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    A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them

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    Alisa Weilerstein’s latest project is a series of staged solo recitals that weave Bach’s cello suites with newly commissioned works.When the cellist Alisa Weilerstein found herself cooped up with her family at the start of the pandemic, her first instinct, like that of so many classical musicians, was to find some way — any way — to communicate.She joined the artists who found solace on social media, streaming a movement of Bach’s cello suites each day, for 36 days in a row. “I just want to have a kind of outpouring of music, of thoughts, and everything else,” she told The New York Times then. “Right now all I really want to do is give.”It didn’t last. Come that November, Weilerstein had put her cello away, and she was taking long walks on the beaches near her home in San Diego instead of practicing. When she finally forced herself to play again, she found herself staring out of the window, wondering what her field might look like when, or if, performers returned to the stage.“To everyone’s credit, I think, everyone is wrestling with this issue,” Weilerstein said in a recent interview from Toronto. “We all had a lot of time to think about what it means to really connect with an audience, what it means to connect with each other, and an appreciation for being in one communal space.”If Weilerstein’s response was a common one to a common crisis, the result of her reflections shines with uncommon ambition, so much so that it is hard to think of many soloists of a similar stature who would dare to bring anything like it to the stage.Meet “Fragments,” a project whose first installment — of six — Weilerstein will perform at Zankel Hall on April 1. Certain aspects of it may be familiar. She will be there, playing solo. She will perform a Bach suite in its entirety, and she will play it with her typical, heartfelt passion. She will offer new music: quite a lot of it, selected from works by 27 composers she has commissioned.Weilerstein at the “Fragments” premiere in Toronto.Lisa SakulenskyBut this project is intended to reimagine what a cello recital can be, to challenge some of the conventions that Weilerstein thinks might inhibit a listener’s immediate response to the music, and to add layers of theatricality to the arguably staid traditions of the concert hall, in an acceptance that a musician is, after all, performing on a stage.So each of the six programs, which Weilerstein will offer over the next few seasons, will have a dramaturgical element: Hanako Yamaguchi, the former, longtime director of music programming at Lincoln Center, is her artistic adviser, and her production team includes the director Elkhanah Pulitzer, the set and lighting designer Seth Reiser, and the costumer Carlos J. Soto. There will be limited program notes in advance, little to guide listeners except their ears and eyes through a collagelike narrative arc assembled from musical fragments.“There’s a lot of things that classical music does uniquely well, and it’s important to preserve those things,” Weilerstein said. “I do think, though, that we clearly have a problem, that we are not connecting with enough people, and that we are relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.So “Fragments” is not, thankfully, another addition to the increasingly passé genre of “response” programming, in which composers are commissioned to write works on the dispiriting condition that they must speak to a piece by the masters of the past. Having scoured the internet to survey the new-music scene, and consulted with past collaborators including Osvaldo Golijov and Matthias Pintscher, Weilerstein invited 28 composers to participate. The 27 who agreed — including Tania León, Joan Tower, Carlos Simon and Daniel Kidane — make up a roster that is remarkably diverse demographically and stylistically, but almost all of them asked if they should write with specific reference to Bach, Weilerstein recalled. She left the choice up to them.“Some did,” she said, “and some very much did not.”Caroline Shaw, whose “Microfictions” for Weilerstein is the second volume in a run of collected miniatures that she has also written for the Miró Quartet and the New York Philharmonic, said that her piece is not an explicit response to Bach, but that his influence was surely present in it.“Fragments” is an attempt to fix a problem, Weilerstein said of “relying too much on our old models of presenting, especially when it comes to new music.”Evelyn Freja for The New York Times“I live with his music all the time, I love it deeply,” Shaw said, adding that the second book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” has been her “soundtrack” for the past year. “It’s very hard to write anything for solo cello and not have some subconscious relationship to Bach.”Weilerstein did set some rules. She asked that the new pieces be about 10 minutes long, and that they come in two or three fragments that she could intersperse with other scores without violating the meaning of the music. Bach was not available for consultation, but she is subjecting his suites to the same treatment.“There was a temptation to write something really virtuosic, really out there, really avant-garde,” said Reinaldo Moya, one of the more junior composers in Weilerstein’s group, “because you’re not going to have the chance to work with a soloist of that caliber every time. At least I don’t.”Free to write what he wanted, Moya drew on the personal ties that he has to Weilerstein through the conductor Rafael Payare, her husband. Earlier in their careers, Moya and Payare both played in the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, a country that has such an addiction to caffeine that it has a precise linguistic taxonomy for coffee and its functions. Moya’s fragments depict an early-morning brew, an after-lunch pick-me-up and a sludgy cup needed for staying up late.“It felt a little bit — all right, it felt a lot risky to give her a piece about coffee like that,” Moya said. “But I wanted to go with my gut, and relate my work to something that might connect with her on that level, not a technical or a composer-y level.”WEILERSTEIN HAS NEVER had the reputation of being a new-music specialist, but she has given her fair share of premieres, and few of her colleagues on the international circuit can list anything so bold as her recording of Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto on their discographies. She has evidently thought hard about how contemporary composers can be given a fairer chance to break through to audiences, especially to those people for whom contemporary art, say, is an easier ask.“There are myriad reasons, of course,” Weilerstein said, exploring the apparent divergence in the fields, “but there is one very fundamental thing, which is, you walk into an exhibition, you see the painting or you see the work of art before anything, and it can hit you right where it needs to hit — and then you can find out all the context around it. With contemporary music, there’s so much context put around it even before we’ve heard anything.”For that reason, the lack of program notes — before the lights go dark, the audience will be given only the most basic information about the project, and the names of the composers they will hear — is a core part of “Fragments,” and a sign, its creators said, that, for all the deliberate, thoughtful artifice, the focus is on the music.“To shed the Rorschach inclination towards finding meaning in the program before hearing the music was a really important piece of the puzzle,” Pulitzer said. “How many of us do that, where we look at the bio, we’re making assumptions about gender, race, nationality, compositional precedent, who where their teachers, and when were they born?”The aim, she added, is to strip as much of that presumptive meaning as possible away, so that listeners can follow Weilerstein’s attempts to create new meaning in her musical quilts, and “dare to embark on this journey of not knowing, and allow it to be OK.”For Shaw, that was part of the attraction of “Fragments,” beyond the obvious appeal of writing for a soloist whose visible commitment expresses such a clear love of music.“Going to hear a concert and not looking at what’s on the program and not knowing what comes next — those have been some of my deepest and most revealing listening experiences,” Shaw said. “There’s also something beautiful and important about presenting different composers side by side, and behind a curtain, so that you’re not focusing on their name, or whether or not they’re Bach.”The staging does offer some hints about the music, as if to hold the listener’s hand. Reiser’s set stays constant, a deconstructed theater arrayed so that it evokes soloists’ constant struggles to create “a room of one’s own” as they travel the world’s halls, Pulitzer said, and at the same time “reawakens the spaces for the people who are familiar with them.” Each composer has a specific lighting color, to give a sense of which fragments combine to make wholes.There may be people, Weilerstein admits, who are put off by even a modest staging, or by her tinkering with performance traditions. For her though, “Fragments” is an attempt to make the concert hall more of a place of adventure again, and less of a dead end.“It’s like the E.M. Forster phrase, ‘only connect,’” Weilerstein explained. “This is the philosophy behind the project, fundamentally: connecting the pieces, connecting the voices of our time together, connecting the familiar and the new, connecting this music with the audience without the barrier of so much contextualization, categorization, bias, all of these things.”“And connecting,” she added, “our contemporary world with the concert format. This is what it’s about for me.” More

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      Yo-Yo Ma Makes His Encore a Call for Peace, With a Nod to Casals

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      The celebrated cellist capped a concert with the New York Philharmonic with a work that Pablo Casals often played to protest war and oppression.Listen to This ArticleAfter a rousing performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to the stage for an encore.But rather than rush into a familiar crowd-pleaser, Ma began speaking from the stage of David Geffen Hall to the sold-out crowd. He explained the work he would play: “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song that was a favorite of the eminent cellist Pablo Casals, who performed it as a call for peace and to evoke his native Catalonia, which he had fled when he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Elgar Cello Concerto was written in 1919, right after the Great War — the Great War that we said would never happen again,” Ma told the audience of about 2,200 people, speaking without a microphone.Then he spoke of Casals who, after World War II, suspended his concert career to protest the decision of the Allies not to try to topple Franco in Spain. “And the only times he would play would be to play this piece,” Ma noted, “which is from his native Catalonia, a folk song that he thought symbolized freedom.”In a telephone interview, Ma said his aim was to remind people of their shared humanity at a time when there is so much strife and suffering in the world, including in Ukraine.“The question is, why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” he said.Ma said that music was a way of coping “in a world where we have both empathy deficit and empathy fatigue.”“How many of us think about World War I or World War II?” he said. “How many of us think about Rwanda or about the Rohingya? These all become distant very quickly in our first world. But for people in other parts of the world, it’s constant, it doesn’t go away.”“I don’t have an answer,” he added. “I’m trying to find a way of coping myself. And maybe at some level playing music is a way of engaging people in the common search of who we are, and who we want to be.”Ma has long been fond of “Song of the Birds,” which he has often performed in the past.In the interview, he said the piece was powerful in part because it highlighted the special abilities of birds.“They literally can have altitude and perspective on our world and have the freedom to cross all our boundaries and borders,” he said. “There is something just wondrous about that. And we’re part of the same world. Can we learn from that and hopefully not make the same sort of mistakes over and over again?”Since the Russian invasion last year, Ma has used music to show solidarity with Ukraine. He performed the Ukrainian national anthem last year with the pianist Emanuel Ax and the violinist Leonidas Kavakos before a concert at the Kennedy Center. He also played a Bach cello suite on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.Casals, regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time, fled Spain in the late 1930s, saying he would not return until democracy was restored. Living in the French border town of Prades, he worked to raise money for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, writing letters to officials, charities, journalists and others seeking support.He would perform “Song of the Birds,” or “El Cant dels Ocells,” at the end of his music festivals in Prades and the scattered concerts he played in exile. He played it in 1961 at the White House for President John F. Kennedy. And he performed it again when he visited the United Nations in 1971, two years before he died, to deliver an antiwar message.“The birds in the sky, in the space, in the space, sing ‘peace, peace, peace,’” Casals said. “The music is a music that Bach and Beethoven and all the greats would have loved and admired. It is so beautiful and it is also the soul of my country, Catalonia.”Ma has often paid tribute to Casals, calling him a hero. He played for the eminent cellist in 1962, when he was 7 and Casals was 85. Casals helped launch Ma’s career when he brought the prodigy to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who introduced Ma at a performance at the White House that same year before an audience that included President Kennedy.In the interview, Ma recalled visiting Casals’s summer home in Spain in 2019, which now houses a museum, where he saw his letters of protest and pleas to help refugees.“Casals showed me, even as a young boy, that he had his priorities,” he said. “He was a human being first, a musician second and a cellist third.”Audio produced by More

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      Leslie Parnas, Celebrated Cellist and Musical Diplomat, Dies at 90

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      His success at a competition in Moscow in 1962 earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.Leslie Parnas, a renowned cellist and teacher whose second-place award at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War helped propel him to a storied career, died on Feb. 1 at a rehabilitation facility in Venice, Fla. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his eldest son, Marcel, said.Mr. Parnas, who hailed from a family of musicians in St. Louis, was 30 when he won the silver medal at the second Tchaikovsky competition in 1962, the first time it included a cello category. His success in Moscow, where he performed for Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, earned him global renown and gave him a platform as a musical emissary.He was the only American cellist to win a top award that year — the other winners were Russian — and his success came only four years after the pianist Van Cliburn clinched the gold medal at the first Tchaikovsky competition, which was viewed as an American triumph.Mr. Parnas, known for his lyrical playing, returned regularly to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s for concerts before large crowds. He studied Russian, offered advice to aspiring performers there and lobbied Soviet officials to send musicians to study in the United States. He later served as a juror for the Tchaikovsky competition.“When I play music,” he told The New York Times in 1978 during a visit to Leningrad, “it is not only an example of emotional freedom, but it is also a message for peace and for the right of each individual to express himself.”Mr. Parnas received the silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow from the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.via Parnas FamilyLeslie Parnas was born on Nov. 11, 1931, the son of Eli Parnas, who worked at a paper box factory and played the clarinet, and Etta (Engel) Parnas, a piano teacher.He began studying cello at a young age and made his debut at 14 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, playing Édouard Lalo’s cello concerto at a children’s concert. Two years later he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with the renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. He graduated in 1951.After a stint in the U.S. Navy Band, he returned to Missouri to serve as principal cellist in the St. Louis Symphony, a position he held from 1954 to 1962. From the outset, his talents were on display. When a soloist was late for a performance of the Brahms double concerto for violin and cello, Mr. Parnas stepped in at the last minute, dazzling the audience.He also caught the attention of the eminent cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, who presented him an award at an international cello competition in Paris in 1957.It was the beginning of a long friendship. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Casals collaborated in a variety of venues, including the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont and Mr. Casals’s festival in Puerto Rico.Mr. Casals, one of the most revered musicians of the 20th century, could be an intimidating figure. But he had a rapport with Mr. Parnas. During a class in 1961, Mr. Casals chastised Mr. Parnas for playing with too much vibrato. Without missing a beat, Mr. Parnas offered to sell him some.“None of us would ever have dared say something like that,” said Jaime Laredo, a violinist and conductor who often played with Mr. Parnas. “Leslie could get away with things like that. They had a mutual respect.”When Mr. Casals died in 1973, Mr. Parnas was a pallbearer at his funeral.The renowned musician Pablo Casals became a friend of Mr. Parnas, who was a pallbearer at his funeral.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesMr. Parnas honed a soaring sound in repertoire that ranged from Brahms to Shostakovich. He won praise for a 1964 recording of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, with Mr. Laredo and the pianist Rudolf Serkin.He could be headstrong, changing tempos on a whim and instructing colleagues to play quietly during his solos.“He was a very instinctive player,” Mr. Laredo said. “He wasn’t that particular about following the score to the nth degree. He just played naturally.”He made his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1965, playing Schumann’s cello concerto. In his review, the Times music critic Howard Klein called him a “fiery and romantic cellist.”“Mr. Parnas did not play so much as he sang the work,” Mr. Klein wrote. “The daring way he dug into those high position passages added a gambler’s excitement.”Mr. Parnas became a fixture on the chamber music scene, including at Marlboro, where he performed for many years. He joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1969 as a founding member, helping cement its reputation as a magnet for top artists. From 1975 to 1984 he was artistic director of Kneisel Hall, a chamber music festival and school in Blue Hill, Maine.Ida Kavafian, a violinist and violist who played alongside Mr. Parnas in the early days of the Chamber Music Society, said his expressiveness was striking.“It was the kind of sound that would just wrap you up, envelop you, and you felt it was all around you,” she said. “It was an experience.”As his performance career waned, Mr. Parnas focused on teaching, including at Boston University, where he served as an adjunct associate professor of music from 1963 to 2013.Agnes Kim, a cellist who studied with him from 2004 to 2008, said he spoke often about the importance of not letting technique interfere with musical expression.“He was a legendary teacher, but to me he was never that faraway, mystical person,” she said. “He was just so friendly, so humble. He always had his playful grin every time I went to the classroom.”Along with his son Marcel, Mr. Parnas is survived by another son, Jean-Pierre, and four grandchildren, two of whom are professional musicians. He married Ingeburg Rathmann in 1961; she died of breast cancer in 2009.Marcel Parnas said that his father continued playing his 1698 Matteo Goffriller cello almost every day until late in life, and that he was especially fond of Bach’s cello suites.“For him, music was everything,” he said. “That was the way he lived: to play the cello.” More

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      It’s Never Too Late to Play the Cello

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      “It’s Never Too Late” is a new series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.In 1940, at age 12, Vera Jiji found her first passion: the cello. She learned to love playing the orchestra instrument at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. “I didn’t pick the cello. They assigned it to me because I had a good ear and long fingers,” said the Bronx native, now 93. “I loved it. It’s a beautiful instrument that can sound like a human voice. It looked like a female body, with hips, breasts and a waist. Holding it and playing it was a very intimate experience.”As an adult, though, she stopped playing the instrument. She became a professor and a fixture at Brooklyn College teaching English classes. She married twice and had four children. Her beloved cello, her mother’s high school graduation present, sat tucked away in the back of her clothing closet. It remained untouched, almost forgotten, for about 40 years. She picked up her cello again only after retiring at 62.“I revived the passion I always felt when I started playing again,” she said. Since then, it has been like a second life.Today Dr. Jiji, who lives with her 93-year-old husband in an Upper East Side townhouse, can be found playing most Fridays with other amateurs and friends in two musical groups, a trio and a string quartet, at the 92nd Street Y. She’s also a part of the Y’s annual musical performance. In 2007 she self-published her first book, “Cello Playing for Music Lovers,” which is sold on Amazon in more than 20 countries. (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)What made you return to music after all these years?Brooklyn College gave me companions and socialization with other teachers and students. I felt important socially. When I retired, I lost that. I felt empty and needed to replace that loss and community. I wanted to meet people in the neighborhood.How did you feel about retiring?I thought my life was over; it wasn’t. I had to find a different road. I thought about the road I took when I was younger, and the one I didn’t take because I was a wife and a mother of four and had a career. I thought about the road I didn’t travel — one filled with music — and realized I should take that road now. I couldn’t take both at the same time. The one I took became my life. I went back to the fork and took the other road to see where it would take me.How did you know where to start?I’m a half a block away from the 92nd Street Y. I walked in and asked about classes; they had a creative music class for people over 60 and told me to just show up. I thought I would have to take a test, but I didn’t. I was at the piano, seated next to an instructor who said, “Let’s see how you play,” when someone walked in carrying a cello. I couldn’t believe it. I asked if I could play it and I fell in love with the instrument instantly.What did that feel like?Like coming home. It all came flooding back, and it was wonderful. I felt like I was reconnecting with a best friend. I needed the opportunity to play music and have these other musicians in my life. This was a return to a prized passion.What have you gained by returning to this passion?Music is a perfect language; it’s like a conversation between people who never misunderstand each other and never get bored. When you play music with people, it’s a kind of friendship. Music is a world of pleasure. It has given me a way to communicate without using words. It gave me a next step in life.What made you write your book, “Cello Playing for Music Lovers”?I looked for other books I could turn to, and didn’t find anything helpful. So I decided to write one. As an English professor, I knew how to do this. I’m good at articulating ideas, being able to put things down in a way people can follow, and I’m disciplined enough to sit down everyday and write. I made it a practice to stop at a specific point where I knew what I wanted to say going forward. I never stopped when I was at a loss. That way I could continue the next day knowing I had direction and wouldn’t get overwhelmed. And I wanted to help others.What did it feel like for Dr. Jiji to return to the cello? “Like coming home,” she said. “It all came flooding back, and it was wonderful.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHow do you feel about this stage in your life?I’m 93. People view age incorrectly: Getting older doesn’t mean you can’t have something, you can. And getting older isn’t getting worse. I’m about enjoying the moment. You have to get up each morning and do something you love. That’s how you move forward.What is your best advice for people looking to make a change?Do not be afraid to go back to something you loved. People say no to things too quickly. We aren’t always our best friends. Your passion or skills are still there. You will remember more than you think. All the information about music I thought I’d lost was in a part of my brain that wasn’t talking to me until I tapped back into it.What have you learned during this new act in your life?Even though I was aging I learned I could still re-enter this wonderful world of creating music. And the community I lost I found again. Music gave me a new group of people. It gave me support. It gave me a new home.In this second act, what are you most proud of accomplishing?Writing and publishing “Cello Playing for Music Lovers.” I lived, I died; what did I give the world? This book, which will outlast me. When I’m gone, this will still be here, helping people learn the cello.What lesson can people learn from your experience?Don’t say no to yourself.We’re looking for people who decide that it’s never too late to switch gears, change their life and pursue dreams. Should we talk to you or someone you know? Share your story here. More

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      When the Cellos Play, the Cows Come Home

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      A collaboration between a cattle farmer and a Danish music training program brings regular recitals to pampered livestock.LUND, Denmark — During a recent performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Pezzo Capriccioso,” a handful of audience members leaned forward attentively, their eyes bright, a few encouraging snuffles escaping from the otherwise hushed parterre. Though relative newcomers to classical music, they seemed closely attuned to the eight cellists onstage, raising their heads abruptly as the piece’s languid strains gave way to rapid-fire bow strokes.When it was over, amid the fervent applause and cries of “bravo,” there could be heard a single, appreciative moo.On Sunday, in Lund, a village about 50 miles south of Copenhagen, a group of elite cellists played two concerts for both some music-loving cows and their human counterparts. The culmination of a collaboration between two local cattle farmers, Mogens and Louise Haugaard, and Jacob Shaw, founder of the nearby Scandinavian Cello School, the concerts were meant to attract some attention to the school and the young musicians in residence there. But to judge by the response of both two- and four-legged attendees, it also demonstrated just how popular an initiative that brings cultural life to rural areas can be.Until a few years ago, Shaw, 32, who was born in Britain, had toured the world as a solo cellist, performing in hallowed venues including Carnegie Hall and the Guangzhou Opera House. When he moved to Stevns (the larger municipality to which Lund belongs) and opened the Scandinavian Cello School, he soon discovered that his neighbors the Haugaards, who raise Hereford cows, were also classical music lovers. In fact Mogens, who is also a former mayor of Stevns, sits on the board of the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra.Left to right: The cattle farmers Mogens and Louise Haugaard, and Jacob Shaw, who founded the Scandinavian Cello School.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesWhen the cellist, who had toured Japan, told the farmer about how the country’s famously pampered Wagyu cows were raised to produce tender beef, it didn’t take much convincing for Mogens to adopt one component of their upbringing for his own cattle.Beginning in November 2020, a boom box playing Mozart and other classical music in the Haugaard barn has serenaded the cows daily. About once a week, Shaw and any students in residence have come over for a live performance.Although it remains unclear whether their new listening habits have affected the quality of the cows’ meat, the farmer noted that the animals come running whenever the musicians show up, and get as close as possible while they play.“Classical music is very good for humans,” Haugaard said. “It helps us relax, and cows can tell whether we’re relaxed or not. It makes sense that it would make them feel good too.”It’s not always good for the people who perform it, however. Shaw said he founded the Scandinavian Cello School to help fledgling musicians prepare for the less glamorous demands of a professional career in an industry that can sometimes chew up young artists in the constant quest for the next big thing.While touring internationally as a self-managed artist, he found himself exhausted by the grind of negotiating contracts, promoting himself and relentless travel, he said in an interview. That experience — coupled with a stint as a professor at a prestigious music academy in Barcelona — made him realize there was a hole there that needed filling.The Scandinavian Cello School’s students, who come from all over the world to live in a former farmhouse in Stevn, Denmark, are mostly aged between 17 and 25.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times“It’s actually nice playing for cows,” said Johannes Gray. “They really do come over to you. And they have preferences.”Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times“Classical music is very good for humans,” Mogens Haugaard said. “It helps us relax, and cows can tell whether we’re relaxed or not. It makes sense that it would make them feel good too.”Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times“I kept coming across fantastic young talents who simply weren’t being given the tools to get out there,” said Shaw. They might have excellent teachers to work with them on the music itself, but what was missing was “that extra bit of help,” he said, in the areas like booking concerts, preparing for competitions and handling social media.In its original incarnation, the Scandinavian Cello School was an itinerant organization — more a traveling boot camp than an academy. But in 2018, Shaw and his girlfriend, the violinist Karen Johanne Pedersen, bought a farmhouse in Stevns and turned it into a permanent base for the school. Its students, who come from all over the world and are mostly aged between 17 and 25, stay for short-term residencies at which they hone their musical as well as professional skills — including how to achieve a work-life balance.The location helps with that. Situated less than a half mile from the sea, the school also offers the visiting musicians the opportunity to help out in a vegetable garden, forage in the nearby forest, fish for dinner, or just relax in an area far from the city.That environment is part of what drew Johannes Gray, a 23-year-old American cellist, currently living in Paris, who won the prestigious Pablo Casals International Award in 2018. Gray initially visited the Scandinavian Cello School in 2019, and then returned for in the school’s first post-pandemic intake, attracted by both the career development opportunities and the leisure activities.“Jacob’s been giving me advice on how to create a program and basically package it to make it more interesting,” Gray said. “But we’re also both extreme foodies, and we love cooking, so after a long day of practicing, we can go out and fish, or plan this huge feast. It’s not just about the music.”As much as the musicians benefit from the environment, so this primarily agricultural region profits from the small influx of international artists. The school receives some financial support from local government and businesses. In return, the visiting musicians — seven have come for the current residency — perform at schools and care facilities in the region. And they play for the cows.An audience of 35 humans also attended two concerts by the school’s students on April 25.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times“I hope it’s one of the lessons we take from corona, how much we all — even cows — miss being together,” said Joy Mogensen, Denmark’s culture minister.Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York TimesBecause of coronavirus restrictions, the two concerts on Sunday were held outdoors, and human attendance for each was limited to 35. (Both sold out.) Among the attendees, who had the opportunity to snack on burgers made by a local chef from the Haugaards’ beef, was Denmark’s minister of culture, Joy Mogensen, who noted that this was the first live concert she had attended in six months.“I’ve witnessed a lot of creativity these last months,” she said in an interview. “But digital just isn’t the same. I hope it’s one of the lessons we take from corona, how much we all — even cows — miss being together for cultural events.”Both species in attendance seemed to enjoy themselves. Before the concert, the cows had been scattered across the field, munching grass in the bright sunshine and nursing their newborn calves. But as the musicians, clad in formal wear, took their seats on the hay-strewn stage, and began the dramatic opening bars of the Danish composer Jacob Gade’s “Jalousie (Tango Tzigane),” the cows crowded over to the fence that separated them from the human audience, and jostled for position.After a program including an arrangement of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody” and a crowd-pleasing encore of Édith Piaf’s “Hymne de l’Amour,” the musicians were as charmed by their livestock listeners as their human ones.“It’s actually nice playing for cows,” said Gray. “We saw it in rehearsal — they really do come over to you. And they have preferences. Did you see how they all left at one point? They’re not really Dvorak fans.”Carsten Snejbjerg for The New York Times More