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      Franz Mohr, Piano Tuner to the Stars, Is Dead at 94

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      “I play more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else,” he said of his career adjusting instruments for Horowitz, Gould and others, “but I have no audience.”Franz Mohr, who in his 24 years as the chief concert technician for Steinway & Sons brought a musician’s mind-set to the mechanics of important pianos and the care of those who played them, died on March 28 at his home in Lynbrook, N.Y., on Long Island, where he lived. He was 94.His son Michael, the director of restoration and customer services at Steinway, confirmed the death.“I play more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else,” Mr. Mohr said in 1990, “but I have no audience.”Sometimes a string would snap or a pedal would need adjusting during a concert, and he would step into the spotlight for a moment. But he did much of his work alone, on that famous stage and others around the world. He might have been mistaken for a pianist trying out a nine-foot grand for a recital — until he reached for his tools and began making minute adjustments, giving a tuning pin a tiny twist or a hammer a slight shave.For years, he went where the pianists went. When Vladimir Horowitz went to Russia in the 1980s, Mr. Mohr traveled with him, as did Horowitz’s favorite Steinway. Mr. Mohr made house calls at the White House when Van Cliburn played for President Gerald R. Ford in 1975, and again in 1987, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev was in Washington for arms-control talks with President Ronald Reagan.Mr. Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, wanted Cliburn to play one of the pieces that had made him famous — Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — but there was no orchestra. Instead, Cliburn played some Chopin and, as an encore, played and sang the Russian melody “Moscow Nights.”“I was amazed that Van Cliburn, on the spur of the moment, remembered not only the music but all the words,” Mr. Mohr recalled in his memoir, “My Life with the Great Pianists,” written with Edith Schaeffer (1992). “The Russians just melted.”He also attended to performers’ personal pianos. The pianist Gary Graffman, whose apartment is less than a block from the old location of Steinway’s Manhattan showroom, and Mr. Mohr’s home base, on West 57th Street, recalled that Mr. Mohr would come right over when a problem presented itself.“If he came because I broke strings, he would replace the strings,” Mr. Graffman said in an interview. But if more extensive work was needed — if Mr. Graffman’s almost constant practicing had worn down the hammers and new hammers had to be installed, for example — “he would take out the insides of the piano and carry it half a block to the Steinway basement. He would work on it and carry it back.” (The unit Mr. Mohr lifted out and took down the street is known as the key and action assembly, a bewildering combination of all 88 keys and the parts that respond to a pianist’s touch, driving the hammers to the strings.)Franz Mohr was born in Nörvenich, Germany, on Sept. 17, 1927, the son of Jakob Mohr, a postal worker, and Christina (Stork) Mohr. The family moved to nearby Düren when he was a child; in 1944, when he was a teenager, he survived an air raid.His interest in music began not with pianos but with the viola and the violin. He studied at academies in Cologne and Detmold and, in his 20s, played guitar and mandolin in German dance bands.He was playing Dixieland music one night when he spotted a woman on the dance floor. “I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her and said to my friends, ‘That is the girl I’m going to marry,’” he recalled in his memoir. Her name was Elisabeth Zillikens, and they married in 1954. Besides his son Michael, she survives him, as does a daughter, Ellen; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter, died in 2019.Tendinitis forced Mr. Mohr to give up performing when he was in his 20s, his son said, and he turned to pianos, answering a want ad from the piano manufacturer Ibach that led to an apprenticeship. Another advertisement, in 1962, sent him to the United States.It said that Steinway was looking for piano technicians — in New York. A devout churchgoer, he had made a connection with a German-speaking Baptist church in Elmhurst, Queens, that showed him the ad. He contacted Steinway and was soon hired as an assistant to William Hupfer, the company’s chief concert technician.Before long, he was tuning for stars like the famously eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who came to New York to make recordings. (In Toronto Gould relied on another tuner, Verne Edquist, who died in 2020.)Mr. Mohr not only worked on the piano at the recording studio, he also rode around New York with Gould. “He loved Lincoln Town cars,” Mr. Mohr wrote in his memoir. “That is all he would drive. He once said to me: ‘Franz, I found out that next year’s model will be two inches shorter. So, you know what I did? I bought two Town Cars this year.”He succeeded Mr. Hupfer as Steinway’s chief concert technician in 1968. The job made him the keeper of the fleet of pianos that performers could try out before a concert in Steinway’s West 57th Street basement. They could choose the one they were most comfortable with, but there were pianos that were off limits — Horowitz’s favorite, for example.Sometimes, maybe with a wink, Mr. Mohr would let pianists try it out.  “He’d regulate Horowitz’s piano to make it feather-light and capable of an enormous range of sound,” the pianist Misha Dichter recalled. “When I’d see Franz in the Steinway basement, I’d ask to try that piano when it was parked in a corner. He’d conspiratorially look over his shoulder and then give me the OK. It was like starting up a Lamborghini.”Mr. Mohr, who retired in 1992, said in 1990 that the first time he tuned Arthur Rubinstein’s piano, before a recital at Yale, he cleaned the keys. Then he proudly told Rubinstein what he had done.“Young man,” Rubinstein told him as they stood in the wings with the audience already in their seats, “you didn’t know, but nobody ever cleans the keys for me. It makes them too slippery.”Mr. Mohr had to find something to gum up the keys and find it fast, before the lights went down. The stickiest thing he could get his hands on backstage was hair spray. “I went pssst up, pssst down,” he said. “The audience laughed. But he loved it.” More

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      An Afrofuturism Festival Brings an Energy Shift to Carnegie Hall

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      The inaugural event explored a movement about denial and transcendence in the most institutional music hall in New York City.The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldn’t fathom why, on the country’s most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensemble’s wondrous “array of odd instruments” and “colorful costumes” out of view.The messages in Ra’s music, and his riddle-like public statements, could’ve helped Wilson understand. “​​On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things,” Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. “As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea of the impossible more and more.” Perhaps the most appealing impossibility, for Ra, was to escape — to disappear.The Arkestra returned to Carnegie Hall in February, almost three decades after Ra’s death, to help kick-start the hall’s first-ever Afrofuturism festival, a series of concerts on its major stages, with satellite events held in smaller venues across New York, around the country and online. Those programs included screenings of sci-fi films made by Black directors, comics lectures and panels on social theory.All tied back to Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that mixes realistic racial pessimism with audacious fantasy, and that holds an increasingly prominent place in culture today. Afrofuturism picks up on a more than century-old mode in Black American art: fusing the tools of sci-fi and surrealism with the histories and belief systems of African societies, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, in search of new models.The trumpeter Theo Croker made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March alongside the keyboardist Mike King, the bassist Eric Wheeler and the drummer Shekwoaga Ode.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“You can call Afrofuturism the high culture of the African diaspora right now,” Reynaldo Anderson, a Temple University scholar and a co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, said in an interview. He was on the five-person committee of scholars and artists that curated the festival, and he sounded well aware of the inherent contradictions of trying to bring a movement about denial and transcendence into the most institutional music hall in New York City.“The Carnegie function is going to be remembered as bringing all those threads together at a mainstream institution,” he said. “I think we made the argument successfully.”That’s partly because the artists they chose knew how to treat reclamation as a viable alternative to escape. Camae Ayewa, a speculative poet and electronic musician who performs as Moor Mother, sat in with the Arkestra toward the end of its set. “I was never here,” she recited, invoking Ra, over the large ensemble’s turbid, thumping swing. “From 1619 to Wakanda, I don’t exist/Whose map is this? Whose timeline?”Then she issued a warning, seemingly to herself: “Don’t be truth in front of the vultures/Don’t be truth in Carnegie Hall.”The festival’s performances were stacked with moments like this: disruptions of the space, caught between gratitude and suspicion. All the performers seemed sincerely thrilled to be there, and nearly all of them went out of their way to say how welcomed they’d been by the staff and the curators. Most also expressed a kind of surprise.Fatoumata Diawara, the incendiary Malian vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, headlined a bill in Zankel Hall that also featured Chimurenga Renaissance, a transnational band mixing hip-hop, lounge music, Zimbabwean protest songs and Afrobeats. Diawara and her five-piece band administered energy to the room as an undiluted concentrate, playing distorted, tension-ratcheting desert blues and dance music from the West African coast.Her songs are mostly in Bambara, which she sings over tightly riveted rhythms drawn from the Wassoulou region of Mali or the highlife tradition of Ghana. She, too, insisted on the right to remain partly unknown. “Many people told me, ‘Why don’t you sing in English?’” she mused between songs. “I don’t need to sing in English to connect with you guys!” A roar rose up to agree, but the point was already proved.Fatoumata Diawara performed with a band featuring Sam Dickey on bass and Victor Campbell on drums.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesDiawara did one song in English: “Sinnerman,” the old spiritual and Nina Simone staple. By the time the quintet reached a canter, many in the crowd had stood up to dance, and those still in their seats seemed to have loosened up completely. It rearranged the energy in the room, made it unrulier. Not long after, in an encore, she pulled up about 10 audience members to dance with her, and the disarray spread to the stage.There was nothing blatantly futuristic about Diawara’s performance, and she was one of a few artists on the bill who have not made a point of nominally affiliating themselves with Afrofuturism. But it felt unbounded, in a way that made you think about how tightly energy like this is often asked to be kept in when it’s not onstage.By contrast, the flutist Nicole Mitchell often does compose for her Black Earth Ensemble with the science-fiction writings of Octavia Butler in mind. Mitchell and her band gave one of the most consistently breathtaking performances of the festival. Mixing Mitchell’s streaked, blustery flute and echoing effects with the inchoate, chewed-up speech sounds of Mankwe Ndosi; the earthy, shifting beats of the drummer Avreeayl Ra; and the contributions of a small crowd of acoustic instrumentalists, this was music with drive and narrative of its own, but it seemed to make every move in anticipation of something far grander to come. That grand thing never quite arrived, which also felt right.The Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig led a group that included four fellow synthesizer artists and a concert pianist, all playing together, and just about everything they did was grandiose. He leaned into fan favorites from the 1990s, and delivered a key insight during his stage banter: Most of the beats he made as a young person, he said, were crafted with the idea that they might one day become the soundtrack to a “Blade Runner” movie.The Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble performed grandiose versions of fan favorites from his early days.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOpening the festival on Feb. 12, Flying Lotus, who may be Craig’s best-known heir, played a sold-out show at the nearly 3,000-seat Stern Auditorium, flanked by the harpist Brandee Younger and the violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Draped in a white robe, and huddled over what looked like an ice sculpture crowned with a laptop, he ran through new and old material, heaving from agitated beats to wide-open airscapes that the three musicians gradually curved and bent. Abstract projections crawled across the ceiling; the elegant molding overhead became electric goo.The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by the (white) cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, the year Ra died, in a series of interviews he’d conducted with Black writers: Samuel R. Delany, a novelist; Tricia Rose, a hip-hop scholar; and Greg Tate, a music and cultural critic. Those interviews, for a special edition of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, are revealing in a number of ways. In them, Dery framed the proposition of Afrofuturism as a conundrum. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” he wondered.But Tate — an expert across the fields of jazz, film, comics, Black history and cultural studies — countered, pointing out: “You can be backward-looking and forward-thinking at the same time.” In fact, that very action sits at the center of Black cultural practice, especially in music. “I see science fiction as continuing a vein of philosophical inquiry and technological speculation that begins with the Egyptians and their incredibly detailed meditations on life after death,” Tate said.Shelley Nicole of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber steps to center stage.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesTate’s sudden death in December at 64 sent a chill through the world of arts and letters. Writing since the early 1980s for The Village Voice and other publications, he had been the rare figure who could comfortably present the patois and perspective of everyday Black life to a mainstream (read: white) audience, without any act of translation or dilution. His presence at the festival would have been meaningful.His shadow loomed generously instead. And for the festival’s closing night on Sunday, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, the genre-stirring big band that Tate co-founded in the late 1990s, played two sets of thrashing, syncopated music: five vocalists, seven horn players, two drummers and two bassists, all in the flow. Bringing the show to a close, the guitarist Vernon Reid delivered a last homage to Tate. Reid and the band chanted Tate’s phone number back and forth, and he asked over and over: “Whose band is this?”“Tate’s!”Reid continued: “He wanted you to make a sound. If you made a sound from your heart, you were in the Burnt Sugar Band.”Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber’s set was in many ways a homage to Tate, its co-founder.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times 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: A Recital Brings Together Two Schubert Masters

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

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      Unsuk Chin on the Violin Concerto She Swore She’d Never Write

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      Unsuk Chin was inspired by Leonidas Kavakos to return to the genre, and the result comes to Carnegie Hall on Monday.The 21st century has been a strong one for violin concertos. Think Jennifer Higdon, whose neo-Romantic showpiece for Hilary Hahn won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. And Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Jörg Widmann (twice) and John Adams (the same).And also Unsuk Chin, whose exceptionally difficult, alluringly colorful 2001 concerto brought her prominence and won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004.That work, which still enchants, now has a successor, the Violin Concerto No. 2, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”). Despite the South Korean-born, Ligeti-taught Chin’s reluctance to write a second concerto for any instrument, she decided to make an exception for the violinist Leonidas Kavakos — who had met her but barely knew her music before she asked to write for him.After having its premiere delayed by the pandemic, the work was unveiled by the London Symphony Orchestra in January. It arrived in the United States last week for performances with another of its commissioners, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which joins Kavakos to perform the work under Andris Nelsons at Carnegie Hall on Monday, alongside Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” (That ensemble gives a concert performance of Berg’s “Wozzeck” at Carnegie the following night.)Pages from the manuscript of the new concerto, “Scherben der Stille” (“Shards of Silence”).Unsuk ChinHeard in Boston on March 4, Chin’s concerto is striking in the intensity of its demands on Kavakos and the novel breadth of the palette it invites the orchestra to play with, both of which are typical traits of her works. Also impressive is the sense of narrative it creates over half an hour as it builds out a motif of just five notes: a flourish of three harmonics that settles down to two more tones.It’s entirely different from Chin’s earlier violin concerto, but equally powerful, and another worthy addition to the growing list of contemporary contributions to its genre.Speaking by phone from Berlin, Chin spoke about the inspiration behind the work, and particularly about its opening page. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Since your first violin concerto, you have written several concertos for other instruments. Has your thinking about the concerto as a genre changed at all, in these intervening two decades?Before my first violin concerto I wrote my piano concerto, which for me is also a very important work. They were not written for a certain soloist; they were very abstract, written for the instrument, rather than a person. Then I wrote my cello concerto for Alban Gerhardt and “Su,” my sheng concerto, for Wu Wei. I also wrote a clarinet concerto for Kari Kriikku.So my musical thinking changed a little bit because I became interested in musical personalities. Before that I didn’t have so much contact with musicians. I thought about my musical ideas in my mind in a very abstract way and then wrote the pieces.But this second violin concerto is again another turning point for me, because I was really enthusiastic about Leonidas’s playing, and it was something I’d never heard before. He plays music at an absolute level.How does what you admire in his playing translate into the concerto?I know all Leonidas’s repertoire, but especially his Beethoven concerto and all the sonatas. For me, it was a completely new kind of interpretation, really convincing and really strong. Through Leonidas’s playing, I rediscovered Beethoven’s music. Very often Beethoven’s materials and themes are banal, very simple, not very interesting, but he made huge artworks out of these small cells, small motifs. Then I thought, OK, I will take some very small material and try to go deeper.The music is quite different from all my other concertos. In my other pieces I have lots of ideas and a lot of colors and many movements, but this piece is just one movement, the longest one-movement piece I’ve written. The basic material is also extremely small.The first page of the published score of the concerto, which begins with a five-note motif for the solo violin, alone.Boosey & HawkesWe hear that material right at the start of the piece, for violin alone. Where does this motif go over the course of the work?The cell in total is five notes, but the first three notes are a kind of grace note; the main notes are the two after that. At the beginning they are the same note, but soon after, it changes. A semitone comes from the first cell.This small cell, or fragment, is permanently repeated through the whole piece, but every time with a different face. Sometimes it’s very melodic, Romantic; sometimes it sounds tragic; sometimes it sounds like abstract architecture. It is always the same thing, but in different layers, with different faces. It goes from beginning to end, but there is also abrupt change.A lot of concertos pit the orchestra against the soloist, but I didn’t get the sense that is what you were aiming for here.In this concerto the most important thing is the solo violin. The orchestra sometimes gives the violinist different colors, but it is mostly supporting the violin — except in one section near the middle, where everyone is doing their own thing and the soloist does not get any support from the orchestra. That is a huge fight between him and the orchestra.Previously you had banned yourself from writing more than one concerto for a given instrument. You have now broken that rule once; can we expect you to return to the piano or cello?I don’t think so. This is a very special, exceptional case. I don’t think I will be able to write a second piano concerto, even a second cello concerto. But you never know. Maybe in 20 years. More

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      ‘Wozzeck,’ the 20th Century’s Most Influential Opera, Turns 100

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      Alban Berg’s brutal classic, a tale of a lowly soldier’s degradation and death, continues to inspire artists.Theodor Adorno had to commiserate with Alban Berg late into the night on Dec. 14, 1925, after the premiere of “Wozzeck” at the Berlin State Opera.The problem was not that Berg’s first opera had been a disaster, that this unknown student of Arnold Schoenberg’s was poised to be sent back into his former anonymity and abject poverty.The problem for Berg was that his musically abrasive, politically unsparing work — based on a Georg Büchner play that he had seen in 1914 and immediately thought of setting to music — had been such a triumph that he started to question the work’s true worth. Adorno later recalled “literally consoling him over his success.”A success “Wozzeck” has remained in the 100 years since Berg finished revising the manuscript on July 16, 1922. The most radical opera of its time, still sounding strikingly modern in its centenary year, it became one of the most influential operas of the 20th century, along with works like Strauss’s “Salome” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.”With its taut, swiftly scene-changing cinematic structure and its omnivorous stylistic appetite, not to mention its use of fleeting, devastating moments of tonality amid the precise constructions of its largely atonal score, the argument could easily be made that “Wozzeck” turned out to be, in fact, the most influential of them all.The premiere of “Wozzeck,” at the Berlin State Opera, received a front-page review in Das Theater, with a photo of Sigrid Johanson, left, as Marie and Leo Schützendorf as Wozzeck.Lebrecht Music & Arts/AlamyRight on cue come a range of performances, in celebration of an opera perhaps too dire to think of celebrating. A William Kentridge staging that played at the Met in 2019 runs through March 30 at the Paris Opera, with the conductor Susanna Malkki at the helm, before it arrives in Barcelona in May, with Matthias Goerne as its Wozzeck. A new Simon Stone production with the baritone Christian Gerhaher in the title role opens at the Vienna State Opera on March 21. And on Tuesday, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra give a concert performance at Carnegie Hall, with Christine Goerke as Marie.Part of the overpowering force of “Wozzeck” comes from its plot. In 15 short scenes, Berg recounts the degradation and demise of Wozzeck, a destitute soldier abused by his captain, experimented on by a doctor, and wracked with suspicion that his partner, Marie, is being unfaithful with a drum major. Driven mad, Wozzeck murders Marie, then drowns himself. The curtain falls on their son rocking on a hobbyhorse. Whether he will escape the fate of his parents — and the general forces that bear down so ineluctably on what Wozzeck calls “we poor people” — is left unclear.What might explain the lasting power of Berg’s opera? And what has its influence truly been? Here are edited excerpts from interviews with artists who hold the work dear.Yuval Sharon, director“Wozzeck” was the first opera that made me believe in opera as a viable art form. It is this huge musical expression of the lives of really disempowered people. Thinking that opera could tell stories that are not just the stories of a privileged position, but could truly represent another point of view, and do it with incredible imagination, opened up the possibilities of what opera can still be.It’s one of the most compassionate operas that I know. It’s not the Beethoven model. It’s not speaking to that aspirational quality that some of us think music captures so well. There is no salvation in the piece, and that is precisely what is so powerful and urgent about it. It’s not going to be the horns that herald a miraculous overcoming of tyranny, like in “Fidelio.” It’s going to have to be us, in the audience, that will need to speak up for Wozzeck.William Kentridge’s production of “Wozzeck” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2019; Kentridge’s staging is now running at the Paris Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesChristian Gerhaher, baritoneBüchner was much earlier than Karl Marx in his ideas, but they were similar. Büchner was not the founder of communism, but he was honest about the difficulties poor people face in creating a normal life. This is touching, without being too ideological.You have a work which deals with a horrific subject. What is going on is terrible, but the point as a singer and also in the audience is that you have this wonderful joy to see thoughts put into words and music in such a precise way. It is with practically no doubt the masterpiece of the 20th century. Nothing is decoration; nothing is neglectable; every tone is important; every word is important. It’s the essence of a quickly moving world, which is modernity.Brett Dean, composerWhat always struck me about “Wozzeck” was that although it came out of a score full of compositional thought which in itself was revolutionary in the history of music, Berg was the one who married process with engagement, married the head with the heart — or the stomach.Despite the strictness of studying with Schoenberg, he realized that you have to go where you need to go. The fact that, for example, in the interlude just before the end, he ingeniously reverts back to this early piano sketch in D minor, and realizes that’s what we need, right here, right now. From the point of view of a modernist, expressionist language, he’s able, willing and happy to embrace everything that he needs at the given time.Act III orchestral interludeVienna Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)Susanna Malkki, conductorPeople talk about how difficult it is, and it’s not entirely untrue, but I think it’s mostly a question of it being incredibly dense, and rich, and profound. You have several layers that make it interesting every time you hear it. I have been personally surprised, since I finally got the score and started to study it, to see how much warmth and beauty and even humor there is. The piece is scarily perfect.Berg is incredibly smart, of course. But when the story becomes unbearable in its sadness near the end, he actually simplifies the music, which gives us room to really feel the pain, and the destiny, and all of that. He gives us time to digest everything, and then of course the final hit comes. It’s just absolutely awful.Stuart Skelton, left, and Waltraud Meier in “Wozzeck” at the Met in 2011.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesDavid T. Little, composerIt was the first piece that I had encountered that I felt was really looking at the tougher parts of life, and not looking away. I had always been drawn to the idea of opera, but looking at Mozart and Verdi, it felt like we were dealing with characters who were not real people, at least not to me, with my background. When I first saw “Wozzeck,” these were ordinary people dealing with extraordinary things, and in the case of Wozzeck, a world that is really bearing down on this character.I remember being shaken by that big, unison B crescendo near the end, just the sense of it being so inescapable. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the 12-minute crescendo at the end of my opera “Dog Days” is a B quarter flat; it’s a homage or reference to that moment. There’s life before that piece, and life after it.Act III, Scene 2Vienna Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)Matthias Goerne, baritoneWhat Berg has made out of Büchner’s play, I think it’s the most perfect piece we have, in terms of story, the characters. Everybody is completely in shape in their character and you immediately find out what kind of person it is, and about their relationship to all the others.You have two different levels. You have this very depressing underdog, Wozzeck, who is in this position of slavery. He constantly needs money. He can feel that something in his relationship is not right. He becomes more and more crazy, and out of control. On the other side, it’s a tragic love story. He becomes a murderer. You have empathy, you feel something for him — but in the end he is killing a human being.Christine Goerke, sopranoI find Marie to be such a complicated and conflicted character. Like so many of us right now, she tries to find the joy in simple things in what seems like an uncaring world. She doesn’t have much, so she tries to do the best with what she has. She grasps at her moments of joy, and then feels guilty for them later. She feels that she should do better, she should be better, she should be content with what she has, and if she can do that — perhaps it will help her to avoid judgment. She is a mother who struggles to keep her own identity as a woman. I have been this woman. Depending on the day, I am this woman.Berg, the composer Brett Dean said, “was the one who married process with engagement, married the head with the heart — or the stomach.”Imagno/Getty ImagesFranz Welser-Möst, conductorWhat Alban Berg did in making the story so compact and emotionally so intense — I think to this very day, people are just totally gripped with the story, especially at the end. We always have an enormous empathy with children, and when that boy comes out and sings “Hopp, hopp!” that’s the latest point, if you have any human emotions, when you start crying in that opera.Schoenberg, when he wrote 12-tone music, never broke the rules that he set up. Berg did, because Berg was such a genius in the theater that he knew, like Mozart, that sometimes you have to break the rules to be more impactful.Act III, Scene 5Vienna Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)Missy Mazzoli, composerThis was the first opera I saw live, at the Met in 1999, when I was 18. It awakened me to this idea that I now see as one of opera’s superpowers, which is to show us the darkest sides of human nature. In that 90 minutes I had this visceral experience of recognizing my own dark side, and allowing myself to go there because I was in the safe, velvet box of the theater.In a way, I’m shocked that it’s not more influential. I wish that opera had continued on this experimental path. “Wozzeck” was not an outlier; it was celebrated and performed everywhere. Berg lived off it for a long time, and had the honor of being denounced by the Nazis. Now opera has retreated — for the most part; there are many exceptions — into a safer, more palatable space. Part of me wishes we could bring back that momentum of the “degenerate” art. More

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      After a Punishing Sprint, Yannick Nézet-Séguin Can Celebrate

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      The Met Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra conductor recently took a break because of exhaustion. Then he found himself in the middle of a performance marathon.However busy your past two weeks were, Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s were probably busier.On Feb. 21, he conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in the conclusion of its Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall, and was planning, in the days ahead, to lead the opening of a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at the Metropolitan Opera, followed soon after by a revival of Puccini’s “Tosca.”Nothing out of the ordinary for him, as the music director of both institutions. But that Thursday — as the Vienna Philharmonic dropped Valery Gergiev from its three-day stint at Carnegie over his ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — Nézet-Séguin got a call asking if he could step in. He said yes.“I said the only condition is, I need to tell the orchestra, ‘You won’t be able to rehearse with me a lot, because it’s just not possible,’” Nézet-Séguin recalled in a recent interview.He wasn’t lying. On the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 25, he was at the Met to lead the final dress rehearsal for “Don Carlos” — which, with intermissions, runs nearly five hours. Then, after a short break, he was able to meet with the Vienna Philharmonic for just 75 minutes to prepare Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and Second Symphony, which together run longer than 90 minutes.At 8 p.m., the concert began. The resulting performance would have been a triumph even under normal circumstances. But Nézet-Séguin didn’t have long to celebrate: “Tosca” had to be rehearsed on Saturday, not to mention that night’s Vienna program.Nézet-Séguin ended up on the podium every day for a weeklong marathon, including an overnight trip to Florida to lead the Vienna Philharmonic in Naples. On Friday, his day off, he taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and was back in New York the next day for “Tosca,” then “Don Carlos” on Sunday — his 47th birthday.Nézet-Séguin leading the Vienna Philharmonic, with the pianist Seong-Jin Cho, in the first of its three concerts at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeIt’s a maddening schedule, reminiscent of Nézet-Séguin’s early career of perpetual overbooking and occasional cancellations. Last fall, signs of that lifestyle began to creep back: two contemporary operas at the Met, along with revivals and concerts there before opening night and a Beethoven cycle (part of what has ballooned into a staggering 14 appearances for him at Carnegie Hall this season). Facing exhaustion, he took a three-week break starting in mid-December, withdrawing from a run of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” at the Met and two performances in Philadelphia.“Maybe the fact that my energies were recharged recently meant that I could be up for this,” he said.During a phone call while en route to New York on Saturday, Nézet-Séguin reflected on that much-needed hiatus, and how he got through his recent grind. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What made you want to say yes to Vienna?My first instinct as a conductor is that I want to help.I have been making some hard decisions in the past decade, about certain opportunities in Europe with orchestras that I have developed relationships with, like Vienna. But my first responsibility is to the institutions that I am the leader of: It’s the Met, it’s Philadelphia, it’s Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal.So I end up having to say no very often. And now here they are, and Carnegie — which has been such a great partner of mine at the Philadelphia Orchestra — needs my help. It didn’t take much time for me to say yes.How did you use that 75-minute rehearsal?When I said yes, I knew that if I took a two- or three-hour rehearsal in the morning, the energy needed would be too much. So the orchestra told me what they needed most from me, and we fixed two or three obvious spots in the Rachmaninoff symphony. But this appeals to what a conductor should be doing. You just make things work. The Rachmaninoff thrives on being free and beautiful. Some things need to be clear, but some things just need to be in the moment. I could never be stressed, because if I start to be stressed, then everyone is, and the result is bad for the audience.Because of the Vienna concerts, you were suddenly holding seven additional works in your head. How did you manage that, on top of “Don Carlos” and “Tosca”?It takes a lot of discipline, because I have music constantly in my head, but rarely the piece that I’m about to do. When I’m juggling a lot of pieces like this, I have to almost press play on a recording, a mental recording. So the day of the Rachmaninoff, I had to force myself to open up the score to get in the right mode. I had a bit more time on Saturday to recuperate and study, but I purposefully decided to not prepare for Sunday. If you take it one day at a time, it really helps.Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to make a habit of these things. Someone from the Met Orchestra asked me, “Have you ever been more busy?” My answer was: I think yes, in my early years as a conductor. I had two different choirs and I was still doing recitals and chamber music, and I was already conducting my Baroque ensemble. I feel like what I’ve been doing this week is rooted in years of experience juggling different repertoire.“I feel like what I’ve been doing this week,” Nézet-Séguin said, “is rooted in years of experience juggling different repertoire.”Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesPhysically and mentally, how did you prepare and unwind?I needed to study a lot, so I really couldn’t think about rest or anything like that. I usually work out very regularly, and that helps for these moments. But now I could not work out simply because one, I didn’t have time, and two, I thought this was also physically demanding.The morning I got the call from Carnegie, I was actually working out with my personal trainer from Montreal, a virtual workout, and I told her, “I would like to focus on shoulders and back because I just feel like it’s been a while.” At that point I thought, Oh, I’m just doing the dress rehearsal of “Don Carlos.” Then two hours later I got this call.Part of my ritual after performances is to go a restaurant or cafe for a quiet meal, whether with my husband, Pierre, or with close friends. In this case, I needed to keep it much more quiet and just go home. Usually my go-to is HGTV; my favorite is “House Hunters” or anything about the Caribbean or island life. But now I tried to unwind with chamomile tea, and with some smooth R&B and a bath. Last night, I realized that I did not watch TV for the past week.In December, you withdrew from performances in New York and Philadelphia.I want to stress that what I did was a three-week break that’s kind of a normal three weeks that people take around the holiday. I don’t want to underestimate what it’s like to cancel those, but I want to put it back in perspective. The fall had been especially intense.The summer, even. You conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony and Verdi’s Requiem at the Met before the season began.Absolutely. For me, it’s a question of being aware of your limitations. What people don’t see is what it needs to put on a concert or an opera. It’s not just rehearsals and studying. It’s a lot of discussions, emails, meetings, conversations, Zoom calls. That’s part of my job, but it can — especially as we re-emerge from the pandemic — be really taxing.It really was the mind: I didn’t want to push my mind to the extent that maybe at some point my body would react in the way of becoming sick. Because that’s a big catastrophe, if I have to drop out of several performances the day before. I thought it was better to plan something before that happened. It was really three weeks without even opening a score. It cleared the mind, in the best way.What did that teach you, then, about planning for the future?This scramble at the beginning of the season was something that I wanted to do. But I eventually managed, by doing little adjustments here and there in my schedule, to plan the next seasons with a certain percentage of less work, less commitment — and better balance of weeks and days here and there where I can just regroup and breathe. I didn’t need to go into that recent break to know that, and this fall was just this exceptional moment. But in the future, my life will be better.Are you at least able to do anything for your birthday, since you have “Don Carlos”?My parents are coming to New York. I’m going to have some kind of family celebration after. I let them organize it; it’s a surprise.And then you’ll have plenty of time for HGTV.I promise you, I will. More

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      Too Close to Putin? Institutions Vet Artists, Uncomfortably.

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      Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led arts organizations to reconsider who performs, forcing them to confront questions about free speech and policing political views.In Canada, an acclaimed 20-year-old Russian pianist’s concert was canceled amid concerns about his silence on the invasion of Ukraine. The music director of an orchestra in Toulouse, France — who is also the chief conductor at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow — was instructed to clarify his position on the war before his next appearance. In New York, Anna Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, saw her reign at the Metropolitan Opera end after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.As global condemnation of Russia’s attack on Ukraine grows, cultural institutions have moved with surprising speed to put pressure on Russian artists to distance themselves from Mr. Putin, a collision of art and politics that is forcing organizations to confront questions about free speech and whether they should be policing artists’ views.Institutions are demanding that artists who have supported Mr. Putin in the past issue clear condemnations of the Russian president and his invasion as a prerequisite for performing. Others are checking their rosters and poring over social media posts to ensure Russian performers have not made contentious statements about the war. The Polish National Opera has gone so far as to drop a production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” one of the greatest Russian operas, to express “solidarity with the people of Ukraine.”The tensions pose a dilemma for cultural institutions and those who support them. Many have long tried to stay above the fray of current events, and have a deep belief in the role the arts can play in bridging divides. Now arts administrators, who have scant geopolitical expertise, find themselves in the midst of one of the most politically charged issues in recent decades, with little in the way of experience to draw on.“We’re facing a totally new situation,” Andreas Homoki, the artistic director of the Zurich Opera, said. “Politics was never on our mind like this before.”The new scrutiny of Russian artists threatens to upend decades of cultural exchange that endured even during the depths of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the West sent artists back and forth amid fears of nuclear war. The Russian maestro Valery Gergiev, who has long been close to Mr. Putin, was fired as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic and saw his international engagements dry up. The Hermitage Amsterdam, an art museum, broke ties with the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The Bolshoi Ballet lost engagements in London and Madrid.Citing that Cold War tradition, the Cliburn — a foundation in Fort Worth named for the American pianist Van Cliburn, whose victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was seen as a sign that art could transcend political differences — announced that it would welcome 15 Russian-born pianists to audition next week for the 2022 Cliburn Competition, noting that they are not officials of their government.Jacques Marquis, the president and chief executive of the Cliburn, said the organization felt it was important to speak out as it watched Russian artists come under scrutiny. “We can help the world by standing our ground and focusing on the music and on the artists,” he said.The American pianist Van Cliburn’s victory at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 was seen as a sign, at the height of the Cold War, that art could transcend political differences.The Van Cliburn FoundationEven as many institutions are eager to show support for Ukraine, and to distance themselves from artists who embrace Mr. Putin, they are uncomfortable with trying to vet the views of performers — and worry that Russian artists, who must often rely on the support of the state for their careers to thrive at home, could face reprisals if forced to publicly disavow the Kremlin.“You can’t just put everybody under general suspicion now,” said Alexander Neef, the director of the Paris Opera. “You can’t demand declarations of allegiance or condemnations of what’s going on.”The situation is tense and fast moving. Leaders of organizations are facing pressure from donors, board members and audiences, not to mention waves of anger on social media, where campaigns to cancel several Russian artists have rapidly gained traction.Institutions are also grappling with what to do about the Russians who are among their most important donors. On Wednesday the Guggenheim Museum announced that Vladimir O. Potanin, one of Russia’s richest men and a major benefactor, was stepping down as one of its trustees.Leila Getz, the founder and artistic director of a recital series in Vancouver, Canada, canceled an appearance by the Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev planned for August. Mr. Malofeev, 20, had not made any statements on the war, nor did he have any known ties to Mr. Putin. But Ms. Getz issued a statement saying she could not “in good conscience present a concert by any Russian artist at this moment in time unless they are prepared to speak out publicly against this war.”Soon she received dozens of messages. Some accused her of overstepping and demanded that Mr. Malofeev be allowed to perform.In an interview, Ms. Getz defended her decision, saying she was worried about the potential for protests. She said she had not asked Mr. Malofeev to condemn the war and that she was concerned for his safety.“The first things that came to my mind were, why would I want to bring a 20-year-old Russian pianist to Vancouver and have him faced with protests and people misbehaving inside the concert hall and hooting and screaming and hollering?” she said.Mr. Malofeev declined to comment. In a statement posted on Facebook, he said, “The truth is that every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.”On Friday the Annapolis Symphony in Maryland announced that it would replace the Russian violinist Vadim Repin, who had been scheduled to play a Shostakovich concerto in upcoming concerts, “out of respect to Repin’s apolitical stance and concerns for the safety of himself and his family.”“We don’t want to put him in an uncomfortable, even impossible position,” the orchestra’s executive director, Edgar Herrera, said in a statement. In an interview, Mr. Herrera said that there had been threats to disrupt Mr. Repin’s performances and that the symphony was concerned that hosting a Russian artist could hurt its image and alienate donors.Deciding which artists are too close to Mr. Putin is not easy. Mr. Gergiev, the longtime general and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, has a relationship with Mr. Putin that goes back decades, and he has often supported the government’s policies. Mr. Gergiev led concerts in 2008 in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia that was aided by Russian troops, and at the Syrian site of Palmyra in 2016 after it was retaken by Syrian and Russian forces.Ms. Netrebko, the star soprano, issued a statement opposing the war in Ukraine but withdrew from performing after declining to distance herself from Mr. Putin, whom she has expressed support for in the past. The war brought renewed attention to a photograph from 2014 of her holding a flag used by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine.The pianist Evgeny Kissin, who was born in Moscow, said he believed that “supporters of a criminal war waged by a dictator and a mass murderer should have no place on the concert stages of the civilized world.”Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe eminent pianist Evgeny Kissin, who was born in Moscow and is now based in Prague, said that while many artists in Russia needed to support Mr. Putin to some degree because their institutions relied on state aid, others went too far. He said he believed that “supporters of a criminal war waged by a dictator and a mass murderer should have no place on the concert stages of the civilized world.”He added that while he thought it was natural for Western institutions to ask Mr. Putin’s most prominent supporters to speak out against the war, he did not think it should be required of artists who had not been particularly political in the past.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 5Anna Netrebko. More