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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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      Chamber Music Society’s Leaders on Balancing Old and New

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      Wu Han and David Finckel take a conservative course navigating passionate feelings about the future of classical music.Inside the offices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center hangs an old letter from an alarmed listener.“The accordion is not a chamber music instrument,” huffs the letter, written in the wake of a concert featuring a Bach sonata transcribed for cello and accordion. “Please do not impose that on your loyal audience again.”The sentiment gives a sense of the grand passions aroused by even tiny tweaks to the society’s programming. Since becoming the organization’s artistic directors in 2004, the husband-and-wife team of David Finckel and Wu Han have faced those passions, which fuel an often fiery debate about the future of classical music.Some quail whenever the society, which presents more than 100 concerts per year in New York and beyond, veers even slightly from traditional crowd pleasers, including works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Others have said the organization should be more adventurous and do more to highlight the work of living composers, who are rarely featured on its main stage at Alice Tully Hall. (Of nearly 100 works on its Tully series this season, two are by living composers; neither was written in the 21st century.)Reviewing the society’s opening night last month in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe chided the organization for “a conservatism extreme even by classical music’s low standards.”In an interview, Finckel, a cellist, and Wu, a pianist, discussed that criticism, as well as the impact of the pandemic and the return of live concerts. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Wu (on piano, third from left) played Mendelssohn last month with, from left, the violinist Richard Lin, the violists Matthew Lipman and Arnaud Sussmann and the bassist Blake Hinson.Cherylynn TsushimaWhile several of your concerts in New York this season have been crowded, it’s unclear whether audiences will show up for culture as they did before the coronavirus. Are you concerned about the future for arts organizations?WU HAN The future of the arts is actually brighter than before. The appreciation for music has grown tenfold because you realize how important it was in your life. For me to walk onstage now is still incredibly emotional. I don’t see how it will ever be the same after this pandemic.How did the pandemic change you and your organization?WU People know that in hard times we have each other’s backs. We support each other. The musicians know that. There’s incredible bonding.DAVID FINCKEL In Soviet Russia, in Communist China, people were literally prevented from hearing music — not by a disease, but by governmental laws and censorship. It’s the way that I, as a privileged American, can feel an even deeper kinship with people having lived in Germany during the 1930s, or the 1940s and 1950s in China, and certainly the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.The pandemic wreaked havoc across the arts and forced the cancellation of dozens of your concerts. You made the decision to pay artists 50 percent of their promised fees and to add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled. How have you approached planning going forward?FINCKEL Now we have a couple of sort of hybrid seasons where there are programs carried over. It never occurred to us to say, “Oh, because we couldn’t do it, it’s no good, it’s old, it’s like food you throw out in the fridge.” These programs don’t go stale. They’re still there waiting for new life.Wu and Finckel (on cello, at right) played in 2015 with, from left, the violinist Daniel Hope and the violist Paul Neubauer.Tristan Cook/Chamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterYou have been criticized for not doing more to feature new music, especially in concerts at Tully Hall, your main stage. Can you explain your approach to programming?FINCKEL We never want to force people to listen to music that they don’t want to listen to because we think it’s good for them. We will make educated guesses as to what we think they might like and latch onto. And in those instances, we stick our necks out.There’s plenty of adventurous programing on the stage of Alice Tully Hall; one has to just study the brochure a little more carefully. But there are definitely programs for people who don’t want to have anything to do with the 20th century, and there are programs for people who don’t want to have anything to do with the 18th century. So it’s all there.Does Chamber Music Society do enough to champion new music, almost all of which is played in far smaller venues than Tully?WU You should have old music, you should have new music, you should have the best musicians playing, then you should shoot for as many places to play as possible.I don’t really care about having a premiere. The main idea is to have new music played as much as possible. New music should be thriving, should live forever, and should be played as much as possible.In a recent review in The Times, Zachary Woolfe, while praising your performances as “generally of unimpeachable quality,” said that the programming of your opening night last month showed a “blinkered view of music” that “encapsulates what the society has presented for some time.” What is your response?FINCKEL I just feel very sorry for this point of view. The person is missing so much opportunity for enjoyment. I mean, there is more variety and diversity in a single string quartet of Haydn than you can find in about a hundred works of other composers. Our repertoire spans 500 years of music. You know how much variety there is in that 500 years?How do you judge the success of your concerts?FINCKEL We use ourselves to judge, because we know when we hear a concert whether it came up to our expectations and our hopes as a good program or not. We know whether we played well or not. We know whether our artists played well. We consider ourselves experienced enough to be the ultimate judge of that and to build upon that experience, to take the organization forward. We take the blame.WU When the hall is completely empty, when nobody wants to come hear our programming, when we finish playing and there’s no applause, when people hate it so much that they don’t want to come to see C.M.S. — that’s the time we have a problem. We are far from there.What do you see as your main challenges in the years ahead?FINCKEL People have a hard time sitting still. Attention spans are getting shorter. The only thing this doesn’t change is the length of a Schubert trio. You can’t make it shorter, and you can’t play it faster. You can’t cut sections out of it. The art is what it is.We have this religious faith in the power and the quality of the art form — that it will grow up like grass grows up through concrete. It doesn’t matter how much concrete you put down; the grass is always going to come up. More

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      Review: Chamber Music Society Returns, Unchanged

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      The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.Out of the crucible of the past year and a half — a brutal pandemic, shuttered theaters, a renewed push for racial justice — major arts institutions have by and large emerged transformed, or at least chastened. Even in the persistently backward-looking classical music realm, there has been a sense of fresh beginnings, of the extension of earlier ventures toward the new and untried.The Metropolitan Opera reopened with its first work by a Black composer. The New York Philharmonic has returned promising premieres and rarities — including, this week, a program of contemporary pieces on which John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, from 1992, is as close to the standard repertory as it gets. Go to Carnegie Hall or the 92nd Street Y, and on any given night you’re likely to hear something other than chestnuts.Then there’s the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.This 52-year-old organization came back on Tuesday with a well played, depressing concert of Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert and Mendelssohn at Alice Tully Hall. Depressing because the program’s blinkered view of music encapsulates what the society has presented for some time — and what’s on the agenda for the rest of its season.Of the nearly 100 works being offered on its main stage at Tully through next spring, just two are by living composers. One of those, George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children,” was written over 50 years ago; the other, Wynton Marsalis’s quartet “At the Octoroon Balls,” in 1995. (And we’ll only get selections from the Marsalis.)Not that programming should be a question of new-music quotas. There are some artists whose main gifts are for astonishing revivals, not premieres. And there is value in providing older but unfamiliar sounds to audiences. The Philharmonic, for example, has already this season presented a Haydn symphony and a Brahms serenade — neither a rarity, but both rarely played by that orchestra.Chamber Music Society, by contrast, rarely ventures off the beaten path, and almost never into work of our time. (It’s true, you don’t often hear Beethoven’s Op. 104 quintet, his arrangement of one of his early trios, which comes in January.) This is particularly frustrating given that the chamber music field is exploding with new work and, relatively inexpensive to present, offers far easier opportunities for experimentation than orchestras or opera companies.Some caveats are in order. The society’s performances are generally of unimpeachable quality. On Tuesday, Beethoven’s Trio in C minor (Op. 9, No. 3) received an airy reading from the violinist Arnaud Sussmann, the violist Matthew Lipman and the cellist Nicholas Canellakis. Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat (Op. 87), the least known work on the program, features a double bass instead of a second violin, a witty minuet and a brief, aching slow movement; Lipman, Canellakis, the pianist Wu Qian, the violinist Richard Lin and the bassist Blake Hinson played it stylishly.Wu Qian and Wu Han — who is, with David Finckel, the society’s artistic director — were graceful in Schubert’s Rondo in A for piano, four hands (D. 951). And Wu Han, Lin, Sussmann (now on viola), Lipman, Canellakis and Hinson came together for a warm, lively performance of Mendelssohn’s Op. 110 Sextet in D, with its unusually heavy complement of low strings and its raucous climax.The society has also given stalwart support over the years to rising musicians. It actively streamed while theaters were closed. It honorably paid artists 50 percent of their promised fees after pandemic cancellations, and will add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled.And its performances at Tully are not the sum total of its offerings. Its concerts in the Rose Studio nearby seem to come from another universe, one far more contemporary and creative. The first “New Milestones” program of the season there, on Oct. 28, includes works — the oldest from 2008 — by Marcos Balter, Shih-Hui Chen, George Lewis, Alexandre Lunsqui and Nina Shekhar.But there are just a handful of those performances, and the Rose Studio seats only about 100, versus nearly 1,100 in Tully. For the vast majority of the organization’s audience, the Tully season is the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — and that audience is being handed a profoundly limited product.It feels like kicking an institution when it’s down to criticize it so sharply as it reopens after such a devastating period. But a conservatism extreme even by classical music’s low standards was a problem with the society before the pandemic. That it seems to have viewed the past 19 months not as an opportunity to re-evaluate and reorient, but as a moment to double down, is unfortunate.Chamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterPresents a program of Puccini, Brahms, Webern and Shostakovich on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; chambermusicsociety.org. More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in June

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      The Met Orchestra’s return, an opera from Paris and a Philip Glass circus work are among the highlights.With in-person performances just beginning to return in many places, here are 10 highlights of the online music content coming in June. (Times listed are Eastern.)Dallas Symphony Orchestra/Met OrchestraAvailable through June 4; dallassymphony.org.One of the most dramatic musical coups of the pandemic came a month ago, when players from the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra — which went unpaid for nearly a year — traveled to Texas to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony. It was a reunion with Fabio Luisi, who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years and is now the music director in Dallas. The filmed result is fresh, vivid and cumulatively quite moving. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Circus Days and Nights’June 1 at noon; malmoopera.se; there are several more livestreamed performances through June 13.Circus juggling was one of the highlights of Phelim McDermott’s recent staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Akhnaten.” Might that have given Glass a new idea? Whether it’s coincidence or not, his latest stage work — a collaboration with the librettist David Henry Hwang and the circus director Tilde Bjorfors — is being advertised as a “never-before-seen fusion of circus and opera,” streamed live from the Malmo Opera in Sweden. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Desert In’June 3 at noon; operabox.tv; available indefinitely.Filmed opera continues to take pandemic-prompted steps forward, including this pivot to episodic narrative. Available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv platform, “Desert In” is an eight-part mini-series in which a married couple runs what is described as “a mysterious motor lodge where guests pay to be reunited with lost loves.” (The episodes, projected to last between 10 and 20 minutes each, will roll out on a weekly basis, two at a time.) The rotating creative team is promising, with composers like Nathalie Joachim and Nico Muhly taking turns writing episodes, for a cast that includes the star mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. SETH COLTER WALLSDetroit Symphony OrchestraJune 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m.; dso.org; available through June 17 and 18.Kent Nagano, an insightful and dynamic conductor, is presenting two 45-minute programs with the Detroit Symphony — both of which, in characteristic Nagano style, offer intriguing pairings of old and new. On June 3 he leads Toshio Hosokawa’s Percussion Intermezzo from “Stilles Meer,” an opera written in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, alongside Schubert’s ebullient Fifth Symphony. The next day he pairs Britten’s “Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury” with Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Britten,” before concluding with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, with the elegant pianist Gilles Vonsattel as soloist. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAdam Barnett-Hart of the Escher String Quartet, which livestreams a program of Bartok and Sibelius on June 10.Ian Douglas for The New York TimesEscher String QuartetJune 10 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through June 17.Scheduled for December of last year, before the pandemic intervened, the exciting Escher String Quartet performs live from the Rose Studio under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The program opens with Bartok’s final quartet, first performed in 1941 and a work that arrestingly combines aching grief — his mother died and World War II was grimly unfolding — with teeming intensity. The concert ends with Sibelius’s unconventional and engrossing “Voces Intimae” in five movements, written in 1909. It’s the “kind of thing,” Sibelius wrote of this work, that “brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death.” ANTHONY TOMMASINIKronos FestivalJune 11 at 10 p.m.; kronosquartet.org; available through Aug. 31.Global in scope, this is the first of three meaty streamed programs which, together with some ancillary offerings and films, make up this intriguing festival of new work presented by the Kronos Quartet and its creative foundation. The premieres include music by Nicole Lizée, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mahsa Vahdat; other pieces are by Clint Mansell, Jlin and Pete Seeger (his sadly ever-relevant “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Le Soulier de Satin’June 14; chezsoi.operadeparis.fr; available indefinitely.As the summer sun invites you outside, the last thing you may want is to stare at a screen for over six hours. But if you have the patience — or if a rainy day keeps you indoors — set aside time for the Paris Opera’s latest premiere: the third in its cycle of works inspired by French literature, as well as Marc-André Dalbavie’s third opera. It’s an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s sprawling drama “Le Soulier de Satin” (“The Satin Slipper”) — in preview clips rich with misty orchestration and long melodies — directed by Stanislas Nordey, conducted by its composer and starring the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and the mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux. JOSHUA BARONE‘Terra Nova’June 17 at 7:30 p.m.; 5bmf.org; available through Dec. 31.Those passing by the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch at Grand Army Plaza on a hot recent Saturday afternoon could experience an unexpectedly sophisticated new song cycle musing on the tangled history of exploration and colonization. Written by the bookish performer-composer collective Oracle Hysterical and played with the quartet Hub New Music, the sometimes propulsive, sometimes sultry music was superb when Majel Connery was airily singing, and foundered only in two long, talky sections at the end. It will be released for streaming in a version filmed at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island. ZACHARY WOOLFETo close her time as composer in residence at the Chicago Symphony, Missy Mazzoli has planned two streaming concerts.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCSO SessionsJune 24 at 12:01 a.m.; cso.org/tv; available through July 23.Missy Mazzoli closes her tenure as the Chicago Symphony’s composer in residence with two rich streaming programs of new and recent music. This, the second of the concerts, includes the premiere of Courtney Bryan’s “Requiem,” which draws on different mourning traditions and is scored for vocal quartet, winds, brass and percussion; there are also works by Gilda Lyons, David Reminick and Tomeka Reid on offer. (The first program, which goes online June 10, is no slouch, either, featuring pieces by Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith and Mazzoli herself.) ZACHARY WOOLFEPhilharmonia OrchestraJune 24 and 25 at 2:30 p.m.; philharmonia.co.uk; available until Sept. 16 and 17.One of the great partnerships in music — the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra in London — ends in June with Salonen’s final concerts as principal conductor. (Rest assured, the group seems in good hands with his successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali.) Both programs are meaty affairs: one beginning with Beethoven’s First Symphony and ending with Sibelius’s Seventh, bookends to Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman) and Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments”; and the other surveying Bach through the eyes of 20th-century artists, along with the premiere of Salonen’s “Fog,” adapted for orchestra, and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida the tantalizing soloist. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in April

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      Bach two ways, the composer Tania León and a Philip Glass adaptation of Kafka are among the highlights.With a widespread return to indoor, in-person performances still a ways off, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in April. (Times listed are Eastern.)‘St. John Passion’April 2 at 9 a.m.; dg-premium.com; available through April 4.This concert sells itself: John Eliot Gardiner, one of the finest Bach interpreters in the world, leading his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the “St. John Passion” — on Good Friday, no less. Not always as popular, and always more controversial, than its sibling “St. Matthew Passion,” the “St. John” is nonetheless a work that Gardiner feels passionately about. As he wrote in his book “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” it is “as bold and complex an amalgam of storytelling and meditation, religion and politics, music and theology, as there has ever been.” JOSHUA BARONEAttacca QuartetApril 6 at 7 p.m.; millertheatre.com; available indefinitely.The Attacca players seem incapable of putting on a dull concert; one of the final live performances I heard before last year’s lockdown featured them in joyous mastery of Caroline Shaw’s string quartets. That was at the Miller Theater, which is hosting this livestream of selections from John Adams’s “John’s Book of Alleged Dances”; Gabriella Smith’s rhapsodic jam session “Carrot Revolution”; and “Benkei’s Standing Death,” a 2020 work by Paul Wiancko, whose “Lift” teems with understanding of and affection for the string-quartet tradition. JOSHUA BARONE‘Pelléas et Mélisande’April 9 at 1 p.m.; operavision.eu; available through Oct. 9.We usually associate the phrase “period instruments” with the Baroque era. But changes in musical technology have been continuous and profound through the ages, such that there can be revelatory performances of “period Beethoven” or “period Wagner” — or period Debussy! François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, have long tailored their interpretations — and the instruments they use — to different works they play. They have recorded Debussy as he might have sounded at the turn of the 20th century, and now take on his epochal 1902 “Pelléas” for Opéra de Lille, directed (and with starkly elegant sets designed) by Daniel Jeanneteau. ZACHARY WOOLFETania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, is among the works that The Orchestra Now will play in a streamed concert on April 10.Miranda Barnes for The New York TimesThe Orchestra NowApril 10 at 8 p.m.; theorchestranow.org; available on demand from April 15 through May 30.This impressive ensemble of graduate students at Bard College presents a characteristically adventurous program, conducted by Leon Botstein. It opens with Tania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, followed by Bernstein’s “Serenade”: a rumination on Plato’s “Symposium” that takes the form of an intense, episodic violin concerto, with Zongheng Zhang as soloist. The brilliant pianist Blair McMillen appears in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, a terrific but seldom performed piece. The program ends with Mendelssohn’s spirited “Scottish” Symphony. ANTHONY TOMMASINIBenjamin ApplApril 12 at 8 a.m.; wigmore-hall.org.uk; available through May 12.When this German baritone sang Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” cycle at the Park Avenue Armory two years ago, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times that he “had the exacting attention to text of an actor, the charisma of a seasoned storyteller and an agile voice.” If you, like me, missed that performance, another opportunity beckons with this livestream from Wigmore Hall in London. Appl will have, in the pianist James Baillieu, the same partner as at the Armory, so we’ll see if he can cast the same spell over the screen. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘In the Penal Colony’April 15 at 12:01 a.m.; philipglasscenterpresents.org; available indefinitely.In the past, I’ve found the recording of this Philip Glass “pocket opera,” adapted from Kafka’s short story, to be a bit of a slog. But a staging can make all the difference, particularly when dealing (as here) with a talky libretto. This 2018 production by Opera Parallèle — presented as part of this year’s digital edition of Glass’s Days and Nights Festival — has turned me around on the work. Thanks to a strong pair of lead performances and a simple yet effective black-box set, Kafka’s bureaucratized dystopia shines through with a fresh lacquer of bleak humor. SETH COLTER WALLSSan Francisco SymphonyApril 15 at 1 p.m.; sfsymphonyplus.org; available indefinitely.The pandemic waylaid this orchestra’s splashy plans to welcome Esa-Pekka Salonen as its new music director. But with its own streaming service now up and running, San Francisco is giving Salonen a chance — however curtailed — to start defining his tenure. For this SoundBox program, he is focusing on ideas of musical patterning. While the program includes some well-worn Minimalist favorites by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the most intriguing item is a premiere from Salonen himself: “Saltat sobrius,” a fantasy on Pérotin’s medieval “Sederunt Principes.” SETH COLTER WALLSJeremy Denk’s Bach concert, presented by Cal Performances, will be available starting April 15.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesJeremy DenkApril 15 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; available through July 14.The first book of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” was to have dominated this pianist’s 2020 performance schedule. That, of course, was not to be, but last spring, he nevertheless produced a series of streams related to the capacious work. He returns to it in its totality for this concert, presented by Cal Performances. ZACHARY WOOLFEHallé OrchestraApril 29 at 7 a.m.; thehalle.vhx.tv; available through July 29.All three of the Hallé’s streams this month will be worth watching, including the premiere of Huw Watkins’s Symphony No. 2, available from April 15. But this last program of the season is the most ambitious: an account of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” filmed on location across the orchestra’s hometown, Manchester, England. Composed amid the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Stravinsky asks for small forces: just seven instrumentalists backing three actors and a dancer. Mark Elder conducts, and Annabel Arden and Femi Elufowoju Jr. direct. DAVID ALLENChamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterApril 29 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through May 6.This program is billed as “Monumental Trios,” and that’s no exaggeration. Beethoven’s Trio in E-flat (Op. 70, No. 2) is a majestic, searching and, at times, alluringly quizzical work. The superb pianist Juho Pohjonen joins the violinist Paul Huang and the cellist Jakob Koranyi in a performance taped in 2015. Brahms’s Trio No. 1 in B, composed in 1854 and revised in 1889, offers music by this composer in his brash early days — then modulated some 35 years later, once he was a probing, mature master. The performance by the pianist Orion Weiss, the violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Carter Brey is from 2017. ANTHONY TOMMASINI More