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      A ‘Nutcracker’ Performance Is Canceled, as the Virus Halts Holiday Shows

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      New York City Ballet canceled Tuesday night’s performance, and a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall was called off.New York City Ballet canceled a performance of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” on Tuesday after several people involved in the production tested positive for the coronavirus, in the latest sign of how the surge in cases is disrupting attempts to bring back some of the city’s most beloved holiday performances.As the production, one of City Ballet’s most popular, was called off at Lincoln Center, plans to fill Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evening with the “Hallelujah” chorus were canceled when Music Sacra postponed a performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” citing the virus. And there are no more holiday kicklines at Radio City Music Hall: The remaining performances of the “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” were canceled Friday.The cancellations came shortly after it was announced that some of Broadway’s biggest hits would not resume until after Christmas, forgoing one of their most lucrative periods of the year amid concerns about the spread of the Omicron variant.It was not immediately clear when performances of “The Nutcracker” would return.“We are very disappointed to have to cancel this evening’s performance,” Jonathan Stafford, the company’s artistic director, said in a statement, “but the safety of our artists, staff and audiences has been New York City Ballet’s No. 1 priority since the Covid-19 pandemic began.”The company has worked hard to bring back the holiday favorite under difficult circumstances. It turned to a cast of dancers 12 and older — it typically casts younger, smaller children as its angels, soldiers and mice, and for its party scene — since only children of those ages were eligible for vaccinations when rehearsals began in the fall.The company said that ticket holders could exchange tickets for a future performance, get refunds or donate the tickets to the company. Music Sacra, which postponed its Tuesday night performance because of positive coronavirus tests among members of its performing ensemble, said that it would perform later this season at Carnegie Hall.It is not only New York that is seeing holiday performances canceled. A number of performances of “A Christmas Carol” at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles were recently canceled, with the theater saying that it would not come back until after Christmas. More

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      Review: An Orchestra Offers a Novel View of Music History

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

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      Two New York Orchestras Return With Acts of Renewal

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      Classical music’s live performance comeback continued with concerts by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.How should classical music ensembles return to live performance after 18 months of pandemic closures and a nationwide reckoning with racial injustice?It’s a question that has loomed as programmers decide whether to open their seasons with statements of purpose. Recently, two major New York groups — the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra — returned with what appeared to be mostly standard fare that could come across as timid missed opportunities, yet offered exceptionally fine and committed music-making that felt like acts of renewal.At Carnegie Hall last Thursday, Bernard Labadie, the music director of St. Luke’s since 2018, warmly greeted the audience and explained that when he and the players started planning their program, “one word jumped out: joy.” This concert was all about having some fun, he added, and Handel’s “Water Music” is “the happiest music I know.”He led the orchestra in a lively, stylish account of the complete “Water Music,” 22 pieces lasting some 50 minutes. Handel wrote this score to provide entertainment for King George I and his entourage during a river trip in 1717 from Whitehall Palace in London to the borough of Chelsea. “Water Music” is best known for the various suites drawn from it — which, for me, more effectively show off the allures of the music and the rich intricacies Handel subtly folded into each piece. But, judging by their enthusiastic ovation, the audience seemed happy to go along for the entirety of Handel’s musical river ride.This Baroque program began with a vigorous account of the Prelude from Charpentier’s “Te Deum,” music that deftly mixes martial-like rigor and sparkling ebullience. Next came a Bach novelty, a “weird creature of my imagination,” as Labadie described it, titled “An imaginary Concerto for Violin.” During his busy years in Leipzig, Germany, Bach often recycled existing movements from instrumental pieces into large sacred scores, Labadie explained. So, with respect and plucky daring, Labadie fashioned a concerto from three Bach movements that feature a solo violin: two sinfonias sandwiching an adagio from the “Easter Oratorio.” The result was a sort-of concerto, with an industrious first movement, a mournful slow one and a fleet finale, made to order for the splendid violinist Benjamin Bowman, who played beautifully.The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra began its season with works by Mozart and Boulogne at the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday.Joe SinnottAt the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday, two Mozart staples dominated the program by Orpheus, which in 2022 celebrates its 50th anniversary as a proudly conductor-less ensemble. (The evening was also the start of the venue’s classical music season.) Opening the concert was a short work by the 18th-century composer and violinist Joseph Boulogne, whose life and musical achievements have been gaining renewed attention. The ensemble gave a vibrant account of the beguiling, three-movement Overture to “L’Amant Anonyme,” Boulogne’s only surviving opera.Then the distinguished pianist Richard Goode, who has collaborated with Orpheus since the mid-1970s, including recordings of Mozart concertos, appeared as the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, a majestic and virtuosic score. Goode was at his best, in a sensitive, crisply clear and supremely musical performance. The orchestra ended with an exciting account of Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony. With just 25 players in the Y’s intimate hall, the music came across grandly, but also with revealing detail.I wish someone from Orpheus had spoken, as Labadie had for St. Luke’s, about the ensemble’s reasons for choosing the works it had for this significant return. There were not even program notes available. Some artists prefer to let music speak for itself. But maybe this is a time when classical musicians need to speak directly about what they are playing, and why. More

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      Review: Sphinx Virtuosi Bring an Intriguing Vision to Carnegie Hall

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      An ensemble of 18 string players who are Black and Latino set a reflective and spirited tone on Friday, with solos by the charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines.“Tracing Visions” was the intriguing title of the program Sphinx Virtuosi, an ensemble of 18 top-notch string players who are Black and Latino, presented at Carnegie Hall on Friday. As Afa S. Dworkin, the president of Sphinx, explained in comments to the audience, that phrase spoke both to the organization’s mission and the music played so impressively on this night.You have to have a vision, to conceive one carefully, before you can write it out and realize it, Dworkin suggested. Sphinx began in 1997 as a “social justice organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts,” an ambitious mission statement more essential at this moment than ever. Based in Detroit but with nationwide reach to some 100,000 students and artists, Sphinx puts string instruments in the hands of children and provides them training; sponsors a national competition that awards stipends, scholarships and performance opportunities; and has a development project for emerging artists, among other initiatives.Sphinx Virtuosi, which is in the midst of a national tour, is the most prestigious outlet of the organization; and the splendid performances showed why. A beguiling account of the opening work, Xavier Foley’s “Ev’ry Voice,” set a reflective tone. The music is like an episodic rumination on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the “Black national anthem.” At first, segments of the melody are played in tentative, harmonically rich strands. Then, while violins ascend to high, softly tender lines, in lower registers other strings begin stirring, as if to get this piece up and running. There are passages of bustling riffs, hard-edge chords, a burst of swing and, finally, a fanfare. This led to Florence Price’s wistfully lyrical Andante cantabile movement from her 1935 String Quartet No. 2, which came across with glowing richness in this version for string ensemble.Various players took turns introducing works. One member explained that the Brazilian violinist and composer Ricardo Herz had adapted “Mourinho,” a bracing dance song in the Brazilian forró style, especially for Sphinx. Since the original was alive with percussion, the string players here slap and tap their instruments to evoke the rhythms that capture the festive vibe of the music, as indeed they did in this arresting performance.The cellist Thomas Mesa performed a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers.Jennifer TaylorThe Cuban American cellist Thomas Mesa spoke at some length before playing Andrea Casarrubios’s “Seven” for solo cello, a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers during the pandemic. The title alludes to the communal ritual of applauding, shouting and banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m. for those heroes. Mesa played it magnificently.Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner,” which received its New York premiere by Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie in 2014, has become almost her signature piece. The music takes “The Star-Spangled Banner” and explores, fractures, transforms and comments upon the tune and its complex associations. Scored for a solo string quartet both with and against a background string ensemble, the piece received a vibrant, assured performance here.The charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines was the soloist in the two next pieces: The British composer Gerald Finzi’s “Come away, come away, death,” a sternly beautiful musical setting of a Shakespeare poem (from the song cycle “Let Us Garlands Bring”); and Carlos Simon’s “Angels in Heaven,” an arrangement of a spiritual sung during baptisms (“I know I’ve been changed”). Tines invited the audience to join in the final refrains of the church song. Many members of this audience clearly knew it well, judging from the vigor of the response.The program ended with the breathless, wild and wailing “Finale furioso” from Alberto Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings. The prolonged ovation that followed was no surprise. More

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      Two Singers Reveal the Core of Art Song, on Stages Big and Small

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      This weekend, Jonas Kaufmann gave a recital at the vast Carnegie Hall, while Will Liverman appeared at the intimate Park Avenue Armory.Two recitals over the weekend in New York might have seemed, at first, to inhabit very different realms of art song.On Saturday evening at Carnegie Hall, Jonas Kaufmann, one of the world’s leading tenors, presented a program of songs in German. Then on Sunday afternoon at the Park Avenue Armory, the rising baritone Will Liverman, currently at the Metropolitan Opera in the lead role of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” gave a varied recital that included works by four Black composers he champions.The Armory’s recital space — the roughly 100-seat Board of Officers Room — is close to the salons and living rooms where Schubert and other composers of his time essentially created the lieder concert. Carnegie Hall, which sold out nearly all of its 2,800 seats for Kaufmann’s engagement, is massively bigger than anything the progenitors of lieder could have imagined.Yet at its core, art song is a genre in which music is put, sensitively and compellingly, at the service of poetic texts. And though the stages Kaufmann and Liverman performed from could not have been more different, both artists proved themselves singers who put words first.Kaufmann, who has been frustratingly elusive in New York in recent years, appeared with his regular recital partner, the fine pianist Helmut Deutsch. They began with nine works that can be heard on their recent recording of lieder by Liszt, whose roughly 90 songs remain somewhat overlooked. In “Vergiftet sind meine Lieder,” an impassioned setting of a Heine poem, Kaufmann was almost in Wagnerian mode, like a despairing Tristan, singing with burnished top notes, yet shaping aching phrases tenderly.Now and then, in the Liszt songs and elsewhere, his voice had its rough patches. (A week earlier, he had canceled some performances in Munich because of a tracheal infection.) But he mostly rallied, and sounded at his clarion-voiced best as the program went on. These Liszt works are marvelous, full of musical-poetic flights, alternately epic and ruminative. The piano parts, not surprisingly for this composer, are often elaborate, with daring chromatic harmonies and wondrous colorings. I was most impressed, however, when Kaufmann lifted melting phrases with focused and floating sound, like the pianissimo moments of “Die Loreley.”Helmut Deutsch, left, with Jonas Kaufmann at Carnegie Hall on Saturday.Jennifer TaylorHe then sang 13 songs by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Zemlinsky and others, ending with Mahler’s profound “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (from “Rückert-Lieder”), in an effectively restrained performance. That was supposed to have ended the recital, after 75 minutes with no intermission. But the enthusiastic audience had other ideas, and Kaufmann complied, with six encores. During the last one, Strauss’s “Cäcilie,” Kaufmann, visibly annoyed, stopped after a couple phrases. “I do everything for you,” he told the audience, “but please respect the rules and don’t film!” People applauded in support, then he started over — and sang vibrantly.Though Liverman has been rightly praised for his wrenching performance in “Fire,” he did sometimes have trouble being heard over the orchestra at the Met. Yet at the Armory, joined by the excellent pianist Myra Huang, his sound almost overwhelmed the space. It was exciting to hear his fearsome account of Loewe’s “Erlkönig” (Goethe’s chilling poem, best known from Schubert’s setting). And he balanced forceful intensity with winningly intimate singing in songs by Strauss, Ravel and Rachmaninoff, all played with taste and flair by Huang.Then, turning to the works by Black composers, Liverman brought affecting directness to Margaret Bonds’s “Three Dream Portraits” (to texts by Langston Hughes), which can be heard on his recent album “Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers.” Songs by H. Leslie Adams and Damien Sneed were also special, coming across like an elegant stylistic meeting place between art song and American standards. I was moved, and impressed, when Liverman performed his own arrangement of a medley of music by Brian McKnight — a favorite R&B artist of his, he explained — singing with lovely casualness while accompanying himself deftly on the piano.Not many opera singers have that skill, let alone the courage. And along the way, he had explored an overlooked legacy of American artists whose work speaks to him personally. More

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      Review: Carnegie Hall Reopens With a Blaze From Philadelphia

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      After a 572-day closure, the hall was lit by a vibrant concert from the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.After being closed for 572 days because of the pandemic, Carnegie Hall, the country’s pre-eminent concert space, opened its season on Wednesday. It took only a simple greeting from the stage — “welcome back,” spoken by Clive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director — for the audience to burst into sustained cheers.On paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s program — including favorites like Bernstein’s joyous overture to “Candide” and staples like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — seemed tilted toward an opening night’s traditional purpose as a crowd-pleasing fund-raising gala. Yet both the choice of works and the vibrant music-making went deeper into questions of classical music’s relevance and renewal than I had expected.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra’s music director, began by leading a performance of Valerie Coleman’s “Seven O’Clock Shout,” a work that the Philadelphians premiered online in May. This five-minute score has become the orchestra’s unofficial anthem for this difficult period. Inspired by Boccaccio and the 7 p.m. cheers for frontline workers during the pandemic, the piece offers a hard-won vision of a more beautiful place.Nézet-Séguin, also the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, led vibrant, impetuous performances of works both classic and new.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesIt opens with cautious trumpet fanfares that activate tremulous strings. The music goes through passages of jittery riffs, burnished string chords, elegiac quietude and eruptive restlessness — complete with actual shouts and claps from the players. The piece at times has a Copland-esque glow, but Coleman adds tart harmonic tweaks and assertive syncopations that continually surprise.The brilliant pianist Yuja Wang was the soloist for Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a work from 1957 considered one of this composer’s lighter, wittier scores. But from the start, this performance — especially Wang’s commanding, colorful playing — seemed determined to look below the bustling surface for hints of the bitterly satirical Shostakovich.As the orchestra played the chortling opening theme, alive with woodwinds, Wang almost sneaked into the fray with a subtly lyrical rendering of the piano’s quizzical lines. Then, taking charge, she dispatched bursts of brittle chords, tossed off creepy-crawly runs and kept bringing out both the sweetly melodic and industriously steely elements of the three-movement work.Yuja Wang joined for a commanding, colorful performance of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThen Nézet-Séguin, who in his other role as music director of the Metropolitan Opera is currently leading performances of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” turned to the “Candide” overture — and may have tried too hard to tease out jagged edges and multilayered complexities in Bernstein’s sparkling, impish music.He then spoke to the audience about how the disruptions of the pandemic shook our collective sense of “where we are, where we are going,” and explained the pairing of the final two works on the program: Iman Habibi’s short “Jeder Baum spricht” (“Every Tree Speaks”) and Beethoven’s Fifth. The Habibi score, written in dialogue with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, was premiered in Philadelphia on March 12, 2020, to an empty hall, just after pandemic closures began.Habibi imagines how Beethoven, a nature lover, might respond to today’s climate crisis. On Wednesday, the compelling piece came across like a series of frustrated attempts at cohesion and peace, with fitful starts, hazy chords and driving yet irregular rhythmic figures. Finally, there is a sense, however uneasy, of affirmation and brassy richness.Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphians will play seven concerts in all at Carnegie this season, including a complete survey of Beethoven’s symphonies.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWithout a pause, Nézet-Séguin dove into the Beethoven. And if you think this classic work has to sound heroic and monumental, this performance was not for you. Here was an impetuous, in-the-moment account. Tempos shifted constantly. Some passages raced forward breathlessly, only to segue to episodes in which Nézet-Séguin drew out lyrical inner voices you seldom hear so prominently. It was exciting and unpredictable. Beethoven felt like he was responding to Habibi, as much as vice versa.The Philadelphians had planned to present a complete survey of the symphonies at Carnegie last season, as part of the celebrations of Beethoven’s 250th birthday. That cycle will now take place in five programs over the coming months, with most of these totemic works preceded by shorter new pieces. (Coming to Carnegie no fewer than seven times in all, the orchestra also plays more Coleman in February, alongside Barber and Florence Price, and Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” in April.)If the opening-night pairing and performances were indicative, this series will be a stimulating conversation between classical music’s storied past and the tumultuous present.Philadelphia OrchestraOther Beethoven symphony programs on Oct. 20, Nov. 9, Dec. 7 and Jan. 11 at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan; carnegiehall.org. More

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      Debby King, 71, Backstage Aide Known as ‘Soul of Carnegie Hall,’ Dies

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      From Sinatra to Isaac Stern to Sting, she attended to the needs of the star performers in the Maestro Suite and helped calm their nerves.Paparazzi, fans and police officers filled the street outside Carnegie Hall one fall day in 1987, waiting for Frank Sinatra to arrive for a show. Inside, a backstage attendant named Debby King was on edge, worried about Sinatra’s reputation for being difficult.As Carnegie Hall’s artist liaison, Ms. King worked one of the more rarefied jobs in New York showbiz. Like a one-night personal assistant, she was responsible for taking care of the maestros, soloists and artists who performed there, and she doted on everyone, whether Itzhak Perlman or Sting, Audra McDonald or André Previn.When Sinatra arrived, his limousine inching through the crowd, Ms. King went to fetch him. He lowered his car window.“You can’t sing from the limo,” she said. “Do you plan on coming out?”“I’m coming out,” he said.He stepped out.“You’re not that tall,” she said.“Shh,” he replied. “Don’t tell everybody.”They started laughing, and Ms. King escorted him to his dressing room, where she had prepared provisions including a bottle of Chivas Regal, chilled jumbo shrimp and Tootsie Rolls. She escorted him to the stage at showtime. Afterward, he gave her a jacket emblazoned with his name, a generous tip tucked inside.Ms. King died on Sept. 20 at a hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She was 71. Her granddaughter Sonrisa Murray said the cause was liver cancer.Although conductors and soloists receive the standing ovations at Carnegie Hall, their performances are supported by a corps of ushers, doorkeepers and backstage attendants. And for 34 years, Ms. King played her part.Specifically, she was responsible for the needs of the stars who used the Maestro Suite, a regal dressing room on the second floor.“She’s the soul of Carnegie Hall,” the cellist Yo-Yo Ma said in a phone interview. “She enables the transition that takes place between a person backstage getting ready to perform and then going onstage to share everything that is important to them. That transition for an artist is often when they’re at their most vulnerable.”Ms. King called herself a professional nerve-calmer, and made it her business to know the preperformance rituals of her charges.The conductor Riccardo Muti and Ms. King after his final concert at Carnegie Hall as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1992. “When he gets here the first thing he wants is his coffee,” Ms. King said of the maestro, “and I must be sure that he drinks it before he goes onstage.”Steve J. Sherman/Carnegie HallShe knew, for instance, that the violinist Kyung Wha Chung liked strongly scented flowers to be placed just outside her dressing room; that the soprano Jessye Norman wanted a thermometer and humidifier in her quarters; and that the conductor Riccardo Muti needed strong coffee waiting for him. When The Wall Street Journal interviewed Ms. King before Mr. Muti conducted a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1990, she stressed this detail.“My honey’s not here yet,” she said. “When he gets here the first thing he wants is his coffee, and I must be sure that he drinks it before he goes onstage.”At what proved to be his last concert at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bernstein gave Ms. King a pin in gratitude.Ms. King also glimpsed vulnerability.When Sinatra played Carnegie Hall that fall in 1987, in Ms. King’s telling, he kept missing his lines as he struggled to read the teleprompter. During intermission, Sinatra’s handlers were hesitant to approach him, but Ms. King took him aside.“You look like you’re having a tough time out there,” she told him. “But listen, you’re Frank Sinatra. You can do anything. They will always love you out there no matter what. If you’re in trouble again, just smile, or say hello to a pretty lady on the balcony.”Back onstage, Sinatra took her advice, and he crooned with confidence.Ms. King, who raised a daughter on her own, had a second full-time job, far from the bright lights of Carnegie Hall.After the evening’s concert ended, she would rush downtown to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner, where she worked until the early morning as an administrator, dealing with matters of the dead. Then it was back to her apartment in Harlem for some sleep before picking up her granddaughters, Oni and Sonrisa, from school and heading down to Carnegie in the late afternoon. She joined the city’s morgue as a clerk in the 1970s, then went to work at Carnegie, initially as an usher, in the mid-1980s. She juggled both jobs for years.In 2004, her jobs collided when the executive director of Carnegie Hall, Robert Harth, died suddenly at 47. A co-worker called Ms. King to tell her that his body was on its way to the morgue, but she already knew.“I’m sitting right here now taking care of him,” she responded. “I’m holding his hand so he’s not alone tonight.”Ms. King with the violinist Isaac Stern at Carnegie for a 2000 screening of the American Masters documentary “Isaac Stern: Life’s Virtuoso.” Ms. King called herself a professional nerve-calmer.Steve J. Sherman/Carnegie HallDeborah King was born on Oct. 4, 1949, in Manhattan and was raised in Harlem. Her father, John, was a deacon. Her mother, Margo (Shaw) King, was a homemaker. Deborah aspired to become a cosmetologist, and in high school she applied for an internship at a salon. But because of a clerical error, she ended up at the morgue instead. In addition to her granddaughters, Ms. King is survived by a grandson and a daughter, Cheryl Leak-Fox-Middleton. Ms. King took pride in putting both her granddaughters through college.She retired from the medical examiner’s office in 2016 and was diagnosed with liver cancer a few years later. She retired from Carnegie Hall last spring.Staff and family members gathered at Carnegie to commemorate the occasion. Cake was served, letters of appreciation from musicians were read out loud, and Ms. King told tales of her backstage adventures. A plaque honoring her was unveiled.Just outside the Maestro Suite, near pictures of greats like Gershwin and Tchaikovsky, her smiling portrait hangs on its very own wall. More

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      Carnegie Hall Counts Down to Its Reopening

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      “The biggest variables — box office sales and venue rentals — are moving in a good direction,” says the director of the hall, which opens its season Oct. 6.The pianos have been tuned. The crimson carpets have been cleaned. The crystal chandeliers have been dusted.After nearly 19 months without concerts, Carnegie Hall, the nation’s pre-eminent concert space, plans to reopen its doors to the public on Oct. 6.With the coronavirus still omnipresent, the reopening is a logistical feat, involving questions about air-ventilation systems, crowd control and hand-sanitizing stations.It’s also an emotional moment for Carnegie, which lost millions of dollars in ticket sales during the pandemic and at one point was forced to reduce its staff by nearly half. The hall is grappling with an anticipated budget deficit of up to $10 million and is planning a lighter-than-usual season of about 100 concerts (versus the usual 150) as it tries to gauge demand.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, inside hall’s archives.Michael George for The New York TimesClive Gillinson, the hall’s executive and artistic director since 2005, says Carnegie is ready for the challenge. The hall has added entrances, upgraded ventilation systems and increased the frequency of bathroom cleaning.“We have to keep adapting to whatever the situation is, not only to look after people as best we can, but also for people to feel as safe as they can,” Gillinson said. “It’s reality as well as perception. Both are equally important.”In an interview, Gillinson discussed the new season, which begins with the Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the virtuoso Yuja Wang alongside works by Valerie Coleman, Iman Habibi, Bernstein and Beethoven.Gillinson also spoke about the lack of racial diversity in classical music and the return of the arts amid the pandemic. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Carnegie has been closed for the longest stretch in its history. Are you confident audiences will come back, especially given the continuing spread of the virus and the need for added safety protocols?Without doubt some people will be concerned. All I can say is the reaction we’ve had has been the opposite. It’s been that everybody is so thrilled that things are coming back to life again. When we opened the box office, beginning to start on the road back, we had people in tears because they were so excited about actually being able to buy tickets again. But at the same time, we feel we’ve got to look after the people who have still got concerns.During the height of the pandemic Carnegie was forced to make substantial cuts, including reducing its staff to 190, from 350. How are you planning the new season amid all the uncertainty?The biggest variables — box office sales and venue rentals — are moving in a good direction at the moment. But that doesn’t mean we count anything as done until we’ve completed the season. You have to be working incredibly hard all the time. You have to be responding to everything that’s happening every day because life just does change every day during Covid.What are you seeing so far in terms of ticket sales?The opening concerts look really strong and very positive. The others will continue to sell as we go along.We deliberately didn’t over-pack the fall. It’s much busier from the new year onward because we just wanted to make sure audiences had time to build up their confidence, and time to really get re-engaged with going out again. So it’s a very deliberate strategy.Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra will reopen the hall in the first of their seven Carnegie concerts this season.Chris LeeSince announcing the season earlier this year you’ve added a few concerts to the schedule, including a complete cycle of Beethoven’s symphonies with Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra that was supposed to happen last year. How did you decide what to revive?When we had to cancel because of Covid, I spoke to Yannick and said, “Look, I promise that we will bring this back in the future.” It was something that meant a huge amount to him. The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned some contemporary works to go alongside the cycle that would actually have some sort of reflection on the world we live in today and look at Beethoven through that light.The minute we were able to open and the governor gave everybody permission to open with full seating, the first thing I did was phone Yannick to say: “This is it, if there’s any way you can do it. I promised you we would bring this back. How about now?” They jumped at it.At the same time there are many artists whose concerts were canceled who you haven’t been able to reschedule. How are you dealing with that?We do feel an obligation to try and bring people back who we haven’t been able to bring back so far. So that’s going to take some time, because if you lose a year and a half of concerts, there’s a lot of concerts. Sometimes the world can move on as well and they’ll be doing other things and there’ll be other repertoire. But we are looking to do the best we can in terms of looking after the people we had to cancel.The Sphinx Virtuosi perform at Carnegie on Oct. 15.Stephanie BergerDo you worry the pandemic has hurt the careers of rising artists whose engagements at Carnegie or elsewhere were canceled?One of the things I’ve always felt about what we do is that the great artists will always come through and they’ll always succeed. They’ve got something to say that is really important to people. Something like this clearly will have changed plans and will have delayed very early-days careers. But the reality is, I think talent and great artistry are never lost. That never, ever goes away.What about smaller venues and less established artists, who suffered a great deal during the pandemic. Do you think they will make a comeback? Has the pandemic fundamentally changed which kinds of artists and groups can survive?Some of the most innovative, interesting, imaginative work that’s ever happened is going on in New York. It’s the most dynamic scene we’ve ever seen.They’re very entrepreneurial people. They’re very creative people. And they’ll find a way to survive. It’s not like all us large organizations where we have massive overhead, much of which we can’t change.The pandemic has made it very difficult for many ensembles to go on extensive global tours, with stops at Carnegie and other venues. How do you think the pandemic will change touring?You’ve got all the issues like climate change and so on. I think there are going to be a lot more question marks about orchestras at least asking themselves how much touring they should be doing. And I think what they do, they will want it to have greater significance than it had before.It’s not just a question of touring and saying, “I’ve appeared in this city and that city.” It’s: “What have I left behind? Is there is there a legacy or is this something important that came out of my having been there?”This season Carnegie will prominently feature Valery Gergiev, the Russian conductor and friend of Vladimir Putin, who will perform a series of concerts with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra. How do you respond to those who think he shouldn’t be given such an opportunity, given his silence on abuses in Russia?Why should artists be the only people in the world who are not allowed to have political opinions? My view is you only judge people on their artistry. If somebody was a racist or somebody said things that were clearly abusive of other races or other people in certain ways, that is completely different and that is unacceptable. But in terms of them being entitled to an opinion which happens to be a political opinion, they have every right as every other single member of society has.What do you make of the current debate around the idea that classical music, which has long been dominated by white, male composers, is racist, and that it has not adequately grappled with questions about representation and diversity?If you think of Western culture, literature, painting, music, the bulk of it was done by people who were white in one form or another. And it’s not invalidated. I always worry when people try and apply today’s values to the world of 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago, because the fact is, what people were trying to do at that time was completely different and it was relevant for its time. We’ve got to be relevant for our time. Diversity is unbelievably important. That is central to the sort of society we must live in now. And that doesn’t invalidate the fact that there was great art created, and OK, a lot of it was created by white people, and some of it was created by people who were racists.Carnegie was one of the first institutions to impose a vaccine mandate for audiences. Did you meet any resistance?I’ve had a very, very small number of emails from people saying: “This is ridiculous. You’re being paranoid. It’s completely unnecessary.” But we know the world we live in has very, very different views on this. We can only have one view, which is, how do we look after people?How do you see the future of the arts in light of the pandemic?How people are likely to feel, nobody can judge that. We can’t tell. But I do think the arts will come roaring back.Why do people live in New York City? Why do the big companies want to be here? Why do the headquarters want to be here? Why is there all this tourism? Culture is the magnet that actually makes New York New York. More