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    Renée Fleming and Uma Thurman Share an Odyssey

    The actress and opera star come together in “Penelope,” a Homeric monodrama by André Previn and Tom Stoppard, at Carnegie Hall.When the polymathic musician André Previn died in 2019, he left behind an unfinished score: “Penelope,” a monodrama he was writing for the star soprano Renée Fleming.It was set to premiere that year at Tanglewood to celebrate Previn’s 90th birthday. Instead, the performance became, “as it were, in memoriam,” the playwright Tom Stoppard, who wrote the work’s text, said in a recent interview.That the premiere happened at all was something of a miracle; the incomplete score’s pages weren’t even in an easily discernible order. But David Fetherolf, Previn’s longtime editor, reconstructed and completed the piece, then published a final version after the Tanglewood performance. And now the original performers — Fleming; the pianist Simone Dinnerstein; the Emerson String Quartet; and the actress Uma Thurman, as Fleming’s speaking avatar — are reuniting to bring “Penelope” to Carnegie Hall on Sunday.Previn and Stoppard had collaborated before, on the 1977 play “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” but Stoppard said that he was reluctant to take on a project like “Penelope” because “I don’t really have any musical intelligence.” Still, Fleming — for whom Previn had composed works including the opera “A Streetcar Named Desire” — kept asking for a monodrama, and Previn eventually persuaded Stoppard to do it.What Stoppard came up with was a retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” from the perspective of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who waits 20 years for her husband to return from the Trojan War and fends off scores of suitors ready to take his place.“The only idea I had about her was that she starts off by resenting the way that she’s perceived by posterity,” Stoppard said. “The first couple of pages are quite slangy, modernistic and ironic, and even sarcastic. I wanted to end up with a feeling which was not about any kind of grievance she was holding, but about the pain she had gone through. And I wanted to account for her being a byword for wisdom.”If set to music, Stoppard’s original draft would have run for about two hours, Fleming said during a recent video interview with Thurman. As a solution, the piece evolved to portray Penelope with two performers: one singing, one speaking. “Both the soprano and the narrator are Penelope, and should be presented as such,” Fetherolf notes in the published score.Fleming, left, and Thurman, right, with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the Emerson String Quartet at the 2019 premiere of “Penelope” at Tanglewood.Hilary ScottThe two performers pass the narrative back and forth, sometimes completing each other’s sentences — the sung part poetically spare (at least relatively, given Stoppard’s idiosyncratic verbal complexity), the spoken one elevated and melodic. In the interview, Fleming and Thurman discussed sharing the role, and what it means to tell Penelope’s story today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Renée, you have been involved with this from the start, but Uma, what was the appeal of the project for you?UMA THURMAN Renée. And Tom, whose work I have known all my life, and who I met when I was a teenager and was sort of daunted by his work and his beautiful, complex use of language.RENÉE FLEMING Uma, the fact that you were involved was so perfect. You are the archetype. You just stand for everything that we imagine Penelope to be, in your professional persona. I think of you as a Greek goddess: her strength, her ability to say no for 20 years and be clever and work around all of these men. I really cannot think of anybody better to do this with.THURMAN It was very hair-raising: I was in this play at Williamstown when we performed “Penelope” at Tanglewood, and I was stepping into the situation of Tom’s muscular, articulate language inserted into the music.Whenever music and language meet, it’s so different from being in a drama or comedy in theater. When you put language to music, it becomes very specific: the pacing, the dividing of words and sentences; it all has to obey the music. It’s a challenge that makes me feel like I’m doing things for the first time, as if you had to fix a bicycle and then you had to go work on a plane. You need the same skill set, but it doesn’t feel like it.FLEMING When I’ve done theater, even musical theater, I have felt completely untethered because I didn’t have the musical framework. It was terrifying to me; there was so much space.THURMAN It’s kind of like a white space. But actually there has to be an architecture inside of it. In this piece, we do switch between those two disciplines and mediums in a beautifully compact way.The spoken text is nevertheless quite musical. What goes into bringing that out in the delivery?THURMAN It’s a lot of breaking things down into patterns of vowel sounds and muscular nouns that paint pictures, and finding tempo and space. This comes from circling vowels and choosing T’s and these kinds of things. But in general, I think that Tom Stoppard’s use of language is elevated. He has a vocabulary triple the normal usage of anyone. I’ve had some very keen eyes help me on that, too. I wouldn’t interpret Stoppard with only my mind.FLEMING I think he’s a genius, honestly. During my first engagement at the Royal Opera in London, I saw “Arcadia,” which was brand-new then, and I was completely hooked. Vocally, “Penelope” is like a long recitative. André was by nature melodic, but for this, because of all the text, I’m just singing words on pitch. And I’m working as hard as I can to make them understood.How did this piece change your relationship with Penelope as a character?FLEMING What I said to Tom was, I want to know why Penelope waited. But that didn’t register with him, and he’s Tom Stoppard, so obviously he wrote it as he saw it. There’s a lot in the original story that we bristle at today — like the killing of all those handmaidens, because they were doing what they were coerced to do? He didn’t soften any of those points.THURMAN Interestingly, having been a great fan of the myth since childhood, I just bought a nice children’s collection for my 9-year-old and was reading to her and freshly engaging with it. We’re dealing with our history; let’s be real. Tom did redact one reference, which had to do with women’s work. It wasn’t coming from him, it was an interpretation of our history, but it was too much.FLEMING From the beginning, one of the things I connected with was this incredible device of her weaving and unweaving her tapestry every night, for years. To me that notion is so musical. Every version of Goethe’s “Faust” has some sort of weaving aria. And that was something I admired, how clever Penelope was, and her strength of conviction.THURMAN She also says, “In tears we outdid each other in forgiving.” And her defense of herself and honoring her marriage and her choice of which man will take her father’s property — the enormous skill that she has to put into play to defend herself. She’s an admirable politician. And the politics in which she is exercising her rights and her choice are not the politics in which we exercise rights and choice today.What goes, then, into her earning the title Penelope the Wise by the end?FLEMING Well, she survived. She survived by wit and she was — as you said, Uma — wise enough to forgive. More

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    Review: A Pianist Makes Carnegie Hall His Home

    Igor Levit returned to New York after streaming dozens of concerts from his apartment during the pandemic.When the pianist Igor Levit streamed dozens of performances from his apartment in Berlin during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, he wore neat but casual clothes: closefitting sweaters, hoodies over T-shirts. He was inviting you to a concert, yes, but also into his home; he offered, in milieu and music, both elevation and comfort.Carnegie Hall, Levit made clear from the moment he walked onstage there Thursday evening, is like home for him, too.Appearing for his first solo recital in the gilded Stern Auditorium, he came on wearing a dark, slouchy collared shirt, left unbuttoned to reveal a crew neck underneath, and black jeans. The impression, as usual with him, was of an artist who dispenses with formalities and fripperies to focus — with relaxation but also intense seriousness — on the music.It was, also as usual for him, an elegantly organized program. A Beethoven sonata that ends in a suite of variations led into the premiere of a new set of variations by Fred Hersch. A transcription of the prelude to Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde” was followed without pause by the B minor Sonata of Liszt, Wagner’s champion and eventual father-in-law — which ends, as “Tristan” does, in the key of B.Building to a mighty climax in a grand account of Liszt’s sprawling sonata, Levit projected a kind of burning patience through the evening. His playing is changeable, but never comes across as improvisatory; there is always a sense of deliberation, sometimes in tempos but always in approach, a palpable sense that everything has been thought out. Yet the results feel confident and fiery, not merely or coolly analytical.From its gently rocking opening — here a mistiness out of which emerged quiet clarity — Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 in E (Op. 109) received a dreamier, and eventually more explosive, rendition than on the recording Levit released in 2013.He has a gift for gentleness, shaping soft, tender melodies that ache without slackening. In the third movement, he built the final variation to furious, ecstatic runs. But the greatest impact came when those runs dropped out, leaving the remnants of a barely audible trill as the path back to the theme.Hersch is best known as a jazz pianist, but he also writes poised concert works. While Levit has played some of his short pieces, this new Variations on a Folk Song is substantial, a bit more than 20 minutes long.The theme here is the plaintive “Shenandoah,” and Hersch gives sober, subtle, respectful treatment to a song that, as he writes in a program note, “I learned as a child and has so much emotional resonance for me.” One of the 20 variations is slightly skittish; another is slightly robust; the most memorable sprinkles tiny quivers in the pauses of a mild piano line. But the mood is consistent, and kindly.Levit is one of classical music’s most politically outspoken figures, which is one reason that the untroubled sincerity of Hersch’s interpretation of “Shenandoah” is so striking. The song is thought to have its roots among the fur trappers of the early American Midwest and their relations with the Indigenous population; it is a melody that touches the core of our country’s history, in all its complexity. But these unvaried variations are a musical vision of nearly unbroken serenity and benevolence — notably, curiously nostalgic.The “Tristan” prelude was here, in Zoltan Kocsis’s arrangement, far more progressive, its opening almost surreally elongated by Levit so that his eventual landing on flooding chords offered some of the shock this work held for its first listeners. Kocsis’s arrangement ends in shadows, out of which Levit’s Liszt emerged; a rough contemporary to “Tristan,” the sonata was here a stand-in for the opera.It had the time-bending effect “Tristan” often does, its contrasting sections seeming to float alongside one another in a vast expanse. The sense of scale was memorable, as was Levit’s touch: densely liquid low rumbles; charcoal-black stark chords; extremely soft passages that sounded candied, like snow glittering in moonlight.The coherence of his conception of the evening extended to the encore: the actual ending of “Tristan,” the “Liebestod,” in Liszt’s transcription. Its climax — which Liszt achieves by working the extreme ends of the piano simultaneously, to delicately epic effect — spoke for the recital as a whole, judiciously balanced yet thrilling.Igor LevitPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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    12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2022

    ‘Better Call Saul’ returns, Cecily Strong stars in a one-woman show, and Faith Ringgold gets an overdue retrospective.As a new year begins in uncertain times (again), our critics highlight the TV, movies, music, art, theater, dance and comedy that promise a welcome distraction.Margaret LyonsThe End of ‘Better Call Saul’Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” which returns for its final season this spring.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Associated PressI’ll be sad forever when “Better Call Saul” is over, so part of me is actually dreading the sixth and final season. I never want to say goodbye to Jimmy or Kim — but man, am I dying to see them again. By the time “Saul” returns on AMC this spring, it will have been off the air for two full years. (Bob Odenkirk, its star, recovered from a heart attack that occurred on set this year.) If there was ever a show that knew how to think about endgames, it’s this one, among the most carefully woven dramas of our time. Of course, thanks to “Breaking Bad,” we know exactly where some of these characters are headed but not how they get there or how they feel about it or whom they’ll hurt along the way. Hurry back! But also, go slow.Salamishah TilletA ‘Downton Abbey’ Sequel Travels to FranceThe sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is partly set in the South of France; from left, Harry Hadden-Paton, Laura Carmichael, Tuppence Middleton and Allen Leech.Ben Blackall/Focus FeaturesOK, so yes, it was weird that my friends Sherri-Ann and Amber and I were the only Black people in the theater when we saw the movie “Downton Abbey” in 2019. At the time, we agreed that despite the absence of people of color in the theater and onscreen, we still found delight in the grandeur — the clothing, the castle, the cast of characters, especially the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley, marvelously played by Dame Maggie Smith. Now that we’ve set our calendars to March 18, 2022, for the sequel, “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” I’m looking forward to seeing how the franchise tries to reinvent itself on the cusp of a new era, the 1930s, and how it fares in the current racial moment. (A Black female face pops up in a trailer.) Partly set in the South of France after the Dowager Countess learns she has inherited a villa there, the movie sends the upstairs Crawley clan and their downstairs employees off on another adventure, with another wedding. While Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton,” has a new show, “The Gilded Age,” premiering on HBO in January — which seems to be a bit more thoughtful in its take on race, class and identity — here’s hoping that this sequel to “Downton” takes a bow in grand Grantham style.Jesse GreenCecily Strong in a One-Woman ShowCecily Strong, left, and the director Leigh Silverman; Strong is starring in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Shed.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesJane Wagner’s 1985 play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” was custom-made for the chameleonic gifts of her life partner (and, later, wife), Lily Tomlin. Who else could have inhabited its 12 highly distinct characters — among them a runaway punk, a bored one-percenter and a trio of disillusioned feminists — with such sardonic sympathy? When Tomlin won a 1986 Tony Award for her work, it seemed to seal the idea that the performer and the play were forever one. But in the kind of casting that makes you smack your head with delight, Cecily Strong takes up Tomlin’s mantle in a revival directed by Leigh Silverman at the Shed, expected to open on Jan. 11. Strong — whose “Saturday Night Live” characters include Jeanine Pirro, the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party and, most recently, Goober the Clown Who Had an Abortion When She Was 23 — seems like another custom fit, nearly four decades later.Jon ParelesAfrofuturism at Carnegie HallSun Ra Arkestra will perform its galactic jazz as part of the Afrofuturism festival that starts in February.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesStepping outside its own history as a bastion of Western classical music, Carnegie Hall will be the hub of a citywide, multidisciplinary festival of Afrofuturism: the visionary, tech-savvy ways that African-diaspora culture has imagined alternate paths forward. Carnegie’s series is expected to start Feb. 12 with the quick-cutting, sometimes head-spinning electronic musician Flying Lotus. (One challenge might be the main hall’s acoustics.) Shows at Zankel Hall include the galactic jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra with the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu and the spoken-word insurgent Moor Mother (Feb. 17); the flutist Nicole Mitchell leading her Black Earth Ensemble; and the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid with her Autophysiopsychic Millennium (Feb. 24); the African-rooted hip-hop duo Chimurenga Renaissance and the Malian songwriter Fatoumata Diawara (March 4); and the D.J., composer and techno pioneer Carl Craig leading his Synthesizer Ensemble (March 19). There’s far more: five dozen other cultural organizations will have festival events.Anthony TommasiniThe Metropolitan Opera Rethinks VerdiThe set model for a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which is expected to open at the Metropolitan Opera in February.Metropolitan OperaVerdi’s “Don Carlos” may not be a flawless opera. But it’s a profound work; I think of it as Verdi’s “Hamlet.” Written for the Paris Opera, it nodded to the French grand style and included epic scenes and massed choruses. But at its 1867 premiere, it was deemed overly long and ineffective. Verdi revised the opera several times, making cuts, translating the French libretto into Italian, leaving a confused legacy of revisions. The Metropolitan Opera is giving audiences a chance to hear the work as originally conceived in its five-act French version, which many consider the best. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led superb Met performances of the Italian adaptation, will be in this pit for this new production by David McVicar. The starry cast, headed by the tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, includes Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanca, Etienne Dupuis, Eric Owens and John Relyea. When performances begin on Feb. 28, be prepared for a five-hour show with two intermissions; I can’t wait.Mike HaleTrue-Crime, Starring Renée ZellwegerRenée Zellweger is starring in the true-crime mini-series “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThis winter brings more than the usual number of big stars taking time out for the small screen, like Uma Thurman (“Suspicion”), Christopher Walken (“Severance”) and Samuel L. Jackson (“The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray”). The one that piques my interest the most is Renée Zellweger, taking on only her second lead television role in “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC. Zellweger can be hit or miss, but her hits — “The Whole Wide World,” “Chicago,” “Judy” — keep her in the very top rank of American actresses. Here she plays Pam Hupp, who is implicated in multiple deaths and is currently serving a life sentence for one of them, in a true-crime mini-series whose showrunner, Jenny Klein, was a producer on solid TV offerings like “The Witcher” and “Jessica Jones.”Jason FaragoAt 91, Faith Ringgold Gets a RetrospectiveA retrospective of the work of Faith Ringgold opens at the New Museum in February and will include “Dancing at the Louvre: The French Collection Part I, #1,” from 1991. Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY and DACS, London, via ACA GalleriesWhen the Museum of Modern Art opened its expanded home in 2019, its most important Picasso suddenly found itself with a new companion: a tumultuous, panoramic painting of American violence that Faith Ringgold painted in 1967. Ringgold, born 91 years ago in Harlem, has never been an obscure figure: Her art was displayed in the Clinton White House as well as most of New York’s museums; her children’s books have won prizes and reached best-seller lists. But she has had to wait too long for a career-spanning retrospective in her hometown. The one at the New Museum, which opens Feb. 17, will reveal how Ringgold intertwined the political and the personal: first in her rigorously composed “American People” paintings, which channeled the civil rights movement into gridded, repeating, syncopated forms; and then in pieced-fabric “story quilts” depicting Michael Jackson or Aunt Jemima, and geometric abstractions inspired by Tibetan silks and embroideries. The show comes with a major chance for rediscovery: the first outing in over two decades of her “French Collection,” a 12-quilt cycle that recasts the history of Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of a fictional African-American artist and model.Maya PhillipsA Viking Prince Seeks RevengeAlexander Skarsgård in a scene from “The Northman,” a story about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father, directed by Robert Eggers.Focus FeaturesRobert Eggers has directed only two feature films, and yet he’s already known as a maker of beautifully strange, critically acclaimed movies. “The Witch,” from 2016, was followed three years later by the grim and perplexing “The Lighthouse.” Both established Eggers as a stylistic descendant of the Brothers Grimm, a crafter of macabre fables that descend into torrents of madness. Which is why I’m excited to see his third feature film, “The Northman,” expected to premiere on April 22, about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father. Steeped in Icelandic mythology, the story is based on the tale of Amleth, the inspiration for Prince Hamlet, my favorite sad boy of English literature. Eggers wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic poet Sjón, so we can surely expect an epic with epic writing to match. There’s also a stellar cast, including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe — and Björk as a witch. I’d watch for that alone.Gia KourlasTransformation, Via Tap and Modern DanceA still from Ayodele Casel’s “Chasing Magic”; from left, Anthony Morigerato, John Manzari, Casel and Naomi Funaki.Kurt CsolakThere are times, however rare, when a virtual dance can be just as stirring as a live one. Ayodele Casel’s joyful and galvanizing “Chasing Magic,” presented by the Joyce Theater in April, was just that. Now the tap dancer and choreographer unveils a new version of the work, directed by Torya Beard, for the stage — an actual one — starting Tuesday, barring any Covid cancellations. And the following month, “Four Quartets,” an ambitious evening-length work by the modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz, lands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Feb. 10-12). Based on T.S. Eliot’s poems, the production features live narration by the actress Kathleen Chalfant, music by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and a set by Brice Marden; in it, Tanowitz continues her exploration of the relationship between emotion and form. It’s true that one is tap; the other, modern dance. What do they have in common? Both have much to say and to show about the transporting, transformative power of dance.Isabelia HerreraThe Rapper Saba Explores TraumaSaba, a rapper from Chicago, will release a new album, “Few Good Things,” on Feb. 4.Mat Hayward/Getty ImagesDiaristic and quietly intense, Saba, a rapper from Chicago, is the kind of artist who navigates grief with a cool solace. In 2018, his record “Care for Me” considered this theme in the aftermath of the murder of his cousin and collaborator, who was stabbed to death a year earlier. Out on Feb. 4, his next album, “Few Good Things,” confronts equally gutting life challenges: the anxiety of generational poverty and the depths of survivor’s guilt. It reprises Saba’s slithering and poetic flows, which breathe out a profound sense of narrative. The beats are still buttery, jazzy and meticulously arranged. But this time around, there is more wisdom — a recognition that living through trauma means finding gratitude and affirmation in the moments you can.Jason ZinomanComedian Taylor Tomlinson on TourThe comedian Taylor Tomlinson in her Netflix special “Quarter-Life Crisis,” from 2020; a new one is in the works.Allyson Riggs/Netflix“Quarter-Life Special,” the debut stand-up special from Taylor Tomlinson, introduced a young artist with real potential. Tomlinson tautly evoked a clear persona (cheerful but not the life of the party; more like, as she put it, “the faint pulse of the pot luck”) and told jokes marked by a diverse arsenal of act outs and manners of misdirection. She covered standard territory (dating, sex, parents, kids) with enough insight and dark shadings to get your attention. Most excitingly, every once in a while, she let her thought process spin out into deliriously unexpected directions, like the story that led her to imagine a test for sadness conducted by the police. “Instead of a breathalyzer,” she explained, “they have you sigh into a harmonica.” This Netflix special made a splash, but it would have probably been a bigger one if it didn’t come out in March 2020. One pandemic later, she has another hour ready, and another Netflix special on the way. She’s now performing it on tour, which is expected to stop in New York in January at Town Hall and then the Beacon Theater. More

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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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