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    100 Years After His Death, Will We Ever Understand Satie?

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    If you’ve ever looked up a playlist to help you relax, focus or fall asleep, you’ve probably come across the music of Erik Satie.Most likely, you will have heard his “Gymnopédie No. 1”: a swaying foundation of chords that seem to step forward yet stay in place, somehow both independent of and supporting an instantly alluring melody.This piece’s popularity transcends genre, exemplifying the composer Virgil Thomson’s idea that Satie is the only composer “whose works can be enjoyed and appreciated without any knowledge of the history of music.”But Satie, while one of the most popular composers, is also one of the most enigmatic. He was a mystery to many during his lifetime and, a century after his death, remains elusive: a house of mirrors full of tricks, distortions and dead ends.Satie’s caricature of himself.API/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesThe more you try to understand Satie, the more difficult it becomes. His “Gymnopédies” are just a taste of a much bigger, stranger collection of works that are rarely heard. They were composed outside any fashion, and beyond traditional forms like the symphony and concerto, with scores idiosyncratic to the point of absurdity. To some they are a joke; to others they are disarming, a way to clear your mind and allow it to question the nature of music and performance. More

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      in Television

      Lalo Schifrin, 93, Dies; Composer of ‘Mission: Impossible’ and Much More

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      Lalo Schifrin, the Grammy-winning Argentine-born composer who evoked the ticking, ominous suspense of espionage with his indelible theme to the television series “Mission: Impossible” as well as scored movies like “Cool Hand Luke,” “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 93.His wife, Donna, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of pneumonia.Mr. Schifrin had a startlingly diverse career as a composer, arranger and conductor in a wide range of genres — from classical to jazz to Latin to folk to rock to hip-hop to electronic to the ancient music of the Aztecs.He conducted symphony orchestras in London and Vienna, and philharmonic orchestras in Tel Aviv, Paris and Los Angeles. He arranged music for the Three Tenors. He provided what The Washington Post called the music of “rebellious cool” for Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.When Mr. Schifrin won an honorary Academy Award in 2018, it was given to him by Clint Eastwood, a frequent collaborator.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBut the prolific Mr. Schifrin, who wrote more than 100 film and television scores, was best known for “Mission: Impossible.” Interpretations of his propulsive theme have also been featured in the eight movies in the “Mission: Impossible” series, starring Tom Cruise, which began in 1996.Like John Williams, whose many compositions for film include the theme from “Jaws,” Mr. Schifrin was a master of creating jittery unease and peril. Both composers worked with a recognizable style and a distinct purpose.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Tech C.E.O. Pays $400,000 to Conduct the Toronto Symphony

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      Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old amateur conductor, led a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony over the objections of some musicians.The musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra took their seats at Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday for a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Then a stage door swung open, and out walked the conductor.He was not a world-renowned maestro or even a trained musician. The man who walked out, wearing a crisp white shirt and taking the podium, was Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old technology executive who had paid the Toronto Symphony nearly $400,000 to lead it for one night.Cheung, a lifelong fan of classical music who played in a harmonica band in high school and has dabbled in conducting, persuaded the orchestra to allow him to act out his long-held dream of leading a top ensemble.“I had watched the videos and heard the recordings,” Cheung, the chairman and chief executive of ComputerTalk Technology in Toronto, said in an interview. “I had seen the magic of the guy standing in front of the orchestra with a stick. So I said, ‘Why can’t I do it, too?’”He added: “I can afford to do it, that’s the main thing. So when it came across my mind, I said, ‘Hey, maybe I should give it a try.’”“I had seen the magic of the guy standing in front of the orchestra with a stick,” Cheung said. “So I said, ‘Why can’t I do it, too?’”Allan CabralWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      In ‘Lash,’ Rebecca Saunders’s First Opera, Sex Flirts With Death

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      Rebecca Saunders has collaborated with the artist Ed Atkins to create “Lash,” a work that hovers around themes of illness and intimacy.Toward the end of “Lash,” a new opera by Rebecca Saunders, a vocal quartet of invites the listener to “come to bed and die.”Saunders, 57, is a masterly composer whose recent music is becoming more passionate, expressive and lyrical than ever. An artist whose works are regularly performed throughout Europe, she has won many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Music Biennale. Her subtle music has an unmistakable momentum.The text of the opera is by Ed Atkins, an artist and writer who often uses hyper-realistic C.G.I. video to unsettling effect. A critically acclaimed, career-spanning exhibition of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain in London, and his “Old Food,” which featured sandwiches filled with uncannily modified bodies, was shown at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Like his video work, Atkins’s prose is obsessed with the strangeness of sex and death.On Friday, “Lash” will premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is Saunders’s first opera and Atkins’s first libretto. Though Saunders wrote a piece based on words by Atkins, “Us Dead Talk Love,” in 2021, “Lash” is the first time the artists have shaped a piece together from the beginning.That relationship allowed Saunders to finally take on an opera. “I didn’t want to give a piece to somebody and just let go,” Saunders said. “I wanted to find the author and the directors and the house who would enable us to work on a collaborative project.”“Lash” features four female performers — the singers Noa Frenkel, Sarah Maria Sun and Anna Prohaska, and the actor Katja Kolm — who represent separate strands of a single consciousness.Marcus LieberenzWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      5 Highlights From the Pianist Alfred Brendel’s Sprawling Career

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      Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, concentrated on a small number of canonical composers, mainly Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.The classical music industry valorizes sweeping range, favoring artists whose programs cross centuries. But the magisterial pianist Alfred Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, was of the old school, focusing his long career on a small number of canonical composers from the same era: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.He nurtured their works with almost spiritual diligence, performing and reperforming, recording and rerecording. Scholarly and eccentric, acute in essays as well as in concert, Brendel rose from obscurity in Austria to become a best-selling, hall-filling star. His extended period under the radar perhaps contributed to his confidence in his idiosyncrasies: both his rumpled onstage manner and his fearless deployment of a sound that could be cool, even hard.That sound was part of Brendel’s resolutely lucid approach to music. Avoiding the impression of milking scores for excess emotion, he gained a reputation for intellectual, analytical performances. Some found his playing a little dry, but others heard a kind of transcendently austere authority.Here are a few highlights from his enormous discography. Click on the links to listen on YouTube.Haydn, Sonata in E minorBrendel championed Haydn’s and Schubert’s sonatas at a time when not everyone placed those pieces at the center of the pantheon. You can hear some of his flintiness of tone in this Haydn Presto, the feeling that he’s poking at the notes. But the livelier passages alternate with slightly, alluringly softened ones, for an effect of unexpected complexity in fairly straightforward music. His fast playing never seems dashed off; he is always palpably thinking. And his diamond-sharp pointedness in the opening of the sonata’s Adagio second movement eventually travels toward mysterious tenderness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      The Best Classical Music of 2025, So Far

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      Our critics picked nine performances that included star turns, new opera productions and the unveiling of a concert hall at the Frick Collection.‘Salome’Those looking for the full, lurid grandeur of Strauss’s “Salome” could find it this spring in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera. But in February, the scrappy company Heartbeat Opera pre-empted the Met with a thrillingly pared-down version, putting the audience just feet from the action and reducing a huge orchestra to two percussionists and an octet of clarinetists who played a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones. Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity. ZACHARY WOOLFERead our review of Heartbeat Opera’s “Salome.”Takacs QuartetAmong the glories of the renovated Frick Collection, which reopened in April, is a new space for chamber performance, replacing the museum’s much-venerated music room. The roughly 220-seat, curved Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, subterranean but airy, with crackling acoustics, was put through its paces in a burst of six excellent concerts, featuring a variety of ensemble sizes, instruments and repertory, from Tudor to today. Most indelible was the veteran Takacs Quartet, coruscating in works by Beethoven and Janacek. And, in Brahms’s Piano Quintet, the group’s electric music-making was abetted by Jeremy Denk on a late-19th-century Steinway. WOOLFERead our overview of concerts at the Frick’s new concert hall.Yunchan LimYunchan Lim performing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations” at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeWhen Yunchan Lim said, right after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto, that he wanted to play Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, the reaction was largely amused disbelief. Not every teenage virtuoso turns so quickly to performing Bach’s 75-minute labyrinth, which requires preternatural reserve and concentration more than technical fireworks. But in April at Carnegie Hall, Lim, now 21, showed that his true gift is for restrained poetry, as he rose from studious, polite opening minutes to eventually offer a “Goldbergs” of heightened, nearly Romantic intensity and contrasts. It was an exhilarating journey. WOOLFERead our review of Lim’s “Goldbergs.”Sondra RadvanovskyWhat makes a great Tosca? To get a sense, watch the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who returned to the Metropolitan Opera in January with what amounted to a master class. She embodies Puccini’s breakneck tragedy at its finest, with a fearlessness that is both musical and dramatic: an openness to vulnerability, even fragility, that can inspire sympathy but, with a formidably strong core, whip into the fury of fight-or-flight desperation. I won’t soon forget the penetrating softness of her “Vissi d’arte” or the chilling sotto voce with which, standing above Scarpia’s corpse, she growled, “And before him all of Rome trembled.” JOSHUA BARONERead our review of Radvanovsky in “Tosca.”‘Akhnaten’Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” has been performed on major opera stages in the past decade with something of a monopoly: the same production, by Phelim McDermott, starring the same countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo. But at the Komische Oper in Berlin this spring, the director Barrie Kosky unveiled a refreshingly different vision for the work: pure abstraction and a minimalism that, in climaxes of opulence, mirrors the deceptive richness of Glass’s score. The company’s chorus, in near-constant movement, was heroic, and John Holliday’s sound as Akhnaten was gorgeously expressive and, in an ideal reflection of the role, as human as it was heavenly. BARONEWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Alfred Brendel, Bravura Pianist Who Forged a Singular Path, Dies at 94

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      With little formal training but full of ideas, he focused on the core classical composers, winning over audiences (though not every critic) around the world.Alfred Brendel, a classical pianist who followed his own lights on a long path from obscurity to international stardom, gaining a devoted following in spite of influential critics who faulted his interpretations of the masters, died on Tuesday at his home in London. He was 94. His death was announced by his family in a news release.Mr. Brendel was unusual among modern concert artists. He had not been a child prodigy, he lacked the phenomenal memory needed to maintain a large repertoire with ease, and he had relatively little formal training. But he was a hard and cheerfully patient worker. For the most part he taught himself, listening to recordings and proceeding at a deliberate pace as he concentrated on a handful of composers, including Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Liszt and Schoenberg.“I never had a regular piano teacher after the age of 16,” he told the critic Bernard Holland of The New York Times for a profile in 1981, although he did attend master classes in his native Austria with the Swiss pianist and conductor Edwin Fischer and the Austrian-born American pianist Eduard Steurmann. “Self-discovery is a slower process but a more natural one.”Mr. Brendel in England in 2007. “I have never belonged to any club,” he said. “I do not believe in schools of piano playing.”Jonathan Player for The New York TimesOver the years, Mr. Brendel developed and continually revised his own ideas on using the modern piano to make well-worn music sound fresh without violating the composers’ intentions. How well he succeeded was very much a matter of taste. His analytical approach appealed especially to intellectuals and writers, and it didn’t hurt, either, that he was himself an erudite writer on music history, theory and practice.His fans filled the house to overflowing for recitals in New York, London and other major cities — including for his memorable cycle of the complete Beethoven sonatas at Carnegie Hall in 1983. Among his champions was Susan Sontag, who contributed a blurb to one of his several books of collected essays, “Alfred Brendel on Music” (2000), saying he had “changed the way we want to hear the major works of the piano repertory.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Does It Matter How a Cello Is Held? It’s a Centuries-Old Debate.

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      Historical response to the cello endpin, which anchors the instrument to the floor, has alternated between acceptance and pushback.Picture an orchestra. How are the cellists holding their instruments? Chances are, in your mental image, they’re playing with endpins — the pointy-tipped metal rods that anchor the cello to the floor and raise it to a comfortable playing height.Musical instruments, like technologies and fashions, adapt to the changing times. These days, playing the cello with an endpin is considered the default, but it hasn’t always been that way. Before endpins became standard, cellists often played by gripping the instrument between their calves, a position that requires strength and finesse.Even today some cellists opt not to use an endpin. At Trinity Church’s holiday performance of Handel’s “Messiah” in December, the cellists cradled their instruments between their legs for the three-hour performance — no small feat of endurance. Uptown on the same night, the New York Philharmonic was playing the same repertoire. Those cellists used endpins.This divide between Baroque cellists (like Trinity’s) and modern players (like the Philharmonic’s) is often explained by a generalization: Cellists after 1850 or so used endpins, whereas before 1850 they didn’t. And so, cellists playing earlier music in a historically minded way often forgo an endpin.But the history of the endpin is far more complicated, having to do with issues of gender, disability and plain stubbornness. Valerie Walden, author of “One Hundred Years of Violoncello,” writes that the endpin, throughout its history, has had “decidedly amateur or womanish overtones and professional musicians probably regarded it as an affront to their male pride.”Some of this may have to do with what musicologists call the “interface” between cello and thighs, an area often sexualized, which seems to be a major source of cellists’ anxiety both historically and today. But the endpin’s story is also about cellists not wanting to change their ways, even when they would benefit from something to lean on.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More