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      Claire Chase Uses Her New Platform to Showcase a Hero

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      When the composer and performer Pauline Oliveros died in 2016, at 84, her reputation in music was secure.Her early electronic and tape-music pieces from the 1960s and ’70s are widely seen as key contributions to post-World War II American experimentalism. Oliveros’s solo shows, on a tricked-out digital accordion, were destination concerts at New York spaces like the Stone well into the 2010s. And the influence of her writing on the topic of “deep listening” had taken root in the academy.Yet at the time of her death, Oliveros had never received a formal showcase of her work at Carnegie Hall. So when the flutist Claire Chase began planning the first shows of her residency there, in her role as this season’s Debs Creative Chair, a corrective move seemed both obvious and overdue.On Saturday, Chase will present a program called “Pauline Oliveros at 90,” followed by two “Day of Listening” events the next morning and afternoon. “I really wanted,” Chase said, “to give the megaphone to the woman who made possible the lives in music that we have.”Oliveros with her digital accordion at Issue Project Room in 2013.Richard Termine for The New York TimesShe was talking about the wide network of players who have drawn inspiration from Oliveros’s example — but also the specific nucleus of artists she described as the composer’s “musical offspring.” They will share the stage at the Saturday concert, a program of two Oliveros text scores: “The Witness” and “The Tuning Meditation.”At a rehearsal of “The Witness” on Wednesday, Chase and her cohort created spellbinding effects while navigating the three “strategies” that Oliveros’s score outlines. In the first section, performers are asked to play only what comes from their own imaginations, without respect to what else is heard in the room; Chase described it as “the opposite of a feel-good meditation.”In the second strategy, they are instructed to interact as spontaneously as possible with one another. Then the highly idealistic third strategy asks musicians to perform “inside of the time, exactly with the time, or outside the time” of a partner’s playing. Chase said that when she once asked Oliveros what that meant, she was told that it was merely an invitation to be telepathic. “She was dead serious,” Chase recalled, “with a smile on her face.”On Sunday, audience members will be able to join the conceptual jamboree using their voices, slide whistles and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument technology that Oliveros pioneered with an eye to helping children with a limited range of movement produce music.The artist Ione — Oliveros’s widow and longtime collaborator — said that while the technology was designed for children with “the least availability of movement,” it is also “wonderful for anybody.” That crossover application is, to Ione, part of Oliveros’s legacy: “Bringing people together for sound and music and play and fun. Pauline was as playful and fun as she was serious.”In interviews, four musicians featured in this weekend’s concerts offered their memories of Oliveros and her music. Here are edited excerpts from the conversations.Musicians who were in Oliveros’s orbit gathered this week to rehearse for Chase’s concert on Saturday.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesClaire Chase, flutistI did meet Pauline when I was a toddler. I have these beautiful memories of her playing her accordion — often barefoot — at concerts at the University of California, San Diego, where my parents would drag me because they couldn’t find child care. She was freer and more unfettered in her skin than anyone I’d ever met.It wasn’t until the late 1990s when I reconnected with her, when she was a visiting artist at Oberlin, where I was an undergrad. We were all on a treadmill toward what we thought would be careers in symphony orchestras. She asked — I have to do it in her Texan drawl — “Can you hear beyond the edges of your own imagination?” It wasn’t just like the ceiling opened up for me. It was like the walls dissolved completely. I found myself totally exhilarated and terrified, and suddenly wondering what else I wasn’t learning in conservatory.Susie Ibarra, composer and percussionistThere’s quite an array of Pauline’s music, between the stuff that she did later, for large ensembles, and earlier recordings that were solo. And then her text scores. There are many points of entry. I just love them all for different reasons.I’m very sentimental about coming to celebrate her at Carnegie Hall, as the first time I played there, it was to play her piece “All Fours for the Drum Bum.” It’s a practice in non-repetitive rhythm and texture. She was always somebody who was a great inspiration, and a mentor who offered such support. We did go into the studio and record duets, but we never released it. I was busy, sure, but she was extraordinarily busy toward the end. I think it’s probably at the right moment to release now.I was so fortunate to play a lot with Pauline as an improviser — and we had a quintet called New Circle Five, which recorded one album, “Dreaming Wide Awake.” She was so playful. Especially when she had her digital accordion; you never knew which “instrument” was going to come out. It was a constant surprise.Alex Peh, pianistMy entrance into contemporary music was a really social one. I’m a professor of piano. But I’m dear friends with Phyllis Chen — and when we did her residency at SUNY New Paltz, Pauline came down. We got the students all jazzed up on her “Sonic Meditations.” That’s when I started doing a lot of contemporary music.I played with Claire on Susie’s album “Talking Gong.” We did the online release, then we had some extra time. We were at a barn upstate, and Claire was just like, “Let’s jam.” So we read “The Witness,” and it all started there. After that, we started improvising in the woods, at the Mill Brook Preserve. We did it in caves, just looking for inspirations. This was in the pandemic; we were all sort of frayed and flustered. And now it’s spun into this.Since that time, I’ve explored piano styles throughout the world. I’ve been doing a lot of work with piano traditions in Myanmar. I’m doing a lot of work with Persian piano. Playing “The Witness” catalyzed this. Before that, I was just playing standard repertoire. I met Pauline, and it kind of unlocked curiosity. She gives permission to explore.Tyshawn Sorey, composer and percussionistMy piece “Bertha’s Lair” was commissioned by Claire for her Density 2036 project. And the day we were scheduled to rehearse that piece — and the day it was completed — I went over to the studio where we were going to rehearse it. Within five minutes of arriving there, we found out the news that Pauline had passed. So we hugged for long time; we didn’t even play. We just talked about Pauline the entire evening.It came out in the interpretation of the music, when we finally rehearsed the piece and played it dozens of times. It was different every time. Yet the spirit of Pauline would always remain over us, the way we both continued to take chances.In terms of Pauline’s sprit: It’s about this openness and trust. This way of becoming through making music and being present at all times. No matter what a particular score of hers would say, it certainly demands a different kind of consciousness on the part of the performer to be able to execute. It would put the performer in a place where they’ve probably never been before. More

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      Review: The Unaffected Excellence of the Cleveland Orchestra

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      One of the finest American ensembles returned to Carnegie Hall with a program that made its argument persuasively, but without force.Classical music is an art form that can’t help having one foot in the past and an eye on its family tree. You hear about piano teachers who can trace their techniques back to Beethoven, or composers who realize only after the fact that Debussy has crept into their writing. Lineage is crucial; influence, inevitable.It’s an observation that was made with gentle persuasiveness by the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst, its longtime music director, at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday. With the casual excellence that has made this ensemble, at least on a technical level, the finest in the United States, they assembled movements from Berg’s “Lyric Suite” and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony into a five-section study in juxtapositions.Versions of this have been done; the conductor Raphaël Pichon and his group, Pygmalion, broke up the “Unfinished” and surrounded it with a sweeping Romantic collage on last year’s album “Mein Traum” — a nod to Schubert’s biography, and to the cultural world in which this work was created. But the musical connections on Wednesday were fewer, and more focused.Neither the Berg nor the Schubert is whole. The orchestrated form of the “Lyric Suite,” originally for string quartet, contains three of its six sections, and the “Unfinished” was never completed beyond the first two movements. Both products of Vienna, more than a century apart, they nevertheless share a quiet intensity, as well as expressiveness shaded by longing and melancholy. As tends to be the case with pairings like this, Schubert comes out sounding more innovative; and Berg, who here doesn’t write with a wholesale use of dodecaphonic style, more reverential.In its version for string orchestra — and particularly with five rows of violins on Wednesday — the Berg has an operatic edge, but under the baton of Welser-Möst, an often measured technician, the opening Andante amoroso was smartly balanced rather than exploited for dramatic effect. He continued into the first movement of the Schubert without pause, carrying the previous work’s subtle momentum through the symphony’s flowing melodies and the soft syncopations of its not-quite-waltzing second subject. Heard so closely with the “Lyric Suite,” the development stood out for its flashes of the future: harmonic language that would flourish at the height of Romanticism.It wasn’t so jarring, then, to return to the Berg — its whispering Allegro misterioso here like a distant and distorted memory emerging into consciousness, its quietness befitting the second movement of the Schubert, which ended with a halo of serenity. But Berg had the last word with his Allegro appassionato, seeming to make explicit the pervasive yearning of Schubert and take its Romantic sentiment to a breaking point. Like the symphony, however, it ended in sustained stillness.The program featured a rarity in Schubert’s Mass in E flat, performed with five vocal soloists and members of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.Chris LeeFor the concert’s second half — Schubert’s Mass in E flat, a wellspring of beauty that is bafflingly underperformed in the United States — the stage was drastically more populated with the addition of five vocal soloists and members of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, an all-volunteer ensemble that behaves like an entirely professional one. Yet, in a miracle characteristic of the Clevelanders, this work had the sense of awe baked into its scale but the clarity of chamber music: the Latin text intelligible despite face coverings throughout the choir, the melodic line traveling with ease among the instruments.It’s not until the “Et incarnatus est” section of the Credo that the soloists enter (with a songlike theme of delicate longing that all but prefigures the aria “Nuit d’ivresse” from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens”). These roles, rarely employed throughout the Mass, were luxuriously cast: the tenors Julian Prégardien and Martin Mitterrutzner, the soprano Joélle Harvey, the mezzo-soprano Daryl Freedman and the bass-baritone Dashon Burton. But they were also artfully indistinct, behaving with a unified vision that gave way to egoless balance.The piece was not without its grandeur. Wednesday’s Sanctus was one of divine wonderment; the Agnus Dei resonated from the lower strings with the richness of an organ. But the “dona nobis pacem” of the final bars, begun at a fortissimo, quickly calmed to a glowing piano. The concert, as much as it was a web of connections, also made the argument that music doesn’t need a showy climax to win over an audience. And neither does this orchestra.Cleveland OrchestraPerformed on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Onstage, It’s Finally Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Again

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      The Rockettes are high-kicking their way through the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. The Sugarplum Fairy, after an unsought interregnum, is presiding over the Land of Sweets at the New York City Ballet. All around the country, choirs are singing hallelujahs in Handel’s “Messiah” and Scrooges are learning to replace bahs with blessings.After two years of Christmastime washouts — there was 2020, when live performance was still impossible in many places, and then last winter, when the Omicron wave stopped many productions — arts-lovers and arts institutions say that they are determined that this will be their first fully staged holiday in three years.“It feels absolutely like the first Christmas post-Covid — there are more tourists in town, Times Square feels very alive again, people are venturing out in a way that I haven’t witnessed since 2019, and sales are more robust across the board,” said Eva Price, a Broadway producer whose musical last year, “Jagged Little Pill,” permanently closed as Omicron bore down, but whose new musical, “& Juliet,” is thriving as this year’s holidays near.Performances of holiday fare, including “The Nutcracker,” Handel’s “Messiah” and, here, “A Christmas Carol,” have become treasured rituals for many families.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesFor arts lovers and arts presenters, late December looms large. Performances of “The Nutcracker,” “A Christmas Carol” and “Messiah” are cherished holiday traditions for many families. Those events are also vital sources of revenue for the organizations that present them. And on Broadway, year-end is when houses are fullest and grosses are highest.“‘A Christmas Carol’ is the lifeblood of our institution,” said Kevin Moriarty, the artistic director of Dallas Theater Center, which first staged an adaptation of the Dickens classic in 1969, and had been doing so annually since 1979 until the pandemic. Most seasons, the play is the theater’s top seller.Last year, Moriarty’s effort to bring the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future back onstage — still with mask and vaccine requirements for the audience — faltered when Omicron hit, and the final 11 days of the run were canceled. “It just felt like the knockout blow we hadn’t seen coming — it felt like things will never get back to normal,” Moriarty said.Handel’s “Messiah” was back at Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesDallas was one of many arts institutions wounded by Omicron. The Center Theater Group of Los Angeles canceled 22 of 40 scheduled performances of “A Christmas Carol,” losing about $1.5 million. On Broadway, grosses dropped 57 percent from Thanksgiving week to Christmas week, when 128 performances were canceled. Radio City Music Hall ended its run of the “Christmas Spectacular” with the Rockettes more than a week before Christmas. And the New York City Ballet canceled 17 of 47 scheduled performances of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” costing it about $5 million.“The virus just made it impossible to go on,” said Katherine E. Brown, the executive director of the New York City Ballet, where “The Nutcracker” has been a tradition since 1954. “It was more than a little depressing, and there were lots of disappointed people, onstage and off.”This year: so far, so good. “It’s going really well,” Brown said. “I don’t want to tempt the fates by saying that too loudly, but it’s actually back to prepandemic levels, and even slightly higher. It feels like we’re really back, and the energy in the houses is just phenomenal.”Of course there are still viruses in the air this year: public health officials are warning of a “tripledemic” of the coronavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, known as R.S.V. Covid cases and hospitalizations have risen nationally since Thanksgiving, and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, donned a face mask on Tuesday as he urged New Yorkers to take precautions. One new Broadway play, “The Collaboration,” had to cancel several performances this week, including its opening night, after someone in the company tested positive for the coronavirus.But with Christmas just days away, there have yet to be the wholesale closings that marred last year. And now most people over six months old can be vaccinated, and there is a new bivalent vaccine, lowering both risk and anxiety.“We learned a lot from last year: there are more understudies in place, there is more crew coverage, and we have contingency plans that feel more spelled out,” Price said. Brown agreed, saying, “Through the school of hard knocks, we’re better at managing through it.”“George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” is being staged once again by New York City Ballet, which had to cut its run short last winter because of Omicron. Sterling Hyltin danced the Sugarplum Fairy in a performance last month. Erin BaianoThe upheaval last winter upended many holiday plans.Mike Rhone, a quality assurance engineer in Santa Clara, Calif., had tickets to the Broadway musicals “Hadestown,” “Flying Over Sunset” and “Caroline, or Change,” and planned to propose to his partner in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.Instead he proposed at home, on the couch. But they’ll try again this year, with tickets to “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Ohio State Murders,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and the Rockettes. “We’ll definitely get that photo in front of the Rockefeller Center tree,” Rhone said, “just as married people instead of newly-engaged.”Shannon Buster, a civil engineer from Kansas City, Mo., had tickets last year to several Broadway shows and a set of hard-to-score restaurant reservations. “The night before we left, we watched handsome David Muir deliver dire news about Omicron surging, Broadway shows closing, restaurants closing, and we canceled,” she said. This year, she was determined to make the trip happen: “I swear by all that is holy that even an outbreak of rabid, flesh-eating bacteria will not keep me from it.” Last weekend, she and her husband made the delayed trip, trying out some new restaurants and seeing “Death of a Salesman” and “A Strange Loop.”For performers, this year is a welcome relief.Scott Mello, a tenor, has been singing Handel’s “Messiah” at Trinity Church Wall Street each Christmas season since 2015. Last year he found himself singing the “Messiah” at home, in the shower, but it wasn’t the same. “It didn’t feel like Christmas,” he said. This year, he added, “feels like an unveiling.”Ashley Hod, a soloist with New York City Ballet, has been part of its “Nutcracker” for much of her life — she performed in it as a child, when she was studying at the ballet’s school, and joined the cast as an apprentice in 2012; since then she has performed most of the women’s roles. Last year she rehearsed for two months to get ready to go on as the Sugarplum Fairy, but the show was canceled before her turn arrived.“It was devastating,” she said.This year, she’s on as a soloist, and thrilled. “We all have a new appreciation for it,” she said. “Everyone feels really lucky to be back.”On Broadway, things are looking up: Thanksgiving week was the top-grossing week since theaters reopened. And there are other signs of seasonal spending: Jefferson Mays’s virtuosic one-man version of “A Christmas Carol,” which he performed without an audience for streaming when the pandemic made in-person performances impossible, finally made it to Broadway, and is selling strongly as Christmas approaches.Beyond Broadway, things are better too. In New Orleans on Tuesday night, Christmas Without Tears returned — it’s a rambunctious and star-studded annual variety show hosted by the performers Harry Shearer and Judith Owen to raise money for charity (this year, Innocence Project New Orleans).Some “Messiah” fans seemed to be in the Christmas spirit. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“The audience was so primed, ready, and wanting the show,” Owen said. “It was like they’d waited two years for this.”But there are also reasons for sobriety: Broadway’s overall grosses this season are still about 13 percent below what they were in 2019, and this fall a number of shows, struggling to find audiences, have been forced to close. Around the country, many performing arts organizations have been unable to bring audiences back at prepandemic levels.Not everyone is rushing back. Erich Meager, a visual artist in Palm Springs, had booked 10 shows over six nights last December. Then the Rockettes closed, then “Jagged Little Pill,” then two more. “Each morning we would wake up and see what shows were canceled and search for replacements, a less than ideal theater experience,” he said. “This year we are staying close to home for the holidays, but next year we’ll be back.”But many patrons are ready to celebrate.“There have been so many virtual performances, but it’s not really the same thing,” said Luciana Sikula, a Manhattan fashion industry worker who had been attending a performance of “Messiah” annually at Trinity Church Wall Street until the pandemic, and finally got to experience it again in person again this month.Jeffrey Carter, a music professor from St. Louis who had booked and canceled five trips to New York since the pandemic began, finally made it this week; he checked out the new Museum of Broadway as well as an exhibit at the Grolier Club, caught the Oratorio Society of New York’s “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall, and saw “A Man of No Importance,” “A Strange Loop” and “Little Shop of Horrors.” “I’m packing in N.Y.C. at Christmastime in four days and four nights,” he said, “and I’m catching up — in person — with people I love.” More

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      Scarred by War, a Ukrainian Children’s Choir Finds Hope in Music

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      Members of the Shchedryk Children’s Choir have emerged from conflict determined to sing, including at Carnegie Hall this weekend.When air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv recently, the Shchedryk Children’s Choir, which was deep in rehearsal for a Christmas program, went into action.More than two dozen young singers, carrying sheet music and backpacks, rushed from the Palace of Children and Youth, their longtime practice space, to a nearby bomb shelter. There, using cellphones as flashlights, they resumed their singing, filling the cold, cramped space with folk songs and carols until the sirens faded.“I was scared, but I was also hopeful,” recalled Polina Fedorchenko, a 16-year-old member of the choir. “We knew that if we could get through this, we could get through anything.”The children of the Shchedryk choir, which will perform at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, have been hit hard by the war. They have lost friends and relatives in the fighting; watched as Russian bombs have devastated schools, churches and city streets; and grappled with the anxiety and trauma of war.But the choristers have also forged a determination to use music as a way to heal Ukraine and promote their culture around the world.At Carnegie, the choir’s 56 members — 51 girls and five boys, ages 11 to 25 — will perform traditional songs and carols alongside other Ukrainian artists in “Notes From Ukraine,” a program sponsored in part by the Ukrainian foreign ministry. Proceeds will go to United24, a government-run platform that is raising money to repair damaged infrastructure.Clockwise, from top left, members of the choir including: Anastasiia Rusina and Taisiia Poliakova; Bogdana Novikova; Polina Fedorchenko; and Kateryna Rohova.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe concert will also celebrate the centennial of the North American premiere at Carnegie Hall of “Carol of the Bells,” by the Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych. (The name of the choir comes from the Ukrainian title for the music.)The choir hopes that the concert will help bring attention to Russia’s continuing attacks, including its recent efforts to damage Ukraine’s supply of electricity, heat and water, threatening a new kind of humanitarian crisis this winter.“It has been exhausting,” said Mykhailo Kostyna, a 16-year-old singer. “We’re just happy now that we can share Ukraine’s culture and spirit with the world.”The State of the WarA Pivotal Point: Ukraine is on the offensive, but with about one-fifth of its territory still occupied by Russian forces, there is still a long way to go, and the onset of winter will bring new difficulties.Ukraine’s Electric Grid: As many Ukrainians head into winter without power or water, Western officials say that rebuilding Ukraine’s battered energy infrastructure needs to be considered a second front in the war.A Bloody Vortex : Even as they have celebrated successes elsewhere, Ukrainian forces in the small eastern city of Bakhmut have endured relentless Russian attacks. And the struggle to hold it is only intensifying.Dnipro River: A volunteer Ukrainian special forces team has been conducting secret raids under the cover of darkness, traveling across the strategic waterway that has become the dividing line of the southern front.After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, many members of the choir scattered across the country. Some, seeking shelter and security, fled abroad.The choir, which has been a training ground for Ukrainian singers since its founding in 1971, held virtual rehearsals to keep the ensemble together. The choristers stayed in touch on social media, where they shared upbeat songs as well as clips of practice sessions, and checked in on one another.“The choir kept my connection to Ukraine alive,” said Taisiia Poliakova, 15, who fled to Germany shortly after the invasion. “It gave me a safe environment amid all the madness of war.”“These songs remind me of the pain,” one choir member said, “but they also help me somehow deal with the pain.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesLearning new songs at home was a challenge that provided an escape from the constant ringing of air-raid sirens. It also gave choir members an outlet for the intense emotions they were experiencing.Oleksandra Lutsak, 20, said the war had deeply affected her music. Now, when she sings, she said, she sees the faces of five friends who died in the war. Sometimes, she imagines the experience of a friend captured by Russian soldiers. When rehearsing folk songs, she envisions “destroyed homes with no roofs, collapsed walls, everything burned down — and people standing around who have nowhere to spend the winter.”“These songs remind me of the pain,” she said, “but they also help me somehow deal with the pain.”Other singers have struggled to look beyond the chaos of war. Polina Holtseva, 15, said she sometimes felt she was living in a constant state of fear. She was pained to see friends and relatives endure physical injuries and economic hardships because of the conflict.“I feel like I’ve suffered so many psychological traumas I can’t even speak of them,” she said. “My nervous system is all over the place. I feel like my whole world has been turned upside down.”Clockwise, from top left, the singers: Mykhailo Kostyna; Uliana Sukach-Kochetkova; the twin sisters Marharyta and Kira Kupchyk; and Varvara Avotynsh.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIn August, the Shchedryk choir reunited for a series of concerts in Copenhagen. Then, this fall, as it prepared for its Carnegie debut, the choir rehearsed in Kyiv for the first time since the start of the war.The recent Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure brought new challenges. Rehearsals were often interrupted by sirens, and frequent power outages meant long stretches without light.“It was in those moments that we felt the most responsibility to keep practicing, because this was a testament to our dedication to our craft,” Fedorchenko said.Because of the war, the choir left Ukraine on Nov. 19 for Warsaw, where they were given rehearsal space inside the Chopin University of Music and obtained visas to travel to the United States.Marianna Sablina, the choir’s artistic director and chief conductor, whose mother founded the ensemble, said that the Carnegie concert, which was planned before the invasion, is now “even more momentous, given the struggles we are facing.”The choir is one of several Ukrainian ensembles to go abroad since the invasion, as part of efforts to highlight the country’s cultural identity. The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, an ensemble of refugees who fled the war and musicians who stayed behind, toured Europe and the United States in the summer. The Kyiv City Ballet performed in many American cities this fall.The Shchedryk choir arrived in New York this week with a mix of excitement and nervousness, uncertain whether the performance would resonate with an American audience. They brought Ukrainian flags, T-shirts and souvenirs to give to new friends.In New York, they have a busy schedule: rehearsals at local churches as well as visits to tourist destinations including Times Square and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Wednesday, they gathered at Grand Central Terminal to sing “Carol of the Bells.”Marharyta and Kira Kupchyk, 14-year-old twins from Kyiv, said they felt relieved to have some distance from the war while in New York. But they said they were still growing accustomed to the enormity of the city.“In Kyiv, you can walk easier — you can even dance down the streets,” Marharyta said. “But in New York, it’s not like that.”In between rehearsals and sightseeing, the twins checked social media apps for news of the war and sent messages to family and friends in Ukraine. They said they worried about their father, who has been out of touch because he recently started military training in Kyiv.“I hope we can help make sure this war will end soon,” Kira said.Marianna Sablina, the artistic director of the Shchedryk choir, preparing the singers for their performance in New York.Lila Barth for The New York Times More

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      Clara Schumann and Florence Price Get Their Due at Carnegie Hall

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      Two works by these composers have been marginalized in classical music, but they were never forgotten, as their histories show.Two composers marginalized by history will take center stage at Carnegie Hall this week.On Friday, the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which is making its Carnegie debut with Beatrice Rana as the soloist 187 years after its premiere.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphia ensemble’s music director, called the concert, which sandwiches those two pieces between classics by Ravel, an example of varying artistic perspectives. “A work of art is a viewpoint from an artist,” he said in an interview. “And if you have only one part of society that always gets their viewpoint heard, we constantly hear one viewpoint. It’s so important to have different viewpoints.”As a result of rediscoveries and shifting approaches to programming, works by Schumann and Price have migrated to classical music’s mainstream in recent years, with attention from major orchestras, especially Philadelphia, and recordings on prestige labels like Deutsche Grammophon. But they were never truly forgotten, as their histories show.Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minorIn 1835, the piano concerto by Schumann (then Clara Wieck, not yet married to the composer Robert Schumann) premiered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, Germany, under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. She was just 16, but already famous as a composer and virtuosic performer. The work earned ovations, and later, the Viennese demanded three performances in one season. But after Robert Schumann’s journal, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, among others, reviewed it as a “lady’s” composition, she shelved it.The concerto’s second edition didn’t come about until 1970, according to Nancy B. Reich’s biography “Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman.” (The pianist Michael Ponti is believed to have made the first recording in 1971.) Decades of work by musicians and musicologists culminated in Schumann’s widely celebrated 200th birthday in 2019. But despite new recordings by Ragna Schirmer and Isata Kanneh-Mason, who recently debuted the concerto with the Baltimore Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, continue to ignore it.Some artists have shrugged off the concerto, which Schumann completed when she was 15, as the work of a teenager. But it has had a long-ranging influence on some of the most beloved piano concertos that came after it.“It was written at a pivotal point in the history of the genre,” Joe Davies wrote in “Clara Schumann Studies,” published by Cambridge University Press last year. “It invites a powerful reimagining of what the concerto can be and do. Stylistically and expressively, she put her own stamp on the genre.”In an interview, Rana, who called the concerto “a genius work in many ways,” said: “I think that it’s very, very underestimated — the intellectual value of this concerto in the history of music.” Schumann’s nontraditional, through-composed form, seamless without breaks between movements, Reich has noted, bears the influence of Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. Rana called it as revolutionary as concertos by Liszt and Robert Schumann, both of which it predates by over a decade.Yannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie in a program featuring Florence Price’s music in February.Steve J. ShermanThe concerto’s powerful march opening, deceptively simple in its orchestral unison, contains the five-note motif that unites the themes across its three movements. In its transformative second movement Romanze, a tacit orchestra listens to the piano sing an exquisite love duet with a solo cello — an instrument that both Robert Schumann and Brahms featured in their concerto’s solo movements. Its final, longest movement displays the full breadth of Clara’s pianistic prowess and personality.Alexander Stefaniak, the author of “Becoming Clara Schumann,” writes that Robert emulated her form and improvisatory style; Robert also inverted Clara’s piano entrance in his piano concerto (also in A minor). Based on that, you could consider her reach extending to Grieg’s and Rachmaninoff’s first concertos, which echo Robert Schumann’s. Brahms might even have been inspired by her third movement Polonaise in his First Concerto’s third-movement Hungarian dance.“You can see she was a great virtuoso because what she writes is very challenging for the piano,” Rana said.At Carnegie, Nézet-Séguin intentionally avoided the cliché of programming Schumann with her husband’s work. For him, she and Price stand on their own. As composers, they had “the self-confidence to believe in what they wanted to bring to the world,” he said. “They are works that have no equivalent.”Price: Symphony No. 3 in C minorPrice’s Third Symphony is a work rooted in the traditions of symphonic Romanticism and classical Black composition, simultaneously adding to and expanding the expectations of orchestral technique. “A cross-section of Negro life and psychology” is how she described it in a letter to Sergei Koussevitsky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music director, in 1941. That was a year after the symphony’s premiere, with Valter Poole and the Michigan W.P.A. Symphony, which was positively received in the Detroit press and even earned a mention in Eleanor Roosevelt’s syndicated column, “My Day.”Price’s music, Nézet-Séguin said, is “like a great wine that really ages very well.” He and the Philadelphia Orchestra released a Grammy Award-winning recording of her First and Third Symphonies last year. Since then, he added, “We keep exploring all the finesse and the detail and the language.”Philadelphia’s recording of the Third is the most high-profile, though not the first. (That was by Apo Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic, released in 2001.) The album comes after decades of artists championing Price’s work, including luminaries like Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, as well as present-day virtuosos like Michelle Cann, Samantha Ege and Randall Goosby, whose live recording of the violin concertos with the Philadelphia Orchestra will be released on the Decca label next year.Rae Linda Brown, in her book “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price,” described the Third Symphony as a reflection of “a maturity of style and a new attitude toward Black musical materials.” Rather than applying African American music idioms through melody and harmony alone, Price incorporates conventions of form, texture, rhythm and timbre, an approach she also used in her Concerto in One Movement (1934), Violin Concerto No. 1 (1939) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952). Her percussion section calls for snare drum, cymbals, triangle, orchestral bells, castanets, wood blocks and sand blocks, to name a few; and she expands the brasses and woodwinds beyond the sets of twos from her earlier works. The first and final movements feature more contrapuntal motion and tonal ambiguity.Nézet-Séguin said that during a rehearsal, a Philadelphia Orchestra member mentioned that Price probably played a lot of Bach, and that the third movement Juba-Allegro’s melody seemed to be a reference to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. That speaks to another core aspect of her style: her use of the African American musical procedure of signifyin(g), in which older works and forms are referred to and transformed in new, unexpected directions.The juba dance movement of Price’s Third features asymmetrical phrasing, rhythmic complexity and interaction between sections. The cool trio section, with habanera rhythms and a muted trumpet, and her use of a modified jazz progression for the main theme, reflects a creative palette that crosses time, region and culture.UNLIKE SCHUMANN’S CONCERTO, Price’s symphony is not making its Carnegie Hall debut. But it has been performed there only once before — by the Gateway Music Festival Orchestra this year. By contrast, according to the hall’s archives, the Ravel works on Friday’s program, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “Boléro,” have been performed there 48 and 114 times.“We’ve had too much of the white European male for too long,” Nézet-Séguin said, adding that it was time to aim “for a certain kind of balance in terms of what we see on our concert stage.”Nézet-Séguin is an established Price champion by now; he and the Philadelphians brought her works to five European cities this summer alone. And Rana can say the same about Schumann, having toured the concerto with Nézet-Séguin, and having prepared a recording to be released in February.“The only way to give dignity to a piece is to listen to it,” Rana said. “It needs to be played. It needs to be heard.”Sarah Fritz, a musicologist who is writing a book about Clara Schumann, teaches at the Westminster Conservatory of Music at Rider University.A. Kori Hill is a musicologist, freelance writer and staff member of the nonprofit ArtsWave. She lives in Cincinnati. More