among the most resistant to relaxing mask rules — wary of alienating older patrons, who represent a large share of ticket buyers. As coronavirus infections have declined and masks have vanished from many other settings, arts groups are feeling pressure from audiences to make a change.At the Met, for example, only about a quarter of ticket buyers said in a survey last month that they would feel uncomfortable attending a performance if masks were optional. Over the summer, that number had been close to 70 percent.“People’s attitudes are changing,” Gelb said. He hoped that relaxing the rules would help make the Met more accessible to “younger audiences who really don’t want to wear a mask.” With the elimination of the mandate, the company will also reopen its bars, many of which have remained closed during the pandemic.Proof of vaccination, as well as masks, were required to gain entry to many venues starting last year, when arts organizations returned to the stage after a long shutdown. Over the summer, however, as hospitalizations and deaths declined, many groups began to ease their rules. Broadway theaters (with a few exceptions) dropped the vaccine requirement on May 1, and the mask mandate on July 1.While most classical, opera and dance groups eliminated the vaccine requirement this fall, many kept in place strict mask mandates on the advice of medical advisers. The question of masks posed a challenge for many groups; they risked alienating some ticket buyers, no matter how they proceeded.At the Met, stage managers have delivered announcements from the stage before each performance reminding audiences to keep masks on for the duration of opera. At Carnegie Hall, ushers have checked each row and called out people who were not wearing masks.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the hall kept mask rules in place this fall because of lingering concerns about the virus among some medical advisers and audience members. But it decided to make a change after medical advisers said it could operate safely without masks, and after complaints from the audience were growing.“Ushers were finding it actually quite difficult because a lot of people were very annoyed having to still wear masks when in most of their lives they’re no longer doing so,” Gillinson said in an interview.By eliminating the mask rules, arts leaders hope they can help restore a sense of normalcy at a time when many groups are struggling to recover from the turmoil of the pandemic. While live performance is flourishing once again in New York and across the United States, audiences have been slow to return.Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview that the mask rules could change if the virus emerged as a deadly threat once again.“This is an ever-evolving situation,” she said. “We will stay on top of whatever the current medical protocol dictates.”But for now, she said, it is time to change focus.“We feel it’s important that we do our part to help the city return to a much more normal state of affairs,” she said, “and to encourage people to come back into the city and to reinvigorate the economy.” More

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      Eight Ways of Looking at a Singular Composer

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      Lukas Foss would have turned 100 this year. Here is a selection of key works from a long and varied (and now largely overlooked) career.“You can’t pin him down, and that’s the difficulty,” the conductor JoAnn Falletta said in a recent interview.Falletta, the longtime music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, was speaking about Lukas Foss, who led that ensemble in the 1960s and would have turned 100 this year. She and the orchestra are celebrating the occasion on Monday with a concert devoted to his works at Carnegie Hall.The polymathic Foss was a skilled and wide-ranging conductor, but he thought of himself primarily as a composer. His music grazed freely among Copland-esque Americana, thorny serial, wild chance-based, angular Neo-Classical, arch Neo-Baroque and churning Minimalist styles. That eclecticism, however, has worked against his lasting popularity, Falletta believes.“He was very proud that he did everything,” she said. “He thought the more techniques you used, the richer your vocabulary was as a composer.”Born Lukas Fuchs to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1922, he was gifted musically from an early age. With the rise of the Nazis, the Fuchses fled to Paris, then to Pennsylvania, where they changed their name to Foss and where Lukas studied piano, composition and conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.“The Prairie,” an oratorio-style choral work to a long poem by Carl Sandburg, made his name as a composer when it premiered in 1944. An unabashed love letter to his adopted country, it was the start of a richly productive writing career — complemented by podium positions in Buffalo, Milwaukee and elsewhere, where Foss, who died in 2009 at 86, sought to ensure contemporary music held a position as valued as the old standards.Though Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project have made valuable recordings in recent years, Foss’s compositions — varied, yet with a singular voice and a pervasive curiosity — are played all too rarely these days.“There’s a kind of sadness that he doesn’t have many champions now,” Falletta said, adding that she hoped the Carnegie concert might in some small way help with that. “If this gives a chance to see about him and look into other things, that’s great.”In the interview, she discussed some key Foss works, including several she will be leading on Monday.‘Three American Pieces’ (1944)“This was originally a violin-piano duo,” Falletta said of a work that Foss orchestrated it in 1986, toward the end of his writing career.“When he first wrote it,” she added, “it was part of that love affair with his new country. It’s so interesting: It has this open-air quality, a little bit of that Ives or Copland language. But like Copland, it wasn’t really his language, because he was an immigrant. How wonderfully strange it is that it’s immigrants that gave us our country’s sound. Foss had no direct connection to the frontier. But there’s a mixture of folk sounds in there, blues, ragtime. I think it’s so delightful — that Americana style, the affection he had.”Symphony No. 1 (1944)“I think here he’s not only reflecting his gratitude to the United States,” Falletta said, “but you also see a kind of rhythmic vitality that’s much more like Stravinsky, and a counterpoint he must have honed with Hindemith. The tradition of the symphony is there, but the second movement is blues — in a classical symphony! And the third movement is jazz, but it’s a Scherzo, with a trio and everything. There’s structural tightness, but it’s always unpredictable. I don’t think he was one to break convention, but he really loved to bend it.”‘Griffelkin’ (1955)In the late 1940s, Foss wrote a lively opera based on the Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” It showed a gift for the kind of dramatic writing that would appeal to children, so he was a natural choice for NBC to approach in the wake of the success of the first opera it had commissioned for television, Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors” (1951).Foss’s delightful result, inspired by a fairy tale about a disobedient young devil, was broadcast on Nov. 6, 1955. It was, Falletta said, “the last part of an age when classical music was for everyone.”‘Psalms’ (1956)“When you hear this,” Falletta said, “remember that the ‘Chichester Psalms’ of Leonard Bernstein — Lukas’s great friend from their Curtis days — had not yet been written.”In the 1940s Foss had already done two cantatas for voice and orchestra, “Song of Anguish” and “Song of Songs,” that were also on biblical texts. “The most dramatic part is the middle part,” she said. “It’s very rhythmic, it’s very jazzy — very Bernstein in its own way, very vivid. The outer movements are shorter and slower.”‘Time Cycle’ (1960)Foss’s best-known piece, this work for soprano and orchestra, dates to the period in which he began to experiment with alternatives to purely notated music; in 1957, he even founded the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught. In “Time Cycle,” which the Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic premiered, four song movements (with jumpy vocal lines and texts about time and its ambiguities by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche) alternate with improvised instrumental interludes.‘Echoi’ (1963)In works for small groups, Foss was able to delve deeper into avant-garde experimentation than he generally could in writing for larger ensembles. “Echoi,” for clarinet, cello, percussion and piano, draws on the kind of chance strategies that John Cage had made increasingly famous through the 1950s. Foss’s is a raucous piece in four sections, partly structured and partly open to swerves determined by the performers.String Quartet No. 3 (1975)“He went his own way,” Falletta said of Foss. That’s true, and he was no follower of trends, but he kept his ears open to new styles and he certainly heard the groundbreaking pieces that the young Steve Reich and Philip Glass were producing starting in the late 1960s. This quartet, its textures shifting throughout, is permeated with the intense, driving regularity of classic Minimalism, but married to the kind of spiky, even gritty dissonance that didn’t really interest Reich and Glass. (“Music for Six,” from a couple of years later, also explores Glassian repetition, sometimes in a gentler, more meditative mode.)‘Renaissance Concerto’ (1985)“When I was Lukas’s assistant at the Milwaukee Symphony, my first assignment was to go to Europe on tour with the orchestra,” Falletta said. “And he was always behind on writing deadlines, so he was working on this piece. He knew I played lute, so he asked me to bring him some music, and I brought him Noah Greenberg’s anthology of lute songs.”The flute was especially close to him; with the piano, it was the instrument he played best. “The third movement,” Falletta said, “is drawn from Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo,’ with Orfeo lamenting the loss of Euridice: ‘Goodbye sun, goodbye sky, goodbye Earth.’ And then he tries to bring her back to life, and she’s following him before he turns around. And Lukas has a little offstage group of strings and the flute, following the orchestra a couple of beats behind, like a couple of steps behind. And then it disappears.” More

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      Review: The Philadelphia Orchestra Returns, With Force

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      Carnegie Hall’s season-opening gala featured the ensemble and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in a program of heavy-handed light fare.Carnegie Hall’s season-opening concert — featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra, a frequent visitor in the coming months — on Thursday night had light fare written all over it.Ravel’s “La Valse” and Liszt’s First Piano Concerto are dazzlers, and Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony is a font of graceful melodies. With a gala dinner afterward, the program promised to go down easy. But Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra’s music director, had other ideas.From the start, “La Valse” was heavy with portent. The snatches of waltz melodies at the beginning did not flit, flicker and come together as they have in other interpretations. The bassoons roused themselves slowly, heavily, refusing to leave their slumber. The strings swooned steadily, and the double basses laid down a menacing pulse.For his choreographic poem, Ravel imagined “an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd,” and in the sheer refulgence of the waltzes, one can see dignified couples sweeping in circles across a floor. Nézet-Séguin brought to mind a gruesome dance, woozy and foreboding. (Some have agreed with that macabre transfiguration, seeing in it a metaphor for the decay of European glory after World War I, but Ravel resisted such interpretations.) The finale was controlled pandemonium. The Liszt and Dvorak likewise careened toward their conclusions.As he did with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in June, Nézet-Séguin reveled in the power of a full orchestra. This time, though, he used a heavy hand to force pieces into uncharacteristic shapes.Dvorak’s normally uplifting symphony turned toward stone-faced implacability; even the clarinets playing in thirds moved lugubriously. In the Liszt, the brasses aimed not only for the back row but seemingly also for passers-by on the street.Elsewhere, there were moments of elegance, joy and even whimsy: a glistening violin solo from the concertmaster, David Kim, in the Dvorak, or basically anything the cellos touched with their warm, translucent feeling.Liszt’s piano concerto, the work of an established showman who wanted to be taken seriously as a composer, combines virtuosic glitter with transparently textured chamber music. One moment you’re in a clarinet sonata; in the next, a sparkling impromptu cutting through an orchestra.The soloist, Daniil Trifonov, concerned himself less with tone quality than with technical bravura. His passagework had a hard glare, and he lined up chords neatly like punctuation marks. Liszt threw down a gauntlet with 19 straight bars of trills in a piece already rife with difficulty, and Trifonov kept it sparking and spinning. It’s a miracle he has any fingerprints left. His scherzo had a wonderfully light air about it.Like Nézet-Séguin, though, Trifonov commanded respect with his prowess but left me cold.Trifonov’s encore, an arrangement of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” prompted knee-jerk guffaws from the audience, and maybe for some it’s so trite that it’s unsalvageable. But as he unspooled the music’s hardy melody over an even-keeled accompaniment, it provided a welcome palate cleanser.Gabriela Lena Frank’s dashing “Chasqui,” excerpted from a six-movement suite for string quartet and arranged for string orchestra, likewise injected new energy into the program. String pizzicatos popped like branches underfoot, and while the high strings turned wiry, the lower ones nurtured a tone that was, in its own way, implacable in its handsomeness.At Carnegie last season, Nézet-Séguin’s promotion of living female composers gave us a noble piece by Valerie Coleman and a mysteriously evocative one by Missy Mazzoli. Each brought out fresh sensitivities in him. Such advocacy could well become a part of his legacy, and it serves him as a musician as much as them as composers.Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

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      Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More

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      Review: The Met Opera Orchestra Raises a Glorious Noise

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      The orchestra’s power in theatrical music was on display in two concerts at Carnegie Hall led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in an awesome display of its might. After an eventful season, in which concerns beyond music sometimes pulled attention from the stage, these back-to-back concerts were a reminder of the orchestra’s pre-eminence in theatrical material.Each concert paired excerpts from an opera with a programmatic piece, an inherently dramatic form that depicts a story or a character using instrumental forces. The performance on Wednesday matched Richard Strauss’s “Don Juan” with Act I of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” and Thursday’s all-Berlioz program placed arias and an interlude from “Les Troyens” alongside “Symphonie Fantastique,” a groundbreaking work that sounds more like a music drama than a symphony.Opening with “Don Juan” felt like a statement of purpose. Here were world-class musicians tackling a bravura symphonic poem that established the modernist bona fides of the 25-year-old Strauss. The orchestra flaunted the depth and breadth of its tone in the opening motif, an upwardly swinging phrase dripping with swagger. The horns covered themselves in glory, and the concertmaster David Chan and the oboist Nathan Hughes contributed shapely solos. At one point, the ensemble’s sound grew so frenzied it turned strident. At the end, the crowd roared.The opera had come to the concert hall, and it was going to raise a glorious noise.This was Nézet-Séguin the extrovert, who deploys the orchestra in the opera house like an instrument of fate, keeping the baseline volume at mezzo forte. The orchestra comes across as an external force that acts on the characters rather than one that sympathetically expresses their innermost feelings. The best opera conductors, though, know when a scenario calls for one or the other.In that light, the ending of “Don Juan” revealed a weakness: Nézet-Séguin is more effective at big moments than small ones. Strauss gives his swashbuckling Don Juan a poetic, even philosophical, demise, but with Nézet-Séguin, he just sort of dropped dead.You could hear Nézet-Séguin working out the dynamic emphases in real time at Carnegie. Wagner built the twilight setting of Act I of “Die Walküre” out of mellow, amber-colored instruments — cellos, bassoons, clarinets, horns. Nézet-Séguin, though, focused less on mood and more on intoxicating, surging romance. It certainly sounded as if Siegmund and Sieglinde’s fateful union was blessed by their father, Wotan, king of gods: Nézet-Séguin summoned divine — that is, awesome — playing from the musicians.Christine Goerke (Sieglinde) and Brandon Jovanovich (Siegmund), both Wagner veterans, are not singers to be blown off a stage. Goerke, who has sung Brünnhilde, easily navigated Sieglinde’s music with her dramatic soprano, cresting the climaxes instead of getting washed-out by them.Jovanovich had the more grueling part. The writing for Siegmund constantly pushes a tenor into a muscle-y sound at the top of the staff, and Jovanovich’s bottom notes paid the price, taking on a gravelly gurgle. The middle and top of his voice remained virile, handsome and taut, and his narration cycled through a remarkable series of emotions — vulnerable, proud, sweet, disdainful, morally upright — before finding transcendence.Eric Owens, glued to his score, couldn’t suppress the nobility of his bass-baritone as the brutish Hunding; instead he channeled the character’s villainy with an obdurate, distrustful manner.After “Die Walküre,” Nézet-Séguin insisted that the cello section stand for applause — a touching acknowledgment of the leading role it played. He also teased audience members as they moved up the aisles to leave: “We do have an encore planned,” he said, stopping people in their tracks — “it’s called tomorrow night’s concert.”The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato performed excerpts from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” on Thursday.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaAt the start of the next evening, the strings’ quicksilver quality in Berlioz’s “Le Corsaire” Overture indicated a very different concert was in store.Nézet-Séguin took pains to quiet the orchestra for Joyce DiDonato’s two arias from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” DiDonato’s mezzo-soprano is not the typical one for the role of Dido — full, rich, expansive — but she defied expectations, sharpening her light, glittery timbre into a blade for the scena that culminates in “Adieu, fière cité.” Rattled and debased after Aeneas abandons her, Dido fantasizes about murdering the Trojans, but eventually, she accepts her fate, recalling sensuous memories of her time with the questing hero. DiDonato cast a spell, ending the aria on a thread of sound, her Dido a shell of her former self — but what an exquisite shell it was.There was fun, too: Nézet-Séguin bounced joyfully to the rollicking bits of “Le Corsaire” and dug deep into the twisted, macabre finale of “Symphonie Fantastique,” with its cackling ghouls and sulfurous air.After raising hell, Nézet-Séguin pivoted again, welcoming DiDonato back to the stage for an encore, Strauss’s “Morgen.” As he calmed the orchestra to a whisper, DiDonato and the concertmaster Benjamin Bowman intertwined their silvery sounds. This time, Nézet-Séguin got the balance just right. More

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      Two Gems of June: Premieres at Carnegie Hall and Harlem School of the Arts

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      The festival circuit may be getting underway but the city offers fine fare with programs of work by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Adegoke Steve Colson.This month, you might feel the momentum in classical music swinging to the domestic festival circuit, with splashy premieres and revivals coming courtesy of Spoleto, Ojai and the Opera Theater of St. Louis. But New York isn’t finished yet, either.Two premieres here over the weekend — one loudly trumpeted and one that enjoyed comparatively little fanfare — were newsworthy and enjoyable on their own terms, while also serving as reminders not to neglect the city’s June calendar.Along with the New York Philharmonic’s presentations Friday of Barber’s Violin Concerto — featuring the star violinist Hilary Hahn — and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the audience at Carnegie Hall heard the premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s 14-minute “Forward Into Light.”The composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, center, with the conductor Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on Friday, for the premiere of her work “Forward Into Light.”Chris LeeCommissioned by the orchestra as part of its “Project 19” focus on female composers, “Forward Into Light” was inspired by the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. With music that was by turns fragile and ferocious — and that also boasted touches of mordant wit — “Light” ably communicated its story about new ideas struggling for space (and for longevity). Spare, ascending motives in the harp anchored some early sections. When the orchestra responded and added in new, consonant melody in turn, there was a sense of material developing through collaboration. Elsewhere, a brief song for clarinet spurred material for other winds. Subsequent interplay, with Minimalist pulses in the violins offset by glissandi in the cellos and basses, recalled the swooning call-and-response arrangements of past Snider works, like “Circe and the Hanged Man,” from her 2010 song cycle “Penelope.”The typically hard-charging Philharmonic music director Jaap van Zweden allowed these moments to breathe. Yet he also relished hairpin turns during which the music throttled into tutti writing. Late in the piece, he managed Snider’s quick dynamic shifts with a Hollywood sound-mixer’s feel for drama.Overall, “Forward” was packed but not overstuffed with historical references, both abstract and concrete. Sometimes Snider’s Sturm und Drang suggested early feminist boldness, or corresponding public sphere controversy. However, a prerecorded sample of Dame Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women,” late in the piece, didn’t register as strongly as the rest of the music. But even in the densest moments, you could discern Snider’s feel for wry commentary. A few walloping brass passages seemed to offer knowing nods and the subtlest of eye-rolls — as though the characters who inspired this music were aware that the unshakable strengths of the suffrage movement could outlast early, noisy objections.The violinist Hilary Hahn performing Barber’s Violin Concerto on Friday, with van Zweden conducting.Chris LeeAnd so, just as in her ecologically oriented “Mass for the Endangered,” the composer’s intellectual concerns dovetailed smoothly with the lush, inviting score. (The Death of Classical concert series presents Snider’s Mass, Monday through Thursday this week at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.)It was the beginning of a fine night for the Philharmonic. In partnership with Hahn, the orchestra gave Barber’s violin concerto some thrillingly rough-hewed edges, cutting against its public reputation as lighter fare. And though van Zweden’s over-articulated grimness in the middle sections of Mahler’s symphony came at the expense of the composer’s more colorful twists, the conductor’s handling of the outer movements delivered undeniable galvanic thrills.While the Carnegie crowd received Hahn’s appearance with an ovation befitting her global-star status — and responded to the culmination of the Mahler with fever-pitch satisfaction — they also greeted the new piece with enthusiasm. It all made for a richly satisfying close to the orchestra’s challenging year outside its own auditorium.The next time we hear them indoors, it will be at the newly refurbished, redesigned Geffen Hall, inside Lincoln Center. What they’ll play there, over the next few years, is beginning to come into focus. And as the Philharmonic’s administrators continue to deepen their engagement with music by Black composers, they might have looked uptown on Saturday for a few more ideas.Adegoke Steve Colson’s “Suite Harlem,” a six-movement work, was dedicated to the Harlem School of the Arts and its founder, the soprano Dorothy Maynor.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesKendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, performed a dance accompaniment in the third movement of Adegoke Steve Colson’s work.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe bassist Luke Stewart was part of the octet performing “Suite Harlem.” Each soloist had a chance to shine throughout the piece.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn the closing night of the second annual A Train Festival at the Harlem School of the Arts, the pianist and composer Adegoke Steve Colson — a veteran of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or A.A.C.M.) — presented a 75-minute premiere of a six-movement work. Titled “Suite Harlem,” it was dedicated to the school, and presented in its 120-seat black box theater. Like Snider’s “Forward,” this work was also dedicated to a female pathbreaker: the soprano Dorothy Maynor, who founded this school in the 1960s.Scored for an octet of piano, vocalist, trumpet, bass clarinet, violin, vibraphone, bass and drums, Colson’s music occasionally felt like a thrilling update of the soul jazz tradition — particularly when the composer’s piano took a subtly swinging yet harmonically unpredictable background role. At other points the work had all the high-energy markers of the 1970s avant-garde. And thanks to some stirring playing from the violinist Marlene Rice, the music also proposed a lineage with some of Ellington’s chamber-adjacent music with Ray Nance on violin (as in “Dance No. 3” from the Liberian Suite).During “Searching Harlem,” the first movement of this premiere, the composer’s wife and longtime collaborator and vocalist Iqua Colson gave affecting voice to Maynor’s intentions in founding this institution. She brought crisp intonation to some mournful melodic lines that described the historical dearth of spaces for the neighborhood’s children “to sing or dance or act a part.” And later in the suite, during the explosive, uptempo penultimate movement, “Resilience,” she channeled the fiery sense of artistic expression made possible by the school, with an inventive solo of scat singing. It wasn’t supper-club-style scat, either — but an ingeniously shaped solo, concluding with some darting phrases that earned one of the night’s biggest rounds of applause. It brought to mind the couple’s long and fruitful collaboration, going back to 1980s releases like “Triumph!” and “No Reservation.”The interdisciplinary nature of the school — and of the A.A.C.M. itself — was brought into enjoyable focus thanks to contributions by students, during the third movement (“Our Beautiful Children”). Two dancers, Kendall McDowell and Jenelle Henry, provided fluid accompaniment to funk-inflected rhythms of the percussionist Pheeroan akLaff and the bassist Luke Stewart.Adegoke Steve Colson shined especially bright in the suite’s final half.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesEvery soloist had a chance to shine, throughout the piece. But Adegoke Steve Colson’s piano playing in the suite’s final half was a cut above this generally high standard: densely avant-garde and joyously singing in equal measure. This solo aspect of his art has been only rarely heard on recordings — like “Tones for” (2015) — so it was a treat to hear him in this manner, in the suite.The music of the Montclair, N.J.-based Colson, who is now 72, is not as well known as that of his A.A.C.M. contemporaries like Henry Threadgill. But there’s still time to give him more airings in New York. “Suite Harlem” was the climactic result of his time as an artist in residence at the school in Harlem. Given his pedagogical bent, perhaps Carnegie could commission a chamber work from him, for its young professional group Ensemble Connect. And a revival of his large-scale opus dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “ … as in a Cultural Reminiscence …” might also fit in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall space.For now, this weekend’s performances were reminder enough of the veteran’s long contribution to music, and of Snider’s emergent career. The back-to-back relationship of their premieres on the calendar was a reminder, too, of the city’s aggregate cultural riches. Even if relatively few concert halls are flexible enough to combine these complementary artistic communities under a single roof, sagacious concertgoers can still plot their own course through New York’s venues, in any season. More

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      Carnegie Hall Musters Stars for a Benefit Concert for Ukraine

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      Headliners from the fields of classical music, jazz and Broadway joined forces to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine and show solidarity with its victims.It was not a typical chorus on the stage of Carnegie Hall: the acclaimed pianist Evgeny Kissin reading from a sheet of paper as he sang Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” with a gathering that included the actor Richard Gere, the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the Broadway star Adrienne Warren.But there they were — four members of the full company that took part in Monday night’s benefit concert in support of Ukraine, an array of star power singing onstage as members of the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York joined from the aisles.“Hold my hand and I’ll take you there,” they sang. “Somehow. Someday. Somewhere.”It was that kind of night at Carnegie Hall, as artists from many disciplines and the institution itself came together to speak out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and show solidarity with its victims.The stars sang Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” for the finale.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian Chorus Dumka, an amateur ensemble that specializes in secular and sacred music from Ukraine, opened the concert with the Ukrainian national anthem. Diplomats foreign and domestic offered thanks and spoke about the power of the arts in times of crisis. In between songs, the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves paused and choked up briefly while speaking about her husband, a doctor, who was in attendance just a day after returning from Ukraine, where he had been helping provide medical care.And there was a message from Ukraine’s first lady.“Music heals and inspires, music boosts hope and confidence,” the first lady, Olena Zelenska, said in a prerecorded video message that played early in the program. “Today’s event is a reminder that Ukraine is an integral part of world culture.”“Music on this stage is a separate important victory,” she added. “It is a sign of unity of our cultures against the chaos and grief of war. And all of you who are in this hall today are our effective and true allies in this cultural struggle.”The hall displayed the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine’s flag.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThe evening included more than a dozen artists and ensembles. There were performances by the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, the violinist Midori, the singer Michael Feinstein, the soprano Angel Blue and the Broadway singer Jessica Vosk. Mr. Kissin appeared toward the end of the program — first with the violinist Itzhak Perlman to play John Williams’s Theme from “Schindler’s List,” and then to play Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 alone.In an interview with The New York Times before the concert, Mr. Kissin said that playing in the benefit felt “so natural for me that I can’t even call it a decision.”“Unfortunately, I am too old and not qualified to take a gun and go to fight in the Ukraine, so I’m doing everything I can: sending money and taking part in concerts for the Ukraine,” he said. “As a Jew who was born and grew up in Russia, I, having belonged to the greatest victims of the Russian xenophobia, I have always felt solidarity with all its other victims, including the Ukrainians.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      Review: Handel’s ‘Serse,’ With Yuks and Exquisite Playing

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      The English Concert’s performance at Carnegie Hall showed off the ensemble’s elastic responsiveness.If you eat up Baroque shtick, as I do, the English Concert’s presentation of Handel’s “Serse” at Carnegie Hall on Sunday was probably right up your alley. Those with more rarefied taste were likely satisfied too, as the conductor Harry Bicket and his ensemble of early-music players offered up a surfeit of exquisite music-making.The English Concert’s annual Handel series — this performance was the first since a shining “Semele” in 2019 — gives New Yorkers the chance to hear Baroque opera and oratorios performed by period instrumentalists of a high caliber. A certain magic occurs when Bicket gives the down beat: The players unleash gleaming rays of sound from the Carnegie stage.The primary differences between the English Concert and a modern ensemble like the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, which Bicket has also conducted, are its transparent texture and alert responsiveness. The English Concert can slow the tempo or shave a few decibels off the volume from one bar to the next. There’s elasticity in the way the ensemble’s sound expands and contracts, reacting to fluctuations in the intensity of the characters’ feelings and enlivening music built predominantly from strings and continuo.Short ariettas and ariosos keep “Serse,” a comic love story, moving along. It’s peopled by serious historical characters — apocrypha be damned — and draws its humor from their unlikely humanization. Serse, the king, leverages his position to come between his brother, Arsamene, and Romilda — much to the delight of Romilda’s sister, Atalanta, who has designs on her beloved. In the process, Serse forsakes his betrothed, Amastre, who spends much of the opera fulminating while dressed as a man.At Carnegie, the jokes started early. Lucy Crowe’s Romilda made a surprise entrance by popping up from a seat in the viola section. Daniela Mack’s Amastre proudly brandished a disguise that consisted chiefly of wearing sunglasses. Mary Bevan’s Atalanta, an incorrigible flirt, made a pass at Bicket and then at someone in the front row. Twice. And there were more conductor shenanigans, a genre mainstay of recent vintage: Bicket interrupted a tense moment in the drama to deliver a most unwelcome letter. The audience loved it.The show’s star was undoubtedly Crowe, who tuned the color of her soprano to the music at hand. She summoned lovely, pastel tone and lambent high notes for “Nè men con l’ombre” and turned the brief but crucial duet “L’amerete?” into a fully realized scene. Clean attacks, silky legato and enchanting trills are at her disposal. If her refreshing impetuousness introduced a little roughness into her sound, it hardly mattered: She is a Handel singer to be heard.The expressive opportunities Handel gives singers constrained rather than liberated some of the other performers. The mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, who released a stirring album of contemporary songs, “enargeia,” last year, was largely humorless as Serse, a self-involved autocrat who nevertheless must plunge into romantic fancies and explosions of temper. When the music aligned with D’Angelo’s stern portrayal, as in the fiery “Se bramate d’amar, chi vi sdegna,” it gave off sparks. Her voice sharpened into focus as she propelled the aria with biting sound and fleet runs.As Amastre, Mack’s dark, ruddy mezzo-soprano shone best against spare orchestrations. Paula Murrihy sang with polish but had difficulty finding the gravitas for Arsamene’s largely unadorned music. Mary Bevan relied on cute bits instead of phrasing to convey Atalanta’s coquettishness but connected in the character’s wounded moments. William Dazeley’s Elviro, a study in buffoonery, sneaked genuinely impressive high notes into his comic-relief responsibilities. As Ariodate, Neal Davies showed off a trim bass-baritone with some pep in it.With three hours of glorious music, the English Concert nearly banished memories of the three years it took for the ensemble to return. Next up: Handel’s “Solomon” — in only 10 months’ time.The English ConcertPerformed on Sunday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More